King Arthur explains to a mob how to tell if a woman is a witch \u2013 Monty Python\u2019s Search for the Holy Grail<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026There are ways of telling whether she is a witch. <\/em>Are there? <\/em>What are they? Tell us. Do they hurt?<\/em> Tell me, what do you do with witches?<\/em> Burn them! And what do you burn, apart from witches? <\/em>More witches! – Wood! So why do witches burn? <\/em>Cause they’re made of wood? – Good!<\/em> How do we tell if she is made of wood? – <\/em>Build a bridge out of her. But can you not also make bridges out of stone? <\/em> Oh, yeah. Does wood sink in water. <\/em>No, it floats. Throw her into the pond! What also floats in water? <\/em> Bread. – Apples. Very small rocks. – Cider! Great gravy. Cherries. Mud. – Churches. Lead. A duck! Exactly. So, logically– If she weighs the same as a duck…she’s made of wood. And therefore? <\/em>A witch! A duck! A duck! – Here’s a duck. We shaIl use my largest scales\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Americans are sitting on the edge of a lot of scary logical \u201crabbit holes\u201d. Here\u2019s some examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and sex trafficker.\u00a0\u00a0Donald Trump was Epstein\u2019s friend, and has been accused of sex offenses and had\/has a known interest in young women.\u00a0\u00a0Therefore, what is Donald Trump?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Constitution states that Congress has the power to declare war.\u00a0\u00a0The President of the United States took the US to war in Iran, without the consent of Congress.\u00a0\u00a0Did Donald Trump violate the Constitution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll persons\u201d are guaranteed civil rights.\u00a0\u00a0ICE and other \u201claw enforcement\u201d agencies are rounding up \u201cpersons\u201d in the United States, holding them without trial, and deporting them from the country.\u00a0\u00a0Is ICE and the others, at the behest of President Trump, again violating the Constitution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Constitution forbids the President from taking bribes, and\u00a0\u00a0\u201cemoluments\u201d (payments) from foreign countries.\u00a0\u00a0Donald Trump accepted an aircraft from the Qataris.\u00a0\u00a0He\u2019s also accepting millions of dollars from folks who want Presidential pardons.\u00a0\u00a0And he took millions of dollars from investors in his family\u2019s crypto-currency scheme.\u00a0\u00a0Is Trump violating Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the final one: Donald Trump violates the Constitution often. The Supreme Court gave him a \u201cfree pass\u201d from criminal liability. Congress won\u2019t do anything about it. What should the American citizen do to protect the Constitution, and the Nation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cole Tomas Allen launched a failed attack on the President and his Cabinet on Saturday night.\u00a0\u00a0We don\u2019t know a whole lot about his life, yet.\u00a0\u00a0We know he\u2019s an educated man:\u00a0\u00a0a Cal-Tech engineer with a Master\u2019s Degree in Computer Science from Cal State.\u00a0\u00a0And, we do know that he sent an \u201capology and explanation\u201d to his family and friends for what he was about to do.\u00a0\u00a0(Just an aside: the government and media refer to this as his \u201cmanifesto\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0But it\u2019s hard to think of a \u201cmanifesto\u201d as starting with the sentence, \u201cHello everybody!\u00a0\u00a0So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused<\/em>\u2026\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the logical \u201crabbit hole\u201d that consumed Allen.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI am a citizen of the United States of America.\u00a0\u00a0What my representatives do reflects on me.\u00a0\u00a0And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He then went into a detailed explanation of his thought process as he hoped to assassinate the President and the highest members of his team.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he made clear the objections he considered, and the \u201clogic\u201d that led him to make the attack.\u00a0\u00a0That includes number three:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou didn\u2019t get them all<\/em>\u201d, followed by the response \u201cYou gotta start somewhere<\/em>\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are a Nation polarized.\u00a0\u00a0We are as divided as any time since the era prior to the Civil War in the 1850\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0At that time, America\u2019s information sources, the newspapers, often were either pro-slavery or abolitionist.\u00a0\u00a0Some of the heroes we were taught about in school, men like William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass, published widely read gazettes to further their abolitionist views.\u00a0\u00a0That was in spite of the fact that those views were opposed to existing Federal law. The Fugitive Slave Act, required runaway slaves be returned to their owners, even from free states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the \u201cfinal straw\u201d of that era was John Brown\u2019s attack on the United States Military Arsenal at Harper\u2019s Ferry.\u00a0\u00a0Brown\u2019s avowed intent was to get weapons to arm a \u201cslave revolution\u201d to end the \u201cabomination\u201d of enslavement.\u00a0\u00a0He was met with full military force, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant JEB Stuart, both familiar names from the Confederacy, but then US Army officers.\u00a0\u00a0Brown was convicted of treason and incitement of slaves to rebel, and was hanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Was Brown a hero, or a madman?\u00a0\u00a0At the time, it depended on your view about enslavement, often on what newspaper you read.\u00a0\u00a0And, how you look at John Brown today might determine your actions in our current political environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our information sources, mostly what we see on the tiny screen on the device in our pocket, are almost as divided.\u00a0\u00a0We can explore any \u201crabbit hole\u201d we want, any time we want.\u00a0\u00a0And it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that some people, even those we think of as intelligent and smart and educated, fall down the \u201crabbit hole\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0They follow a \u201clogic chain\u201d, not unlike the one King Arthur takes the witch mob through.\u00a0\u00a0Arthur \u201clogic-ed\u201d that a witch would weigh the same as a duck.\u00a0\u00a0Allen “logic-ed” that the only action he could take was violence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not an apology for Cole Tomas Allen.\u00a0\u00a0As I\u2019ve written before, violence is not the answer to our current crisis.\u00a0\u00a0In fact, I see violence as abetting those who want to push the Constitution aside, and make America an authoritarian regime.\u00a0\u00a0But it would be a mistake to ignore the \u201clogic\u201d that got him to this ultimate action.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the true peril of our time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\nLogic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Apologies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Polarized<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Into the Hole<\/h2>\n\n\n\n