World Unity 28

   After the Civil War, men hungry for power worked to weaken  the sovereign powers of the states. Washington had assumed enough sovereignty to defeat in war 11 of the states. The federal army held them under martial law for 5 years. The military power that the Federal Government possessed was something that every American now reckoned with and feared. Everyone knew that Washington could use its army against whomever it wished and that it was further solidifying its power with a federal police force and federal prisons. The radical Republicans in power in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination had supported the war and now did everything possible to further reduce state sovereignty. They tried to impeach Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, who succeeded him to the presidency. He was against the movement towards expanded federal power and wanted to restore the Washington government and the union to their prewar status. He  survived his impeachment trial in Congress by one vote. In law and in fact, the federal government was no more sovereign now than it had been before the war, but the Republican party understood with fervor that something close to full sovereignty could at last be seized by a united group of men. They expanded federal power by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. They used the court system to strike down state laws that opposed federal policies or tried to regulate business practices.

   Everything worked against the sovereignty of the states and towards the sovereignty of the Federal Government. Everything except the Constitution. The Constitution does not assign full sovereign power to any state. Instead it takes sovereign powers away from all the states of the union and gives sovereign powers to a central government that is not located in a state. It not only refuses to the Federal Government the status of a state but also separates its power among three branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Constitution makes no government completely sovereign and forces every one of them to be democratic. The Federal Government marched ahead after the Civil War towards the status of a national state without being a state and the states, weakened by the war, believed they had lost the status as states with nearly full sovereign power that they had had before the war. The rush towards the creation of postwar America as a nation was based on the fiction that the Constitution had created a national government located in Washington D.C.. At the same time, the states suffered from the fiction that the ratification of the Constitution had left them with nearly full sovereign power when in reality such a degree of power had already been taken away from them by the Constitution. The Constitution had limited the powers of all American governments to such a radical degree that they were all doomed forever to be capable of functioning only as democracies.

   But the radical Republicans had nonetheless discovered that a political party with branches and supporters in every state could wield sovereign powers from the top down if it could establish solid political centers of power in all the states from the bottom up. The Constitution could be amended but it could never award full sovereignty to any government. The two party system became the only route towards the exercise of something close to full sovereignty by Washington. The two party system is in full force today but so is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the entire legal system of the union, both state and federal, would be nullified. Without it, all the states would become fully sovereign and separate nation-states. The Washington government would still be a non-state agency located in a stateless district but its powers would be invalid because it would no longer have the supreme power and duty of organizing states into a just union. Two political parties can continue to fight for supreme central power but without the Constitution and the Union, no power would exist that they could seize.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

Saving Washington To Save The World

50 states exercised their sovereignty by electing Donald Trump president of a government in Washington that is not located in any state and is not fully sovereign. American states parcel out their sovereignty assigning part of it to a central government and keeping the greater part for themselves. The citizens of the states vote for representatives to the legislatures of 2 governments neither of which are fully sovereign. It is impossible to rule a united group of sovereign states despotically. A fully sovereign nation-state is always ruled despotically either by one dictator or by some group of men elected democratically. The most important political objective of citizens of any state should be to make most laws regulating how they live. The fullest amount of political freedom should be the objective not the fullest amount of sovereignty. If Donald Trump were the president of a sovereign state, his total inability to govern would be a disaster. As it is, he and the other money-grabbing politicians in Washington simply grab and grab because government is mostly done locally. But Washington has absolute sovereignty in limited areas that directly affect world military and economic security. Trump's mismanagement is weakening an international system ruled by Washington whose collapse would be the worst economic disaster that has hit the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. We Americans must remain firmly loyal to Washington and support it for good or bad. We need to save the world by offering nation-states worldwide open admittance as new states to our union. But if we don't keep Washington safe and secure there will be no world to save.

Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall
usoftheworld.com

The Robot That Lives Where We Think

The beginning forms of the internet resembled the mindless forms of early life from the amoeba on up the ladder of lower forms. The beginning internet was not much more than wired interconnections of simplistic (relatively speaking) early government computers. Then open protocols allowed a kind of spontaneous expansion up the internet ladder much like the progress  in the natural world of lower and still mindless forms of life to instinctual behavior guided by crude spinal  cords that eventually evolved to small undeveloped brains. The internet needed the massive concentration of mind-power from thousands of computer engineers and programmers before it reached the present stage. It has evolved to a vast system of open communication ripe for commercial exploitation (and hacking) once  provided with a concentrated, limited mental focus by organizations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Animals evolved up to the stage of limited brain power and that is about the mental status of the present internet. It can only falsify real thinking which can  be real only if it starts individually in one individual brain and expands with complete freedom. Google patches together for us our ideas if they can be diminished to fit the focus of its platform’s technology. And of course Facebook nicely arranges for us with its platform pale feelings we try to express as genuine although our real feelings live only in a space that Facebook knows nothing about called the heart. The internet is a robot. It is not alive. Its power is that it succeeds in acting like it is alive. 5000 years ago animals named humans started using their minds creatively. They had nothing much around them to stimulate complex thinking so they began using their minds together with imagination. It took 5000 years to develop to the complexity of our present technological society which has eliminated imagination as a companion to our well developed brains. The challenge now for the internet is to take the next evolutionary step from lower-level sense thought to truly complex thinking, to  graft onto itself something  resembling  the wide range of our minds which we have drastically limited by submitting them exclusively to reason and logic. The goal is to make the robot who commands so strongly our attention able to think with something like our unique capacity for free individual thought. “Man does not think or is not able to think where he lives and so he is compelled to live where he thinks,” wrote the Russian philosopher Leo Shestov. The internet is discovering new revolutionary free protocols so that it soon may be able also to live its robot-style invented life where we think along with us who become more and more stupefied the more we live where we think.

Daniel McNeill

Read examples of the free individual thought that wants to change the United States of America to the United States of the World. At: usoftheworld.com  

Woody Allen, Millenials and the Same Vapid Culture

Woody Allen must answer those who now accuse him of immoral behavior. His generation grew up in a kind of social and political moral vacuum. In  Woody’s youth in the 1950s, we had three clear and loud moral commands: hate Communists, shut up about everything else and use the educational and economic system to make money. James Jones wrote a novel published then, “From Here to Eternity”, in which the hero declares you’re nothing if you don’t go your own way. We either went the way of a morally inept and vapid society or our own way. Woody refused the public-school educational system which taught him nothing culturally except drivel and refused the dead-beat culture taught in colleges which was mainly European culture, by then a dead culture strangled to death by the Second World War. What to do? Something, anything other than what we were supposed to do. Woody almost became a criminel and saved himself by becoming a comic. Then he succeeded in enlivening the tedious and dumb conformity of the period in movies with the interesting and unusual personalities of actors who floated before us for a few minutes as though real persons even though clearly they belonged to no society of any moral authenticity.  The insipidity of our American culture will tirelessly turn all of us into work-a-day slobs unless we find the courage to express ourselves with real freedom and real words free of media blather and oversimplified talking points. We need also some brave and free political acts that may end our moral vapidity by actually creating goodness. But nothing has changed much since Woody’s time. We have terrorists instead of communists and the educational paths to success are still dead-beat with most humanistic studies gone. The millenials have the same vapid culture. Their technological bells and whistles don’t make it as lively as they think. But there is one difference. They don’t feel any necessity to go their own way. That’s big. The vapidity is still real. They accept it wholeheartedly and intend to enjoy it as best they can until their generation or a new one decides it is immoral to live without the freedom and creativity of the bold.

Daniel McNeill

Read 42 arguments for changing the United States of America to the United States of the World at: usoftheworld.com  

World Unity 27

After the Civil War, Americans wanted as little to do with Washington as possible and most considered it a grave moral weakness, almost a sinful condition, if anyone expected anything from it. Protestants in the south lived for years under martial law and some Protestants in the north had sent their sons to their death in Washington’s armies. Both groups knew that nothing could arise in Washington except more power for Washington.The only power they had was the power they found in themselves. Native Americans were soon surrounded by vast numbers of immigrants speaking incomprehensible languages. Over 20 million Europeans came to America between 1870 and 1910. They came from nation-states or empires and understood little about the new radical political system in America. Most native Americans understood that they had never lived in a nation and had no reason to believe they lived in one simply because Washington had gained more power by a civil war.  A common saying passed among immigrants that was equivalent to not living in a nation, “America is a free country”. As America raced on through the most extraordinary industrial revolution ever witnessed on the planet, Americans were forced to take upon themselves a new identity that gave them power and purpose in the new America. Individuals discovered “the work ethic”.The new religion that thrived in the late nineteenth-century industrial jungles preached that poverty was shameful and sinful and riches blessed. People struggled to improve their lot by making money. They ascended if they could the stairs to the divine temples where the rich lived in bliss. On their way up, like the rich, they did not look down at the millions of Americans that the savage industrial development had defeated and held prisoners in the hell fire of poverty.  In the economic arena no one was united with anyone and this lack of unity made individual values the only solid weapons against defeat and produced ironically an overall unity as everyone searched for the American dream on their own. Extreme individualism fit well with a government at the top that was like an aloof imperial government that never left its lofty perch to aid the common man.  Rich men conveyed money to key officials in Washington to keep federal-government power out of the hands of the average American and the immigrants laboring in the dog-eat-dog industrial hell. Many Americans never again took anything Washington politicians said seriously. Historians went to work to discover in American history the “new nation” that Lincoln had spoken of in his Gettysburg Address. Americans kept silent and lived by the work ethic.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

The Origins of Baseball

Books on the history of baseball pay very little attention to the problem of how baseball originated and how and why it evolved to its present form. Ball games, with rubber balls or balls covered with rawhide, sometimes with bats three or four feet long, were universal among native Americans, going back many hundreds of years. The games often had a ceremonial character. Before the year 1000, in northern Mexico and Arizona, there were ball courts, similar to those of the Mayas of Central America, as large as 180 by 61 feet. The issue of some ancient American ball games was life or death. More recently some of the pilgrims building the Plymouth Plantation used to escape from the tedium of work by playing ball. Forms of baseball similar to the one we know were played by white Americans well before 1870, which is the generally accepted date for the finalization of baseball in its present form. The history of baseball since that time is, of course, well documented. Yet we know little more now about its early history and evolution than was known in 1907 when the Special Baseball Commission, made up of prominent baseball executives and two United States senators, announced, with insufficient evidence, that Abner Doubleday is the father of baseball.

Daniel McNeill

Read the complete essay about the indirect meanings of baseball at:

usoftheworld.com/baseball-metaphysics

World Unity 26

The Civil War caused a radical power shift but it never resulted in the birth of a nation. However, there was a need to unify a post war America that welcomed and put to work 20 million immigrants. School children soon began pledging allegiance every school day to a nation. The Pledge of Allegiance expressed the altered state of the union thus: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” The 13 red and white stripes stretched across the flag represent the 13 original states of the union. The stars on the flag represent the 13 original states and all subsequent states admitted to the union by bills passed by the Congress. The stars and stripes express the union’s complexity. The Pledge of Allegiance simplifies it. It states that all the states taken together are a republic. And it states that this republic is one nation. Since it is impossible logically and practically to form a nation out of 50 sovereign states and so many immigrants coming from all parts of the world, the pledge should be seen as an effort to strengthen loyalty to Washington. Old Americans and new Americans had to learn that there could be no liberty and justice for all and no union without a powerful government in Washington. A corrected pledge, one in harmony with our true history and a more authentic basis for our loyalty to Washington, would be: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republics for which it stands, one perpetual union indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” By 1959, there were 50 states and, adding the government in Washington, 51 republics. The Federal Government, although it is not a state, is certainly, with its duties outlined in the Constitution and its great powers, one republic. In the future we hope it will be the central government of a worldwide union of states and then it will be the head of something much greater than one nation.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall