Know Your Enemy: Even Jesus Did This – Religion and Empire

While Sun Tzu said:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Jesus said:

“Love your enemies,
Do good to them who hate you.”

But do notice, in pragmatic terms, Jesus made himself scarce around the religious elites who were out to get him and his small band. He too encouraged the selling of a cloak (coat) to purchase a sword (gun) for the disciples to use as self defense in times of crisis.

However, the truth is there as Paul notes in his letter to those in Rome:

“But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Jesus too set the stage for a unique way with dealing with those out to do one harm:

Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.

While this all sounds like life on a personal level, this also extends to relationships between communities, cultures and countries as well. I am guessing I would get booed like Ron Paul did during a GOP debate in South Carolina years ago, but I stand by it. So would Francis Marion! But I digress.

The reality is that those that choose to do good in this world will find opposition. Even back in the 1st century Paul wrote to the Thessalonians:

“For we wanted to come to you — I, Paul, more than once — and yet Satan thwarted us.”

The Roman Empire had good roads too .. so this was not an infrastructure issue, but a real one with a real adversary. There is evil in this world that makes life difficult.

So on to the core of my message here and the article and book that led me down this strange path. “The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs” by Andrei Martyanov does a convincing job at painting an accurate picture for the state of the American Empire, which by definition is the enemy of most of the people of the world and IF we were honest, considering our erosion of privacy and freedoms, it is also an enemy of its own citizens, not unlike the USSR of its day.

This book gives an insight into the evolution of weapons and the way they influenced international relations in the 20th and 21st centuries. It also defines Revolution in Military Affairs as manifested via policy, politics, and technology. It reviews some models which are useful in assessing the current geopolitical situation. This book also tries to give a forecast of the future development of warfare and the ways in which it is going to change the whole system of international relations, hopefully towards a new geopolitical equilibrium.

Some helpful early quotes from this book will help you see the value of knowing your enemy, knowing the truth, so that y’all can be prepared.

modern war between nation-states became so complex, in reflection of the tools of such wars, that it is an axiom, not even a theorem, that people who cannot grasp fundamental mathematical, physical, tactical and operational principles on which modern weapon systems operate are simply not qualified in the minimal degree to offer their opinions on the issues of warfare, intelligence operations and military technology without appropriate backgrounds. Failing that, what can one think but that they are merely in the business of content provision (filling space/entertainment) or of propagating the official line—of propaganda, in short—mostly with regard to warmongering? In today’s information-oversaturated world of massive egos nurtured by the dopamine of public visibility and of American politics turned into showbiz, these are the types who dominate the discussion on the most important, vital issue of war and peace in our time.

This is so true, the information overload renders most people helpless in sifting through the lies to find the foundational truth. So much of media is indeed government blow-horns used to confuse and disorient the sheep on any given day making them in fact impotent.

I can only hope that the knowledge readers will gain through this book will help to increase public awareness of the deadly consequences of even a conventional war between global superpowers and will help to dispel the war propaganda being pushed on the public by ignorant and incompetent pundits who have no business offering even an iota of their opinions on what is today a Revolution in Military Affairs of historic magnitude.

Again, the ignorance of the elite usually leads to the slaughter of the innocent. Herein lies the dilemma, how does one find the time to sift through all the Geo-politics while real life is raging right along side in real time in their own communities and their own relationships?

Those holding a modern Ph.D. in philosophy or political science, unless they have a serious education and experience in other fields, will be hard-pressed to derive any sensible conclusions on automation, for example, barring some self-evident and easily accessible truths such as that increased automation removes workers from the manufacturing floor, thus increasing unemployment. This same Ph.D. will have very little knowledge of what goes into the fundamental technological principles relating to the automation of modern industry or, for that matter, how G-code interpreters work for Computer Numerical Control machining centers and what is required to run them—a knowledge domain belonging to college-educated engineers.

This is why we have the blind leading the blind. Those at the top are ill-informed by their own ignorance in attempting to make good decisions. This happen not just in government committees, think-tanks or even at the state and local level, but this also occurs in most major corporations these days as technology has outpaced the knowledge that middle and upper management were taught as little as one decade ago.

The article by Moon of Alabama is a good one to understand the pragmatic situation we find ourselves in with the latest Russian technology advances (such as underwater drones pictured below) as well as the coordinated drone (two pictures down) strike on the Saudi oil production facility.

Artistic rendering of a drone submersible

Martyanov explains why the models the ‘experts’ use fail. He shows how the advantage of one weapon system against another one can be calculated. People who have had a military education know these formulas. Those who only studied political science have likely never heard of them.

I will allow MOA to be the expert on that aspect of this book.

Houthi drones on display

My own interest lies in the philosophic underpinnings of Martyanov’s book itself. More posts on this book will be in the works shortly.

Stay tuned.

-SF1

Roots: What Are We as Individuals and Community At Our Core? Honorable?

As I read the headlines that 99% of Americans do not see, those from independent and grassroots media, across the Internet, I find a search for several things from all angles across the globe. I find words like honor, freedom, faith and reason all being bantered about as we humans attempt to make sense of this broken world.

On the one hand, we have people looking back in our broken (and sometimes covered up) history. For example, Karen Stokes writes of the type of person typical of areas of the southern USA in 1863 under the stress of war that threatened their families and their livelihood:

.. their letters also offer an inspiring story of “devotion to home, family solidarity, faith, virtue, fidelity, sacrifice, bravery, and a strength of character that makes it possible to survive terrible loss and trauma.

The character to stand up to tyranny when ones own family and way of life could be swept away like that of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible is something that was not seen in these united States since the War for Independence 80 years earlier when the same kind of people stood up to the British Empire.

A man or woman of honor were people, who in times of crisis, rose to the occasion and became unwilling leaders in their efforts to repel the forces of change that represented a foe who’s agenda was to implement their own life view on others, with force. Honor was a sought after attribute especially in the South in the decades after the War for Independence, and by the 1930s had all been but overshadowed by something new:

Earlier in the 1930s, the celebrated English writer and critic G. K. Chesterton gave his thoughts on what the “Old South” had to offer the world in his essay “On America,” in which he asserted that, although the twentieth century was the “Age of America,” there was “a virtue lacking in the age, for want of which it will certainly suffer and possibly fail.”

That missing virtue, according to Chesterton, was honor.

The Age of America emerged from the post-“Civil War” north’s view that its own victory over the South was a moral one. All one has to do is to count the atrocities and scandals in the decades that followed until the Northern GOP was forced to finally let the South go in the late 1870s, removing them from military districts and allowing them to go it alone to recover economically. It would not be until the 1970s that most of these states did recover, without much if any federal assistance. That is not honorable.

Lately, there has been yet another underground effort to capture the essence of what the history of the South could help us in the 21st century understand about the core of human nature in a world that seems out of control and bent on destroying us:

in his book Why America Failed (2012), cultural historian Morris Berman expressed similar sentiments, characterizing the antebellum South as a culture focused on “honor and community,” and further stating, “In its flawed and tragic way, the Old South stood for values that we finally cannot live without if we are to remain human.”

It does seem that hope and encouragement are sorely needed at this time in this world. Personally I take solace in reading what the 1st century Jesus-followers did as they faced persecution and yet stood with honor, grace and defended their families against all odds, with the strange by-product of having Jesus’ words ripple throughout the Roman Empire in such a way as to turn the then known world upside-down!

So in 1939, as the threat of another world war was evident, a book was offered in an attempt to give some hope from a more secular view:

What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization? In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in his book ‘The South to Posterity’ ..

.. He maintained that these works of historical literature would always stand as solid evidence that the South had “fought its fight gallantly, and, so far as war ever permits, with fairness and decency; that it endured its hardships with fortitude; that it wrought its hard recovery through uncomplaining toil, and that it gave to the nation the inspiration of personalities, humble and exalted, who met a supreme test and did not falter.”

The core of his book centers around the real war-time correspondence letters of Alexander Cheves Haskell, one of seven brothers who fought in the War Against Southern Independence:

In ‘The South to Posterity’, one man whose story Douglas Southall Freeman offered as testimony to the “court of time” was a young Confederate cavalry officer from South Carolina, Alexander Cheves Haskell. Freeman had recently read a biography of Haskell which drew heavily on his memoir and correspondence, and he singled out a letter Haskell penned in 1863 as among the finest examples of “the war-time correspondence of high souls” and “one of the most beautiful born of war.” Freeman included only a portion of this letter in his book, but all of Haskell’s wartime letters have finally been collected and published as part of his family’s correspondence in my new book An Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861-1865.

An Everlasting Circle includes many outstanding letters written by a remarkable and prominent family that sent seven sons to war. Dr. James E. Kibler has contributed an excellent afterword to the book that comments on the literary value of the letters and the kind of civilization that could produce a family like the Haskells. It was a civilization shaped by classical learning and orthodox Christianity.

Beyond this article, others like Bionic Mosquito, has taken sights off the distractions of today’s world and centered on the core of what each generation needs to grapple with, the tension between reason and faith:

As God is the author of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, why would any Christian agree to live with such distinctions? It seems reasonable to suggest that one reason Christianity has lost its way (and has lost many in the West) is precisely because Christian leaders have accepted and even emphasized this difference. “Oh, you just have to believe by faith; don’t ask questions.” This is too often heard.

It is interesting that non-Christian intellectuals are making this connection once again. I am thinking of Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke. It is also interesting that this has led to an increase in interest in Christianity – although I think neither of these two have ever intended to increase church attendance.

It is the case: God moves in mysterious ways….

Yes, that last quote is a teaser. You will have to go look around Bionic’s site to see the path he has traveled in his quest for truth. I may have to post about some of his works this year. He has done a great service for those around the globe who are starting to see all the government and media lies and are desperately searching for truth.

Stay tuned!

-SF1

Options When Windows 10 Kills a PC: Linux Mint Extends the Life-cycle!

The Linux OS on the Dell Inspiron on the left made a bootable USB with a Linux Mint ISO ver. 19.2 64-bit Cinnamon for the Lenovo laptop on the right and is now booting up a fresh Linux OS!

I am thinking that my Lenovo PC read my post a few weeks ago:

My next update will hopefully be when I prepare to transition one of my laptops (either a Lenovo Model G510 vintage 2011 or H/P Model 15-p030nr vintage 2014) to have the Linux Mint OS that has proven so very successful on my oldest laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1545 vintage 2010.

Yes, my wife’s other old laptop would not even boot up after the latest Windows 10 update, and it was not even a major feature update which is did accomplish a few months ago (1903 feature update). Just the Lenovo splash screen and the dots that form a circle appeared with the CPU fan blazing every now and then indicated that this PC was not happy, and not useful anymore.

Enter Linux Mint’s installation guide once more to the rescue.

This was the first time I had another Linux PC to assist with the process of creating a bootable USB. Start to finish, including downloading the 1.9GB ISO file it took about 1 hour to install Linux Mint and configure it for future operations. I see this 2011 Lenovo PC as becoming my primary laptop and my older Dell will become my backup.

I utilized a wired Ethernet connection in case Linux did not have my wireless configured right away, but it did and it was not needed (but it was faster).

The installation guide is very straight forward, a big improvement since my first laptop rescue effort over 5 years ago with a PC that was facing no ongoing support for Windows 95. 🙂

Using Linux to facilitate another PC’s transition from Windows to Linux is no chore really, in fact, it was a little fun to see the “re-birth” of an old laptop towards being a valuable tool going forward. It is too bad that smartphones can’t be rescued like this, due to their battery finally giving up and making the life-cycle very short (2-4 years depending).

I love a market that has options like this, competition is good!

-SF1

Amexit: Post War of Independence from British Empire – Politically Hijacked

[A] large group of soldiers who saw the goal of the Revolution as getting rid of the power of a centralised government to rule over Americans. They had a fellow American feeling with comrades in other states for shared sacrifices and they were willing to entertain a federal (not national) government to handle some of the joint affairs of the States, but insisted that such a government must be kept within a strictly circumscribed role.

Yes, even Francis Marion, as you shall see, was himself marginalized at the end of the War for Independence from the British Empire. There were efforts already in the works politically to turn this “win” into something of their own choosing that was much different than what the soldiers and militias were fighting for.

The above quote is from a 2014 article about James Jackson who immigrated to the Georgia colony as a 15 year old. My guess is that you never heard of him. Maybe some of these names you will recognize from your academic experiences:

Nicholas Gilman of New Hampshire, John Lansing of New York, Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania, John Francis Mercer of Maryland, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, Thomas Sumter of South Carolina, and James Monroe, St. George Tucker, and John Taylor of Virginia.

Well maybe you have heard of Thomas Sumter and possibly John Taylor, but the others have been obscured by the academic history books for some time. The likes of these people had the following qualities:

A patriot did not seek public fame and fortune. His task was alertness to preserve the principles of free government against all comers. He did not seek power, but if called to public office he took it as a duty to his society, not as an opportunity for self-advancement. His ambition was for his country, not himself. The example here was the Roman hero Cincinnatus, who was called from his farm to lead an army and having won the victory went home and resumed his plowing.

This type of person was one that could see quickly into an existing situation and rightly identify the bad actors behind the scenes. These men, with their prophetic ability, typically would see the red flags much sooner than someone like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison as explained here:

[James] Jackson was nearly alone in 1790 in discerning and exposing the implications of what was afoot; joined only by William Maclay of Pennsylvania in the Senate. As one historian has put it:

The astonishing thing is that the comparatively crude Maclay from the wilds of Pennsylvania and the leather-lunged James Jackson from sparsely settled Georgia should have caught the full significance of it all before it dawned on Jefferson and Madison.

So even three years after the coup d’etat at Philadelphia where the “perpetual” Articles of Confederation was shredded in favor of a NEW document formed in secret called a constitution, there were two yet in the government who saw this new direction for the union for what it was. Patrick Henry had rightly said “I smell a rat” in 1787 as he was the most prophetic of all.

So what helps to form such an honest sort of individual. A mixture of nature and nurture no doubt, as can be seen in a quick biographical sketch here below:

James Jackson was born in 1757 in Devonshire, England. At the age of fifteen he sailed the Atlantic unaccompanied and landed in 1772 at Savannah, Georgia, where some family friends were living. Despite his youth and his recent arrival from the mother country, Jackson enthusiastically joined the cause of American independence. Throughout the war he was active in military service. After the British capture of Savannah, Jackson escaped, reportedly swam the Savannah River, and arrived barefoot and in tatters to join the South Carolina patriot forces as a private, serving 17 months with Thomas Sumter’s partisans. He took part in most of the fighting in the Southern colonies and in expeditions into Florida and to the Indian frontier. He was wounded at least once and repeatedly cited for gallantry and enterprise. Jackson ended the war as a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel in command of his own battalion and was selected to receive the official surrender of Savannah from the departing British, July 11, 1782.

A pioneer, a survivor, a fighter .. “.. a tough, independent citizen ready to defend his society against foreign threats. Equally important, it was characterized by the wisdom to discern and the courage to oppose threats to liberty from inside. History furnished many examples of the undermining of free governments by plausible, designing men ambitious for power and profit. This is why Thomas Jefferson said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and that the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. A virtuous republican had the makings of such a patriot.” – Clyde Wilson & Brion McClanahan

In 1782, with the War for Independence almost over, James goes back to the plow:

After the war Jackson established himself as a successful lawyer and planter. Georgia was the smallest of the States in population and settled territory (though already filling fast with new settlers) and had an exposed frontier. It quickly ratified the proposed Constitution for the United States without the reservations that concerned many and kept North Carolina out of the Union for several more years. In 1788 the George legislature elected Jackson Governor. He declined on grounds that he was too inexperienced for the august position. The next year he was elected as one of Georgia’s two Representatives to the First Congress. Shipwrecked on his way to New York, he arrived too late for the inaugural day but was soon an outspoken member of the House.

Notice the humble nature of this man, declined his election as governor of Georgia because he felt himself too inexperience! More of this please!

What he found a year later in New York, NY, the first capital of the united States drove him toward using “straight” language:

Jackson found the House discussing the proper way to address the President, with proposals like “His Excellency,” “His Grace,” and “His Serene Highness” being offered by those who wanted to endow the new government with dignity and awe.

He lamented that the probably source of this trend toward having a god in government on earth to displace the God in Heaven was most likely Boston, where as he rightly explains:

.. a town which, fifteen years ago, would have acknowledged no Lord but the Lord of hosts ..

Cutting, but so very true. In fact, after a miraculous win by 13 united colonies against a world power like the British Empire, one can only see that as the Israelites of old, they still could not trust a God that delivered them and proceeded to form a central government that would guarantee this independence for years to come. The downside was that liberty itself would be sacrificed for this perceived safety.

Typical of the pioneer reluctant hero and patriot of the day, his opponents ridiculed his character and speech:

.. some opponents hinted that the Representative from Georgia was too loud and crude. “I have accustomed myself to a blunt integrity of speech,” Jackson told the House, “which I hope the goodness of my intentions will excuse.” The more serious criticisms of the Representative from Georgia were uttered in private. It was known that Jackson had more than once taken his stand on the Savannah dueling ground and had always walked away.

But the disgust for the words to be used in this new republic was pale compared to Alexander Hamilton’s intentions that made the rich richer and the poor/soldier poorer:

The first move came in Hamilton’s proposal to pay off the Continental debt of the Revolution. Everyone agreed that the debt had to be retired, but the devil was in the details. Hamilton’s plan was to pay the holders of the debt in interest-bearing government bonds, thus to create a permanent public debt, which would in turn require tax revenue.

There was an even more serious kicker. The debt was to be funded at face value. The debt, aside from loans from European allies, consisted of paper that had been issued by the Continental Congress for soldiers’ pay and bounties and army supplies. Almost all of it was now in the hands of Northern and European capitalists who had acquired it at cents on the dollar when it was “not worth a Continental.” Jackson pointed out that there were not twenty of the original receivers of Continental paper left in Georgia and that soldiers had invariably been forced by necessity to sell their paper at a large discount.

.. and, there’s more!

Hamilton’s proposal was soon followed by another—the government should assume the remaining debts of the States, now also in the hands of speculators, and fund them in the same way. A proposal in the House to pay some of the proceeds to the original holders was roughly quashed by what was beginning to look like an organized party. Not only that, but, Jackson pointed out, certain money men who obviously had advanced knowledge of Hamilton’s plans had been in Georgia very recently buying up debt certificates.

Yes, by this time the ’cause’ had been fully hijacked by a new political machine that would give Lincoln everything he needed to permanently change this nation into something so much different. The balance of this article show the emergence of government scandals that have unfortunately continued to this day, sucking the life out of taxpayers at every revolution of the sun.

Here in 2019 we can see the fruits of the labors of Hamilton and Lincoln that were seasoned by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Johnson, Nixon, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama and even Trump today. The American Empire is the “same thing only different” from the British one that the American colonies sought to remove themselves from. Now we (US government/empire) are the global and domestic oppressors that operate above the law.

Not cool.

-SF1

17SEP1787 – Coup d’etat in Philadelphia: US Constitution

Anyone who attended public school in the last 100 years have been taught that the US Constitution was one of the milestones in this country’s birth and maturation process towards being and becoming the land of the free.

This is rubbish. Americans were more free in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris than they were after the US Constitution was revealed on 17SEP1787 and finally ratified by 11 of the 13 former colonies two years later in 1789.

For those that would like to dig into the details rather than be persuaded by a single blog post I would recommend Sheldon Richman’s book ‘America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited‘:

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.

Personally, way back in MAR1976 when I was a high school senior and 17 years old, I made the oath below:

“I, (state name of enlistee), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

Enlisting in the US Navy, I had little to no idea as to the words I was repeating. At that time I was not aware how defective the Constitution was, the way it was created (the charge in 1787 was to amend the Articles of Confederation, not to replace it) and the way it has been abused.

Note that my first charge in this oath I took is to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So what if the President of the US is that enemy, how can I still “obey the orders of the President of the United States”?

Looking back in history, I see that many if not all the presidents have subverted the US Constitution either in the letter or spirit of that defective document. LBJ, FDR, Wilson, Lincoln and even Washington all said that some existing crises necessitated their decisions and actions. So what good is this document (as Lysander Spooner said)?

The answer is “Absolutely Nothing!” This document does nothing to restrain tyranny in these united States as it was originally intended, by some of its authors.

But I digress, for a better question is why was this document needed? Why were the Articles of Confederation just tossed aside? Why was this document drafted in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia behind closed doors in tremendous secrecy?

The truth is, if word leaked out of the actual contents, the original intent and the agenda that was behind this major shift, the revolution that had just concluded would have been set ablaze again. The authors of this document were in a race against time and did everything in their power to ensure that the adoption took place as quickly as possible to avoid reflection and contemplation in the public square that would kill the proposal once the consequences of its agenda became apparent.

They were actually insisting that the states ratify first and then propose amendments later. The document had no bill of rights and it actually gave more power to the general or central government. It was a political coup d’état. No wonder Patrick Henry said he smelled a rat.

It was nothing less than an oligarchical coup to ensure that the moneyed interests, bankers and aristocrats could cement their positions and mimic the United Kingdom from which they had been recently divorced.

In the interests of truth, the document that should be taught before the US Constitution is in fact the Articles of Confederation that was conceived in 1776 and adopted in 1781. As William Buppert explains:

As Austrian economists have discovered, bigger is not necessarily better. The brilliant and oft-dismissed Articles of Confederation (AoC) and Perpetual Union are a testament to voluntarism and cooperation through persuasion that the Constitution disposed of with its adoption. Penned in 1776 and ratified in 1781, the spirit and context of the Articles live on in the Swiss canton system and are everywhere evident in the marketplace where confederationist sentiments are practiced daily. The confederation’s design divines its mechanism from what an unfettered market does every day: voluntary cooperation, spontaneous information signals and the parts always being smarter than the sum A. confederation according to the Webster’s 1828 dictionary is:

  1. The act of confederating; a league; a compact for mutual support; alliance; particularly of princes, nations or states.

This ‘marriage’ retains the freedom of the entities that would voluntary join to also exit. What is obvious is that the US Constitution did not guarantee this exit clause, otherwise the state constitutions of New York and Virginia would not have had exit rights penned into their own documents. Furthermore, when the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787, 55 delegates came but 14 later quit as the Convention eventually abused its mandate and scrapped the Articles of Confederation instead of revising it.

Ultimately, actions spoke louder than words when even the much admired Washington was revealed as having none of the talk of independence and wanting a firm hand on the yoke of the states to make them obey their masters on high. Washington’s behavior in the Whiskey Rebellion cast away any doubts of the imperious behavior of the central government a mere four year after the adoption of the Constitution.

There were those who stood in the way, but typical to politics in general, these people are marginalized. Patrick Henry gave the firmest defense of the skeptical posture when he questioned the precarious position the Constitution put to the state’s sovereignty on 5 June 1788 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention. It should be noted that the savvy ‘Founding Lawyers’ ensured that the process of ratification was sped along by bypassing the bicameral house requirements and simply asking the states to conduct ratifying conventions. Henry’s text says:

“How were the Congressional rights defined when the people of America united by a confederacy to defend their liberties and rights against the tyrannical attempts of Great-Britain? The States were not then contented with implied reservation. No, Mr. Chairman. It was expressly declared in our Confederation that every right was retained by the States respectively, which was not given up to the Government of the United States. But there is no such thing here. You therefore by a natural and unavoidable implication, give up your rights to the General Government. Your own example furnishes an argument against it. If you give up these powers, without a Bill of Rights, you will exhibit the most absurd thing to mankind that ever the world saw — A Government that has abandoned all its powers — The powers of direct taxation, the sword, and the purse. You have disposed of them to Congress, without a Bill of Rights — without check, limitation, or controul. And still you have checks and guards — still you keep barriers — pointed where? Pointed against your weakened, prostrated, enervated State Government! You have a Bill of Rights to defend you against the State Government, which is bereaved of all power; and yet you have none against Congress, though in full and exclusive possession of all power! You arm youselves against the weak and defenceless, and expose yourselves naked to the armed and powerful. Is not this a conduct of unexampled absurdity? What barriers have you to oppose to this most strong energetic Government? To that Government you have nothing to oppose. All your defence is given up. This is a real actual defect. . . “

We, in 2019, are feeling the full effects of this constitution’s real purpose with the emergence of the government spying on its citizens and the whole Red Flag law emergence. Total control implies that all guns are in the government’s hands so that “All your defence is given up”

Helpless tax slaves is the aim of the government we have today, thanks in part to the efforts of Madison, Hamilton and John Jay.

It appears that James Madison tried to reverse himself somewhat by introducing ten amendments called the Bill of Rights, but it was too little, too late, and only represented a piece of paper:

“Our constitutions purport to be established by ‘the people,’ and, in theory, ‘all the people’ consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of ‘the people’ exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.”~ Lysander Spooner

-SF1