Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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At a church I was making a delivery at this weekend, an assistant pastor mentioned to me that he’s hearing more and more about Ron Paul, but still hates his foreign policy. He asked me the status quo neoconservative question: “Don’t you think it’s wiser to take the war over there than to bring the war over here?”

My answer was: “No. Bring the war over here.”

He was shocked. Literally floored. With his mouth agape, and before he could respond, I told him I’d post a blog post for him, and him alone, but share it with the public. I think it’s a worthy post to share with others, because it opens up a realistic eye to this so-called war, and the definition of “them.”

When many think of “them” bringing the war to us, they think of 9/11. 9/11, a tragic event, an event that could have been prevented with less government, not more. No government in the world can prevent guerilla attacks. It isn’t possible. Yet private organizations can, and do, prevent outbreaks of mad people every day. I saw a drunk youth booted out of a shopping mall by armed guards once. It was fast, and no rights were violated. When 9/11 happened, my claim to fame was that I foresaw the event just 7 months earlier. I ran an email newsletter read by around 2000 people. I was ranting and raving about the inability of the airlines to monitor security, about the inability of pilots to arm themselves, about how ridiculous it was that pilot doors weren’t even locked (a year before 9/11, I witnessed an old lady accidentally open the flight-deck). Before 9/11, few listened. They felt secure. The day after 9/11, I was stuck in San Diego, and I received hundreds of emails asking me how I knew there would be an attack. My response was: “Because government got in the way.”

Terrorist attacks are infrequent even in the Middle East. We hear about all the ones that happen, but if you were to plot them out on a world map, you’d see they mostly happen in the same 2 or 3 locations. What is unique about those locations is the massive oversupply of government agents in those areas — agents there to supposedly secure the area. Yet just miles away from the most popular place for terrorists to attack, you see peaceful private citizens going about their lives: going to movies, eating fast food, shopping, living. The common sign is not where the terrorists are, but where uninvited agents of war exist.

So I welcome the idea of bringing the war over here, for many reasons:

1. Reducing our foreign aggression would reduce the amount of innocent casualties that occur. I find it horrific that our government doesn’t keep track of how many innocents are murdered during our dalliances in foreign lands. I want to know. I think I have a right to know. It’s a more important fact than how many enemy combatants are killed. I also think that by not killing innocents, we’ll anger far fewer people. Blowback’s a mean enemy.

2. Reducing our foreign aggression would reduce the amount of money we spend on military games. It’s a massive figure, and when money matters get large, I have a law I wrote: “The bigger a monetary amount grows, the less understandable it is to common people.” When I mention to someone that a $100 car radio was stolen at the mall, they understand. When I mention that billions of dollars a year are stolen because of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policy, they look like they didn’t hear me. Big numbers mean little connection to reality for most people. So I’ll put it this way: the U.S. government has to tax 10,000,000,000 people (about the size of the world’s population) $100 each to pay for the Iraq war. That’s 10 billion people paying $100 each. It’s staggering, since it takes a few hundred years for a single person to count up to a billion. They still don’t understand.

3. Reducing our foreign aggression will definitely reduce the amount of hatred aimed at the U.S. government. I’ll be in the Middle East with my wife on December 27th, less than 15 miles from Iran. We’re going shopping and sightseeing, and we’ll eat good food. I’ll take photos. It’s not a bad place to be. The people I know in the Middle East are constantly shocked at our saber-rattling, and many of them can’t understand why “we” hate “them” — most of the countries we supposedly hate looked very much like our own home towns. The photos you see in the paper and on TV would be akin to someone going to the California desert and calling it America. It’s called lying.

4. I know my neighbors in Illinois. Most of them are packing heat. That’s what a conservative area calls for: people using their God-given inherent right to protect their homes. I’d love to see any army, organized or not, try to walk 5 miles into the U.S. The U.S. army would be ridiculously undermanned if it had to repel an enemy attack. The U.S. private citizens would not be. We have 300 million adults in the U.S. We’re spending $1 trillion on a war that we’re losing, just as we’ve lost every war since the day after WWII ended. $1 trillion divided by 300 million adults = $3333 per adult. That’s more than enough money to arm every adult with a single firearm and enough ammo to last years. Personally, I gave up my gun ownership beliefs, but that’s the wonderful aspect of freedom: if the enemy has no idea who is armed, they’re less likely to attack. John Lott’s great book “More Guns, Less Crime” showcases how towns with few gun restrictions are the safest, and towns with heavy gun restrictions are the most dangerous. Criminals know what the laws are, and they know that the average resident will follow them. Why rob in a town with many legal guns when you can rob in a town with strict gun laws?

Seriously, bring it on. I know my neighbors wouldn’t stand for it. It doesn’t matter who attacks, because the minute a madman goes on a rampage, I can see 50 million or 100 million Americans not standing for it.

It’s a good answer. Let people hate us for our freedoms, our Imperialism, our love of Britney Spears, our use of trans-fat laden foods, or even our ice cream variety. What are they going to do? Come here? If they do, there is only two groups to blame: the attackers, and those who pretend to defend us.

We can defend ourselves. We don’t need the police (who can’t defend anyone while they write their traffic citations and play Dog the Bounty Hunter with those who jump bail on a minor pot charge). We don’t need the Army. All we need are individiuals who understand that they may be called to defend their families, their home, their neighbors and their towns. No one can destroy freedom except those voted to protect it. And if you’re familiar with the past 90 years, you understand that is exactly the case. 9/11 should have been responded to by returning more rights to individuals. Instead, we chose the wrong people.

Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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An interesting question came into my email inbox yesterday from someone who must have come across an older article I wrote castigating the idea of voting, and why I’m an anti-voter (meaning I do vote, but I write my own name in on every line). The question he asked was simple: “If you don’t agree with the process of voting, why not recommend a change in the process?” I emailed him back right away, but it piqued my curiosity into what others thought of my ideas of “fixing” Democracy, if it would even work.

First of all, I believe Democracy is an evil word, based solely on the idea that 51% of the people in a voting district can tell 49% of the people what to do. To me, it doesn’t work. The only Democracy I could theoretically accept would be one that operated under a strong barrier to unlimited power. The U.S. Constitution, as well as many State Constitutions, theoretically were formed with the barrier to unlimited power in mind, but we can see that they’ve all been stretched way beyond their original intent. You can’t stop powerful people from pushing their powers a tiny bit at a time, which snowballs into tyranny. Democratic tyranny is worse than Dictatorial tyranny, since you can’t easily blame millions for bilking the fruits of your labors. I’d rather blame on Dictator than try to convince hundreds of millions.

That being said, I do think there are steps we can take to make Democracy more palatable. Of course, the first point is to restrain those powers to a very slim definition of what government should do. The second step, I believe, is to extend the voting timeframe, along with regular updates of the current tabulated results. Real-time counting of ballots is not difficult to do, even with punch voting systems.

As each punch card is submitted by the voter, a receipt is printed for them detailing who they voted for and where their vote is recorded. If there is a problem, they don’t press the “Submit” button. They press “Cancel” and redo their vote. Then they return to the tallying machine until they’re happy. Upon “submit” being pressed, the numbers are uploaded to the central servers. In this day and age of DSL and cable broadband, getting real-time votes recorded centrally should not be a 3 week process.

At the end of the voting day, the votes are tabulated and provided to the media or to a website where people can look at them. The voting period, in my opinion, should be one week long. If after the first day of voting the non-voters see how the results are proceeding, they can then make a decision to pop in the car and head to the polls tomorrow. I seriously think this would get the lazy and apathetic voters to turn out if they saw how things are going. There’s nothing worse than hearing someone complain about their candidate losing when they didn’t show up. This way, they have a reason to go, especially if their candidate is losing or the margin is close. If the difference between one candidate and another is huge, i.e. a landslide, then people likely won’t turn out.

While this won’t fix democracy, it will be a huge step in getting the apathetic out to vote. This would be especially true at the local level, when tax addenda and bond issues are voted on. It would increase the media’s profits from covering elections, as they’d have more traffic to post results. Bloggers would profit with the additional traffic as people who haven’t voted would be able to get opinions on the various issues.