1. The concentration of such extreme wealth in so few hands wouldn’t have to have resulted in, but certainly has resulted in the wholesale purchase of all political and regulatory power in the US, resulting in an egregious tilting of the economic playing field in favor of the wealthy few and against the less wealthy majority. Again, it is not the wealth distribution per sé that is unfair — it is the tilting of the playing field, and therefore the illegitimacy of much of the concentrated wealth in the hands of the few that we object to.
2. If those in the middle and lower ranges of the economic distribution were living lives that had an acceptable baseline and were improving, then we don’t think it would matter in any way how wealthy the super-wealthy were. The fact that the vast numerical majority of Americans are leading progressively more difficult and desperate lives while the super-rich get super-richer in an economic landscape that is politically engineered to favor them is a very significant problem.

Watch this excellent video-info-graphic on wealth distribution in America:

By and large, one side sees evil in the fact that firearms are legal and readily available. Their argument boils down to the belief that if people couldn’t get guns, then killings like this wouldn’t happen.

The other side sees evil in the shooter instead of the weapons. They express much anger toward the kid himself, his mental condition, his reported values and behavioral “differences,” coupled with an implicit or explicit preference to eliminate (one way or another) individuals that resemble him from society.

We think that both sides in this argument are tragically missing the real issue. Missing it by avoiding doing the one thing that nobody wants to do in a situation like this; looking in the mirror.

Aside from accidents, legitimate law enforcement, war, and self-defense, there are generally two categories of death by firearm: there is evil and there is sick. Assuming that the narrative we are reading about the Newtown shooting is accurate, this is as clear a case of sick as there is. Evil in this context is when someone kills someone else for gain; for example, to steal their belongings. Adam Lanza gained nothing from killing those kids. Adam Lanza was sick.

What both sides in the worn out and endless red-blue argument seem to be missing is that Adam Lanza is one of us. As a society, we are Adam Lanza and Adam Lanza is us. If we want to move in the direction of preventing, or at least reducing the frequency of tragedies like this, we must confront as a culture, as a society, that we are sick.

As a society, we produce individuals like Adam Lanza. We also produce individuals like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon who are willing to see the majority of Americans suffer increasing poverty so that they can enjoy increasing wealth. We also produce individuals like Ben Bernanke who is willing to in-debt generations of unborn Americans for decades and to create global food inflation which directly leads to increases in malnourishment and starvation for those who are already on the edge of their ability to purchase food, all in order to maintain a status quo that is grotesquely tilted in the favor of the few against the many. And we produce individuals like Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, who seemed to be weeping during his statement on the Newtown shooting, whose global peace and cooperation rhetoric is beyond compare, and who authorizes remote, video-game-like assassination of countless innocent civilians by un-manned drone-fired missile strikes, while simultaneously doing everything he can to promote legislation that guts the Constitution, making it impossible for him to be held legally responsible for actions that are clearly terrorist in nature.

As a culture, we are sick. And when you are sick, you cannot expect to get well by masking the symptoms of illness. Leaving aside the practical impossibility of eliminating firearms, even if you could get rid of them all and make them impossible to get, you would not cure the ills that produced Adam Lanza. You would instead produce more unabombers, or increase the numbers of murder by automobile. Likewise, you cannot cure the illness by incarcerating people with social disorders, or people who prefer to wear black clothes. The sickness doesn’t go away when you focus on the symptoms; it just manifests itself in a different way.

The only way to begin to address this sickness is to be willing to look in the mirror and realize that we are ill; that we cannot point to something or someone else, out there, that needs to be eliminated. As bad as this massacre is — and it is horrific — it is clear that we are not yet ready, as a culture, to take that look in the mirror. As long as we are still fighting about who or what is to blame, we are still committed to looking anywhere and everywhere but the mirror. To put it in twelve-step terms, we have not yet hit rock bottom.

What will it take, America?

It is clear from their comments that some of the Senators who voted in favor of the Amendment did so because their interpretation of the language in the Amendment is the exact [Orwellian] opposite of the common sense intention of it. Senator Levin’s comments in particular argue that the Congress, via prior legislation, has already pre-approved indefinite military detention which satisfies the clause that we took exception to in our opinion piece: “unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.”

If Levin’s argument is correct, the Feinstein-Lee Amendment, instead of providing habeus corpus and due process protection (which was the stated and common sense intention of the Amendment), is actually an ineffectual affirmation of a blatantly unconstitutional congressional power to authorize indefinite military detention without trial.

Legal scholars on the Lawfare blog have been looking carefully at the Amendment and interpreting it within the context of prior legislation and court decisions. Here are links to two posts from yesterday (11/30/2012) that, although somewhat technical, are well worth reading:

Can Congress be Express Without Being Explicit? Senate Debate on the NDAA’s Domestic Detention Provision

Domestic Military Detention After the (New) Feinstein Amendment

The first piece highlights the ambiguity of the language and quotes extensively from Senator Feinstein’s and Senator Levin’s congressional remarks on the Amendment (we address Levin’s remarks below). The second piece tears apart the language and argues that Levin’s interpretation is incorrect and that the Feinstein-Lee Amendment goes a long way toward achieving its stated intention to protect citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States from unconstitutional detention.

While nobody on our team here in the Belligerent Act Cloud is a lawyer, our common-sense opinion remains that the language of the Amendment egregiously fails to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by affirming the notion that Congress can authorize indefinite detention without trial. Whether Levin’s interpretation that Congress has already provided such authorization is correct or not, our opinion remains that either way, such a notion is outrageously unconstitutional, and in direct conflict with both the fifth and sixth amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Furthermore, Levin’s congressional remarks (see the first Lawfare blog post linked above) seem fully deranged to us. The Senator is either strategically trying to derail the whole argument by deliberately conflating the authority to detain with the authority to detain indefinitely without trial and without recourse to legal counsel, or he himself does not understand that the issue at hand is not about the authority to arrest and detain people; it’s about the legal authority to arrest them and then detain them indefinitely without trial. The Constitutional issue is about the right to legal representation and a speedy trial.

Senator Levin appears to be arguing against a wholly non-existent straw-man. Nobody that we are aware of is seriously arguing for a curtailment of military or police authority to detain suspected criminals or military combatants. Those arguing on the side of the Constitution are arguing, in simple terms, that neither the Congress nor the President has any Constitutional right to authorize indefinite detainment without trial and legal representation for those detained. In other words, the Constitutional issue is what happens after a person is detained, not whether the police or the military have authority to detain.

Unless we misunderstand his remarks, either Senator Levin understands the real issue, in which case his intentionally misconstruing it in his argument is dishonest, disingenuous, and dishonorable, or he does not understand the difference between authority to detain and authority to detain without trial, in which case he is incompetent. In either case, our recommendation to the voters of the state of Michigan is to remove Senator Levin from office at their earliest convenience.

There has been some controversy over this Amendment. Some have lauded it as Congress finally doing something to protect the Constitutional and civil rights of Americans, while others have claimed that it does no such thing.

We read through the text of the Amendment[PDF] and our opinion is that it does not protect Constitutional rights.

We see two specific problems with the Amendment. The first problem is that it specifically applies to “a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States.” Where addressing the right to trial, the US Constitution draws no lines between US citizens, permanent residents, and anyone else. The Constitution refers to “Persons,” in these contexts, and clearly means to lay out how US Law is to treat ALL PERSONS. In addition to this, the text of the Amendment affords no form of due process protection for anyone (regardless of their citizenship status) who is apprehended outside the United States which we take as antithetical to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution.

The second, and much greater problem is the phrase that comes next in the text of the Amendment which is: “unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.” This little phrase extends to Congress the exact same blatantly unconstitutional, totalitarian, dictatorial power to impose indefinite detention upon anyone it chooses to that which the original 2012 NDAA granted to the President and which prompted us to build this website.

Our take is that the Feinstein-Lee Amendment, in the guise of protecting Constitutional rights, has instead simply extended the unconstitutional powers that the 2012 NDAA granted to the President, also to the Congress.

The context in which this conflict is playing out is the historically unprecedented, exponentially-gowing public debt, facilitated by fractional reserve banking whereby banks create money “out of thin air” to lend at interest (see: In What Universe?) which supports insane levels of unsustainable, unconscionable government spending far in excess of government revenue and global economic productivity.

And the shape of the conflict is as follows. If you are a high-ranking politician in the developed world, life is pretty good for you. As the head of an insolvent, deeply indebted country requiring massive bailouts from its peers, you are free to hop on a private jet with your good friends to go watch a sporting event and enjoy 1,000 Euro ($1,300) meals in-flight. What is your personal incentive to take on the politically unpopular mission of beginning the revolutionary level of belt-tightening that is required to put your country on a fiscally sustainable path for the future?

If you even try to start down that path, you know that you will be ejected from office in record time. If you don’t do it, if instead you walk the fine lying line of pretending concern about fiscal sustainability while at the same time doing everything possible to prolong the unsustainable status quo, saddling tax-payers (even those not yet born) with ever-greater burdens, stealing wealth from prudent savers by currency debasement; then you get to keep your job and your access to all the spoils of wealth and power.

How many selfless patriots willing to stand up — against their personal incentives — and do the right thing do we have in the highest level of government in the developed world? Right. The political system is an evolutionary machine that specifically selects for politicians with the traits of extreme desire for wealth and power coupled with high levels of skill in lying and manipulation.

Math is math, and that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. At some point — and it is impossible to tell when because the global economy is a vast, complex system with great inertia — the brutal reality of arithmetic will assert itself and the world’s ledgers, with their gigantic trillions of exponentially growing debt on the one side, and their very finite real capital wealth on the other, will have to be reconciled.

Anyone who pulls their head out of the sand and ponders this for more than a brief moment knows it is true. It is also true and equally obvious that the bigger the debt side of the ledger gets, the more catastrophic the ultimate reconciliation must be. The right thing to do is to look at this catastrophe head on and deal with it in a rational, adult manner. The wrong thing to do is to continue pushing the reconciliation off into the future, making it exponentially worse with each can-kicking effort.

The oligarchs have every incentive to prolong the current regime and keep kicking the can as long as possible. This is making the ultimate book-balancing ever larger and ever more dangerous for those of us who are now, and who will end up paying for it in the future.

And as the tension of this most significant conflict of our time continues to ratchet up, the oligarchs will keep cranking up the Orwellian response. Down will be ever more up. War will be ever more peace. And the demand for liberty will be ever more smothered and vilified in the name of protecting us from the ravages of terrorism.

This relatively simple basis for human law would of course require sometimes complex interpretation in practice. Issues of property and how it comes into being require negotiation and agreement. Issues regarding how an individual’s use of the commons (including resource usage, pollution, etc.) affects other individuals is another area that requires interpretation of the principle of non-harm and detailed negotiation and agreement about the legitimate and sustainable use of the commons.

These are examples of areas where there may be legitimate conflict of interests between one individual and another and where negotiation and agreement are the appropriate means of resolving the conflict.

At present and throughout human history, there is an entire realm of human conflict which we label as illegitimate conflict where the basis of the conflict is either between the beliefs of one individual and another, or based on a difference in presumed membership in a human collective which an individual perceives to be in conflict with another collective. Into this category of illegitimate conflict we put every form of nationalism, racism, tribalism, and all conflicts on the basis of religious belief, political belief, philosophical belief, or any other belief.

We believe that there is one primary conflict of interest in America today that must take priority over all others until it is resolved. That is the conflict of interest between the common people and what some authors have called the “ruling elite” made up of powerful government figures and the ultra-wealthy individuals who, through their ownership and control of the mass media, are able to unduly influence the national conversation and through their enormous wealth are able to pay politicians to do their bidding by passing laws and selectively enforcing laws such that the economic playing field remains tilted in their favor, against the interests of the common people.

At the present time in America, every other conflict; between the political or philosophical right and left, between Christian and Muslim, between those who favor abortion and those who don’t; between those who prioritize the sustainability of the environment and those who prioritize immediate business profitability, between gun rights activists and those who oppose them, etc. — all those other conflicts (especially what we call the illegitimate conflicts based on beliefs or forms of tribalism) are actively being used in the time-tested strategy of “divide and conquer” to distract the common people from the conflict of economic interests between themselves and the ruling elite which has, over the past thirty years, dramatically changed the way we live together in America; lowering the standard of living and abrogating individual liberties for the common people while dramatically raising the standard of living and granting outrageous license to the ruling elite.

We must work to nullify illegitimate conflicts and temporarily set aside our legitimate but lower priority disagreements and take on this massive conflict of interest between the people and the de facto oligarchs or this trend will continue until we very soon find ourselves living in a dystopia with some combination of the characteristics envisioned by Orwell and Huxley.

Yes, it would definitely be better if sick people and those who are willing to kill others for their own gain did not have easy access to firearms. The problem is that we do not trust government. When we tune out the rhetoric and look at the actions of those holding high political office (those in essential control of the military), what we see are a group of people whose interests do not coincide with our own and who seem — on the whole — astonishingly, sociopathically willing to throw the rest of us under the bus in order to protect their own wealth and power.

Watch the short video below where news anchor Ben Swann and rapper Ice-T give a summary of the real reason for the second amendment that cuts through the political sideshow to the meat of the matter. A citizen’s right to keep guns is about protection from government tyranny; it is literally and very specifically how the United States came to be a nation.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

A casual reading of that sentence could allow one to assume that the language there only applies to persons who are connected in some way to “al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces.” Leaving aside for now the vagueness of that characterization (define “associated forces”) and the ease with which someone could manufacture some form of association therewith, the simple boolean logic of the language in that sentence does not even require such an association.

The phrase “including any person who has committed a belligerent act or” logically makes that sentence apply to ANY PERSON WHO HAS COMMITTED A BELLIGERENT ACT. You can put anything you want before the word “including” and anything you want after the word “or”; from the point of view of pure boolean logic, the sentence still applies to any and every person who has committed a “belligerent act.” The use of “including” and “or” makes the phrase quoted above logically step out of any limits at all and from a purely logical point of view this sentence applies to any person who has ever committed a belligerent act (without, of course, defining what constitutes a “belligerent act”).

Given the context of the rest of the indefinite detention language in the 2012 NDAA, this essentially means that the President in his sole discretion can label an act “belligerent” and then order the indefinite military detention without trial of the person who committed the act so defined.

In other words, the vague and ambiguous language of this section of the 2012 NDAA is a subtle legal basis for allowing the President to arbitrarily lock up or threaten to lock up anyone whose actions he does not like, at his sole discretion and without trial.

Whether or not the production of such a justification is the real intent of the language, that is the actual result of this language having been signed into law. Whether or not President Obama ever will, or ever intends to make use of this provision, having signed it into law, he, or any future President could in fact legally do so.

The single phrase: “including any person who has committed a belligerent act or” in the context of the 2012 NDAA abrogates every U.S. citizen’s constitutional rights under the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments and radically undermines the single most important founding principle of the United States of America; the principle of habeas corpus, or the right to trial.

That’s why we call our site and our protest a Belligerent Act. Grab one of our banners and join the protest today.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We [perhaps arrogantly] offer the following update / interpretation of this sentiment:

All humans are born out of Mystery, inherently Free, neither owed nor owing, without obligation to or from any other. In furtherance of a mutual human desire to make this world the best possible place for humans to live, all humans must be treated equally under human law, and no human law shall in any way limit or curtail the inherent Liberty of any human except to prohibit those actions that would cause harm to the body, life, property, or Liberty of another.

We specifically point out that nothing in the foregoing makes any reference to, or special allowance for human collectives. Human collectives are simply arbitrary groups of humans and neither a collective itself nor a particular human within a collective has any special status with respect to the foregoing statement; in no case shall any human, regardless of their membership in any collective of humans, curtail the Liberty of any other human except to prevent human harm.

The US government has been corrupted from the very top via the rise of professional sociopaths in political and corporate office. If you listen to their words, they are — one and all — paragons of populism, self-sacrifice, and social service. If you pay the slightest attention to their actions, it could not be clearer that what they are actually doing is exploiting the power and influence of their positions to enrich themselves at public expense.

One need look no further than the economic crisis that is enveloping the US (and the world) at the present time to see ample evidence. While politicians and the owned media present bright economic statistics one after another with TV-plastic smiles, real people in America are struggling and, isolated in front of giant flat screens in their little (or big) house-boxes, wondering why the economic “recovery” they keep hearing about seems to be passing them by.

In the savings and loan crisis of the 1980’s, William K. Black and his colleagues investigated, prosecuted, and secured over 1,000 major felony fraud convictions. In the current financial crisis, which massively dwarfs the S&L crisis in both the depth and breadth of fraud as well as the severity of the devastating consequences, there has been virtually no criminal investigation and not one single major felony conviction of any of the C-level players in the financial industry who were directly responsible for the carnage.

The typical left/right clusterfuck of insipid argument about whether or not “free market capitalism” was responsible for the crisis and what to do about it misses the fundamental issue as usual. Of course proper laws and regulation of the common business environment are necessary to maintain a fair and balanced marketplace and to guard against fraud and exploitation. Of course fraudulent behavior must be prosecuted with fervor. But nobody alive in America today has ever seen free market capitalism. That which the conventional left is demonizing and that which the conventional right is championing is entirely a straw man.

Despite the repeal of pragmatically good regulatory prohibitions like the Glass–Steagall Act (which put simple but important limitations on what big banks can do with other people’s money), the business environment of America today is an historically unprecedented, impenetrable swamp of hyper-bureaucratic legislation and regulation that has one and only one effect: it serves to protect the anti-competitive monopolies of the large and established corporate interests who can afford to lobby these regulations into law in the exact form that keeps the playing field tilted in their direction. The thousands of pages of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a perfect example.

In true Orwellian up is down fashion, the lawful purpose of regulatory legislation — the establishment and maintenance of a level playing field in the common market, and the protection of the commons from exploitation by the few — has been entirely subverted in practice into a means of protecting the financial interests and exclusive access to the commons of the largest, wealthiest and most politically influential corporate entities.

The land of the free and the home of the brave has become the land of the thief and the home of the debt slave.

So, what to do about it? We believe that the corruption, like a metastatic cancer, has become systemic and is not surgically treatable. We do not believe that an entirely corrupt political system, made of corrupt politicians, is capable of reform from within. Those at the top of the current system are personally benefitting from the status quo, and the culture of sociopathy which they embody ensures that they will continue to do what serves their self-interest at the expense of everyone else. The only chance that the US “patient” has for survival is radical chemotherapy: wiping out the whole system to kill the rot, pressing the restart button and starting over from scratch.

We think it is past time to begin taking concrete actions to hasten the needed healing crisis, and we think there are some simple and powerful things that anyone can do to help crash the system and force the reset.

1. Fire Congress

One big problem with the US political system in practice is that once elected, incumbents tend to be re-elected over and over again. Incumbents’ electoral advantage comes from money and access to media which is granted to them by large corporate [“special”] interests in exchange for legislative “favor.” This subverts the intention of term limits and creates a structural support for corruption and cronyism. You can negate this corporate influence over the political system by simply tuning out the rhetorical noise on the TV, ignoring the fake democrat/republican theater, and voting for the strongest non-incumbent in every congressional election. If the people make a practice of rotating everyone out of office at every electoral cycle, political office will be much less attractive to sociopaths looking for a cushy career at public expense.

2. Fire Your Big Bank

It would be hard to exaggerate the level of deceit, ruthlessness and evil that the TBTF banks represent in America today. As an industry, they have destroyed the financial system by taking incomprehensible risks with other people’s money — YOUR money — and engineering corporate-level compensation that rewards those at the top with absurd salaries and bonuses based on short-term performance without accepting any form of responsibility or accountability for the longer term devastation that ensues when their risky schemes inevitably blow up.

First they risk your money with none of their own skin in the game[PDF], and then when the risky bets they make blow up, they lobby congress for a public bailout (more of your money), all the while paying themselves hundreds of millions in salaries and bonuses on the way up, and on the way down (2011 approximate total compensation: Jamie Dimon - $23 million; Lloyd Blankfein - $16 million; James Gorman - $13 million; John Stumpf - $19.8 million; Brian Moynihan - $8 million; Vikram Pandit - $15 million).

They can’t do any of that stuff without your money. So take it away from them. Pull your money out of any accounts you may have at the TBTF banks: Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase. Close any brokerage accounts with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Move your money instead into your local community in the form of small banks and local coops.

3. Elect Ron Paul President

4. Fly Our Banner

While America slumbers in a miasma of bread and circuses, elected officials are busily preparing the legal ground for suppression of public protest by legislating away the most basic protections of individual liberty that the US was founded upon. The NDAA takes away the most fundamental protection — habeas corpus — that United States citizens have against the concentrated powers of corrupt government. Don’t let this Belligerent Act against the people by the government stand unchallenged. Support the #StopNDAA movement, participate in P.A.N.D.A, and if you have a blog or a website, put one of our banners on it to help us educate people about what they are losing and to voice your demand for the repeal of this abrogation of human rights.

Since 9/11 a significant and accelerating number of legislative acts have been passed through Congress and signed into law by both Presidents Bush and Obama that have massively eroded the legal basis for the individual liberty of American citizens.

The distance between the spirit and letter of the Bill of Rights and such legislation as The Homeland Security Act, The USA Patriot Act, the NDAA of 2012, The Trespass Bill, The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order, and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (to name but a few) is so enormous that we are confident that, could they be transported into the present, the founders of the nation and the framers of the Constitution would find it impossible to comprehend an America so mired in the legislation of an Orwellian, totalitarian state. Even more bewildering to those who risked all to found a Nation that held individual liberty above all else would be the complacency of the American public as the legal dismantling of the Constitution goes on in plain sight all around them.

And that’s just the recent legislative side of the Constitutional destruction. There is also more than enough for the American people to fear from government agencies operating beneath the legal radar such as sophisticated and widespread (i.e. total) spying on US citizens by the NSA.

The basis of the political argument that it is necessary to curtail, restrict, trample on, and otherwise obliterate the protections of individual liberty guaranteed to United States citizens by the Constitution is that the loss of individual liberty is necessary in order to safeguard the US population against terrorist acts.

Leaving aside for the moment the very real issue of suffering in its many forms, let us stipulate that the worst thing that can happen to a person is to die. Also leaving aside unanswerable questions about the afterlife, from the point of view of the experience of mortals, when you’re dead you’re dead. Thus it is obvious why we do everything we can to avoid death for as long as we can.

If death is the worst thing that can happen to a person, and given the finality of death, what is the real difference between dying in a terrorist bombing and dying in a traffic accident? One could argue all kinds of hypotheticals about the relative suffering involved in the one way to die vs. the other. Both are violent and unexpected and in either case, death could be relatively quick or more prolonged. For the sake of argument, let us say that they are, on average, roughly equivalent in terms of the experienced negativity for the victim.

Now let’s look at some numbers. On September 11, 2001, the worst terrorist act in US history (by far) took the lives of 2,977 victims. Between 1970 and 2007 there were a total of 3,292 American deaths ascribed to terrorist incidents (including 9/11). In 2010, a total of 15 Americans lost their lives to terrorism, although all of those deaths happened outside of the US.

Traffic fatalities in the United States for 2010 — at a 61-year low — were 32,885. For the single year 2010, there were approximately ten times as many deaths from automobile accidents as there were from terrorist incidents during the thirty-seven year period from 1970 – 2007. For the year 2010, almost 2,200 Americans died in an auto accident for every one that died at the hands of terrorists. Said another way, in 2010 death by automobile accident was 2,200 times more likely to happen to the average American and automobile fatalities were a 2,200 times bigger problem than terrorist fatalities. For 2010, deaths by terrorism per day: 0.04; deaths by auto accident per day: 90.1.

We could also go on for some time about other ways to die that are far more prevalent than death by terrorism in America. As an American you are far more likely to die from medical malpractice, being attacked by an animal, falling down the stairs, in an industrial accident, of complications related to smoking cigarettes, of complications related to obesity, and even somewhat more likely to die in a non-terrorist airline crash than a terrorist event; air travel being the statistically safest form of travel.

But let’s simply focus on the relative difference in the US political response to death by automobile accident vs. death by terrorist incident. Under the banner of protecting American citizens from terrorism over the past decade, the US Government has destroyed the Bill of Rights (as detailed above) and launched two wars that have cost trillions of dollars and killed (at this writing) 6,432 American soldiers along with estimates of over 100,000 on the low side to well over a million on the high side Iraqi and Afghanistani civilians.

Leaving aside the effectiveness of slaughtering foreign civilians as a means of deterring terrorism (what do you think your response would be toward a foreign government who killed your sister?), to date in its military response to 9/11, the US Government is responsible for the deaths of more than twice as many US military personnel as the number of casualties of 9/11.

In 2010, 32,885 American deaths by automobile accident and 15 American deaths by terrorism. So where is the war on auto accidents?

Given that Americans are over two thousand times more likely to die by going to the grocery store in their car than by an act of terrorism, and given that death is the worst thing that can happen to you and that death is death, why are US politicians not proposing laws to ban automobiles? With the popular freak-out that occurred when the US government merely imposed a national speed limit of 55 mph for auto travel (which resulted in a dramatic decrease in highway fatalities), how are we to reconcile the utter docility with which Americans are currently greeting the fact that the Government now has legal grounds to lock up any citizen they deem a threat without judicial oversight, without trial, and without legal representation for the accused?

On the whole, Americans don’t think twice about the safety of getting in their car. And the vast majority of Americans would participate at the drop of a hat in a nation-wide revolt if ever threatened with the loss of the freedom to get in their car and go where they please, when they please. Given the comparative loss of life statistics between auto accidents and terrorist incidents, America’s fear of terrorism is massively irrational and delusional. And that fear is being both strategically exacerbated and ruthlessly leveraged by the US Government for the purpose of increasing government power and the financial interests of elected officials at the expense of the Constitutionally guaranteed liberty of US Citizens.

Life itself comes with no guarantees except this one: we are all going to die. There is no real question about that. Everyone who has ever lived has died. The question is rather how we want to live until the moment we kiss this realm of experience goodbye once and for all.

We don’t know about you, but our preference is to look at the risks head on and make our own decisions about how we live. Just as we’d rather take the chance of getting in the car and going where we want, when we want, knowing full well that any ride might be our last, we’d likewise rather have the freedom to get on a plane without suffering gestapo security procedures, or make a phone call without wondering whether big brother is listening in, even if that meant (though we are confident that it would not) that the likelihood of death by terrorism were to increase by a couple thousand times — say, up to the level of dying in an auto accident.