Rollin' in th' mud

“I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose. I would never take any official service, and thereby I will [be free] to satisfy my own purposes.”

Chuang Tzu (369-286 B.C.)

I've not rolled in the mud since about '90 when a friend and I went up to Nashville to blast the ditch for a pipeline re-routing for the extension of an airport. Hot damn... if you want to get the job done on time and the weather is not cooperating, raining constantly, temps in the 50's.......
well then, you by gosh get down in that ditch with the pneumatic drills, drill steels, a hundred feet of air hose, your boots and rain gear, and freaking get after it. Not only do you have to drill the holes, stuff a plug in the top, write down the layers of rock and how deep each was, you also have to go back with a pipe connected to the air hose and blow out any water that had seeped in while you were drilling a couple hundred more. The rain suits were mostly to make us think we were'nt really getting that wet and muddy. Evenings we went to the best steak and prime rib establishments in town. The friend had his girl friend along. Me......it was just pass out when I hit the bed, get up in the morning and do it again. The friend....well let's just say that several mornings he looked almost as bad as before we'd washed the mud off the night before. Rode hard and put up wet was an understatement. Hard work, good pay, good friends......it don't get much better.

But I digress slightly from the quote above. My main thoughts are that with all the "governmental oversight" into every little nook and cranny of our lives these days, it becomes almost imperative that we keep in mind who the Sovereigns, and, who the servants are.

With the goberment lead by that staunch conservative John Quisling McCain trying to (and make no mistake, they are going to pass it) pass another law making you and I terrorist combatants......

Known as The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, or S. 3081, the bill authorizes the President to deny a detainee a trial by jury simply by designating that person an “enemy belligerent”:

An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent … may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities. [Emphasis added.]


The latest Defense Authorization Bill just passed by Congress shows how far the law-makers and law-enforcers will go. The doctrine of habeas corpus goes back to before the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. It was an ancient Anglo-Saxon limitation on the power of government. If the feds held a prisoner, a writ of habeas corpus required them to “produce the body.” The government had to either release the person or charge him with a crime. For more than 800 years, this gave people some protection against government.

But now, in the Year of Our Lord 2011, the Congress of the United States of America, with the complicity of POTUS, himself, has seen fit to deny the right of habeas corpus to American citizens. Henceforth, the feds can capture you, put you in prison and waterboard you every day for the rest of your life. They don’t have to charge you with murder or jay-walking or any crime at all. They don’t have to let you talk to a lawyer. Or to your spouse. Or to your Congressman... They don’t have to read you your rights or provide any evidence against you. Like the Argentines in the ’80s, they just ‘disappear’ you. And you’re gone forever.

The Guardian reports:

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said “detaining citizens without a court trial is not American” and that if the law passes “the terrorists have won”.

“We’re talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk,” he said. “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.”

So now the feds, whose salaries we pay, can spy on us with drones we paid for too. They can send a swat team to disappear us...and keep us in prison.

Our question is: ‘what gives them the right?’ What bread to these people eat? What air do they breathe?

Obummer and his cronies may bow and kowtow to every pissant so-called ruler or leader in the known world, but they don't have to expect me to bow down to them.