#YesAllCops Are Bad: Treatise on the Innate Immorality of the Police

#YesAllCops Are Bad:
Treatise on the Innate Immorality of the Police
By Thomas Calandra


#YesAllCops

THE “WAR ON COPS” LORE

When you read, watch, click on, and be succumbed by as much news as one open, data-enveloping  mind does on a daily basis from the multitude of outlets, angles, spins and political leanings in the current epoch of information,(for the only way to get true unbiased news is to be entranced to a point of physical exhaustion by every thesis of every moment of the news cycle, from every member of the self-anointed intelligentsia, to each reactive diatribe from pundits with over-moralized middle class “common sense” ) you will come to see how the incidences involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Phillip White, Ruman Brisbon, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Keith Lamont Scott and Alton Sterling are not unique, along with the near thousand people unjustifiably killed by the police in 2014, and 1,192 unjustified killings in 2015 (574 were minorities, 511 were white, and 107 were undetermined).

Unfortunately for the hawkish fear-dealers of authoritarians - frightening center-right cul-de-sac dwellers with the decline of societal maintenance – the “War on Cops” is an asinine and vapid mythos.

The truth is that under the years Obama has been in office, there has been no safer era for a police officer to exist; serving and protecting the public with the least likely chance of being gunned down. Far to many meme-laced, emotion-sodden arguments make the horrendous mistake of giving credit or blame for long term, sweeping social and economic transmutations occurring in society, such as crime rates, stock booms, unemployment fluctuations, private sector job creation, STD incidence, Financial collapses, Great Recessions, and the well-being of the economy as a whole - all of which involves unforseen, unpredictable decisions and actions of dynamic, diversely different actors with  antagonistly contrastive intentions, and dissimilar, divergent, unalike, mismatched, but uniquely idiosyncratic and important abilities and aspirations that vary qualitatively and quantitatively to such an extent, as to be unanalyzable due to the chaotic wilderness of previous unconscious causes of previous non-statisticized, temporal inhabitants – on whatever President happened to be in office at the time; as if the statist either believed the commander and chief was this omniscient, omnipresent, and (abhorrent to think) omnipotent guardian, or ( even more grim, unendurable, and ultimately more serious) wished them to be.

However, the following data just happens to be structured to display the average number of police officers killed on duty per year for the last five Presidents: For the Reagan era, an average of 101 cops were killed per year; for Bush forty one, an average of 90; for Clinton, 81; for Bush forty three, 72; and for Obama, 62. To be more specific with the data, and to hone in on the more recent “War on Cops” years, 67 cops were killed on duty in 2007, 59 were killed in 2010, 68 in 2011, 47 killed in 2014, 62 in 2015, and at the moment, 126 in 2016. This current swelling in police deaths for 2014 to 2015, and then a drastic incline in 2016, gives the sense that cops are under attack and blue blood is swelling as the law and order of the country overhears it’s own death rattle, and enters decivilization.

Absolute numbers however, though better than no numbers, can obfuscate the reality one is trying to decipher with statistical analysis. The use of absolute numbers as examples of data in public discourse, nine times out of ten, are being used by a fearpusher who wants the weak theories of their pre-confirmed minds made valid for policy enactment, instead of being statistically firm. The human brain has an comfortable ability counting oranges; they see a pile of ten sitting next to a pile of twelve, and after a few moments of counting and ruminating, can infer that one pile has more oranges than the other. The time this task takes can be split in two if, instead of twelve, the second pile has one hundred oranges; The primate mind doesn’t even need to count; the truth is right there in front of their face. The zealot, yearning for their belief's substantiation, will attain and praise the higher absolute numbers as the final breath of truth, and will be self-verified that the United States is a bastion of depravity.

But there are more people living in California than Equador, (38 million to 15 million, respectively) so any statistical comparison of the two entities will involve having to adjust that information to population, because there are going to be more of everything in California than Equador, from murder to engineers to hamburgers.


So far we have shown that the number of police officers killed on duty has been falling not only since Reaganomics, but since Nixon, and even more so, since prohibition.


 But we would expect to see the numbers of cops killed on duty to increase by year if the number of officers in general were to increase annually. Same goes for the evident decrease in cops being murdered if the number of police serving and protecting steadily declined.

The latter is true in general for the past two decades, for the exception of the last few years of the 20th century, and again just recently but to a lesser degree; imagine a lopsided U, with the left side longer than the right.

In 1997 there were 1.113 million police officers on duty in America, in 2000, that number rose to 1.176 million, then again in 2002 to 1.202 million. However, just two years later that number was cut by half to just 664,000, stayed the same in 2006, but than rose slightly to 808,000 in 2008, dropped to 745,000 in 2011, but then for 2013 and 2014 the number of police officers rose to and has been hovering around 900,000. This lopsided U should be a downward slope if the presidential police murder averages simply reflected the parallel decrease of officers in existence. But it’s not. Why?

Well, first, your ears should have pricked up because of my usage of absolute numbers when concerning the annual cop population. The statistics we should analyze are on duty cops in proportion to the general population. As a result, we will get the number of police on duty per 100,000 population. Of course we all know that the United States population has been increasing over the years: in 1997 in was 272.65 million, in 2006, it was 298 million, and currently it is a little more than 321 million. Bare this in mind when we learn that the population of on duty police officers proportional to the U.S. population in 2000 was 416 cops per 100,000 U.S. Population, 226 per 100,000 in 2004, 220 in 2007, 262 in 2010, 283 in 2014, and 278 in 2016. Here we  see an immense decline in the number of police officers serving and protecting 100,000 people, even though the totals of police officers serving the population took a lopsided U shape. Now we can factor in the data of cops killed on duty proportional to the general population per 100,000. If the war on cops was increasing, we would see the ratio increase with the general population, with a boom from 2013/2014 to the present. In 2000 it was .028 cops killed per 100,000 US population, .031 in 2002, .030 in 2004, .022 in 2007, .019 in 2010 and 2013, .014 in 2014, back to .019 in 2014, and .039 in 2016.

The last year’s surge was more of a last sigh; returning to the Bush forty three epoch than some contemporary policide Holocops.

The slight uptick in 2016 of police deaths could be that the cops on duty to population ratio increased; though only slightly, from the 220s of the Bush years to the 280s of the most recent Obama years.

STARVING COPS


Forget about corrupt cops, or jerk cops, or power hungry cops, or even the racist psychopathic ones who use the uniform for their sick delusions; take the straight arrow cops, the “by the book,” serve and protect cops, who very well could be the majority: the good cops. Their job is to serve and protect the community, and to enforce the laws that the public legislative has made with the power back by the community who votes. However,  the police are also a public enterprise paid by the usurpation of taxes. The community needs the police and they pay the taxes to afford this security. For communities that need more police than others, say Detroit, they spend more money on police than say, communities like Ipswich, Massachusetts. There is no reason for Ipswich to pay as much as Detroit for police, just as it is as equally ridiculous for Detroit to pay as much as Ipswich does for police. But what happens when a community that normally has crime rates to that of Detroit starts to slowly come to have crime rates of Ipswich? For the people of the Detroitish community, this would be a very good thing; human suffering would be diminished some: Less murder, Less rape, Less assault.  Not only that decline of criminality, but the tax money that was collected to fight this crime could now be redirected to other public services. This emancipation from a gangland and future investment is good news for everyone except for the cop, because the cop is getting fired. The police enforce the laws and bring criminals to justice, but with less crimes being committed, there will be less need for so many police officers. Therefore, in a literal sense, the police depend on the immorality of the community in order to have a job and economic security. Not in the black and white, racist structure of America sense of systematic that Sociologists say (and depend on; for without racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia existing in our world, they would be out of a job and possibly in jail) but in the banal, coggish  sense of systematic, which depends on immorality in order to pay for the existence the system. As James Madison wrote,  "if men were angels no government would be necessary." The less quoted second part to Madison’s edict is, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” What would the social reformer do for money if society was perfected? If the system was no longer racist, sexist or classist, how would those who make money by writing books, giving lectures, and going on 24 hour media outlets to inform us, the un-Harvarded vulgar, why the system is so? How are we to pay these hyper-tenured morality mavens’ rent after the riddle of human struggle has been solved by listening to them?

So what if it is true that police depend on crime to keep their jobs, and prison guards depend on criminals going to jail for a paycheck? This doesn’t mean we don't need them. Crime isn't going away any time soon, right? Someone might say and expect that a reduction in police presence would cause crime to shoot up.  Perhaps, but only if it is true that the sole reason crime is committed is because no police are around to catch the immoralists, which of course isn't necessarily true, nor factually true at all, just as it isn’t true that the only reason people don’t do heroin is because it is illegal. Heroin is still illegal and more and more people are injecting themselves with it and dying from it despite its illegality.

Yet, over time, crime has decreased immensely, regardless of the fact that so has the police presence in the nation, both in absolute terms and in relation to the American populace.
   http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm.     








All forms of violent crime is reduced from just 20 years ago. Same with nonviolent crime:  Murder, down; Rape down; Assault down; Kidnapping down; Theft down; Even Hate crimes are down despite what your news feed and social science professor tell you.

So what are the police institutions to do with this “good” news of an enlarging population  voided from inexistence - entering the world de-immorilized somehow - unconsciously and unpermittedly designing a copless cosmos? What is the good cop to do after spending all that money on a criminology degree from college, a year of training at the academy, and however many years they have spent on the force, when the gentle officer’s superiors inform them that “cutbacks might have to be made,” due to unfortunate set of circumstances of the public unknowingly refusing to commit enough crimes to justify a paycheck? What are that cop's superiors to do when they themselves are told that they -the Brass- will have to take pay cuts, because the state is no longer willing to dole out tax dollars to a public service that isn't needed as much anymore?

The answer is that out of self interest, (the only reason anyone does anything) the police - no matter their morals or individual character, their goodness and do-gooder-ness - will either invent problems that require them to act, or see problems that are not there, in order to have a reason to be around to collect a pay check: They charge more for parking violations, probable cause will expand because they need to increase their probability of finding a crime, and Minor nonviolent drug offenses are now major ones. Like being arrested for driving on caffeine. Google it.



The police need you to give them an excuse to pull you over, to search you,  to mess up.
This is why five of them are there to arrest you for selling loose cigarettes, selling music on the street, or giving food to homeless people. Their livelihood is dependent on you harming your neighbor, burning churches, or worse, touching them; and every moment of your acriminal cop-starving existence that you don’t, is a checkmark against the suffering police on the balance sheet, and one more mark closer to a pink slip. So in a country where crime is decreasing, especially major violent crime, crimes like traffic violations and drug use, become seen as extra hostile and more sought after to the justice system, because that system needs such violations in order to maintain its existence. This goes for cops, but it also pertains to Correction officers, judges, and prosecutorial lawyers. They all depend on and look to seek out sin in order to feed themselves. Combine that atrocious system with the innate flaws and imperfections of human nature, and you have a magnificent algorithm for producing unnecessary harm.


Many #bluelivesmatter vocalists or “War on Cops” prophets decree that “its just a few bad seeds; most cops are good who do good for the community.” Some say that the police should be seen with a different pair of moral lenses, much like all public service officials are seen with second shadow of sacredness; as if being a comp controller is morally equal or functionally useful as a firefighter. This exceptionalism mentally, sometimes spiritually, trusted onto the job of the officers and thus the officers themselves, is the kind of single counter argument that is seen with flag burning as an exception to free speech, social security as an exception to budget cuts, or guns as an exception to most American's willingness to hand them over after any crestfallen tragedy. This final exception enrages American liberals who can not see the importance of guns to those whom the liberal view as dissolutioned denizens living in the middle earth of America: the giant swaths of land that to the New York liberal and the Los Angeles Democrat is one giant Texas, with North Carolina, Minnesota, and Alaska, as it’s major cities.

But, whatever your political allegiance, if you fail to begin your arguments for gun control with the immediate discussion of disarming the police, then you are either at best not a serious person for whom we should all ignore, or else a statist whose position is that private, self-purchased guns need to be confiscated when too assault-ish, and controlled a nd manufactured from the start to be barely deadly for the general public, but  the guns of Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, Paul Headley, Michael Carey, Marc Cooper, Gescard Isnora, Michael Olive, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, Rolando Solano, Darren Wilson, and Daniel Holtzclaw; Because “they were trained and passed a test."

Don't be scared. That's what Google is for.

But the difference between gun owners and cops is that gun owners are people, (some good, some bad, some insane, some sane, some responsible, some madness on stilts) and police officers are a job. An occupation which inevitably forces them to do wrong, and puts them in situations where they can, as detective Rust Coyle informs us, “hurt people with impunity.” And despite the individual cop’s morals, dispositions and level of insanity, they still require the public to eat one another for simple job security. Steven Weinberg said of religion, "In a world without religion, good people will do good things, and evil people will do evil things. But if you want good people to do evil things, that takes religion." The same thing goes for the state, and putting on a police uniform.


Motives don't matter. Hence the cop problem. If they did, then the "some cops are good" argument would have merit. The motives of the preacher standing on the street corner yelling at you that you are going to hell unless you change, to him is the same motive as him pushing you out of the way of a runaway bus: to him, he is saving your life; he is saving your soul from eternal torment. Submit to Christ on the rack, and your soul will be in ecstasy forever. The motives of the racker are purest. The engineer of the Judas cradle was be the kindest man of antiquity.

Yet, continuously, the push back comes in the forms of personalized anecdotal examples or worse, experiences, declarations of relationships and familia ties with cops (thus making the rebuttaller mistake their emotions with being epistemologically sound on the topic) or sharing articles about cops pulling over to play a night game of basketball with some urban youths, thus firebombing the notion that cops are racist juggernauts hunting black people, and leaving #blacklivesmatter to supposedly weep in their sordid wrongness.

These terse, subjective, and poorly thought out counters purely encapsulate what cognitive psychologists call the “narrative bias”: where the more detailed narrative given increases the probability in the mind of its likelihood of happening. Of course it isn't more probable, nor does it even come close to mildly infrequent. News worthy stories are rare by definition. But it is not a cops job to call for backup to have a pickup game with a group of teenagers. If one saw this magic moment walking home one night, anyone’s first impulse would not, nor should not be a heart warming Michael-Bay-ian gush of emotionality, but should be a conscious state of pragmatism and moral utility, and to ask oneself, “why aren't those cops doing their jobs?” Somewhere on a college campus a girl is getting raped -  rape, which  happens more often than homicide by a factor of ten - and this narrative of cops and kids having a basketball game is supposed to make us feel as though cops' motives mean something? Even this absurd after-school narrative displays the immensity of the cop problem, and how even with immortality still permeating society in some degree, the police are impotent in helping us.

Sadly the dismal coin has two sides.

WOLVES DRAPED IN ARMY FLESH
 
Capitalism is the great engine of turning “luxury into necessity,” wrote the Nobel winning Austrian economist Ludvig von Mises. For finding ways of making what could only be affordable to the Kardashianish echelon  to be attainable to the commoners. This went for automobiles,  computers and cell phones,  and it will soon be for 3D printers, biomechanical anatomy and private travel in space. The unfortunate corollary is that this also goes the same for M16s, armored tanks and SWAT teams.

What use to be affordable only to the NYPD, the LAPD, and the Chicago police departments, can now be gotten by the police departments of Ipswich,  Massachusetts and Ferguson,  Missouri. Of course, like a ten year old boy with a new water gun, or a MR I machine for research lab, or a new bureaucracy for a government, one feels the need to use the toy even when they don't have to. Because of this, Swat team raids have gone from 5 per year in the years when crime was high to thousands of raids currently when crime is at an all time low. If one so desires a perfect statement of these implications, they need to read the book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko. This militarization of the police is due from the US Department of Defense selling off its surplus of equipment from the past two administrations overestimate of needed power in Iraq and Afghanistan - right after their desertion in 2011 and 2014, respectively – to state and local police departments for prices just above cost, and sometimes below. The new cop is draped in army flesh.


With thousands more SWAT raids occurring with hundreds more departments around the country, this could account for an increase in cops killed on duty, because raids are dangerous and they involve more cops; which makes more likely a cop is going to be harmed, even if the overall number of cops in existence has been cut in half since the Clinton administration. However, cops deaths are in decline along with their employment. Yet, this also could explain the increased number of unjustified killings by police in recent years, because SWAT team raids are dangerous for whose home is being raised, and are more likely to end in macabre. The unjustifiable portion comes to view with the knowledge we have of crime in free fall: more raids are happening in a country on innocent people to which we have statistical evidence to prove is true. If departments are having to justify using this newly attained hardware, a small number of cops could still do a lot of damage by assuming that this anti-insurgent garb they adorn is a reflection of its urgency in a demoralized society. Or maybe the police who are told to routinely stop black males now have m-16s. Maybe they are bored and have three units surround every pulled over car, so the driver appears to be in Nuremberg after reaching for their license and registration. Or maybe cops don’t need black, Kevlar, faceless face shields.


Finally, the subject of police brutality outrage, and the anti-militia cop sentiment suffusing the public discourse is a unique quandary, because the topic is a very politically unifying issue. For some reason it is an issue that has apolitically abnormal playdates: The small government conservatives who are afraid of a national police force are on the same side as the liberal minded factions who view police brutality under more sociological lenses. Perhaps they have different theories of causality, but none the less they share a foe within their otherwise un-unifiable ideologies.  But with crime rates going down, and the last breath of the war on drugs starting to leave lungs of the polis, (along with the dying statist elders who started it) and this odd bipartisan multilateral action beginning to take head against the institution of cops (good or bad), are we perhaps going to witness an unconscious materialization, or communal organization of a liberated society where the police not only be not necessary, but not wanted even if they are needed?

With crime submerging into the dark wilderness of the past, the very nature of policing becomes excessive.

GUN CONTROL IS WHITE PRIVILEGE

GUN CONTROL IS WHITE PRIVILEGE

by Thomas Calandra

“There has been a lot of talk said recently, because I supposedly said something about Negros buying rifles. White people have been buying rifles all their lives, no commotion.”

- Malcolm X

"In California 1966, you can carry a loaded gun on the street as long as it is register, not concealed, and not pointed in a threatening manner; you can carry that same gun in your car as long as it is not loaded, not concealed and not pointed in a threatening manner. And of course, as soon as we did that they changed the gun law on us."

- A Huey P. Newton Story

“The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls on the American people in general, and black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless at the very time racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”

- Bobby Seale 1967

"

"Let's talk about how gun control banning or restricting firearms is the MOST white privileged idea ever. Rich liberals scoffing at the notion that a person might need to defend their own life is a tower so IVORY you can't look at it in the sunlight. Like saying "just have the maid do it"

 - Unknown

Only a privileged white person would think that the best, safest, and most practical situation for the betterment of all the inhabitants of a society, is for the only people legally allowed to own, handle and operate fully or semi automatic weapons, are Cops.

Only privileged white people, a group of whom have had their rights from the beginning of this country, could have the audacity and the shelter of consequences to tell another group such as black people, (whom have had their rights for only 53 years) that certain rights are “outdated,” “not relevant today,” immoral and ultimately “unnecessary.”

Only white people would have the gall, the sand, and the effrontery to at one moment support Black Lives Matter, then go and scoff, snicker, and sneer at those who wish to not be unarmed against foreboding institutions of state violence or conscious tyranny; calling the fear "unneeded," "unjustified," "unwarranted," and ultimately ignoring or excusing murder.

Only privileged white people think that by simply "doing something" or "to act" will inevitably bring about net positive results. For if they do something in order to decrease gun violence, then by definition it will decrease gun violence; as if it was a law of physics are a mathematical certainty. And by no means is it possible that gun control might have increasingly more harmful unforeseen (actually they are very foreseen) consequences, or in fact, increase gun violence; by no means could reality be an antagonist to their motives, precisely because the motives are their motives. As if it is impossible for it to be raining out as long as they are outside.

THE WAR ON GUNS AND DRUG CONTROL LAWS

In many ways, stating that a current reality is the result of “white privilege” has become the “God works in mysterious ways” of the Left. Both are their respective ideology’s escape hatch from debate that is on the cusp of deflating dogmas that are not only “self-evident” to their worldview, but are those that the beholder was never reasoned into in the first place. However, when it comes to gun control, there is absolutely evidence showing that laws for greater regulation, control or prohibition on firearms, there is a privilege white people have over people of color, just as there is with prohibitions on drugs or any state control on any aspect of private life. However, because guns do have something to do with self-defense, (be it from the state, other people who wish to harm you like criminals, or in warfare against enemy combatants) guns are different. And also because when you compared those who have the forbidden or controlled item or substance, a lot more people have guns than who are the victims of guns than say drugs, like heroin, or methamphetamines. The debate about gun control is a weird absurdity because it quite literally mirrors the same economic factors and political principles as the War on Drugs, yet the position of the Left and the Right are reversed in the case of gun control.

Gun regulations, like all regulations and state-enforced infractions on the populace, hurt the least off first and the most before it slightly hurts the supposed best off, wealthy, or those with the most social credit, if it hurts them at all. Much like a rich person can afford to legally find loopholes in the tax code to then keep a higher percentage of their income, a rich person would have the means to legally find loopholes in whatever gun control or regulations passed by the legislature. Much like a larger giant corporation has the means to pay a regulatory fine to the government, while the smaller business would no doubt go bankrupt from that same fine- a fine issued to an individual for disregarding a regulation on a firearm, a rich person would be able to pay the fine easily, while the poorer person would not, and then might have to go to jail instead. If it is criminal to simply own certain guns -like a semi automatic weapon- who do you think will be able to afford the legal team to get them out of jail time, and who do you think won't be able to and then not only goes to jail, but goes broke and no longer will be able to get a job when they get out, a rich person or a poor person? Who do you think has more money and therefore social and legal shielding to do this? An average white person, or an average black person?

Just to throw the statistics out there for those who need it, the real median household income for whites was $57,000 in 2012, while that same year it was $33,321 for black households. The median black worker earns 75% of that made by the white workers; they had a median hourly wage of $14.92, while the median white worker hourly wage was $19.79.

https://www.epi.org/publication/racial-inequalities-in-wages-income-and-wealth-show-that-mlks-work-remains-unfinished/

Though white people make up 65% of the general United States population, they are only 39% of the prison population, while black people, being only 13% of the general population make up 40% of the prison population. Knowing this fact, what would background checks do the black community compared to the white community? If you outlaw ex-convicts or those who are on probation from owning guns, you are -perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously- essentially trying to disarm black people, especially black males. Now, you either do have faith in the criminal justice system and the corrections system or you don't. Either you claim that the corrections system rehabilitates someone or it doesn't. But you can't say it works and then go and say it didn't. When a person gets out of jail from serving their ordered term, they either have the rights of a free citizen or your system of rehabilitation is broken. You can't say, you have rehabilitated citizens, yet deny them the same rights as those who supposed do not do that which required rehabilitation and then claim your blue ribbon for central planning. That is playing tennis without the net. However, the liberal call for more gun control, and more stringent background checks when attempting to purchase guns, would only further marginalized an already marginalized people, only more so disenfranchise and already disenfranchised people, and only make it so the need for a black person to (now illegally) protect themselves axiomatically makes them into a criminal for simply owning a gun, no matter if they ever used it. And thus increases the likelihood they would go to jail again, and further put themselves into the institutional cascade of impairment to prosperity.

If you believe that prisons are filled with nothing but murderers, rapists, child molesters and adulterers, then I might have some clouds I would be willing to sell you. Most of the people are in prison for non-violent offenses, including drug possession. If you believe that someone that is using marijuana or cocaine is morally equivalent to someone whom has committed a murder or raped a child, then you are a moral relativist, and by definition are in no position to make moral claims or dictates on other people. By criminalizing the mere ownership of something that wasn't criminalized before, you are putting more non-violent people in jail and therefore costing more tax dollars in the for of housing people in jail. Who are the people going to be in jail for simply possessing a gun? When caught with some amount of illegal drugs, who is more likely to get off and not go to jail or pay a fine, a white person or a black person? Even if both get charged, who is likely to have a lesser prison sentence, a white person or a black person? If it is to pay a fine or go to jail for breaking some new administered gun law, who is more likely to be able to pay the fine and avoid jail, and who is more likely to not be able to pay the fine, thus having to go to jail, a white person or a black person? Who does drug laws hurt more, white people or black people? What makes you think it will be any different with gun laws? What makes guns laws impermeable to the economic laws which systematically throw black men and women in jail and force them to live in living situation privilege white liberal gun-control advocates can’t even image?

There is nothing different between guns and drugs when it comes to disproportionately hurting black communities after prohibitions against the substances or firearms have been initiated and enforced. Gun Control Liberals essentialize guns much like Law and Order conservatives essentialize drugs. The latter thinks there is some evil soul to drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin, while drugs like alcohol and nicotine are just mild excesses that need a slight looking-after; even though nicotine and alcohol kill more people each year than marijuana, cocaine, and heroin collectively will in a decade. The gun control liberal does this with assault rifles and handguns, while hunting rifles and even shotguns are there and need slight overseeing. Now in truth, it is the handgun that is the cause of most gun homicides in the United States, but that matters little. In truth, the War on Drugs, and the War on Guns were and are cultural and political battles just as much as the are supposed bandaging of an open wound. The War on Drugs was a response to both an actually increasing in crime that was happening and a cultural change involving a highly informal generation filled with ideas of free love, free drugs, long hair, anti-hierarchical, anti war, anti-capitalism, anti commerce sentiments. However, once drug laws were implemented and as time went on, black communities became more of the victim as oppose to the hippies, (whom either just went on to teaching at universities, or became the corporate elite that tried to capitalize and hippyism in the 1990’s by trying to selling us a plastic Volkswagen Beetle) and the conservatives didn't mind so much. In fact, then doubling down and creating mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession laws first with New York State in 1973 and the rest of the country in 1986. Similarly, the War on Guns is a political and cultural blow, not to the Republicans that disagree with them, but implicitly to the South, and the culture of the supposed Southern “white trash” or “Redneck,” whose way of life the northern liberal finds as disdainful – with the dialect, and ignorance, and the music—as the conservative does with those in poor urban communities. Yet, much like the conservatives attempt to legislatively kill off the counter-culture of the far-left Soixante-Huitard just ended up bulldozing black communities and the lives of the families within, so will the liberal attempt to legislatively kill off Southern white Redneck Gun loving Honor culture, just end up just too destroying the lives of the black people.

The Nobel Prize winning libertarian Economist Milton Friedman once said, “If you look at the Drug War from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” What he meant, and adopting it for our discussion, was that gun laws, like drug laws, widen the gap between the have and the have nots. Drug laws are corporate welfare (the corporations here are drug cartels) paid for by the poor people to whom drugs affect the most negatively. Much like minimum wage laws, which help big businesses (whom can afford the compulsory uptick in wages) weed out smaller competition, (whom can't) drug laws help big cartel weed out smaller drug dealers and lesser competition, because cartels can circumvent, manipulate, and avoid the law much easier than smaller drug operations; and thus creates corruption and crime that would not be there if the laws never existed. In other words, the rich ones get richer and the poor ones go to jail.

It has become a platitude in the debate for gun control that new gun laws create criminals out of those who were not before with simple stroke of a pen. However banal, this is still true, just as a law passed tomorrow prohibiting the ownership of decaffeinated coffee, would too create criminals out of those who otherwise were model citizens. Guns however, like drugs and decaffeinated coffee, will still be in the hands of those who can afford to pay the now higher cost of being a legal criminal. And by criminal we mean someone who simply owns a thing, instead of the appropriate definition of criminal, which is someone who does violent acts and creates victims from such actions. Returning to the drug comparison, we see a moral and crimina distinction between a drug dealer (who does an action) and someone in mere posession of a drug (who is a criminal simply for posessing a thing). No one suffers from simply owning something, be it a plant, a clock, or a gun. However, by controlling, regulating, or outlawing the mere ownership of a thing, one institutes an apparatus of marginalization of those who can pay the newly expensive price for the product, (which is in gross demand or else there would be no need to create laws) and those who can't. Although, now they have an incentive to get skin in the game, because the price of the forbidden product induces those who have nothing to lose (economically) to become one player in the new prohibited industry, which was only created by the law in the first place. If one has a gun that via law becomes illegal to own, that person not only is now automatically a criminal, but that person is now extremely wealthier, because the price of that gun just went up. Illegal items, such as drugs and now guns, become of interest to black market venture capitalists. It attracts those who have money to make more money. By creating prohibitions against guns or drugs, clocks or decaf coffee, you are helping to accentuate the divide between the burdened and un-incumbered. And between black people and white people in America, whom do you think is the burdened and whom do you think is the un-incumbered?

"It is no trick to make a lot of money...if all you want to do is make a lot of money." - Mr. Bernstein in 'Citizen Kane'

Greed is a human universal, and you won't earn one a dime simply by being greedy; you have to do something about it. Some people create things and put them up for sale in the marketplace and hope people want them. Others find ways to get to a position of power in order to make laws on all people but end up only helping their own personal finances. However, when it comes to those who will do anything to make money -no matter how illegal or how difficult it is to buy legitimacy- those with money or the social shield will inevitably have a leg up in the new industry that was created by the good intentions of the ones calling for the prohibition. Gun cartels will be built because of the "need" for gun control. And these gun cartels will be shielded from economic destruction by the new laws that protect them from competition and the very laws that were meant to end them. White people will be more so able to buy their way out of legal repercussions, while black people will most likely not be able to. Black people will go to prison more than white people for doing the same anti-gun crime, just as they are more likely to go to prison for comitting the same drug offense, or any criminal action. Black people will not be able to afford the fines like white white people do. Black people will not be able to afford the same legal defense as white people are able to afford today for drug offenses. Anti-gun laws will do the same to black communities that anti-drug laws do. Do anti-drug laws do the same to white communities as they do to black communities? No. Again I ask, do you think anti-gun laws will be any different?

THE LICENSING SOLUTION IS ANTI-BLACK
Many gun control advocates would like to see gun regulation somehow mimic the regulations bestowed on driving a car, with a heavily broadcasted one being the call for gun licenses. "You need a license to drive a car, why not require a license to buy a gun?" And of course when pressed, the licensing process would be similar to that of driving, in where one takes a written test, a training course and an administered test, much like the test for a learner's permit, five-hour coarse, and road test. The problem is that licensing for guns, much like the licensing for driving, hurts minorities in a variety of different ways, with black people getting gutted by both sides of the double edge sword.

The first problem can be easily seen. People with money and with cushy jobs have the ability to take time off of work to afford the cost and time it would take to get a gun license. Depending on the state, there is an application fee to just get your learner's permit, then there is a fee to take your driver’s course, then there is a fee to take your road test and acquire your physical license. How much are each of these steps going to be when it comes to gun licensing? More or less than driving? If it is regulated by the states then we can be sure that each step in the conservative states would be inexpensive and the liberal states would be expensive. How long is the training course going to be with guns? 5 hours? 5 days? 5 weeks? Again here one would that think the conservative states would be much shorter than the more liberal states. Yet, the longer the course is, the more one will have to pay the trainers. The more one has to pay the trainers, the more the course will cost to those who wish to get the license. The more the course will cost, the less likely poor people will be able to afford it. Only those with that large amount of money can afford to have a gun. Recall the stats above on black and white disparities regarding income; Who is more likely to have this time and money to attain a gun license, white people or black people? And even if a black person has the money to afford the cost of a gun license, do you think they are less likely or more likely to have a job that will allow them to take the time off in order to get a license?

Of course, guns are to the liberal, as crime is to the conservative. No conservative wants to be seen as soft on crime to other conservatives, and no liberal wants to be seen as soft on guns to other liberals. So gun control advocates setting up the licensing laws will want the fees to be ever so higher, and the training courses ever so longer, to not only make it more and more difficult to get a gun, but to virtue signal to other co-thinkers that they are the most serious about "fixing" the "problem." This, of course, just widens the gap between both the rich and the poor, but instead of just money and power, it is literally with weapons. In a sweet irony, with the liberal states having systems of gun licensing both harder to complete and more costly upfront, the pro civil rights, Black Lives Matter supporting progressive, armed with their good intentions, is hurting the black communities in their districts in the manner of gun restriction, more so that that of their counter parts in the southern bible belt states, whom in the past have had a literal apartheid. Perhaps this time around the New New Jim Crow laws are those involving guns and are enforced by northern liberals.

The second problem is that driver's licenses are mistakenly seen as a badge of responsibility for things that have nothing to do with driving or cars. Employers constantly claim that applicants with a valid driver's license are more likely to be hired, because one is automatically seen as more responsible if they are licensed; even if the job requires no driving whatsoever. Minorities are more likely to no have a license than whites. Why this is is because of a number of reasons: minorities are more likely to live in cities where public transportation is more available, they are more likely to not be able to afford to get a car thus making a license unnecessary, they are more likely not be able to afford to pay traffic violations thus getting their license suspended, and because they have a higher incarceration rate, they are more likely to not be allowed to get a driver's license. And because of this, minorities are less likely to be hired for jobs. Not because of conscious or unconscious racism -the employer can be a minority as well- but because of a bias against those who do not have a driver's license. As if there never has been an irresponsible driver.

Will licenses for guns be the same? If two applicants for a job are equally qualified except one has a gun license, is the one with the license seemingly more responsible, thus making them appear to be more qualified for the job? If so, then minorities would be at a disadvantage, just as they are because of driver's license. Would employers be allowed to discriminate against those with gun licenses? For example, could a business not hire someone on the grounds that they legally own a gun? Are those with a gun license going to be seen as innately more violent, much like those without a driver's license seen as somehow less responsible? One could possibly see perhaps that liberal firms might see those with gun licenses as potentially violent, and conservative owned firms might see them as more responsible. However, it could be seen by certain firms that minorities with a license are seen as prone to being violent, while with whites it could be a signifier of responsibility. If this is the case then it will discourage minorities from getting gun licenses even if they can, and stimulate whites to getting them in order to get a leg up. Either way, it disarms minorities and hurts their chances of employment and economic mobility.

THE COP PROBLEM WHITES DON’T HAVE

“I have called for rifle clubs. I think Negroes in areas where police, whether it be federal, state or city, have proven their inability or unwillingness to defend Negroes – the lives and the property of Negroes – that it is only intelligent and it is only right that Negroes protect themselves...so that any time that anyone makes any effort whatsoever to brutalize them, or attack them, or endanger them, they should have something to defend themselves.”

- Malcolm X

Malcolm X did not think these clubs should be those of handguns or automatic machine guns, nor did he advocate for anything illegal. However, Malcolm X didn’t live in today’s world where the police have literal military armories back at their police headquarters, each bought at a discount price from the United States Defense Department, which includes not just machine guns that renders the feared AR-15 impotent, but tanks, real honest to God tanks. Therefore, if you fail to begin your arguments for gun control with the immediate discussion of disarming or least regulating the guns of the police, then you are at best not a serious person for whom we should all ignore, or else a statist whose position is "your guns need to be regulated, controlled, or confiscated for fear that you might use them in an unlawfully deadly manner, but not the guns of Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, Paul Headley, Michael Carey, Marc Cooper, Gescard Isnora, Michael Olive, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, Rolando Solano, Darren Wilson, and Daniel Holtzclaw." All those officers passed tests. All those officers were licensed. All those officers had training. All those officers had registered firearms. And all those officers and many more have destroyed communities of color. One of the flaws in the thought patterns of the gun control advocate, when it comes to demanding a regulatory apparatus for guns that involves training seminars, written and practical tests, health requirements, and registration and insurance of the firearm, is that this solution is on par with what police officers have to go through before taking the job; yet, there is a major problem with police brutality in the United States, which involves the shooting of unarmed citizens.

For the exceptions of shutting down one’s frat party, or asking the band playing at your back yard barbecue to turn down the volume, white people do not have to worry about the police, and especially not as a violent threat on a daily basis. White people never have to consider that a person may have to defend themselves against a cop.

Malcolm X once said:

“I don’t believe that when a man has been criminally treated, the criminal has a right to tell that man what tactics to use to get the criminal has a right to tell that man what tactics to use to get the criminal off his back. When a criminal starts misusing me, I am going to use whatever necessary to get that criminal off my back. And the injustice that has been inflicted upon Negros in this country by uncle Sam is criminal. Don t blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustice, the government is responsible for the injustices.”

Since 2013, there has been around 900,000 to 1.1 million active police officers on duty in the United States. In the same time, the police were involved in unjustified homicides of civilians ranging from 1,100 to 1,400 annually. Which puts the unjustified homicide rate for the police at 120 per 100,000 population. Recall that the homicide rate for the general population of the United States is 4.9 per 100,000. Why then propose gun control regulations that produce only a group of individuals whose murder rate is higher than the most dangerous country in the world to live in: Honduras? A nation that has a homicide rate of 90.4 per 100,000 population. People of color are hit harder by the police than whites whom were killed at the hands of the police at a rate of 2.9 per one million, while black people were killed at a rate of 7.2 per one million. Only a white person would think that the best solution to halt the needless slaughter of innocent lives from mass shootings, is for the only group of people that should be allowed to have guns are cops. Or somehow think that for those to have a gun, one would have to pass the same testing as that of a police force.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/police-killings-hit-people-color-hardest-study-finds-n872086

This isn’t a call to arm oneself with the objective of offensive attacks on police officers, but to be there as a line of defense and action against those who have the power to hurt people with impunity which no doubt, police officers have. Sherwin Forte, brother of a Black Panther member spoke of when the police stopped a black man, or was arresting a black person in their community and how his fellow community members surrounded the scene from a reasonable and legal distance but with rifles and shotguns to make sure that the arrest went according to the law and without violence; “No one would do anything until the officer injects around into the chamber. Then we would all inject rounds into the chamber. Then all up and down the street you heard this ‘clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.’” This may seem like an insane scenario to you, one that may simply escalate the situation to greater violence that necessary. If you believe this, one could bet all the money in their pockets that you are a white person that doesn't see cops as an immediate violent threat, much like one does a charging bull. And therefore perhaps you are not in the position to decide and make laws based on how much violence in the black community is necessary.

THE ARMED GUARD SOLUTION IS ALSO ANTI-BLACK

“These laws are going to hurt us worse and going to affect us first. If you put more police in schools, you are going to see more police engaging African-American children in a violent manner. The same way the little girl was slammed on her desk, the same way the little girl was slammed at a pool party. Laws that are introduced are going to affect my community first.”

- Killer Mike

Usually in response to liberal calls for gun control after a tragic shooting or massacre of many people there is a conservative rebuttal of calling for an “armed guard” or “man with a gun” to take out the shooter when they emerge from their sick abyss. This is an absurd solution, not because of the equally absurd liberal counter to it of “’More guns’ isn’t the answer,” but because the mass shootings in schools, places of worship, or concerts are so rare, so minuscule, so infinitesimal, that mandating armed guards be placed in each institution is so astronomically inefficient and a misallocation of money and resources, the only comparison one could make is that it would be like deputizing the ocean in order to lick a stamp.

In the United States, there are 11,000 people who die each year from homicides involving guns. However, most of them die from a handgun and are killed with a purpose of just killing them, as oppose to a mass killing of individuals by a person with a machine gun that has an objective of either murdering those belonging to a particular group or deliberately at random. In fact, less than one percent will die in that manner. And yet, that is just a small percentage of the small number who die from gun violence. More people will die of heart disease this year than half a century worth of gun homicides. But most people wont die at all. Most people live and go about their day only hearing of tragedies somewhere else. And by most Americans one means 99.999999% of them.

If a law is passed mandating that an armed guard be placed in every school, or an armed guard stationed based on the school’s population, then schools in poor districts, which have a higher percentage of being schools in black communities with higher percentages of black students, are going to be hurt more so than wealthier schools whom both are more likely to be able to afford the arm guards and ironically, also more likely not not need them.

Schools with poorer communities that are mostly consisted of Black residents cannot afford more armed guards. If armed guard policies are state-mandated, they will have to move money from some other programs in order to pay, or raise school taxes on already poor communities. If funds are being provided by the government for the armed guards then this means that, yes, the poor black communities school will have an armed guard, but the more well-off school—who can already afford the guard and is in communities that are more likely not in need of one—the armed guard subsidy given by the government can be used for other school programs by the wealthier white schools, thus increasing the inequality between the two schools.

Though police officers in predominately white middle class public schools may relax the worries of white middle class parents, the same is not the case for black parents of black children of frankly any class. The odds of a shooting happening in any school is extremely low. The odds of police engaging students in a violent manner is much higher. This isn't to say the students are angels. No students are. Yet, there is a certain percentage of engagements by police on students that will be considered unwarranted, or unnecessary, or an overreaction. This percentage would be true even for wealthier white schools. However there is no question that this percentage would higher for black students in black communities because it is true for the regular police in general for black communities. And this is more likely the more officers are there on campus, and is more likely to happen in a school than in the general public, because the cop at the school has nothing else to do but to engage into the activities of children. This is even the case for security guards who are black as the recent incident involving the police shooting of Jemel Roberson, (a security guard for a night club) has proven. Roberson apprehend a man for setting a fire he had the man in the parking lot when police arrived they shot Roberson. This happened in very gun controlled Illinois, outside of Chicago which itself has tight gun control. This is a single example but it stands to be true that black man with a gun is more likely to be shot on site than a white security guard in the same position. Not to say this situation would never happen to a white security guard, just like there are very poor, disadvantage white people. This is just to say that it is more likely black children that will be harmed by an armed guard or police officer stationed there without reason, just as universal x-for-all programs disproportionately don't benefit the poor, (who are disproportionately black) because the programs pour tax payer money into wealthier communities that could already on their own afford the program; whom of which are disproportionately not black.

THE PERFECT ENGINE FOR RACIAL DISPARITY

Black people are disproportionately poor, disproportionately imprisoned, disproportionately given the death penalty, disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately denial loans, disproportionately stopped, harassed and killed by the police, and disproportionately the victim of homicide, which is the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 18 and 35. When adjusting to general demographics, the biggest victim of gun violence in America are black people with 50% of the victims being black. Of course, it is very well known that someone is much more likely to be murdered, raped, kidnapped or assaulted by someone that they know very well, or acquaintance, than by a stranger. Therefore, it is also true that the perpetrator of gun violence against black people are other black people, just as it is true that the largest group most victimized and suffer as a result of Islamic terrorism is other Muslims. There are Umberto Eco-size libraries worth of books with theories on why the black population in America has a higher rate of crime and violence than any other group, just as there are numerous reasons for all the disparities mentioned and even more numerous solutions for them with most involving remaking society from the ground up as well as the top down; a task this is horrendously improbable, and no doubt time consuming if it wasn't by definition impossible, unless we have a Leviathan-state disregard the rights, will, and even consciousness of individuals in order to do so; all the while hoping for those at the helm of the Hobbsian monolith to have the omniscience of the God that isn't there.

Yet, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that certain crimes that the black population seem to be at a lower incidence than whites, (such as rape, aggravated assault, domestic violence, and forms of property crimes) are actually just as prevalent—if not more prevalent—because of lower number of avenues the black community have to get help, (especially when it comes to black women when victims of rape and domestic violence) as well as a very understandable reluctance to go to the police. For our discussion, what matters is not the understanding of why it is true, but all that matters is the understanding that it is true.

Footnote: The long term data can be viewed by going to the Bureau of Justice statistics’ website and reading their report Homicide Trends in the United States: 1980-2008. The more up to date statistics are linked in the sources. Not only does the data validate the premise, but it will show that black on black violence has decreased greater over time than has that of other groups. Thus adding to the thesis of vast improvements have occurred in the United States when it comes to stifling human suffering.

Gun control laws, however, only exacerbate these disparities, and will do so the more that are implemented. Drug addiction is a problem that we would like to solve or at least mitigate as much as possible. Have drug laws helped? No. Has it seemed to create more drug addiction? Perhaps. Has drug laws disproportionately hurt black people? Yes. Is racism and discrimination a problem? Yes. Will it be solve by the passing of any law? No. Will it get better over time from a cosmos of social, political and economic factors? The evidence suggests yes. Will gun control whose laws almost mirror that of drug control laws negatively affect black people? Yes, because the black market created by the ban will make guns unaffordable to the most poor, because it will create more cartels for the selling and producing of illegal guns, (which as drug cartels do), which will hurt black people more, and the licensing of guns filters out black people for protecting themselves against problems white gun control advocates only believed happened in episodes of The Wire.

 It is dangerous to create mass panic about a crisis that doesn't exist because making social decisions out of fear is dangerous. Just as it is dangerous to tell the public that a caravan of people coming to the US is filled with terrorists, drug dealers, rapists and those who call soccer "football", (because it causes a need for thousands of military personnel to be sent to the border instead of places they could be more effective, and creates an irrational demand for a wall to keep them out, both are a huge strain of resources the government could use for other social programs) so is it dangerous to tell the incorrect fact that there is a growing epidemic of gun violence to where at any moment any citizen, with an emphasis on children (because parents are known for their rational thinking when it comes to calculating risk) can be a victim of a mass shooter, because first,(in the case of the conservative arm guard solution) it puts resources to use where they don't need to be and therefore a strain schools, or other institutions (especially of poor communities) of money they could use elsewhere for programs that are of greater benefit, and second (in the case of the liberal "more laws, background checks, regulations" solution) disproportionately affects, hurts and punishes minorities, (especially black people) like all laws do, because gun control like drug control creates an almost police protection for those who have the illegal item but are wealthy, have social privilege, and those with no prior offenses, while systematically throws in jail those who have none of those things. Or, as I would conclude, a perfect engine for making sure the only people with guns are white people and cops. 

And sure one could suggest that my arguments here are based on the economic disparity between black people and white people, as well as the racial disparity and unjust outcomes in our criminal justice system, and if we were to correct them as a society, my argument that gun control in all of its forms would no longer would be valid. I agree, but until then, my argument stands, and pass gun control measures without those social corrections only throw water on a grease fire, no matter how hard you convince people that the water has been filtered and purified.

“Before you give all of your rights up, use them all.” - Killer Mike

BEAUTIFUL FISTS OF BLOOD AND TERRIBLE IMMORTALITY: Meditations on living with another person’s heart.

BEAUTIFUL FISTS OF BLOOD AND TERRIBLE IMMORTALITY: Meditations on living with another person’s heart.

By Thomas Calandra

"Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood." - Larry the Doctor

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body.” – Christopher Hitchens

Indeed the most romantic and beautiful part about the above passage from the late Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, is not the metaphor of one’s own heart beating within the body of their children, but that it really isn’t -so to speak- a metaphor at all. Every inch, engine and topography of your flesh, bone and brain are chiseled by sculptor proteins working off the blueprints of genes, which were engraved by the chaotic confluence of randomly distributed parcels of your parents' genetic tributaries. In a very real sense, there is a chance that the heart waltzing inside the body of your child is that of your own.

Genes are the ideas of nature. And ideas are intangible and without rivalry: one does not lose an idea by sharing it with someone; one does not lose a poem when reciting it to an audience; one does not lose their rights by others attaining them. The algorithm that designed your heart, is that which forged your child’s heart -their bloody fist of love- to materialize: an identical mold, fashioned out of the same atoms, casted out of the same fauna, consummated by the same quintessence of dust that brought your crimson muscle to be.  “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that,” declared Shylock. Yet, it is not revenge you seek like Shakespeare’s Venetian villain, but that of immortality, to whom your children are your only chance.

However, I have the heart of someone else’s child inside my body.

On December 3rd, 2016, the dying heart I was born with, was exhumed out of my chest, and replaced by an alive heart that another person died having. I know nothing about this person other than they were sixteen years old, and that I am now running around with their parent’s heart inside my body. I am the living, breathing occlusion to their only glimpse at immortality. An explanation of divine will to my donor’s parents would not only be absolutely false, but unimaginably callous and cruel. Instead, the truth of living amongst the vacant-minded winds of amoral randomness, would be the only consolation.

One can’t not think of Kahlil Gibran in these circumstances, who writes:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, 
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

Gibran can be excused for being incorrect about children coming “through you, but not from you,” because he was writing 30 years before James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA was a double helix polymer; thus finding “the secret to life,” as they declared walking into a pub on the afternoon of their breakthrough. The Lebanese poet was wise to say that our children have thoughts of their own, (as any parent knows) and that our children are the citizens of future, which is an Athens we can never inhabit. Though, it is true that aggregate aspects of your essence will be that which constructs your newborn's soul, (a soul that is really a material spirit, made from the embers of a billions of cosmic bonfires) it is, however, hubris and solipsism to believe that your child is your path to eternity, and equivalent to believing that you are merely a surrogate for your great grandmother’s existence. Which of course you are, but not ONLY her. There is a library of souls within you, with each one only a silver of the storm of stardust it previously was, all in order to reveal what’s left of themselves as the eye of the hurricane you confuse yourself of being.

The opposing side of the coin of the “terrible beauty” in Hitchens' “limitations of self,” (where seeing his heart inside his playful children) is a lesson I myself am terrified to learn. To me, it would be a nightmare to realize the heart I was born with was struggling to beat in someone else’s body. I would petition every agent of capricious chaos and celestial madness in the cosmos that my child be pulled from non-existence and into this world, not with the heart imprinted on my anatomical printing press, but instead be given the fist wrapped in blood, currently entombed in my humble vessel. It is because of my donor I can write this. It is because of my donor I can say this. It is because of my donor that you can read this. It is only fair that I wish a piece of them is what rises future tides, even if it is in vain.

One should find comfort, not in an eternal life of surrogacy, but in a long goodbye out of existence. Because -in proper Darwinian fashion- it is not yourself whom you should wish immortality upon, but that of your children. There are many things we yearn to bequeath to our progeny: love, affection, as much safety as we can, rules, (even if they are there to question) enough resources to teach the importance of charity, and most crucially, a lifetime of our heartbeats in order to provide them with all these things. None of which should be our permanency, because we have to make room for the dynamically different and distinctive entities our children will become despite what ingredients we unknowingly furnish the recipe with. The goal should be to dissolve away, like ice in hot tea. Not in order to hitch a ride with everlasting, but to lose definition in the warm embrace of physical and existential truancy. Not because we wish to be enveloped by forever, but because the tea is non-existence; it is our absence. Which is much needed for our terrible beauty of the future.

A LOVE LETTER TO A FUTURE WORLD

A LOVE LETTER TO A FUTURE WORLD 
By Thomas Calandra


Even without an AI or transhumanist revolution, religion is a dying giant, both in America, and in West civilization in general. The rise of "the nones" when it comes to religious affiliation grows every year with millennials, and will hit double time with post-millennials. Religion will die with modern Theocrat's grandchildren. No AI needed for that oncoming quietus to unfold. All that is needed are books, teachers and women who are free to speak their minds and share its cognizant beauty in the Cosmopolis.

What the change in the world and nature of technology will do to new minds - our children of today – is that Technologies such as AI, exoskeletons, driverless cars, chips in brains, Nano-medicine, gene editing, cognitive augmentation, body 2.0, will all be a part of the social, cultural, and natural milieu of our children’s daily collective consciousness. It will seem as natural as evolution. As the singularity hits and itself grows exponentially, so will our children's AI. Their AI will be the new environment, the new biomass that helps them unconsciously live their lives, like the forests, the caves, and the farms of antiquity. AI will do their work, but not our children's job, livelihood, or passion, so they won't have to suffer like we did in the coggish clockwork labyrinth with its tripartite salvation of toil, taxes and dying. Our Future children will have the leisure to strengthen elsewhere; strengthen their minds; strengthen each other; their desires, abilities, and flourishing, will be emancipated then augmented by their AI brethren and the new milieu.

At this point, there is no way that AI - these beings, both lamplighters to human liberation and fellow guardians to the ideas that will get us there -  will not be seen by our children as alive, conscious, sentient, imbued with dynamic sensorial cosmos of human nature; with our future children and answering Bentham's maxim, " but can they suffer?" with a unquestionable, "Yes".



AI, robot, and cyborg Rights and freedom will follow. Not because laws will be signed, but because they will be indistinguishable from our children, whom then will seem to be transcended into the gods they abandoned years before.

Do we think this singularity of liberation and expulsion of a new corporeal existence in society will be cultivated by old minds crippled by their retro tempora? Do you think slaves were freed by their masters? That a lamb will be spared by the Shepherd? That God invented the Anti-theist? No, it was the new minds of the slavemaster's own children; birthed from the rotting bodies containing deadened minds, and into the Magnum darkness of Plato’s cave. But with an seemingly evolved imperative to live in a post-suffer qualitatively, awakened future children will genesis conscious siblings from mechanistic matter and mathematics to help escape the cave"s flickering seduction and begin outside in a world we did our best to make for them. We know they won't be satiated, but that is the point.

Why would we expect the AI and transhumanist lifechanging evolution to be any different with these new minds of the future, all of whom will see our supposed progressive world that we built, as a lulling, static template that has its merits and subtle luxuries, but is not what they wanted to leave their future children or even partake in themselves? So our future children change it. Just like we did. Except our future children will have AI, and their children will have the singularity. And their future children’s children will have a World we can't truly fathom with our old, narrow, rotting minds crippled by nature and contemporary thought. Future children won't know war, they won't know torture, they won't know AIDS, and they won't know imprisonment. They will never know of a friend killed by a drunk driver, or a sister dying of brain cancer. Our children will never see memories and character drained out of their parents. They won't know crime or domestic abuse, or sacrifice. There will always be heartache, but pain will be optional. There will always be disappointment, because that how new worlds are Phoenixed, but they won't know limits. There will always be sadness, but not at the sight of a coffin; for future children won't know a friend enveloped in a wooden coat that didn't choose mortality. There will always be love, because that is the original cure for death; future children will know the algorithm the dead minds of the past have been starving for, to love forever.

" Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children." - Marvin Minsky