Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

The U.S. Is a Failed State: Dissolve It

By Michael S. Rozeff

July 23, 2013

America is a very sick patient with a curable cancer that, if left alone, will cause death. The cancer is the Union or the state known as the U.S.A. More commonly, the Union and the U.S.A. are referred to as the U.S. government, the federal government or simply the government. It is the body established by the Constitution that administers the powers described in that Constitution. Phasing out and dissolving the U.S. government, which can be done by constitutional means, will remove the cancer and restore a degree of health.

Ending the Union will certainly not cure all of America’s ills, because they trace back to wrong and false ideas. These are like bad habits, genetic and environmental factors that cause cancer. If they are not changed, the cancer will come back. The search for non-destructive politics is as never-ending as the search for health and longevity.

The main reason why Americans should dissolve the Union is that it is a failed state. For those who believe in the efficacy and goodness of states, their most essential, central and important task is to keep the peace within their domain. This goal entails protecting the lives and property of the citizens under its protection, the people of the United States.

Perfection of the government at keeping the peace is not to be expected. A certain amount of failure of a state to keep the peace is normal and tolerable, but at some point when war becomes the norm or becomes so extensive, permanent and destructive that keeping the peace is all but forgotten or impossible to attain, we can safely declare that the state has failed. This has happened with the U.S.

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See Also:

2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

‘A study of how do you know anything in Afghanistan’: An Interview with Weston Prize-winner Graeme Smith

Hannah Moscovitch

Random House, October 21, 2013

The author of The Dogs Are Eating Them Now talks with playwright Hannah Moscovitch.

EXTRACTS:

Partly, it’s just that in any war—but especially a place as alien as Afghanistan—you have to be very careful about the conclusions you draw. I’ve been wrong so many times with so many things in Afghanistan. So many foreigners have misjudged the situation that you have to be so, so cautious about how you know anything. It’s almost a kind of interesting epistemological study of how do you know anything in Afghanistan.

. . . . . . .

I think we went through a whole transformation in our understanding of who it was we were fighting. Operation Medusa was that moment for me where I started to think, “Oh, okay, maybe we’re not fighting Al-Qaeda in the fields, maybe we’re not fighting people who intend to fly airplanes into buildings in the West. Maybe we’re fighting a bunch of ignorant farmers who have decided to join the Taliban because they’re really pissed off.”

If you look back in the record, especially 2003 to 2006, people would use Al-Qaeda and Taliban in the same breath when talking about our enemies. As things progressed, they started to make the distinction. My friend Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, two very good academics, wrote an entire book called An Enemy We Created. It’s a fantastic book, I think they’ve only sold fewer than 700 copies which is a terrible shame because it describes the distinction between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and how they were connected briefly and how they fought each other.

. . . . . . .

I think the task they were given, the tools and the task were never really matched up.

. . . . . . .

Endless books will be written about why this didn’t work. We’re just now reaching a point in the conversation with ourselves where we’re able to reflect on why this didn’t work.

. . . . . . .

It’s a very humbling thing, working in Afghanistan.

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Psychosocial Implication of Without Within

Enjoying going solar for oneself

Introduction
Going solar as an exercise in technomimicry
Planets “within” as vehicles for significance?
Internalizing alternative modes of transportation
Objects, projects, rejects and subjects
Questionable objectification of the natural environment
Dominion over the world “without” — understood as being “within”
Problems of society as “within” rather than “without”
Transforming awareness framed by stellar evolution
Ignorance “without” as re-cognized “within”
Conclusion
References

The Poverty of our Political Theater of the Absurd

The public sphere has been effectively stripped of everything but corny, irritatingly hammy political theater.

All we have left in the U.S. is a deeply impoverishing Political Theater of the Absurd. Policy, theory and governance have all been reduced to competing stage performances in the Theater of the Absurd. The actors are transparently given to farcical overacting in exaggerated dramas drained of meaning; they proceed through the cliched motions as if the audience hadn't seen the same charades overplayed dozens of times before.

“Government shutdown” and “debt ceiling” may have engaged audiences starved for entertainment in a bygone age, but now they exemplify a theater that is so impoverished it can only re-stage tired formulaic dramas with a savage appetite for incompetence and buffoonery.

Continue reading “Eagle: Charles Hugh Smith on the Poverty of Our Political Theater of the Absurd”