"Everything--yes, EVERYTHING--you "know" is wrong!!!" -- vk
"Do Americans suffer from UNdiagnosed Stockholm Syndrome?" [see the essay on Germany below and, via analogy, apply the analysis to the American public. In other words, think for yourself!]
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already. --Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.
*** VAUGHN KLINGENBERG, LOTTERIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT 2012 *********
His disciples came to him and asked, "When will the Kingdom [of Heaven] come? And Jesus answered them, "It will not come by waiting for it...." -- The Gospel of Thomas.
"REAL HOPE. REAL CHANGE. RIGHT NOW!!!" (R)
SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER--AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC!!!
In a very real sense my own political views are of trivial significance because in the long run it is the Lotterist Assembly that will uphold and strike down laws. My significance is only in that of being an iconoclast, clearing and leveling the playing field before the mantle of power is passed on to a new generation of Americans, a millennial generation. Still, my own personal views need to be expressed because they will have some impact on the institutions and practices that follow, and to satisfy the natural curiosity of like-, and unlike, minded individuals. V.K.
Upon assuming the Presidency I will IMMEDIATELY initiate the following:
1. Declare, via Executive Order, a State of National Emergency and dissolve the present federal congress housed in Washington DC. (I will leave it to the individual states to decide whether they choose to adopt a lotterist government themselves.) Immediately, on inauguration day if not earlier, begin forming and establishing a government by lottery so ideally, the first set of lotterist electors can join me on inauguration day for the swearing in of themselves for office as well (see The Lotterist Manifesto on The Lotterist Party website for a detailed account of the form this government will take). 2. Declare, effective immediately, via Executive Order, free health care for all Americans (and anyone else residing in the US) 3 Appropriate the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans. More precisely, I will limit wealth to 10 million dollars per family and 5 million dollars per individual. All other wealth will be appropriated by the state to pay for social service programs for all Americans (i.e., social security, national health care, national day care centers...etc.), as well as pay down our massive debt. As a consequence of expropriating wealth from the very richest Americans (see the "L-curve") , individual taxes should for the remaining Americans should drop to virtually nothing for the foreseeable future. I will also switch the currency to a gold standard. 4 Declare the non-use of any nuclear weapons. Not the first use, but ANY use of nuclear weapons. (I would not want the deaths of millions of innocents on my conscience even for the call for a retaliatory strike.) 5. Declare a Pax Americana--a Rwanda will not happen on my watch, while the rest of the world stands by with hands in their pockets. 6. Invalidate the Patriot Act, and dissolve the CIA and NSA.Initiate a new investigation into 9/11 and its aftermath, the justifications for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Immediately apologize to, free and give compensation to all Gitmo "Enemy Combatants" [sic]. 7. Reduce the military budget to a small fraction of what it is now, and convert the military to an armed American Peace Corps to intervene in places like Rwanda or where ever else massive civilian casualties are taking place. 8. Feed the world. A priority of my administration is that starvation literally cease from happening anywhere around the globe. Instead of guns our factories will produce butter as the instrument of our foreign policy. 9. Withdraw our military from hitherto American puppet states, and allow for the opportunity of other countries to develop independent of coercive American influence. As for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our solution is to have Israel dismantle its status as a Jewish state and allow Palestinians, Moslems, Christians, and all non-Jewish sects to have full equal rights with Jews. I believe in a one state solution.
10.
The solution to the foreclosure/bankruptcy/economic crisis: a) write down all mortgage loans to fair market value--across the board--and have the lenders "eat" the loss; b) return to the earlier lax regulation on bankruptcy, and cap the interest rate on credit cards at 5% above inflation; c) liberalize Small Business Administration loans and grants.
11. My solution to the unemployment crisis: reduce the manditory work week from 40 hours to 32, thereby opening up more opportunities for employment.
12 My solution to the homelessness problem: open mothballed schools and convert them into homeless shelters/community resource centers/day care centers.
. 13. I will resign from office three and a half years into my tenure, on June 1st, 2016, and return to private life. Thereafter, the lotterist government I have outlined elsewhere can assume its role as the full governing body of the United States.
14. Extradite ex-Presidents and government officials for trials in countries in which they have committed or aided and abetted a capital crime. E.g., George Bush II would be turned over to Iraqi civilians for crimes against that country. No one who has served in a previous administration will be permitted to serve in my administration. Similarly, no one with dual citizenship will serve in my administration. All existing department heads will be fired (or pensioned off) so we can begin afresh.
Objections and Replies to Critics of My Candidacy
1. What are your qualifications to be President? You have no prior government experience or experience even leading a company, let alone a national government?
Answer: I honestly believe that my greatest qualification for being President is that I don't particularly want to be President--odd as that may sound. I have no interests in being President. I am running because, to paraphrase what a critic of ancient Roman society once observed, "How can you not run?"--things are so bad today that the question should not be, "Why run for office?", but "Given the corruption of our two party democratic system, how can you not run?" As for my lack of experience, the charge is legitimate, but, hey, if George Bush II supposedly was qualified and gifted enough to be president....I rest my case.
"Til next year in [the New] Jerusalem!" -- Vaughn Klingenberg.
For a full account of the Lotterist philosophy or, more accurately, methodology, I strongly urge you to visit the companion website: thelotteristparty.org
I agree with Plato’s critique of democracy in The Republic made 2500 years ago: it is a harlequin government composed mostly of the basest elements of humankind.Now remember Plato and Socrates lived under tyrannies, plutocracies, militocracies (government by the military), democracies, and lotteries.(Not surprisingly, the only government post ever held by Socrates was when he was selected by lottery to fulfill a judicial post.)Each form of governance has problems peculiar to itself (although, significantly, a critique of lotterism is omitted from The Republic).With respect to democracy, what Plato does is he looks at the nature of man, with his appetites, spiritedness, and intellect, and deduces that since all people have appetites, fewer are honor oriented, and fewest still are intellectuals, that a democratic government necessarily would be run, essentially, by the moor less, appetative masses.In other words, not reasoned policy would dictate government behavior but irrational, spur-of-the-moment, desire, because this is what all men have in common.(If you think Plato is out of date, just look to Maslow hierarchy of being to uncover a popular [plagiarized from Plato] version of it for today.)Of course Plato’s solution to the problem of governance is rule by philosopher-kings, but since that ain’t gonna happen, the trick for us is to raise not individual philosopher-kings, but a nation of philosopher-kings, and lotterism has the potential, at least, to make that happen.
Of course Plato isn’t around to see the intricate sophistication of two party democratic rule in the U.S. today.In the abstract, democracy is a viable form of government, provided we have an intellectually critical electorate sift candidates on the reasonableness of their views.But that is not how it works in America.Instead, we have a two party dictatorship that filters candidates so that only those who are willing to go along to get ahead are nominated for positions.This of course brings out the worst type of person for elected office: spineless, sycophantic demagogues who are more loyal to the party that got them nominated and elected than to the public which they purported serve.In fact, I would go so far as to argue that, as with authoritarian personality types that are attracted to police work, the very fact that someone wants to be a politician should, by that very fact, disqualify them from office.The type of person who wants to be elected to office in order to have legislative power over the ruled masses is, by definition, a power hungry self-seeking, quisling of the worst order.Combine the modern self-seeking politician personality type with the constant need for high-buck campaign solicitations (actually, legal bribery) and we can easily see how this personality type will suck up to power, and eventually become a mere water boy for the moneyed elite that can guarantee him the money he needs for the deliberately ever increasingly expensive political campaigns.
In America, the public is only given the opportunity to ratify and rubber stamp the existing plutocratic democratic system that actually functions here in the U.S. with elections every 2, 4, or 6 years.Unfortunately, the Media conspires with the two parties to shut down upstart, grassroots political organizations.They both do this by, typically, ignoring or marginalizing these upstart parties, by making it onerous legally and logistically to set up a party, and by infiltrating and destroying an upstart party from within.This brings me to Orwell’s critique of democracy from his profound and insightful book, 1984. In the world Winston Smith inhabits, the real power in Oceania is the Inner and OuterTemple (oops, I mean Party).The way the Temple seized power in Oceania was not through democratic election necessarily, but via “oligarchic collectivism.”In other words, a kabbal from the Temple used the political methodology of both overtly and covertly mutually self-promoting members of their organization until they held the very top positions throughout all of government (the top position, Big Brother, being merely a figurehead behind which the Temple rules).As Orwell notes, it doesn’t matter to the Temple who particularly is in positions of power as long as they are members of the Temple.As Chekov notes in The Government Inspector, any old fool and his foot soldiers can invade another country from without; it takes real genius to invade a country from within.Orwell’s critique of the pernicious influence of “oligarchic collectivism” would apply not only to any form of democracy, but to other institutions—Media, big business, education, the military, intelligence...etc...—as well.
So what is the cure?From the above we can see that we do not want people in office who want to be there, nor do we want moneyed interests to have decisive sway over policy, nor do we want partisans of “oligarchic collectivism” to covertly infiltrate and subvert government institutions. To my mind, government by lottery is the only solution. True, we will get the odd self-serving, self-centered individual selected for office, but I believe we will get far more public spirited, selfless, well intentioned Americans who will do what is right for the nation as a whole. No longer will political parties filter out altruistic, uncompromising Americans.No longer will money have an influence on policy.And no longer will it depend on “money, or who is in your family tree” when it comes to determining who we have as "our" so-called “representatives” [sic].
Item: The Democrats hold a 60 vote majority in the Senate and all they need is 51 votes to pass the Obama’s “Health Care Reform Act” [sic].
Item:Even before the Health Care bill was presented to Congress, Obama took single-payer health care off the table as an option.
Item:The Media drums home the message that Obama needs 60 votes to avoid a filibuster from the Republicans in the Senate (the Media ignores that Obama only really needs 51 votes to pass the bill).
Item:Obama postures himself as a “consensus” President, and employs this excuse [i.e., the need to have a 60 vote majority] as a reason for trying to come to terms with Republicans in order to avoid a filibuster.
Item:Were the Republicans to actually filibuster and hold up a national health care bill for all Americans, the Republican party would self-destruct electorally.
Item: Were the Democrats even half-witted they would allow—nay, encourage—the Republicans to filibuster, thereby allowing the Republicans to hang themselves with their own rope, and secure a Democrat electoral victory in the next election and for many years to come.
Item: The Democratic leadership, including President Obama, has deliberately chosen not to follow the course of action listed above.
What can we conclude from this?
Since Obama and the Democrats could unilaterally pass universal health care and at the same time allow the Republican Party to destroy itself, and since Obama and the Democrats have chosen not to do this, we can only conclude that the Democrats and Republicans are conspiring together to thwart true national health care (i.e., actually the grand strategy is to transfer health care costs from businesses to consumers). Not only that, I dare say at the same time the Democrats are actually conspiring to resurrect the Republican Party, their purported ideological enemy. What could possibly be a plausible alternative explanation?
Fuck Obama.Fuck the Democrats. Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the System!!!
Some Random Thoughts on the Haitian Earthquake of January 12th.
1. Coincidentally, the earthquake fell on the Feast of St. Tatiana who, according to legend, when she was forced to pray to a God other than Yahweh, an earthquake resulted.
2. Like the tsunami that struck Malaysia on Boxing [the corpses] Day a year after the Prime Minister of Malaysia severely criticized Israel's apartheid system and the maltreatment of Palestinian moslems, the earthquake in Haiti struck just off the coast as well, and in Haiti it had the equivalent force of a half a megaton nuclear explosion. The curious thing is that the US Media seems to be obfuscating when it comes to the whereabouts of the origin of the earthquake and for some reason is resistant to acknowledging that it took place just off the coast of Port-au-Prince (which it did).
3. Similarly odd (or perhaps I am just a stickler for precision), the Media keeps repeating it was a 7.0 earthquake when in fact it was a 7.2 earthquake.
4, Another oddity: while 150,000-200,000 Haitians have died in the earthquake and 3,000,000 are homeless, according to the an Israeli wire report (JTA), not a single Israeli living in Haiti was injured by even so much as a fallen brick. Wow, what luck!!!
5. Closer to home: why is the US government sending the USS Vinson, a huge aircraft carrier, to do rescue work in Haiti? I could see a helicopter carrier or several hospital ships (we only sent one), but why a lumbering aircraft carrier that is not even set up for humanitarian relief work and whose landing area cannot even accommodate transport aircraft? Furthermore, since the earthquake occurred off the coast of Port-au-Prince isn't there the danger that another sea-borne earthquake may arise? Most odd.
6. One more thing: I demand to know where the Israeli submarines—Dolphin, Leviathan, and Tekuma—were on January 12th, 2010 (and, for that matter, where they each were on Boxing Day, when the tsunami hit Malaysia). This should pose no problem given the sophisticated HAARP global submarine monitoring system we have in place.
Haitt: Crimes of Commission and Crimes of Omission
There are crimes of commission and crimes of omission, and with respect to Haiti, I have a question to put to you. It has been 18 days since the earthquake in Haiti. At a minimum, now, 150,000 people are dead, and many times that number are suffering from thirst and hunger. You authorized the sending of an aircraft carrier to aid the people of Haiti. Why you sent an aircraft carrier (with little in the way of surgical facilities) I'll never know. However, had the aircraft carrier been stocked with helicopters for delivering aid to Haitians--that would then make some sense. My understanding is that that is not the case. That the aircraft carrier is merely a show--giving the appearance of assistance while at the same time not really delivering any. Can you prove that I am mistaken in my assessment? I would hate to be put on trial in Haiti for a crime of conscious and deliberate neglect--a Crime Against Humanity. You can not claim ignorance going forward. Both I and the nation expect to hear from you immediately to address this issue. (One would have thought that you would have a special place in your heart for disadvantaged and destitute black folks, but perhaps we are mistaken. Please prove me wrong.)
(The Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press have both refused to acknowledge even receipt of my editorial and while Jonathan Brown, Editorial and Opinions Editor of the University of Minnesota Daily Newspaper, did want to publish my essay, it was subsequently pulled by the Editor in Chief, Holly Miller, prior to publication. vk)
“History is written by the victors.” -- J. Goebbels.
Rethinking the Holocaust: Allied Culpability for the Holocaust
“Truth,” we are told, “is the first casualty of war,” and the legacy of lies surrounding World War II and the Holocaust is with us still. In 1938 President Roosevelt called for a special conference to deal with the Jewish Question--how to safely repatriate additional Jews from Nazi Germany to foreign countries. Roosevelt chose as the site of this conference the obscure French town of Evian. All well and good. An American President wanted to save the Jews from the clutches of the evil Nazis. Curiously, however, instead of sending a delegation from the U.S. State Department to attend this meeting, Roosevelt merely sent a personal banking friend of his to attend the conference on behalf of the US government. Needless to say, on the eve of war, while Nazi Germany was eager to expatriate domestic Jews, no country, including the US, would accept any additional Jewish immigrants from Nazi Germany. Yet another missed opportunity to save 6 million Jews from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
This got me to thinking, we ought to have a fresh debate on the facts of the Holocaust--were the Nazis solely to blame for the Holocaust (the common view) or did the U.S. in particular share some measure of guilt for the Holocaust? I went to the Mount Zion Synagogue (on Summit and Syndicate in St. Paul MN USA) to have Jews join with me in opening a new debate on the Holocaust. Instead, as I stood outside the synagogue with a petition in my hands on a bright summer Saturday, I got death threats from the Jews as they entered the Synagogue--"Holocaust denier," "Nazi sympathizer," "white trash"--they name called me. I was mystified. Surely if the Holocaust is as undeniable as a historical event can be, why would anyone resist an open and frank discussion on the topic. We owe it to the millions who died in the concentration camps to come to an honest account of the culpability for the crime of the Holocaust. Then it dawned on me--there is profound insecurity in the Jewish community when talk of debating the true nature of the Holocaust is brought up for discussion.
Now why is that? I decided I would do a thought-experiment and instead of assuming that the Nazis wanted the Holocaust, I would reverse the deck and propose as a topic for consideration that perhaps it was the Allies who really wanted the Holocaust and did whatever they could to make it succeed. In other words, could there be any basis for entertaining the notion that the Allies in fact orchestrated the Holocaust and made d***sure that Nazi Germany would be saddled with the guilt for it?
I am a bit of a history buff when it comes to World War II so I began to think: is there any evidence (besides the failed Evian Conference) for Allied complicity in the Holocaust? To my surprise, indeed there was. After the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 it was obvious to even the Nazi hierarchy that they were going to lose the war. American General Omar Bradley, seeing the defeat of Nazi Germany now as inevitable, proposed to invade Nazi-occupied France in the summer of 1943 (a full year in advance of the actual D-day), but Roosevelt overruled him. The American president wanted the Communist Soviets and the Nazi Germans to bloody each other for another year before he would commit American troops to the European theater. Now in a certain Machiavellian sense there is some logic to this position, but on the other hand, if Jews were dying in the camps at the rate of hundreds of thousands a month it does make one wonder, "Why the delay?" Of course we are told that the Allies had absolutely no knowledge that millions upon millions were being held in Nazi concentration camps. (Apparently word hadn't gotten out to Roosevelt, the Allied leadership, and the OSS--the American intelligence agency during WWII--that Hitler and the Nazi's were anti-Semitic, and that they were incarcerating millions of Jews from all across Europe). Damn those Nazis were clever! They could hide the movement and incarceration of over 12 million concentration camp victims--people certainly sympathetic to the Allied cause and willing to reach out and fight for the Allies against the Nazis--but somehow Allied intelligence could not locate those 12 millions. Oooops.
Then I began to think even more deeply on this topic. Roosevelt and the Allies would only accept "unconditional surrender" from the Nazis. The Allies never wavered from this position. Now while that all sounds well and good, what if agreeing to a conditional surrender--say Hitler and his cronies would serve life imprisonment instead of receiving the death penalty--would have brought the war to an end in 1943. Were that the case, then literally millions and millions of Jews (let alone other Europeans and American GIs) lives would have been spared, but I guess it was more important to carry the fight to the absolute final end--Jews be damned! If only Roosevelt knew that millions of Jews were being killed in concentration camps, if only Roosevelt knew.....
But Roosevelt did know, of course. There was a war time famine in Nazi Germany beginning in 1944. Now let me ask you this: in times of famine who would be the last group fed--regular German citizens or people housed in prison camps? Duh. The famished and horrible picture of Jews in the concentration camps was the predictable result of the famine in Nazi Germany in the last year and a half of the war. Once again, however, Allied intelligence simply missed the connection between a national famine and its effects on the most vulnerable--concentration camp internees. (Boy, was our intelligence bad in World War II. If only some Jews were a part of the OSS in World War II, I'm sure things would have turned out much differently, if only...--but that is grist for yet another, even more interesting, editorial.)
With all the above in mind (and more) I have finally come to the conclusion that not only did the Allies in WWII not subvert the Holocaust--they actually orchestrated and facilitated it. In a word, not the Nazis but the Allies were the ones who really wanted the Holocaust. It was a tremendous burden on the Nazi war machine and war economy to arrest and house millions of Jews, and greatly crippled their war effort. On the other hand, by forcing the Nazis to keep Jews within their territories it greatly eased the war effort on the Allies. In fact, one could argue that some incarcerated Jews were safer in the Nazi concentration camps, far away from the incinerated German cities that were being fire-bombed on a daily basis by the Allies (forget the fact that only German women, children, elderly, and the infirm were in these cities as virtually all the military aged German men were at the front--but that, too, is yet another sorry story).
Oh, and one last note regarding that obscure French town that in 1938 Roosevelt choose to hold the conference in, purportedly for relocating and rescuing Jews from the clutches of the evil Nazis--what does "Evian" spell backwards? Indeed!!!
Vaughn Klingenberg, 11/11/09 975 County Rd C2 W Roseville MN USA 55113 Cell 651-343-8224 Email: vaughn_kl@msn.com ________________________________________
[DRAFT ESSAY]
The Case for Probable Mossad/Jewish Culpability for 9/11 By Vaughn Klingenberg
Granted many non-Jews conspired to bring about 9/11, and they should be duly investigated and punished. For my purposes, however, I am limiting myself to the overwhelming evidence of Mossad/Jewish involvement in orchestrating, causing, and profiting from 9/11 and all that followed from it, in particular the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (hitherto two anti-Israeli states now occupied by Israel’s proxy army, the United States military), the recently invented, post-Cold War, War on Terrorism, and the related War on Dissent as embodied by the hypocritically named “Patriot Act.” I will omit talk of the gargantuan economic and military expenses that have followed in the wake of 9/11, partly because that would take me too far afield, partly because we are not paying for those expenses right now (they are “off-the-books,” so to speak--for now).
Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Doug Feith among others have argued in the first Bush administration that “a new Pearl Harbor” would be necessary to rally the American population behind any post-Cold War American military adventurism. This was an ominous prediction by officials well placed to in fact bring it about. American democracy has a history of inviting (nay, encouraging) attacks on itself in order to justify to the public our faux reluctance to go to war. This was true in World War I with the sinking of the Lusitania (the Germans warned that Anglo-American ships carrying ammunition would be the target of uboat attacks—even if they were employed as a cover as passenger vessels with up to 1,000 passengers on board); this was true in World War II with the attack on Pearl Harbor (the US and England cut off all oil shipments to Japan, thereby forcing Japan to attack British and American oil fields in Southeast Asia, which precisely coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor [and which few history books acknowledge]); and this was true of the purported North Vietnamese attack on American naval vessels in the Tonkin Gulf (which is now universally acknowledged as a sham) which got the US into the Vietnam War (with 50,000 American soldiers killed, 400,000 wounded, and 2-3 million Vietnamese killed, and untold numbers wounded, injured, or crippled).
With the demise of the Cold War the US straddled the world like a military and economic colossus. We had no significant enemies and then there was the expected “peace dividend,” money that was to be redirected from intelligence and the military towards social programs. The CIA and military now had a problem: how to redefine themselves to make them relevant to the "New World Order" (Hitler’s phrase for his Nazi programme of the 30s and 40s, oddly appropriated by George Bush I to define the post-Cold War American world). World peace was in danger of breaking out, and this eventuality had to be stopped. Yes, there were some in the US government who looked with pleasure on the opportune attack of 9/11, but there were also “foreign” interests that could be served at the same time as well.
Instead of going through the details of 9/11, I will merely list some of the more salient, and curious, events. True, hijackers of Middle Eastern extraction appear to have been the immediate cause of 9/11, but there were mediate causes as well. Why did Mr. Silverstein, owner of the Twin Towers, double the insurance on the Towers a mere 3 months before the attack. For 20 years the towers stood as silent witness to the economic power of New York City and even after the sub-basement attack on the Towers a few years earlier the then landlords decided against taking out extra insurance, but now the Jewish Mr. Silverstein made the prescient decision to double the insurance a mere 3 months before the attack. What a savvy businessman! Also speaking of Mr. Silverstein, why did he give the secretive order to “pull” (i.e., demolish) Building 7, and then shortly thereafter it collapsed and, even though not hit by a single plane, was declared by the US Government’s official 9/11 Report as part and parcel of the collateral damage of the 9/11 attack? And, as long as we are talking about money and investments, why did the government close down investigations into Wall Street trading leading up to 9/11, in particular, several big players reportedly pulled their money out of airline stock and even were short selling airline stock just before the attacks. Did these investors have insider information on the attacks? The simple answer is we may never know since the government, for some strange reason, made these questions off limits and shut down the investigation into these very pertinent questions.
Of course there is also the “Dancing Israelis”—Mossad agents with Canadian passports who filmed the attack on the Towers before it even happened and who were celebrating and dancing when the Towers were hit; while they happened to be arrested for their untoward behavior (significantly, this set of Jews were the only ones arrested on 9/11 for suspicion of 9/11—no Arabs were arrested on September 11th, that would happen later; also significantly, the “Dancing Israelis” were later ordered released and flown to Israel by the (Jewish) Homeland Security Czar, Michal Chertoff. Can you say “Jewish conspiracy”?). Then there is the fact that, if 9/11 was an Al Qaeda operation, somehow these clever Arabs pre-positioned milit
