Selective Service System

My Lai, Vietnam


As I watched another Memorial Day orgiastic celebration of the dead soldiers who sacrificed their lives for The State, I thought of the Selective Service System that picked most of these men for the rites of human sacrifice.

During World War II 73% of all personnel were drafted. The draft percentage of the Army was 90%! These men were shamed or forced to die, and kill, for The State.

The selection process reminds me that we seem to still practice primitive human sacrifices. The ritual may be different but the desire to offer humans as sacrificial victims to the State God is still practiced.

The Selective Service System will select those men who are least valuable to The State for human sacrifice. The Selective Service System never selects a female. The State needs the female wombs to produce more babies to help The State grow. No one in The State wants to see their state decrease in size.

I can see the men on the Selective Service boards feeling their odds increase at finding a female mate each time they select a male for human sacrifice. The fewer males in a society the greater number of females available for the remaining males. Better to sacrifice some males to eliminate the competition instead of having to kill them yourself.

The panegyrics we offer on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, calling those selected heroes, even though some were running away when torn to shreds by incoming artillery, are lures for more young men who want glory or martyrdom and will sign up to go into another country and kill some other young man for The State.

There are 22 American military cemeteries on foreign soil. These cemeteries are the footprints of an empire built on plunder, violence and aggression.

Imagine, if instead of lauding the dead on Memorial Day and the veterans on Veterans Day, that we instead demeaned and ridiculed them. If we did that there would be very few volunteers for The State to carry out unnecessary wars and plunder started by old men with sadistic egos.

We made dueling between individuals illegal. It is time we made war between states illegal. Conflicts between states could be settled in an international civil court or criminal court.

It was alleged that one State ship provoked a ship of another State in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. As a result, millions died. Would it not have been better to solve the dispute in an international court?

Charles Tolleson

CONSEQUENCES FOR NOT REGISTERING
The maximum penalty for failing to register with Selective Service is a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Failure to register will cause ineligibility for a number of federal and state benefits including:
FEDERAL JOBS
A man must be registered to be eligible for jobs in the Executive Branch of the Federal government and the U.S. Postal Service. This applies only to men born after December 31, 1959.
STUDENT FINANCIAL AID
Men who are not registered with Selective Service cannot obtain Federal student loans or grants. This includes Pell Grants, College Work Study, Guaranteed Student/Plus Loans, and National Direct Student Loans.
CITIZENSHIP
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) makes registration with Selective Service a condition for U.S. citizenship, if the man first arrived in the U.S. before his 26th birthday and was required to register.
FEDERAL JOB TRAINING
The Workforce Investment Act (formerly JTPA) offers important job-training opportunities. This program is only open to those men who register with Selective Service.
STATE JOBS, LOANS, AND TRAINING
Most states have added additional penalties for those who fail to register with Selective Service.
STATE DRIVER'S LICENSE LEGISLATION
As of May 16, 2002, 19 states, 2 territories, and the District of Columbia have enacted driver's license laws supporting Selective Service registration. They are Oklahoma, Delaware, Arkansas, Utah, Georgia, Hawaii, Alabama, Florida, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio, South Dakota, Mississippi, Idaho, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Virgin Islands.

Islamic woman elected to office

I've written before that technology; cell phones, TV, Internet, jet airplanes, will allow ideas to change cultures more than invading armies change cultures. Globalization and free trade, when ideas cross borders and armies do not, is the best way to advance civilization.

This story shows no invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the torture, for the greater good, was necessary. The Islamic world of the past cannot survive. Women will change the Islamic culture the same way women changed American culture. The Islamic women will cease to have a large birth rate. They will demand more options, including less family restrictions. Their families units, the foundation of the current tribal system, will fragment, like the American families.

(Kuwaiti women win first parliamentary seats,By DIANA ELIAS, Associated Press KUWAIT CITY - Kuwaitis elected female parliament members for the first time and rejected a number of Islamic fundamentalist candidates in a weekend vote that many hoped would bring stability to the country's rocky political scene.)

Update. This from the Christian Science Monitor of Nov 27, 2009- "But even more significant news – a major step for women – went largely unnoticed outside Iraq. Fifty women graduated alongside male classmates as senior officers in the national police force. In next year's class there will be 100 of them. The jobs are among the highest-paying in Iraq. The majority of the women in this year's class finished law school. There have been some women in lower police ranks, but they have not until now been eligible for the elite officers' corps."

Like most other wars, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are unnecessary. All the torture of innocents for the greater good of the collective, was unnecessary. All the innocence women and children killed by a stealth missile were unnecessary.

We made dueling illegal. We made slavery illegal. It's time we made war illegal. If an individual is harmed by another there is redress in a civil suit. The same should apply to nations. It is crazy human behavior to kill 10 million people as in WW I simply because some madman murdered an Archduke.

We could have dueling between States to settle conflicts. The duelers would be each State leader and the weapons be games of cards, billiards, or chess.

International arbitration to settle disputes between nations has been proposed before. One was presented to the British Parliament in 1849 by Richard Cobden. States do not want an end to war. War gives governments power. Imagine a world with no wars, no veterans hospitals, no bombs. All that energy can be directed to exploring planets and curing diseases.

Imagine if we lived in a world were cowardliness was praised and bravery ridiculed! That would eliminate war. Or, it just might give the advantage to a state that had plenty of unmanned weapons that could be fired by a coward a thousand miles from the battlefield.

Charles Tolleson

Prisoner Abuse, U.S. Military Photos

President Obama has decided not to release the prisoner abuse photos.

I think they should be released. Photos show evil. They show evil that governments participate in.

Most people live in a visual world, not a reader's world. The photos of prisoner abuse, like the photo above of Bull Connor's police dogs in Birmingham, AL in 1963, will change people's attitudes about trusting a government.

The government prosecutes people all the time for abuse; sexual abuse, child abuse, and spousal abuse. Who is going to prosecute the government when it is an abuser?

After 9/11 the rest of the world sympathized with America. We had all the cooperation we needed to go after terrorists. Instead we decided the crowd of the America tribe wanted blood, so off to war we went. The fog of war, especially another unnecessary war, now 7 years long with no end in sight, allows too many things to happen, most of them bad.

Now we are despised by the world. Maybe President Obama, who has seen the photos, does not want the world to know what an evil empire he is in charge of. How will he keep the respect the world has shown him in his first 100 days?

Maybe President Obama does not want Americans to be ashamed. We have had an uppity attitude since WW I when President Woodrow Wilson said that everything America touches turns "holy". Destroy our illusions that we are the best and most virtuous country in the world and you destroy our happiness.

Charles Tolleson

Selecting Congress the way we select jurors

To improve our Republic we should select members of The House of Representatives in a similar way we select jurors.

Too many members of congress are bought by lobbyists with money and group voting. This is why Bastiat's quote, "The law is about one group plundering another group" has come true. With random selection of members of The House of Representatives this opportunity for plunder would diminish.

The two party system is about power and perks. The majority party in power gets to elect the Speaker of the House who appoints the committee chairs. The Speaker of the House has enormous power and perks; a military jet to travel in, a large staff, and many media interviews.

The political party that is in power gets to chair all the congressional committees. These committee chairs have the best offices, a larger staff, and more media interviews.

The party in power can raise more money through campaign contributions from lobbyists hoping to buy favors.

Members of congress usually vote on a bill before reading the bill. They vote the way their party leaders tell them to vote. In the future each member of the House of Representatives should be required to read a bill completely before voting "Yes" for the bill. Members who vote "No" or "Abstain" will not be required to read the complete bill.

If we select members of congress by the same way we select jurors we will eliminate the antagonistic two party political system that collects power and perks and divides the spoils of government power. Members selected randomly like jurors will vote their consciences more often than the way lobbyists want them to vote.

We should select a member to the House of Representatives to represent each district. No district should contain more than 500,000 people. This increase in congressional representatives is needed as currently each congressional representative represents an average of over 647,000 people in each district. Try contacting your representative and you will get a staff member. There is no way the ordinary citizens who is not a member of some powerful group can get an audience with their so called representative, who constantly tells us they represent us. They represent an area, and they represent those who have the most clout, the most money, and the organizations with the most members who will vote, like the American Association of Retired People, or some subcontractor of some weapons system.

The districts would select each representative the way they select jurors, in a public televised forum. The potential jurors should be interviewed by the professional staff, not about their political views, but just about their reading and comprehension skills to see if they are qualified to serve. A professional psychologist should be allowed to ask a few questions. One person from an approved list of those who pass will be randomly drawn from the list to serve in congress.

The district would hire a professional staff for the representatives to show the inexperienced representatives how the congress works. This way the representatives would not be obligated to vote for the lobbyists who have the lobbying and financial power. Imagine a small business owner serving in congress and getting to vote on a bad piece of legislation that was written to protect big corporations from competition.

The selection process should have each member serve from six months to no more than two years, depending on the selected representative's life needs.

Update June 23, 2009-- The current way of electing the 435 members of the House of Representatives can remain the same. One additional member that is needed to more represent the people can be selected from each district by the juror selection process. This would double the number of members in the House of Representatives and reduce the average number of citizens represented by each representative from over 700,000 to less than 400,000. Members who are selected by the juror process could, after serving their jury term, run for one of the elected positions. This would help prevent career politicians.

Charles Tolleson