"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."--John Adams
During the Obama Administration, I created a Social Media meme that read, "The Second Amendment--Protecting the Other Nine Since 1791." This is really the truth--an armed populace is essential not only for the individual defense of the individual members but for the corporate defense of the whole. A friend of mine whose uncle was a high-ranking military official during World War II has told me that the Japanese did not attempt a ground invasion after their strike at Pearl Harbor because Americans were so heavily armed. History, especially the history of the 20th century, is full of examples of foreign invasions and of internal communist take-overs that involved the slaughter of unarmed populations. Tyranny begins with disarmament.
Since the completely senseless, tragic shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, there are many new calls for gun control. From the Twitter campaign to #BoycotttheNRA to the bill introduced yesterday to ban assault weapons, we are hearing once again that the problem in our country is too many guns in the hands of too many unstable people. Maybe we can stop these shooting by banning automatic weapons, or bump stocks or increasing background checks or waiting periods or at least by raising the minimum age to purchase these guns. On the other side, gun advocates claim that we need better treatment for mental illness or more armed guards.
I do not believe gun control will fix any of the issues we are facing--I DO believe that ending gun-free zones could help with the problem of shootings in schools but the issue there is that the teachers would have to be the ones to take responsibility for carrying these weapons and for training on them and for many that is not going to be practical. Personally, I would not want to be responsible for protecting everyone at my workplace with a gun. Teaching attracts, on the whole, liberal people who support big government at the expense of personal freedom. Certainly not all, but many, teachers believe that more government is the answer to problems. On top of that, we have created an environment in schools over the last forty years where teachers have been stripped of personal authority to deal with discipline problems or manage troubled students. It seems a little naïve to now ask teachers to be responsible for the personal safety of the class by arming themselves, training on weapons and shooting assailants when we have spent four decades creating a culture of non-confrontation in our schools.
The real problem in this country is neither guns nor lack of gun control. The real problem is that our free republic, as John Adams said so eloquently in the above quote, was created for a moral and religious people. Freedom requires individual responsibility and individual morality and as a society we have lost both. When we decided as a culture that we did not want to be "One Nation Under God" and that we did not want the Ten Commandments telling us "Thou Shalt Not Kill" we were sowing the seeds of the crisis we face today. We abandoned a Judeo-Christian culture with an absolute sense of right and wrong for a Secular Humanist culture with a relative sense of morality and told several generations "if it feels good, do it." Unfortunately, to some people mass murder feels good. Our Constitutional Republic with its protections for individual rights is "wholly inadequate" to govern people with no personal sense of morality who don't know right from wrong.
Banning guns, ironically, will not solve the issue of mass-murder. People who want to murder others will still find weapons and will still kill people. Gun control just disarms their potential victims and gives them more targets. But a godless society that relies more and more on the government is going to trade more freedom away to that government so that they don't have to be responsible for themselves. And as that happens, our country is lost.
For the present, I think the majority of Americans still support gun rights and the NRA is still a force to be reckoned with. And that is a GOOD thing because the Second Amendment Does still defend the other nine. But the society is rapidly becoming less moral and less religious rather than more so. Among, Millennials (those born between 1980 and 2000) only 40% say that religion is an important part of their lives and only 27% believe that the Bible is literally true. And this group will represent 40% of voters by 2020. Millennials are the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers, and they are neither moral nor religious.
If we as Americans do not return to our Christian heritage our Second Amendment freedoms and the other nine it protects will all be lost to a new generation that does not value them. We need to pray for our nation more than ever and take seriously the other warning of John Adams: "A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever."
Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set, incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA. The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Big Brother is Watching--Part 1: The Internet
My website went down last night. No, this was not an ordinary server crash. Nor was it a 404 error or even at "Sorry, we can't find this webpage" error. The website was gone--as the ServePro commercial says, "Like it never even happened."
I had been on my website in the morning so I know that the disappearing act took place sometime between 8:45 AM and 7:00 PM. My emails are tied to my domain name, so they went down too with a notice that the Domain Name was unavailable.
Since I know that my domain name is pre-paid and registered for another several years, I was not really concerned. AT&T manages my domain name and my webhosting, so I assumed that they might be conducting some kind of general maintenance and that everything would come back up on its own. But when I got up this morning with still no website I knew there must be a bigger issue.
Five phone calls and three emails later, I learned that ICANN had suspended my domain name. ICANN is the International Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN has managed the Internet since October 1, 2016. Assignment of domain names and registrations now happens on their watch. Although Obama got the blame for the transition, the seeds of ICANN were planted in the Clinton Administration in 1998. The Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations all made the determination that global governance of the Internet was the best way to protect and manage it. In September of 2016, CBS News quoted Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Chief under both Bush and Obama, on the subject of surrendering Internet governance to ICANN, “If we don’t make a transition to a more global form of governance, many people will say, ‘Look, this is a U.S tool, and we’re going to make our own Internet. We have to realize that even though we know our motives are good motives, there are people who will argue that if we don’t give it up that we have bad motives. To maintain credibility we have to go through this process.”
Before the transition, many conservatives were worried about ICANN shutting down sites they don't like--about regulating and controlling speech and thought. Obama supporters insisted that they were just being paranoid and silly. After the transition life seemed to go on as before and most of us forgot about ICANN.
So what does any of this have to do with my website? I learned this morning that ICANN is now sending a yearly email to all domain owners to make sure that they are still active and want to remain registered. The email is sent to the email on file with the webhost--which is typically a different email than the host provides. In my case ICANN sent an email to an email address I have not checked in almost 10 years. When the email does not get a response within 15 days, ICANN suspends the domain until the party to whom it is registered confirms it. This annual check-up does not take into consideration that the domain name may have been paid in advance for a certain period of time and that the owner may be accessing it daily.
After four confirmation emails and a text message confirming that I am still using the domain, I was able to get my website back up. And I confirmed with AT&T that I can change the email in their system so that ICANN can reach me next year so that I don't have to go through this again. But the experience has shown me how quickly this "global governing body" can flip a switch and cut off anyone's website or email and make it disappear without a trace--as if it had never been there.
That's a scary thought, and it portends a scary future for all of us if ICANN ever does decide to regulate content and not just domain names and numbers.
Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set, incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA. The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
I had been on my website in the morning so I know that the disappearing act took place sometime between 8:45 AM and 7:00 PM. My emails are tied to my domain name, so they went down too with a notice that the Domain Name was unavailable.
Since I know that my domain name is pre-paid and registered for another several years, I was not really concerned. AT&T manages my domain name and my webhosting, so I assumed that they might be conducting some kind of general maintenance and that everything would come back up on its own. But when I got up this morning with still no website I knew there must be a bigger issue.
Five phone calls and three emails later, I learned that ICANN had suspended my domain name. ICANN is the International Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN has managed the Internet since October 1, 2016. Assignment of domain names and registrations now happens on their watch. Although Obama got the blame for the transition, the seeds of ICANN were planted in the Clinton Administration in 1998. The Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations all made the determination that global governance of the Internet was the best way to protect and manage it. In September of 2016, CBS News quoted Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Chief under both Bush and Obama, on the subject of surrendering Internet governance to ICANN, “If we don’t make a transition to a more global form of governance, many people will say, ‘Look, this is a U.S tool, and we’re going to make our own Internet. We have to realize that even though we know our motives are good motives, there are people who will argue that if we don’t give it up that we have bad motives. To maintain credibility we have to go through this process.”
Before the transition, many conservatives were worried about ICANN shutting down sites they don't like--about regulating and controlling speech and thought. Obama supporters insisted that they were just being paranoid and silly. After the transition life seemed to go on as before and most of us forgot about ICANN.
So what does any of this have to do with my website? I learned this morning that ICANN is now sending a yearly email to all domain owners to make sure that they are still active and want to remain registered. The email is sent to the email on file with the webhost--which is typically a different email than the host provides. In my case ICANN sent an email to an email address I have not checked in almost 10 years. When the email does not get a response within 15 days, ICANN suspends the domain until the party to whom it is registered confirms it. This annual check-up does not take into consideration that the domain name may have been paid in advance for a certain period of time and that the owner may be accessing it daily.
After four confirmation emails and a text message confirming that I am still using the domain, I was able to get my website back up. And I confirmed with AT&T that I can change the email in their system so that ICANN can reach me next year so that I don't have to go through this again. But the experience has shown me how quickly this "global governing body" can flip a switch and cut off anyone's website or email and make it disappear without a trace--as if it had never been there.
That's a scary thought, and it portends a scary future for all of us if ICANN ever does decide to regulate content and not just domain names and numbers.
Alexandra Swann's novel W: The Set, incorporates her novels The Planner and The Chosen which tell the story of an out-of-control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21 and NDAA. The set is available on Kindle. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
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