The Futility of Reform
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Why can’t statists see that their system is inherently defective and that any reforms that are enacted to fix it only makes things worse?
Look at Iraq. Twelve years ago, statists were celebrating “Mission Accomplished” over the fact that the most powerful military force in history had just smashed a small, weak Third World regime.
Statists were ecstatic over the U.S. conquest of Iraq. They were convinced that this time — for the first time ever — they would finally show the world what a great success statism could be when the U.S. military and the CIA were given a free hand to do whatever they wanted.
The idea was to show how military force, in the form of bombs and bullets, could transform a society into one of democracy, peace, prosperity, and harmony. Iraq was to be their statist model for the entire Middle East and the rest of the world.
The actual result? Alas, another debacle. Today, as everyone knows, Iraq is nothing but a hellhole of death, destruction, impoverishment, detention, torture, and dictatorship.
What better confirmation of the manifest failure of U.S. statism in Iraq than the new bombing campaign against ISIS that President Obama and the national-security establishment have just initiated?
And by now, we all know that it won’t end with ISIS. It’s just a beginning. Each new intervention brings a host of new problems, which then necessitate new interventions, which produce new problems. It’s a perpetual process.
Look at healthcare. It’s no different there. When Medicare and Medicaid were adopted in the 1960s, statists believed that they were bringing a new dawn to healthcare in America. Instead, it turned out to just another statist debacle, with ever-rising prices, corruption, regulation, and disillusioned physicians.
What did statists do? With each new crisis, statists simply piled regulations and reforms on top of regulations and reforms, hoping that their statist healthcare system would finally succeed. That’s what Obamacare is all about — to address the problems that decades of Medicare, Medicaid, and regulatory reform have produced.
But Obamacare will not do any good. In fact, Obamacare will only make the situation worse than ever. Before too long, statists will be calling for new reforms to fix the problems produced by Obamacare. Those reforms will only make the situation worse than ever. That’s because it is impossible to fix a system that is inherently defective.
Immigration? Sometimes I wonder whether Americans just like living under a regime of constant, never-ending crises. You especially see that in the area of immigration. Every single American alive today has lived under a constant, ongoing immigration crisis since the day he was born.
Do you recall when they made it illegal to hire illegal aliens? They said that that would finally resolve the immigration crisis. After all, they said, if they can’t get jobs, they won’t come. But they came anyway because American employers wanted to hire them.
So they established those Soviet-style checkpoints within the United States, stopping travelers who had never entered Mexico and asking for their papers, just like in the Soviet Union.
Alas, that reform didn’t work either.
So, they built that Berlin Fence down on the border. Wasn’t that supposed to fix the immigration crisis once and for all?
It didn’t.
The fact is that nothing they can do can fix the immigration crisis. Let me repeat that: No matter what statists do, nothing will fix the immigration crisis. That’s because immigration controls, as a system of socialist central planning, are inherently defective. The controls themselves produce the crises. Any attempt to fix the immigration crises only makes things worse.
Meanwhile, statists wring their hands in perpetual anxiety over the immigration crisis. They keep demanding that public officials “do something” about those illegal aliens who are “invading” America. They don’t realize that there is nothing that public officials can do to fix the immigration crisis. In fact, whatever public officials do will only make the immigration crisis worse.
Look at the drug war. Decades of intervention punctuated by drug-war crises. Mandatory minimum sentences, asset-forfeiture laws, militarization of the police, overcrowded prisons, illegal searches and seizures, and highway robbery of innocent people.
None of it has done any good. On the contrary, each new drug-war reform has just produced more death, destruction, corruption, loss of liberty, and ruination of lives. That’s because statism is an inherently defective system.
Social Security, public schooling, the dollar, home mortgages, and on and on. It’s all one great big statist debacle. And each new reform to fix the problems caused by previous reforms only makes the situation worse, which inevitably brings new calls for reform.
If you choose, you can spend your life getting sucked into this statist maelstrom. You can pace the floors in deep anxiety over the latest official enemy of the Empire overseas or the ongoing, never-ending crises in healthcare, immigration, education, the drug war, and the rest of the welfare-warfare state. You can angrily demand that public officials “do something.”
If you choose that route, you’ll just be wasting your time, money, and energy. The fact is that there is nothing that can be done to fix or improve any statist program. Any new reform will only make the situation worse. That’s because statism is an inherently defective system.
There is only one solution: Stop trying to fix or reform any aspect of statism. Instead, dismantle every single welfare-warfare program. Don’t trim the weed. Pull it out by its root.
The only solution to the perpetual crises that statism produces is the philosophy of individual liberty, free markets, and a limited-government, constitutional republic.
That necessarily means dismantling the Empire, abandoning all military bases in foreign countries, bringing all the troops home, and ending foreign intervention, foreign aid, and foreign meddling.
It means repealing, not reforming, Medicare, Medicaid, occupational licensure, healthcare regulation, and all other state involvement in healthcare.
It means the lifting of all immigration controls, thereby enabling the free movements of people across borders.
It means a repeal of all drug laws.
It means a separation of education and the state and economy and the state.
It means a dismantling, not a reform, of the entire welfare-warfare state apparatus.
It’s the only way to bring us a society of peace, prosperity, and harmony. Isn’t that what we all want for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren?
Link:
http://fff.org/2014/09/30/the-futility-of-reform/
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Government propaganda...
Propaganda is force!
by Bob Livingston
Propaganda can be words and phrases that collectivize and mold the public mind so that subtle or overt force is made easier or becomes unnecessary.
Carefully chosen words by the establishment are the basis of mass mind control leading to acceptance of force. Until the people accept collectivism under some pretext, they are not docile and completely subdued.
But, Bob, you say, you have written this before. Well, a whole volume could easily be written demonstrating the twisting and distortion of words and phrases along with outright lies to manipulate the public mind. Really, few people escape this psychological warfare.
Words are created and repeated, which expands the collective psyche to accept and repeat some more. People who freely use those terms are not in control of their own thinking process.
Following are some examples of establishment words and phrases used as propaganda:
See your doctor
It is oh, so evident that this phrase channels the crowd toward pharmaceutical control. The doctor is only the medium. Few doctors suspect that “medical orthodoxy” is a rigidly controlled system in the medical schools and practiced by the pharmaceutical companies.
We have long held that so-called modern allopathic medicine is a very esoteric witchcraft — a deceptive practice that has little or nothing to do with curing or healing, but it does have to do with a multitrillion-dollar industry. But don’t just take my word for it.
Read the words of Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, from her book “Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.”
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
This fraud is becoming increasingly visible in the wake of the revelations by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whistleblower William Thompson and the establishment’s reaction to the revelations.
In case you missed it, and it’s likely you did because there is a full-on mainstream media blackout on it and circling of wagons by the establishment, Thompson has revealed that he and other CDC researchers have been falsifying data for years in order to cover up a link between vaccines and autism.
In a recorded call between Thompson and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Thompson is heard to say:
The CDC has put the [autism] research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research [on the autism-vaccine connection]… CDC is…they’re paralyzed. The whole system is paralyzed right now… I have a boss who’s asking me to lie…if I’m forced to testify, I’m not gonna lie. I basically have stopped lying… Really, what we need is for Congress to come in and say, “Give us the data and we’re gonna have an independent contractor do it,” and bring in the autism advocates [who understand the vaccine-autism connection] and have them intimately involved in the studies.
The attempt to stem the damage has reached the absurd. State Farm insurance recently fired comedian Rob Schneider over his anti-vaccination stance. This is common practice by the establishment to shut down any dissenting views.
But even if they worked and were without risk, vaccines only stimulate temporary immunity. By trading lifelong immunity for temporary vaccine-induced immunity, people become vaccine dependent.
The winners of repeated mandatory vaccinations are the pharmaceutical companies. The losers are the people, who are first put at risk as children for vaccine adverse events and then put at risk as adults for repeated vaccinations that have already failed.
The pharmaceuticals, aided and abetted by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, have discovered a money machine in mass vaccinations. But they need and have to have your body for the pretense.
Healthcare is a right
This is a phrase that seeks to establish that modern medicine is beneficial to the health of the people. It disarms any negative connotation. It greatly helps cover the medical fraud.
There are more than 600,000 injuries and 100,000 deaths annually in the U.S. from adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospitals. These are caused by FDA-approved drugs. ADR is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S.
Life expectancy
This phrase programs the public psyche to expire when we retire. Since people are not cooperating and are now living longer, this concept must be reinforced from time to time, as Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., recently did in The Atlantic.
“By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life,” Emanuel writes in the magazine. “I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations… [It is] a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining.”
Establishment propagandist CBS News medical contributor David Argus, M.D., pontificated before a national audience with, “Ezekiel Emanuel did a remarkable thing: He created discourse. He made everybody start to talk about this.”
Taxpayer
This word is among the greatest deceptions in the English language. The system wants everyone to believe himself a taxpayer or as one who pays his or her “fair share.” Since the government (and banksters) create money (credit), why would they need you to pay taxes?
The answer is they don’t, but they do need a regulatory system and a dossier on everyone to profile your manner of living and, yes, even your thoughts. It’s a thought system and a system of people regulation.
Tax dollars
There is no such thing; see “taxpayer” above. Our so-called “tax dollars” don’t exist as money going to pay government expenses. When we “pay tax dollars,” we are not funding the government or anything else. We are reducing our consumption as part of social planning.
Your fair share
This is a collectivist concept that eventually evokes a guilty conscious. Few have any concept of what this means, but it unconsciously produces a herding instinct.
Democracy
This is a big one and it has sucked in everyone. Democracy is a system of manipulated mob rule by the elite. It is the very opposite of human liberty. Democracy does not mean freedom and freedom does not mean democracy.
Democracy is a front for despotism under the rule of an oligarchy.
Hitler called his Nazi Germany. America is a fascist system with benevolent totalitarianism.
Democrat and Republican
These words show how perfectly the same thing can have two names. Aren’t you glad that you go to the polls and vote? The politicians are laughing at us.
The government spends money
The word “spend” suggests that money is finite or limited. This makes so-called “budgets” myths to occupy the public mind and to create the aura of the legitimacy of governments. The federal government does not “pay” or “spend” money. It creates credit and exchange it for goods and services.
Yes, they get everything for nothing. This is how the politicians “finance” their perpetual wars. Few people would pay real money out of their pockets to kill “terrorists” killing each other in the Middle East. The public reaction against this would be visible and dramatic, if people truly understood how perpetual wars benefit the ruling class.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/propaganda-force/
by Bob Livingston
Propaganda can be words and phrases that collectivize and mold the public mind so that subtle or overt force is made easier or becomes unnecessary.
Carefully chosen words by the establishment are the basis of mass mind control leading to acceptance of force. Until the people accept collectivism under some pretext, they are not docile and completely subdued.
But, Bob, you say, you have written this before. Well, a whole volume could easily be written demonstrating the twisting and distortion of words and phrases along with outright lies to manipulate the public mind. Really, few people escape this psychological warfare.
Words are created and repeated, which expands the collective psyche to accept and repeat some more. People who freely use those terms are not in control of their own thinking process.
Following are some examples of establishment words and phrases used as propaganda:
See your doctor
It is oh, so evident that this phrase channels the crowd toward pharmaceutical control. The doctor is only the medium. Few doctors suspect that “medical orthodoxy” is a rigidly controlled system in the medical schools and practiced by the pharmaceutical companies.
We have long held that so-called modern allopathic medicine is a very esoteric witchcraft — a deceptive practice that has little or nothing to do with curing or healing, but it does have to do with a multitrillion-dollar industry. But don’t just take my word for it.
Read the words of Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, from her book “Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.”
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
This fraud is becoming increasingly visible in the wake of the revelations by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whistleblower William Thompson and the establishment’s reaction to the revelations.
In case you missed it, and it’s likely you did because there is a full-on mainstream media blackout on it and circling of wagons by the establishment, Thompson has revealed that he and other CDC researchers have been falsifying data for years in order to cover up a link between vaccines and autism.
In a recorded call between Thompson and Brian Hooker, Ph.D., Thompson is heard to say:
The CDC has put the [autism] research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research [on the autism-vaccine connection]… CDC is…they’re paralyzed. The whole system is paralyzed right now… I have a boss who’s asking me to lie…if I’m forced to testify, I’m not gonna lie. I basically have stopped lying… Really, what we need is for Congress to come in and say, “Give us the data and we’re gonna have an independent contractor do it,” and bring in the autism advocates [who understand the vaccine-autism connection] and have them intimately involved in the studies.
The attempt to stem the damage has reached the absurd. State Farm insurance recently fired comedian Rob Schneider over his anti-vaccination stance. This is common practice by the establishment to shut down any dissenting views.
But even if they worked and were without risk, vaccines only stimulate temporary immunity. By trading lifelong immunity for temporary vaccine-induced immunity, people become vaccine dependent.
The winners of repeated mandatory vaccinations are the pharmaceutical companies. The losers are the people, who are first put at risk as children for vaccine adverse events and then put at risk as adults for repeated vaccinations that have already failed.
The pharmaceuticals, aided and abetted by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, have discovered a money machine in mass vaccinations. But they need and have to have your body for the pretense.
Healthcare is a right
This is a phrase that seeks to establish that modern medicine is beneficial to the health of the people. It disarms any negative connotation. It greatly helps cover the medical fraud.
There are more than 600,000 injuries and 100,000 deaths annually in the U.S. from adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospitals. These are caused by FDA-approved drugs. ADR is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S.
Life expectancy
This phrase programs the public psyche to expire when we retire. Since people are not cooperating and are now living longer, this concept must be reinforced from time to time, as Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., recently did in The Atlantic.
“By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life,” Emanuel writes in the magazine. “I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations… [It is] a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining.”
Establishment propagandist CBS News medical contributor David Argus, M.D., pontificated before a national audience with, “Ezekiel Emanuel did a remarkable thing: He created discourse. He made everybody start to talk about this.”
Taxpayer
This word is among the greatest deceptions in the English language. The system wants everyone to believe himself a taxpayer or as one who pays his or her “fair share.” Since the government (and banksters) create money (credit), why would they need you to pay taxes?
The answer is they don’t, but they do need a regulatory system and a dossier on everyone to profile your manner of living and, yes, even your thoughts. It’s a thought system and a system of people regulation.
Tax dollars
There is no such thing; see “taxpayer” above. Our so-called “tax dollars” don’t exist as money going to pay government expenses. When we “pay tax dollars,” we are not funding the government or anything else. We are reducing our consumption as part of social planning.
Your fair share
This is a collectivist concept that eventually evokes a guilty conscious. Few have any concept of what this means, but it unconsciously produces a herding instinct.
Democracy
This is a big one and it has sucked in everyone. Democracy is a system of manipulated mob rule by the elite. It is the very opposite of human liberty. Democracy does not mean freedom and freedom does not mean democracy.
Democracy is a front for despotism under the rule of an oligarchy.
Hitler called his Nazi Germany. America is a fascist system with benevolent totalitarianism.
Democrat and Republican
These words show how perfectly the same thing can have two names. Aren’t you glad that you go to the polls and vote? The politicians are laughing at us.
The government spends money
The word “spend” suggests that money is finite or limited. This makes so-called “budgets” myths to occupy the public mind and to create the aura of the legitimacy of governments. The federal government does not “pay” or “spend” money. It creates credit and exchange it for goods and services.
Yes, they get everything for nothing. This is how the politicians “finance” their perpetual wars. Few people would pay real money out of their pockets to kill “terrorists” killing each other in the Middle East. The public reaction against this would be visible and dramatic, if people truly understood how perpetual wars benefit the ruling class.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/propaganda-force/
FUBAR!!!
U.S. Bombs 41 $250,000 Humvees Captured by ISIS
Written by Warren Mass
During the past six weeks U.S. combat jets have bombed and eliminated 41 Humvees originally given to the Iraqi military, but afterwards captured by ISIS forces. CNNMoney cited a statement from Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, that the bombs that U.S. jets are dropping on the Humvees cost $30,000 each, while the armored vehicles themselves originally cost about $250,000 each, depending how each was equipped.
“In some cases, we have seen instances of ISIL capturing and employing U.S.-made equipment,” a U.S. Defense Department spokesperson told CNN. “When we’ve seen these terrorists employing this equipment, we’ve sought to eliminate that threat.”
Harrison noted that once the United Stats destroys the equipment that it originally supplied to the Iraqi military, it will likely have to replace the armored vehicles. “If we want them [the Iraqi military] to be able to secure their own borders in the long run, we’re going to have to re-equip them,” said Harrison. “So we’ll be buying another Humvee and sending it back to the Iraqi military.”
CNNMoney noted some of the other expenses resulting from our ongoing military operations in Iraq and Syria. The initial assault in Syria used 47 Tomahawk missiles, which cost about $1.5 million each. Among the U.S. aircraft used in the strikes was the F-22 Raptor, which costs about $62,000 an hour to operate.
The House of Representatives voted 273 to 156 on September 17 to provide the U.S. military with the authority to train and arm “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State or ISIS. The following day, the Senate voted 78-22 in favor of the continuing resolution funding the government, including the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account used to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although “ISIS” (or the government’s preferred abbreviations, “ISIL”) do not appear in the text, funding for the war on ISIS is listed as funding for “Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terrorism.”
CQ Roll Call, the Washington-based newspaper that focuses on political news on Capitol Hill, noted that the CR provides funding for OCO in the amount of $85 billion.
Gordon Adams, who was in charge of national security budgets at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, told CQ Roll Call he thinks the total cost of the Obama administration’s war on ISIS could hit $1.5 billion a month — about the size of NASA’s budget.
Adams estimated that the cost of air strikes in Iraq and Syria could cost $10 billion over the next year, assuming this war lasts that long. Other costs, including training, supporting, and equipping “Iraqi forces and Syrian rebels,” could total another $6 billion to $8 billion a year.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told CQ Roll Call that a vote for the Title 10 authority to equip and train the Syrian rebels would be a vote for war.
“People know what they’re voting on here. I do,” he said September 11. “If I want to make the argument, ‘Oh, it was stuck in the back of the bill, and I never got to that page.’ Try to explain that back home. Folks will remember how you voted on that issue.”
Among the strongest statement made in the Senate against funding the “moderate” Syrian rebels was one made by Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va):
I have seen no evidence that the Syrian rebels we plan to train and arm will remain committed to American goals or interests. The vast majority of national-level Syrian rebel groups are Islamists, none of whom are interested in allying with the United States, and none of whom we should be associating with. Further, the opposition fighters that we will train care more about overthrowing [Bashar] Assad than they do about defeating ISIS. Assad is evil, but he is not a threat to America. If the "moderate opposition" have to choose between defeating Assad and defeating ISIS, why do we believe they’ll choose our priority over theirs? How do we know that they won’t join forces with ISIS if it helps them overthrow Assad?
If the “moderate opposition” decides to jump ship and join forces with ISIS, as Manchin fears, taking equipment paid for by the U.S. taxpayers with them, we can always spend more money to destroy the equipment we already paid for, as we are doing with the Humvees.
As we write, the U.S. National Debt clock shows a figure of $17.757 trillion.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/19215-u-s-bombs-41-250-000-humvees-captured-by-isis
Written by Warren Mass
During the past six weeks U.S. combat jets have bombed and eliminated 41 Humvees originally given to the Iraqi military, but afterwards captured by ISIS forces. CNNMoney cited a statement from Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, that the bombs that U.S. jets are dropping on the Humvees cost $30,000 each, while the armored vehicles themselves originally cost about $250,000 each, depending how each was equipped.
“In some cases, we have seen instances of ISIL capturing and employing U.S.-made equipment,” a U.S. Defense Department spokesperson told CNN. “When we’ve seen these terrorists employing this equipment, we’ve sought to eliminate that threat.”
Harrison noted that once the United Stats destroys the equipment that it originally supplied to the Iraqi military, it will likely have to replace the armored vehicles. “If we want them [the Iraqi military] to be able to secure their own borders in the long run, we’re going to have to re-equip them,” said Harrison. “So we’ll be buying another Humvee and sending it back to the Iraqi military.”
CNNMoney noted some of the other expenses resulting from our ongoing military operations in Iraq and Syria. The initial assault in Syria used 47 Tomahawk missiles, which cost about $1.5 million each. Among the U.S. aircraft used in the strikes was the F-22 Raptor, which costs about $62,000 an hour to operate.
The House of Representatives voted 273 to 156 on September 17 to provide the U.S. military with the authority to train and arm “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State or ISIS. The following day, the Senate voted 78-22 in favor of the continuing resolution funding the government, including the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account used to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although “ISIS” (or the government’s preferred abbreviations, “ISIL”) do not appear in the text, funding for the war on ISIS is listed as funding for “Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terrorism.”
CQ Roll Call, the Washington-based newspaper that focuses on political news on Capitol Hill, noted that the CR provides funding for OCO in the amount of $85 billion.
Gordon Adams, who was in charge of national security budgets at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, told CQ Roll Call he thinks the total cost of the Obama administration’s war on ISIS could hit $1.5 billion a month — about the size of NASA’s budget.
Adams estimated that the cost of air strikes in Iraq and Syria could cost $10 billion over the next year, assuming this war lasts that long. Other costs, including training, supporting, and equipping “Iraqi forces and Syrian rebels,” could total another $6 billion to $8 billion a year.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told CQ Roll Call that a vote for the Title 10 authority to equip and train the Syrian rebels would be a vote for war.
“People know what they’re voting on here. I do,” he said September 11. “If I want to make the argument, ‘Oh, it was stuck in the back of the bill, and I never got to that page.’ Try to explain that back home. Folks will remember how you voted on that issue.”
Among the strongest statement made in the Senate against funding the “moderate” Syrian rebels was one made by Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va):
I have seen no evidence that the Syrian rebels we plan to train and arm will remain committed to American goals or interests. The vast majority of national-level Syrian rebel groups are Islamists, none of whom are interested in allying with the United States, and none of whom we should be associating with. Further, the opposition fighters that we will train care more about overthrowing [Bashar] Assad than they do about defeating ISIS. Assad is evil, but he is not a threat to America. If the "moderate opposition" have to choose between defeating Assad and defeating ISIS, why do we believe they’ll choose our priority over theirs? How do we know that they won’t join forces with ISIS if it helps them overthrow Assad?
If the “moderate opposition” decides to jump ship and join forces with ISIS, as Manchin fears, taking equipment paid for by the U.S. taxpayers with them, we can always spend more money to destroy the equipment we already paid for, as we are doing with the Humvees.
As we write, the U.S. National Debt clock shows a figure of $17.757 trillion.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/19215-u-s-bombs-41-250-000-humvees-captured-by-isis
How to avoid getting sick...
Bullet Proof Immune System - How to not get a cold ever
by: Michael Edwards
You don't have to catch the next flu. With the right combination of supplements, in most cases, you can knock out, or radically lesson the severity of an infection. If an illness is caught early enough, even people who eat a lousy diet can treat it with the right supplements before they feel really sick.
Infection remedies include virus, bacteria, fungus, and most of the parasites that make us sick. Believe it or not, candida (a type of fungus) can give us the same symptoms as a bacterial or viral infection, and many times people have multiple infections at once causing flu like symptoms. The only way to properly prepare your immune system to be as strong as possible is to have a diet and supplement regimen to address not just viruses, but all the other infectious organisms as well. The good news is that there are many different herbs and foods that none of these invaders and pathogens like.
The Foundation - Foods, Herbs and Diet for the Immune System
Infection wants an easy host. An easy host does not eat a healthy diet filled with lots of raw, fresh, organic produce, full of enzymes and vitamins. To be healthy, eat a salad every day with raw garlic. Don't eat processed foods, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, or GMO foods. Don't eat any food with artificial colors, flavorings, or preservatives or MSG.
Take a really good whole food multivitamin with lots of easily assimilated vitamin C.
Drink plenty of fluids. Stevia sweetened cranberry lemonade with cayenne will help detoxify and flush the system, while making the body extremely inhospitable to infection (cayenne, cranberry, and lemonade are all very good at fighting off sickness).
If there is any sign of a cold or infection coming on, don't use cough drops, or nasal spray, or any over the counter medications. Stay away from anything sweet, even fruit (besides stevia, green apples, berries, and watermelon).
That's the foundation. With good sleep habits and a nearly perfect diet, there's no getting sick.
Bulletproof your immune system with the most powerful herbs
A Good echinacea, the pure, clean, and potent kind that makes your tongue feel as fuzzy as a shag carpet, will knock out a viral infection all by itself in most cases. When you combine echinacea with vitamin C, flu and colds don't stand a chance. Echinacea strengthens the entire immune system, but don't take it for more than a week at a time, as it loses its effectiveness if you take it for more than 7 days straight. Wait at least 5 days before taking it again.
Goldenseal is antiviral and anti-parasitic. It's also a powerful blood cleanser. It can be a little hard on the liver. Black radish can help offset that by keeping the gallbladder healthy and maintaining proper bile flow, and it's also antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-parasitic. Coptis chinensis, also known as goldenthread, is a very powerful aid to detoxification. It helps keep the lymph glands clean and running smoothly, and it's antibacterial, antiviral, anti-parasitic, and antifungal.
For those who don't take care of themselves, getting sick is a very good way to detoxify. For someone who doesn't eat as well as they should, and/or doesn't get enough sleep, getting sick is a way of taking out the garbage. Parasites, viruses, bacteria, and candida need weak cells to feed off of and to make a home. A poor diet, lack of sleep, and habits like drinking or smoking cause malfunctioning cells to develop. To use the methods that prevent infection, and to do so repeatedly, without taking care of oneself, can lead to serious illness such as cancer, or autoimmune disease.
Disease suppression is dangerous in the long run, even with all natural, perfectly safe remedies. With that in mind, if you need to make it through a stressful situation when the weather is changing and you know you won't get enough sleep for a while, and the food situation won't be ideal for periods (this certainly happens to me with business from time to time) without getting sick under any circumstances, then this protocol is what you need. On the other hand, these practices can also be used while detoxifying to strengthen the detox and to lesson the side effects and reduce the likelihood of a weakened immune system and getting sick. For more on foods and supplements covered, check out the sources. For more on the immune system, and recipes for formulas to strengthen it, check out Make Your Immune System Bulletproof with These Natural Remedies.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/047068_immune_system_natural_medicine_cold_prevention.html#ixzz3Epfle2uz
by: Michael Edwards
You don't have to catch the next flu. With the right combination of supplements, in most cases, you can knock out, or radically lesson the severity of an infection. If an illness is caught early enough, even people who eat a lousy diet can treat it with the right supplements before they feel really sick.
Infection remedies include virus, bacteria, fungus, and most of the parasites that make us sick. Believe it or not, candida (a type of fungus) can give us the same symptoms as a bacterial or viral infection, and many times people have multiple infections at once causing flu like symptoms. The only way to properly prepare your immune system to be as strong as possible is to have a diet and supplement regimen to address not just viruses, but all the other infectious organisms as well. The good news is that there are many different herbs and foods that none of these invaders and pathogens like.
The Foundation - Foods, Herbs and Diet for the Immune System
Infection wants an easy host. An easy host does not eat a healthy diet filled with lots of raw, fresh, organic produce, full of enzymes and vitamins. To be healthy, eat a salad every day with raw garlic. Don't eat processed foods, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, or GMO foods. Don't eat any food with artificial colors, flavorings, or preservatives or MSG.
Take a really good whole food multivitamin with lots of easily assimilated vitamin C.
Drink plenty of fluids. Stevia sweetened cranberry lemonade with cayenne will help detoxify and flush the system, while making the body extremely inhospitable to infection (cayenne, cranberry, and lemonade are all very good at fighting off sickness).
If there is any sign of a cold or infection coming on, don't use cough drops, or nasal spray, or any over the counter medications. Stay away from anything sweet, even fruit (besides stevia, green apples, berries, and watermelon).
That's the foundation. With good sleep habits and a nearly perfect diet, there's no getting sick.
Bulletproof your immune system with the most powerful herbs
A Good echinacea, the pure, clean, and potent kind that makes your tongue feel as fuzzy as a shag carpet, will knock out a viral infection all by itself in most cases. When you combine echinacea with vitamin C, flu and colds don't stand a chance. Echinacea strengthens the entire immune system, but don't take it for more than a week at a time, as it loses its effectiveness if you take it for more than 7 days straight. Wait at least 5 days before taking it again.
Goldenseal is antiviral and anti-parasitic. It's also a powerful blood cleanser. It can be a little hard on the liver. Black radish can help offset that by keeping the gallbladder healthy and maintaining proper bile flow, and it's also antibacterial, antiviral, and anti-parasitic. Coptis chinensis, also known as goldenthread, is a very powerful aid to detoxification. It helps keep the lymph glands clean and running smoothly, and it's antibacterial, antiviral, anti-parasitic, and antifungal.
For those who don't take care of themselves, getting sick is a very good way to detoxify. For someone who doesn't eat as well as they should, and/or doesn't get enough sleep, getting sick is a way of taking out the garbage. Parasites, viruses, bacteria, and candida need weak cells to feed off of and to make a home. A poor diet, lack of sleep, and habits like drinking or smoking cause malfunctioning cells to develop. To use the methods that prevent infection, and to do so repeatedly, without taking care of oneself, can lead to serious illness such as cancer, or autoimmune disease.
Disease suppression is dangerous in the long run, even with all natural, perfectly safe remedies. With that in mind, if you need to make it through a stressful situation when the weather is changing and you know you won't get enough sleep for a while, and the food situation won't be ideal for periods (this certainly happens to me with business from time to time) without getting sick under any circumstances, then this protocol is what you need. On the other hand, these practices can also be used while detoxifying to strengthen the detox and to lesson the side effects and reduce the likelihood of a weakened immune system and getting sick. For more on foods and supplements covered, check out the sources. For more on the immune system, and recipes for formulas to strengthen it, check out Make Your Immune System Bulletproof with These Natural Remedies.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/047068_immune_system_natural_medicine_cold_prevention.html#ixzz3Epfle2uz
That's a lot of money...
The U.S. Government Is Borrowing About 8 Trillion Dollars A Year
By Michael Snyder
I know that headline sounds completely outrageous. But it is actually true. The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this. When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months. And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014. But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year. When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off. This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts. In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued. The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.
So why does so much government debt come due each year?
Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames. For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year. So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep "rolling it over" again and again and again.
This strategy has indeed saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments, but it has also created a situation where the federal government must borrow about 8 trillion dollars a year just to keep up with the game.
So what happens when the rest of the world decides that it does not want to loan us 8 trillion dollars a year at ultra-low interest rates?
Well, the game will be over and we will be in a massive amount of trouble.
I am about to share with you some numbers that were originally reported by CNS News. As you can see, far more debt is being redeemed and issued today than back during the middle part of the last decade...
Read the rest:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-u-s-government-is-borrowing-about-8-trillion-dollars-a-year
By Michael Snyder
I know that headline sounds completely outrageous. But it is actually true. The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this. When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months. And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014. But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year. When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off. This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts. In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued. The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.
So why does so much government debt come due each year?
Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames. For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year. So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep "rolling it over" again and again and again.
This strategy has indeed saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments, but it has also created a situation where the federal government must borrow about 8 trillion dollars a year just to keep up with the game.
So what happens when the rest of the world decides that it does not want to loan us 8 trillion dollars a year at ultra-low interest rates?
Well, the game will be over and we will be in a massive amount of trouble.
I am about to share with you some numbers that were originally reported by CNS News. As you can see, far more debt is being redeemed and issued today than back during the middle part of the last decade...
Read the rest:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-u-s-government-is-borrowing-about-8-trillion-dollars-a-year
Deja Vu all over again...
Guards at Concentration Camps Were Just Doing Their Jobs
By Laurence M. Vance
The lamest, most ignorant, and most intellectually lazy excuse given to justify the actions of U.S. soldiers (and sailors, airmen, and Marines) is that they are just doing their job.
Of all the things I have been told over the years by apologists for the military, that soldiers are just doing their jobs is overwhelmingly the thing I am told the majority of the time.
Even as U.S. troops return to Iraq, some critics of further military action will still say that we need to support the troops because they are just following orders, they didn’t ask to go back to Iraq, they didn’t write their job description, they joined the military because they were patriotic, they are just serving their country, they had no choice but to join the military because they were unemployed, and, of course, they are just doing their jobs.
Because I am weary of repeating myself over and over and over again, instead of referring people to my LRC articles on soldiers being responsible for their actions, writing a lengthy e-mail trying to explain the culpability of soldiers, or referring people to my books War, Christianity, and the State and War, Empire, and the Military, from now on I intend to just give a simple nine-word reply.
Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
The horrendous treatment accorded to inmates by the guards at concentration camps before, during, and after World War II is well known.
Anyone who today tried to defend those who “worked” (that is, killed, starved, beat, gassed, and worked inmates to death) as a guard at concentration camps by saying that they were just doing their jobs would be dismissed at once as a madman.
And that is precisely why my reply to supporters, apologists, and defenders of the military will simply be that guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
So, in what follows I will not only state the evils that soldiers do when they do their “jobs,” but also my response to those who excuse their actions because, after all, soldiers are just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they bomb, maim, and kill for the state. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they “accidentally” kill civilians. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they function as the president’s personal attack force. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they help to carry out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling U.S. foreign policy. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they invade another county. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they enforce UN resolutions. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they fight senseless foreign wars. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they make war without a constitutional declaration of war. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they occupy some foreign country. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they undertake “regime change.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they kill “terrorists” remotely via drone. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they help establish democracy at the point of a gun. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they work as recruiters and lie to impressionable young men. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they make widows and orphans. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they practice gunboat diplomacy. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they undertake “nation building.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they carry out assassinations. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they torture “terrorists” to get information. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they serve as policemen, firemen, security guards, social workers, guardians, babysitters, and overseers of the world. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they do everything but actually defend the United States. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
But it is not just the actions of soldiers that many Americans attempt to justify with lame, ignorant, and intellectually lazy excuses. They make apologies for cops as well.
So, again, in what follows I will not only state the evils that cops do when they do their “jobs,” but also my response to those who excuse their actions because, after all, cops are just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they issue tickets for not wearing a seat belt. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they perform “no-knock” raids. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they hide at the bottom of a hill to give unsuspecting drivers a speeding ticket. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arrest people for victimless crimes. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they forcibly extract DNA, urine, and blood from “suspects.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arrest people for possessing a plant the government doesn’t approve of. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they go online and pretend to be a hooker trying to prostitute her 12-year-old daughter. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they perform strip-searches. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arm themselves to the hilt with surplus military weapons. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they employ tactics designed for the battlefield and war zones. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they shoot people who try to defend themselves from police brutality. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they crack down on dissent using paramilitary tactics. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they seize property and cash from people who have not been charged or convicted of a crime. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they kick down your door in the middle of the night because they were told you had drugs in the house. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they have to meet their monthly ticket quotas. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they go undercover and lie in order to entice people to commit crimes. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they enter homes without search warrants. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they “stop and frisk” people without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Perhaps it is time for soldiers and cops who are Christians, libertarians, have moral scruples, want a clean conscience, have respect for individual liberty and private property, or want a free society to get another job. After all, you can’t have a war without soldiers, and you can’t have a police state without police.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/laurence-m-vance/just-doing-their-government-jobs/
By Laurence M. Vance
The lamest, most ignorant, and most intellectually lazy excuse given to justify the actions of U.S. soldiers (and sailors, airmen, and Marines) is that they are just doing their job.
Of all the things I have been told over the years by apologists for the military, that soldiers are just doing their jobs is overwhelmingly the thing I am told the majority of the time.
Even as U.S. troops return to Iraq, some critics of further military action will still say that we need to support the troops because they are just following orders, they didn’t ask to go back to Iraq, they didn’t write their job description, they joined the military because they were patriotic, they are just serving their country, they had no choice but to join the military because they were unemployed, and, of course, they are just doing their jobs.
Because I am weary of repeating myself over and over and over again, instead of referring people to my LRC articles on soldiers being responsible for their actions, writing a lengthy e-mail trying to explain the culpability of soldiers, or referring people to my books War, Christianity, and the State and War, Empire, and the Military, from now on I intend to just give a simple nine-word reply.
Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
The horrendous treatment accorded to inmates by the guards at concentration camps before, during, and after World War II is well known.
Anyone who today tried to defend those who “worked” (that is, killed, starved, beat, gassed, and worked inmates to death) as a guard at concentration camps by saying that they were just doing their jobs would be dismissed at once as a madman.
And that is precisely why my reply to supporters, apologists, and defenders of the military will simply be that guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
So, in what follows I will not only state the evils that soldiers do when they do their “jobs,” but also my response to those who excuse their actions because, after all, soldiers are just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they bomb, maim, and kill for the state. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they “accidentally” kill civilians. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they function as the president’s personal attack force. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they help to carry out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling U.S. foreign policy. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they invade another county. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they enforce UN resolutions. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they fight senseless foreign wars. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they make war without a constitutional declaration of war. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they occupy some foreign country. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they undertake “regime change.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they kill “terrorists” remotely via drone. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they help establish democracy at the point of a gun. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they work as recruiters and lie to impressionable young men. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they make widows and orphans. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they practice gunboat diplomacy. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they undertake “nation building.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they carry out assassinations. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they torture “terrorists” to get information. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they serve as policemen, firemen, security guards, social workers, guardians, babysitters, and overseers of the world. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Soldiers are just doing their jobs when they do everything but actually defend the United States. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
But it is not just the actions of soldiers that many Americans attempt to justify with lame, ignorant, and intellectually lazy excuses. They make apologies for cops as well.
So, again, in what follows I will not only state the evils that cops do when they do their “jobs,” but also my response to those who excuse their actions because, after all, cops are just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they issue tickets for not wearing a seat belt. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they perform “no-knock” raids. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they hide at the bottom of a hill to give unsuspecting drivers a speeding ticket. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arrest people for victimless crimes. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they forcibly extract DNA, urine, and blood from “suspects.” Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arrest people for possessing a plant the government doesn’t approve of. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they go online and pretend to be a hooker trying to prostitute her 12-year-old daughter. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they perform strip-searches. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they arm themselves to the hilt with surplus military weapons. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they employ tactics designed for the battlefield and war zones. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they shoot people who try to defend themselves from police brutality. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they crack down on dissent using paramilitary tactics. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they seize property and cash from people who have not been charged or convicted of a crime. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they kick down your door in the middle of the night because they were told you had drugs in the house. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they have to meet their monthly ticket quotas. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they go undercover and lie in order to entice people to commit crimes. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they enter homes without search warrants. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Cops are just doing their jobs when they “stop and frisk” people without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Guards at concentration camps were just doing their jobs.
Perhaps it is time for soldiers and cops who are Christians, libertarians, have moral scruples, want a clean conscience, have respect for individual liberty and private property, or want a free society to get another job. After all, you can’t have a war without soldiers, and you can’t have a police state without police.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/laurence-m-vance/just-doing-their-government-jobs/
Wealthy getting ready to bug out???
When These People Go Into Hiding, It Is Time to Pay Attention
by Dave Hodges
Something big is about to happen. How do I know? I know because people I have known for years have pointed to the last quarter of 2014 as the beginning of the end for many of our institutions and perhaps our very way of life. Some of my very best contacts have told me that it is time to stop warning the people, because it is now time to start hiding from the wrong people. My initial reaction is to not believe them, but there are too many well-placed sources to not take seriously.
Along these lines, I recently received an email contact from Pastor Lindsay Williams regarding a survival tip for the difficult times ahead. Pastor Williams has been a guest on my show several times. I sent him back an email asking when he would like to come back on my show. He responded that he has stopped doing interviews. This is becoming an all-too familiar theme as this past weekend, one of my best insider sources told me he was going to stop disseminating information because what he had to say would have no impact on the coming events. As he stated “The train has its final destination and there is no stopping it. America had its chance to mobilize and try and stop the coming tyranny, but they could not get off the couch and stop watching the damn NFL. Well, the new NFL term stands for “Not For Long” and that is how much time this country has left. Americans have been wallowing in their own apathy and ignorance for decades. Soon, they will be wallowing in their own blood”. This is from a General who fought in two wars.
In a December 9, 2012 interview on The Common Sense Show, Jim Marrs discussed how approximately 400-500 top level bankers have left their positions and have gone into seclusion. Marrs reminded my listening audience of how the elite have developed seed vaults which only they have access to. Marrs was clearly alluding to the fact that some very bad events are coming and the global elite are aware of it and are moving to meet the threat. My insider sources inform me that the same thing is happening in various federal organizations who have recently retired from the CIA, DHS, NSA and FEMA. This fact is indisputable. I have firsthand knowledge of four ex-fed officials and their families who have relocated to safety enclaves when doing so was very disruptive to their respective family’s lives. Increasingly, it is looking like some major event(s) is/are coming and persons with insider information are attempting to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Getting Out of Harms Way: Massive Retirements From
the Alphabet Soup Agencies
When government officials, from the various alphabet soup agencies, retire en masse, it is not necessarily a noteworthy event. However, when the same officials retire en masse and then relocate to form their own survivalist enclaves, then this is something that we should all sit up and take notice of, especially when we are seeing the same behavior on the part of Wall Street executives.
In my dealings with purported alphabet soup agency informants, I have been receiving some very dire warnings in terms of what lies ahead for America. At the time I began to receive information, two years ago, about the dangerous times that we are living in, Doug Hagmann also went public with conversations he had with DHS’ “Rosebud” telling us much the same thing.
I have had conversations with two insiders and a relative of another insider who tell similar stories of a coming series of apocalyptic events. Much of the Hagmann information, to a large extent, corresponds to the information I have received.
DHS and CIA Relocations
It is a matter of official agency policy that some current DHS and CIA officials and their families will be provided safe sanctuary in various strategic locations in Colorado in times of trouble. Most people in the know are aware of the underground facilities which lie below the Denver International Airport which has an underground connected railway to the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD/Fort Carson/Peterson Air Force Base underground facilities. The structures are part of the Continuity of Government program developed by the United States government in the early days of the Cold War. However these facilities are increasingly becoming the planned refuge for many of the global elite residing within the United States when all hell breaks loose...
Read the rest:
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/29/when-these-people-go-into-hiding-it-is-time-to-pay-attention/
by Dave Hodges
Something big is about to happen. How do I know? I know because people I have known for years have pointed to the last quarter of 2014 as the beginning of the end for many of our institutions and perhaps our very way of life. Some of my very best contacts have told me that it is time to stop warning the people, because it is now time to start hiding from the wrong people. My initial reaction is to not believe them, but there are too many well-placed sources to not take seriously.
Along these lines, I recently received an email contact from Pastor Lindsay Williams regarding a survival tip for the difficult times ahead. Pastor Williams has been a guest on my show several times. I sent him back an email asking when he would like to come back on my show. He responded that he has stopped doing interviews. This is becoming an all-too familiar theme as this past weekend, one of my best insider sources told me he was going to stop disseminating information because what he had to say would have no impact on the coming events. As he stated “The train has its final destination and there is no stopping it. America had its chance to mobilize and try and stop the coming tyranny, but they could not get off the couch and stop watching the damn NFL. Well, the new NFL term stands for “Not For Long” and that is how much time this country has left. Americans have been wallowing in their own apathy and ignorance for decades. Soon, they will be wallowing in their own blood”. This is from a General who fought in two wars.
In a December 9, 2012 interview on The Common Sense Show, Jim Marrs discussed how approximately 400-500 top level bankers have left their positions and have gone into seclusion. Marrs reminded my listening audience of how the elite have developed seed vaults which only they have access to. Marrs was clearly alluding to the fact that some very bad events are coming and the global elite are aware of it and are moving to meet the threat. My insider sources inform me that the same thing is happening in various federal organizations who have recently retired from the CIA, DHS, NSA and FEMA. This fact is indisputable. I have firsthand knowledge of four ex-fed officials and their families who have relocated to safety enclaves when doing so was very disruptive to their respective family’s lives. Increasingly, it is looking like some major event(s) is/are coming and persons with insider information are attempting to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Getting Out of Harms Way: Massive Retirements From
the Alphabet Soup Agencies
When government officials, from the various alphabet soup agencies, retire en masse, it is not necessarily a noteworthy event. However, when the same officials retire en masse and then relocate to form their own survivalist enclaves, then this is something that we should all sit up and take notice of, especially when we are seeing the same behavior on the part of Wall Street executives.
In my dealings with purported alphabet soup agency informants, I have been receiving some very dire warnings in terms of what lies ahead for America. At the time I began to receive information, two years ago, about the dangerous times that we are living in, Doug Hagmann also went public with conversations he had with DHS’ “Rosebud” telling us much the same thing.
I have had conversations with two insiders and a relative of another insider who tell similar stories of a coming series of apocalyptic events. Much of the Hagmann information, to a large extent, corresponds to the information I have received.
DHS and CIA Relocations
It is a matter of official agency policy that some current DHS and CIA officials and their families will be provided safe sanctuary in various strategic locations in Colorado in times of trouble. Most people in the know are aware of the underground facilities which lie below the Denver International Airport which has an underground connected railway to the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD/Fort Carson/Peterson Air Force Base underground facilities. The structures are part of the Continuity of Government program developed by the United States government in the early days of the Cold War. However these facilities are increasingly becoming the planned refuge for many of the global elite residing within the United States when all hell breaks loose...
Read the rest:
http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2014/09/29/when-these-people-go-into-hiding-it-is-time-to-pay-attention/
Parents are smartening up...
Huge Plunge in Kindergartener’s Vaccination Rates: Officials Stumped
By Christina Sarich
The number of parents deciding not to vaccinate their children is growing at an alarming rate – at least according to officials who are now nonplussed at the waking of humanity.
Considering the quite ‘heavy’ vaccination schedules proposed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), parents should be refusing vaccinations. Since the 1950′s, the number of vaccines children under 6 are expected to obtain has grown by 414%. Apparently, at least Californian parents have had enough and are refusing to immunize their kindergarten-aged children.
Public health experts are saying that these refusals to have their children vaccinated (at a rate of half as often than just 7 years ago) is contributing to the re-emergence of measles across the state, and may lead to serious outbreaks of ‘other diseases.’ But this is nothing more than scare-mongering and the typical line of vaccination-pushers.
Actually, there are numerous studies which show that un-vaccinated children are far healthier than their vaccinated peers. Findings uncovered during one study looking at New Zealand’s children found that:
“. . . 92 percent of the children requiring a tonsillectomy operation had received the measles vaccination, indicating that the vaccination for measles may have made some of the children more susceptible to tonsillitis.”
The percentage of kindergartens in which at least 8% of students are not fully vaccinated because of personal beliefs has more than doubled as well, according to data on file with the state.
Health officials are not pleased with this trend since they believe in herd immunity, and since according to ‘experts,’ measles and whooping cough need at least 92% of kids immunized. The CDC is a big pusher of herd immunity, but as a direct result of vaccinations, mucosal immunity in children is very weak. This leads to more than one million children having to have tubes put in their ears every year due to Otitis Media or “glue ear.” It is a buildup of water in the ear, which requires this invasive medical procedure.
Despite herd immunity propaganda, there is no system of the human being, from mind to muscles to immune system, which gets stronger through avoiding challenges, but only through overcoming challenges.
Furthermore, it is a lie that disease will spread without vaccinations at a 95% rate. In truth, most states fail to meet the CDC’s goals of extending basic immunizations to 80% (not 95%) of children. Rates ran as low as 65% in Colorado in years past, and as low as 75% in Florida. This did not cause a sudden epidemic of measles, or flu, or whooping cough. Some experts suggest that herd immunity is a myth created by those who might profit from it,. It looks like many Californian parents agree, or at least are wary of vaccines in general.
“Five days a week, [children are] in their small classroom,” said Shannon Stokley, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s the perfect conditions for spreading germs and spreading infections.”
What Stokley seems to disregard are the numerous other factors which can contribute to outbreaks.
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Centre, a consumer’s group based in Virginia, argues that vaccines are responsible for the increasing numbers of children and adults who suffer from immune system and neurologic disorders, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and seizure disorders. She believes more studies to monitor the long-term effects of mass vaccination should be conducted. She wants physicians to be absolutely sure these vaccines are safe and not harming people...
Read the rest:
http://naturalsociety.com/huge-plunge-kindergarteners-vaccination-rates-officials-stumped/
By Christina Sarich
The number of parents deciding not to vaccinate their children is growing at an alarming rate – at least according to officials who are now nonplussed at the waking of humanity.
Considering the quite ‘heavy’ vaccination schedules proposed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), parents should be refusing vaccinations. Since the 1950′s, the number of vaccines children under 6 are expected to obtain has grown by 414%. Apparently, at least Californian parents have had enough and are refusing to immunize their kindergarten-aged children.
Public health experts are saying that these refusals to have their children vaccinated (at a rate of half as often than just 7 years ago) is contributing to the re-emergence of measles across the state, and may lead to serious outbreaks of ‘other diseases.’ But this is nothing more than scare-mongering and the typical line of vaccination-pushers.
Actually, there are numerous studies which show that un-vaccinated children are far healthier than their vaccinated peers. Findings uncovered during one study looking at New Zealand’s children found that:
“. . . 92 percent of the children requiring a tonsillectomy operation had received the measles vaccination, indicating that the vaccination for measles may have made some of the children more susceptible to tonsillitis.”
The percentage of kindergartens in which at least 8% of students are not fully vaccinated because of personal beliefs has more than doubled as well, according to data on file with the state.
Health officials are not pleased with this trend since they believe in herd immunity, and since according to ‘experts,’ measles and whooping cough need at least 92% of kids immunized. The CDC is a big pusher of herd immunity, but as a direct result of vaccinations, mucosal immunity in children is very weak. This leads to more than one million children having to have tubes put in their ears every year due to Otitis Media or “glue ear.” It is a buildup of water in the ear, which requires this invasive medical procedure.
Despite herd immunity propaganda, there is no system of the human being, from mind to muscles to immune system, which gets stronger through avoiding challenges, but only through overcoming challenges.
Furthermore, it is a lie that disease will spread without vaccinations at a 95% rate. In truth, most states fail to meet the CDC’s goals of extending basic immunizations to 80% (not 95%) of children. Rates ran as low as 65% in Colorado in years past, and as low as 75% in Florida. This did not cause a sudden epidemic of measles, or flu, or whooping cough. Some experts suggest that herd immunity is a myth created by those who might profit from it,. It looks like many Californian parents agree, or at least are wary of vaccines in general.
“Five days a week, [children are] in their small classroom,” said Shannon Stokley, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s the perfect conditions for spreading germs and spreading infections.”
What Stokley seems to disregard are the numerous other factors which can contribute to outbreaks.
Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Centre, a consumer’s group based in Virginia, argues that vaccines are responsible for the increasing numbers of children and adults who suffer from immune system and neurologic disorders, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and seizure disorders. She believes more studies to monitor the long-term effects of mass vaccination should be conducted. She wants physicians to be absolutely sure these vaccines are safe and not harming people...
Read the rest:
http://naturalsociety.com/huge-plunge-kindergarteners-vaccination-rates-officials-stumped/
Monday, September 29, 2014
OOPS!!! No global warming in Portland, Maine...
Where’s the Warming in Portland, Maine?
Michael S. Rozeff
I’m 73 years old, and I don’t think that it’s any warmer today than when I was a kid. In fact, I remember some summers much hotter than nowadays, but that’s mere anecdote and subject to all the vagaries of memory. Being a skeptic concerning global warming as well as man-made global warming, I decided to do some simple research.
Being from New England and still having family there, I decided to check the temperatures on a given day in July for as far back as I could find an official record. Portland, Maine has an official weather station. I chose July 26 for a date. I was able to obtain the official high and low temperatures for that date for the years 1961 to 2014; 2008 and 2009 were unavailable, so I’ve recorded the monthly average high and low temperatures for those two years. This makes no difference at all in what I found.
Here are the data for year, high, and low temperatures on July 26 in Portland, Maine.
July 26
1961 86 64
1962 71 57
1963 99 65
1964 75 58
1965 84 55
1966 82 62
1967 82 60
1968 83 57
1969 64 59
1970 86 64
1971 76 61
1972 80 58
1973 80 64
1974 70 53
1975 77 52
1976 75 45
1977 71 48
1978 75 55
1979 81 67
1980 85 61
1981 75 61
1982 88 66
1983 82 57
1984 78 51
1985 74 63
1986 88 65
1987 86 64
1988 74 62
1989 95 69
1990 83 64
1991 72 61
1992 78 52
1993 73 57
1994 82 63
1995 83 68
1996 80 55
1997 89 53
1998 78 53
1999 75 63
2000 73 55
2001 72 53
2002 69 49
2003 86 60
2004 74 58
2005 87 64
2006 82 67
2007 85 65
2008 80 61 (Month average)
2009 74 58 (Month average)
2010 82 57
2011 74 62
2012 73 61
2013 72 62
2014 80 57
I challenge anyone to find any evidence whatsoever in these data that there has been a warming trend over these years.
To supplement these data, we can use some averages supplied by the U.S. weather service. They say that the years 1971-2000 (30 years) had a July average monthly high of 78.8, and they say that the 70-years 1941-2010 averaged 79.0 The average lows were 58.6 and 58.2, respectively. Mathematically, it has to be the case that the combined years 1941-1970 and 2001-2010 averaged almost exactly the same as the years 1971-2000. This again provides no evidence of global warming in Portland, Maine during the period 1941-2010.
There are other ways to look at these data. We can look for runs of hot and cold years by ranking warmest to coldest (for July). The weather service does this for 1941-2010.
The 10 hottest maxima from hotter to cooler are
1952 (84.7 degrees); 1955; 1949; 1994; 2010; 1948; 1999; 2006; 1959; 1968 (81.0 degrees)
These average 1974.
The 10 coolest maxima are as follows from warmer to cooler:
1956 (76.2 degrees); 1961; 1969; 1962; 1967; 1986; 1992; 1996; 2004; 2009 (74 degrees)
These average 1980.
Hence, if we look at extremes of the extremes, the hotter July months occurred earlier in time, since they average 1974, and the cooler ones occurred later in time, since they average 1980.
There is no evidence here that’s consistent with global warming.
This is one experiment only. It confirms my personal experience.
Consider the difficulties of repeating this experiment for other locations and periods, and then consider the difficulties of accounting for the variations that will surely occur. Some will show no change. Some will show warming. Some will show cooling. There will be cross-sectional sampling variation and its significance must be ascertained. The distributions may not be normal. They’ll probably show marked kurtosis. Then this has to be done globally. Then after that one needs models of climate changes and variations not caused by mankind. Unless this kind of careful work has been done convincingly, the science behind the global warming hypothesis will be controversial.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/wheres-the-warming-in-portland-maine/
Michael S. Rozeff
I’m 73 years old, and I don’t think that it’s any warmer today than when I was a kid. In fact, I remember some summers much hotter than nowadays, but that’s mere anecdote and subject to all the vagaries of memory. Being a skeptic concerning global warming as well as man-made global warming, I decided to do some simple research.
Being from New England and still having family there, I decided to check the temperatures on a given day in July for as far back as I could find an official record. Portland, Maine has an official weather station. I chose July 26 for a date. I was able to obtain the official high and low temperatures for that date for the years 1961 to 2014; 2008 and 2009 were unavailable, so I’ve recorded the monthly average high and low temperatures for those two years. This makes no difference at all in what I found.
Here are the data for year, high, and low temperatures on July 26 in Portland, Maine.
July 26
1961 86 64
1962 71 57
1963 99 65
1964 75 58
1965 84 55
1966 82 62
1967 82 60
1968 83 57
1969 64 59
1970 86 64
1971 76 61
1972 80 58
1973 80 64
1974 70 53
1975 77 52
1976 75 45
1977 71 48
1978 75 55
1979 81 67
1980 85 61
1981 75 61
1982 88 66
1983 82 57
1984 78 51
1985 74 63
1986 88 65
1987 86 64
1988 74 62
1989 95 69
1990 83 64
1991 72 61
1992 78 52
1993 73 57
1994 82 63
1995 83 68
1996 80 55
1997 89 53
1998 78 53
1999 75 63
2000 73 55
2001 72 53
2002 69 49
2003 86 60
2004 74 58
2005 87 64
2006 82 67
2007 85 65
2008 80 61 (Month average)
2009 74 58 (Month average)
2010 82 57
2011 74 62
2012 73 61
2013 72 62
2014 80 57
I challenge anyone to find any evidence whatsoever in these data that there has been a warming trend over these years.
To supplement these data, we can use some averages supplied by the U.S. weather service. They say that the years 1971-2000 (30 years) had a July average monthly high of 78.8, and they say that the 70-years 1941-2010 averaged 79.0 The average lows were 58.6 and 58.2, respectively. Mathematically, it has to be the case that the combined years 1941-1970 and 2001-2010 averaged almost exactly the same as the years 1971-2000. This again provides no evidence of global warming in Portland, Maine during the period 1941-2010.
There are other ways to look at these data. We can look for runs of hot and cold years by ranking warmest to coldest (for July). The weather service does this for 1941-2010.
The 10 hottest maxima from hotter to cooler are
1952 (84.7 degrees); 1955; 1949; 1994; 2010; 1948; 1999; 2006; 1959; 1968 (81.0 degrees)
These average 1974.
The 10 coolest maxima are as follows from warmer to cooler:
1956 (76.2 degrees); 1961; 1969; 1962; 1967; 1986; 1992; 1996; 2004; 2009 (74 degrees)
These average 1980.
Hence, if we look at extremes of the extremes, the hotter July months occurred earlier in time, since they average 1974, and the cooler ones occurred later in time, since they average 1980.
There is no evidence here that’s consistent with global warming.
This is one experiment only. It confirms my personal experience.
Consider the difficulties of repeating this experiment for other locations and periods, and then consider the difficulties of accounting for the variations that will surely occur. Some will show no change. Some will show warming. Some will show cooling. There will be cross-sectional sampling variation and its significance must be ascertained. The distributions may not be normal. They’ll probably show marked kurtosis. Then this has to be done globally. Then after that one needs models of climate changes and variations not caused by mankind. Unless this kind of careful work has been done convincingly, the science behind the global warming hypothesis will be controversial.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/wheres-the-warming-in-portland-maine/
Mpre JFK stuff...
Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence
Charles Burris
Early this morning I finished viewing Douglas P. Horne’s authoritative FFF video series, Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence. The Future of Freedom president Jacob Hornberger and Douglas Horne are to be commended for this outstanding project regarding the truth behind the JFK assassination.
Horne is the former Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), established by the JFK Records Act of 1992, which was tasked with defining, locating, and ensuring the declassification (to the maximum extent possible under the JFK Act) of all Federal Records considered “reasonably related” to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Horne details the numerous anomalies and interrupted chain of custody and destruction of key evidence regarding the president’s body, in the autopsy report(s), the autopsy photo collection (particularly the JFK brain photographs), the deliberate alteration and forgery of the extant Zapruder film, and the supposed “magic bullet” found at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Horne has previously written at LRC concerning “Photographic Evidence of Bullet Hole in JFK Limousine Windshield ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’” and other related subjects.
I have over sixty books on the assassination and the Kennedys but this video series nevertheless blew me away and caused me to marvel at the in-depth meticulous research of Horne and the mind-boggling audacity of the conspirators behind the cover-up. It more than ever confirms the hypothesis of James W. Douglass, David S. Lifton, and John Judge regarding the involvement of elements of the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and other top echelon of the National Security State in the coup d’état’s murder and cover-up. Because of what occurred before, during, and after the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, John Judge’s specific indictment of Naval Intelligence takes on an even greater importance.
Accordingly today I purchased via the LRC Amazon portal the entire five volume series of Douglas Horne’s Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. I strongly urge all LRC readers view this crucial five-part video series and purchase the five volumes.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/altered-history-exposing-deceit-and-deception-in-the-jfk-assassination-medical-evidence/
Charles Burris
Early this morning I finished viewing Douglas P. Horne’s authoritative FFF video series, Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence. The Future of Freedom president Jacob Hornberger and Douglas Horne are to be commended for this outstanding project regarding the truth behind the JFK assassination.
Horne is the former Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), established by the JFK Records Act of 1992, which was tasked with defining, locating, and ensuring the declassification (to the maximum extent possible under the JFK Act) of all Federal Records considered “reasonably related” to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Horne details the numerous anomalies and interrupted chain of custody and destruction of key evidence regarding the president’s body, in the autopsy report(s), the autopsy photo collection (particularly the JFK brain photographs), the deliberate alteration and forgery of the extant Zapruder film, and the supposed “magic bullet” found at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Horne has previously written at LRC concerning “Photographic Evidence of Bullet Hole in JFK Limousine Windshield ‘Hiding in Plain Sight,’” and other related subjects.
I have over sixty books on the assassination and the Kennedys but this video series nevertheless blew me away and caused me to marvel at the in-depth meticulous research of Horne and the mind-boggling audacity of the conspirators behind the cover-up. It more than ever confirms the hypothesis of James W. Douglass, David S. Lifton, and John Judge regarding the involvement of elements of the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and other top echelon of the National Security State in the coup d’état’s murder and cover-up. Because of what occurred before, during, and after the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, John Judge’s specific indictment of Naval Intelligence takes on an even greater importance.
Accordingly today I purchased via the LRC Amazon portal the entire five volume series of Douglas Horne’s Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. I strongly urge all LRC readers view this crucial five-part video series and purchase the five volumes.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/altered-history-exposing-deceit-and-deception-in-the-jfk-assassination-medical-evidence/
Still hiding JFK assassination truth...
Symposium on the JFK Assassination: Day One
By Josh Mitteldorf
There are people who have devoted their careers to untangling the history of the JFK assassination, and for this I am grateful. But I came to the AARC conference in Bethesda this weekend hoping to get a broad sense of who was behind the plot, and how heirs to power in the wake of JFK continue to corrupt America to this day. In this, I was disappointed.
Fifty years on, there is agreement only on the outline of a narrative: JFK was shot by several gunmen hiding on the ground in Dealey Plaza. Oswald had been pre-selected as scapegoat. CIA and LBJ were prime movers in the plot, but they could not have gotten away with what they did if JFK had not stood up to powerful military and financial interests and provoked their ire.
Most readers of this site have long realized that the Warren Commission report was a whitewash, and that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy of government insiders. I was surprised that about half the presentations yesterday (and those planned today and tomorrow) were directed toward debunking (yet again) the official “lone assassin” theory. Another segment of the conference was devoted to tussles with the National Archive over release of documents. In addition, there were hours spent describing the forensic sleuth-work used to decode CIA documents that have come into public view, and to sort out the many pseudonyms used by the few key players. I’m grateful that there are dedicated people who do this work, but details at this level are interesting only to afficionados.
Old Men, First-hand Accounts
Ernst Titovets, now a medical researcher at University of Minsk, reminisced about Lee Harvey Oswald, pal of his youth during two years when Oswald lived abroad in the USSR. He told us that Oswald was voluble, idealistic, a pacifist and admirer of President Kennedy. He described Oswald’s political vision as combining the socialist economy of Soviet Russia with the freedom and democracy of the USA. He was convinced a better world was coming, as both systems would soon implode from their own excesses.
In the day’s high point, we heard a first-hand confirmation of CIA primacy in the plot. Antonio Veciana, now 86 years old and infirm, was a Cuban exile and anti-Castro activist, recruited by CIA personnel. (He spoke through a translator yesterday, though his English is not so bad.) He had heard through his handlers of the assassination plot in 1963, which at the time he thought to be justified by JFK’s softness on Castro. A few years later, he came to a more sympathetic view of JFK, and regretted not having spoken up when he could. But he has waited until this year to bare his history and speak out. (He spoke glowingly of JFK’s American University address.)
Central to Veciana’s narrative and several other accounts during the day was a story of the Cuba connection, and the reason that Earl Warren was coerced into lending his reputation and credibility to an absurd cover-up. In addition to the “lone nut” story, scapegoating Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA had prepared another false account for selective, internal use. Oswald was sent by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips (aka Maurice Bishop) to Mexico City to get a Cuban visa. As pre-arranged, the visa request was denied. But the trip to Mexico and a (disputed) visit to the Cuban Embassy were used to fabricate a story
that Oswald was an agent of Castro
that JFK and RFK had plotted to kill Castro
that Castro had envoyed assassins to take out JFK pre-emptively
Three times, LBJ approached Earl Warren to head the investigation, and three times he declined. Finally, Warren was convinced that if the American people knew “the truth”, they would demand a full-blown invasion of Cuba, risking war with the Soviet Union. Warren thought he was lying to save the world from nuclear holocaust.
Or so the story goes.
Threads to the Present
Andrew Kreig, author of Presidential Puppetry and occasional OEN contributor, makes a case that the JFK assassination fundamentally changed American politics. Presidents from LBJ through Obama have understood that they serve at the pleasure of the CIA, and demands placed on them have been increasingly audacious and destructive. Kreig goes further to assert that every recent presidential candidate (both parties) has been pre-vetted, trained and promoted by the CIA.
This speaks to the importance of correcting the record, and of the timeliness of a new investigation to tell us who were the heirs to power in the wake of the Coup of 1963, and how they connect forward to the people leading our country today. It also helps explain why the National Archives has never complied with the 1992 order from Congress to de-classify all records related to the case; why the assassination has become a taboo topic in the MSM; and why so many people who certainly know better pretend that JFK’s assassination was an isolated tragedy.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/no_author/presidents-serve-at-the-pleasure-of-the-cia/
By Josh Mitteldorf
There are people who have devoted their careers to untangling the history of the JFK assassination, and for this I am grateful. But I came to the AARC conference in Bethesda this weekend hoping to get a broad sense of who was behind the plot, and how heirs to power in the wake of JFK continue to corrupt America to this day. In this, I was disappointed.
Fifty years on, there is agreement only on the outline of a narrative: JFK was shot by several gunmen hiding on the ground in Dealey Plaza. Oswald had been pre-selected as scapegoat. CIA and LBJ were prime movers in the plot, but they could not have gotten away with what they did if JFK had not stood up to powerful military and financial interests and provoked their ire.
Most readers of this site have long realized that the Warren Commission report was a whitewash, and that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy of government insiders. I was surprised that about half the presentations yesterday (and those planned today and tomorrow) were directed toward debunking (yet again) the official “lone assassin” theory. Another segment of the conference was devoted to tussles with the National Archive over release of documents. In addition, there were hours spent describing the forensic sleuth-work used to decode CIA documents that have come into public view, and to sort out the many pseudonyms used by the few key players. I’m grateful that there are dedicated people who do this work, but details at this level are interesting only to afficionados.
Old Men, First-hand Accounts
Ernst Titovets, now a medical researcher at University of Minsk, reminisced about Lee Harvey Oswald, pal of his youth during two years when Oswald lived abroad in the USSR. He told us that Oswald was voluble, idealistic, a pacifist and admirer of President Kennedy. He described Oswald’s political vision as combining the socialist economy of Soviet Russia with the freedom and democracy of the USA. He was convinced a better world was coming, as both systems would soon implode from their own excesses.
In the day’s high point, we heard a first-hand confirmation of CIA primacy in the plot. Antonio Veciana, now 86 years old and infirm, was a Cuban exile and anti-Castro activist, recruited by CIA personnel. (He spoke through a translator yesterday, though his English is not so bad.) He had heard through his handlers of the assassination plot in 1963, which at the time he thought to be justified by JFK’s softness on Castro. A few years later, he came to a more sympathetic view of JFK, and regretted not having spoken up when he could. But he has waited until this year to bare his history and speak out. (He spoke glowingly of JFK’s American University address.)
Central to Veciana’s narrative and several other accounts during the day was a story of the Cuba connection, and the reason that Earl Warren was coerced into lending his reputation and credibility to an absurd cover-up. In addition to the “lone nut” story, scapegoating Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA had prepared another false account for selective, internal use. Oswald was sent by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips (aka Maurice Bishop) to Mexico City to get a Cuban visa. As pre-arranged, the visa request was denied. But the trip to Mexico and a (disputed) visit to the Cuban Embassy were used to fabricate a story
that Oswald was an agent of Castro
that JFK and RFK had plotted to kill Castro
that Castro had envoyed assassins to take out JFK pre-emptively
Three times, LBJ approached Earl Warren to head the investigation, and three times he declined. Finally, Warren was convinced that if the American people knew “the truth”, they would demand a full-blown invasion of Cuba, risking war with the Soviet Union. Warren thought he was lying to save the world from nuclear holocaust.
Or so the story goes.
Threads to the Present
Andrew Kreig, author of Presidential Puppetry and occasional OEN contributor, makes a case that the JFK assassination fundamentally changed American politics. Presidents from LBJ through Obama have understood that they serve at the pleasure of the CIA, and demands placed on them have been increasingly audacious and destructive. Kreig goes further to assert that every recent presidential candidate (both parties) has been pre-vetted, trained and promoted by the CIA.
This speaks to the importance of correcting the record, and of the timeliness of a new investigation to tell us who were the heirs to power in the wake of the Coup of 1963, and how they connect forward to the people leading our country today. It also helps explain why the National Archives has never complied with the 1992 order from Congress to de-classify all records related to the case; why the assassination has become a taboo topic in the MSM; and why so many people who certainly know better pretend that JFK’s assassination was an isolated tragedy.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/no_author/presidents-serve-at-the-pleasure-of-the-cia/
"Many still believe Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace and life on earth. The claim that America is “exceptional and indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries."
Washington’s Secret Agendas
Paul Craig Roberts
One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.
The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure.
The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a “mushroom cloud going up over an American city.” With the rise of ISIS, this long war apparently is far from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman Empire.
The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.
The American public fell for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.
The public fell for the lie that Assad of Syria used “chemical weapons against his own people.” The jihadists that Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to Washington’s propaganda, a threat to America.
The greatest threat to the world is Washington’s insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence. We face the situation in which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the fate of countries.
Many still believe Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace and life on earth. The claim that America is “exceptional and indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries.
The casualties of Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce more recruits for ISIS. Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce “boots on the ground” in Iraq. Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed, and our heads will be cut off. The newly created propaganda of a “Russian threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s borders. A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.
Usually it takes the American public a year, or two, three, or four to realize that it has been deceived by lies and propaganda, but by that time the public has swallowed a new set of lies and propaganda and is all concerned about the latest “threat.” The American public seems incapable of understanding that just as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, threat was a hoax, so is the sixth threat, and so will be the seventh, eighth, and ninth.
Moreover, none of these American military attacks on other countries has resulted in a better situation, as Vladimir Putin honestly states. Yet, the public and its representatives in Congress support each new military adventure despite the record of deception and failure.
Perhaps if Americans were taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be less gullible and less susceptible to government propaganda. I have recommended Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the US, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US, and now I recommend Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers, the story of the long rule of John Foster and Allen Dulles over the State Department and CIA and their demonization of reformist governments that they often succeeded in overthrowing. Kinzer’s history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides insight into how Washington operates today.
In 1953 the Dulles brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day. Americans might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.
The Dulles brothers overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. “A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.”
A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and well paid “liberator,” Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.
We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.
President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting “a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala “expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.” This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.
What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy. The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary gullibility of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.
Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.
The Dulles brothers next intended victim was Ho Chi Minh. Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was springing the domino theory on the Western innocents. Nationalism and anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist subversion.
Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the “communist threat” by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US “to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.” Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.
The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.
Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people. Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.
The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.
Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.” The rot in Washington now permeates the country.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/washingtons-secret-agendas.html
Paul Craig Roberts
One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its hidden agendas.
The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure.
The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a “mushroom cloud going up over an American city.” With the rise of ISIS, this long war apparently is far from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman Empire.
The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.
The American public fell for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.
The public fell for the lie that Assad of Syria used “chemical weapons against his own people.” The jihadists that Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to Washington’s propaganda, a threat to America.
The greatest threat to the world is Washington’s insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence. We face the situation in which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the fate of countries.
Many still believe Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace and life on earth. The claim that America is “exceptional and indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries.
The casualties of Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce more recruits for ISIS. Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce “boots on the ground” in Iraq. Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed, and our heads will be cut off. The newly created propaganda of a “Russian threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s borders. A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.
Usually it takes the American public a year, or two, three, or four to realize that it has been deceived by lies and propaganda, but by that time the public has swallowed a new set of lies and propaganda and is all concerned about the latest “threat.” The American public seems incapable of understanding that just as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, threat was a hoax, so is the sixth threat, and so will be the seventh, eighth, and ninth.
Moreover, none of these American military attacks on other countries has resulted in a better situation, as Vladimir Putin honestly states. Yet, the public and its representatives in Congress support each new military adventure despite the record of deception and failure.
Perhaps if Americans were taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be less gullible and less susceptible to government propaganda. I have recommended Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the US, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US, and now I recommend Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers, the story of the long rule of John Foster and Allen Dulles over the State Department and CIA and their demonization of reformist governments that they often succeeded in overthrowing. Kinzer’s history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides insight into how Washington operates today.
In 1953 the Dulles brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day. Americans might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.
The Dulles brothers overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. “A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.”
A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and well paid “liberator,” Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.
We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.
President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting “a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala “expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.” This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.
What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy. The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary gullibility of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.
Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.
The Dulles brothers next intended victim was Ho Chi Minh. Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was springing the domino theory on the Western innocents. Nationalism and anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist subversion.
Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the “communist threat” by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US “to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.” Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.
The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.
Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people. Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.
The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.
Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.” The rot in Washington now permeates the country.
Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/washingtons-secret-agendas.html
The Middle East policy disaster...
Welcome To Barack Obama’s Syrian Gong Show
By David Stockman
Folks, this war is only three days old and its already a gong show. Its become at least a four-front affair—with Obama’s “broad” coalition amounting to little more than a few stealth Arab nations renting back to Washington the equipment and American trained pilots it had earlier provided them.
The President’s shock-but-not-awe campaign apparently not with bombs on the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqah but via a tomahawk barrage on some Nusra Front rebels in northwestern Syria. These were anti-regime fighters of the not-so-moderate persuasion who had been recently driven there after a bloody struggle with ISIS. As explained by the WSJ:
In July, the Islamic State routed its rivals including the Nusra Front and allied Islamist rebels from eastern Syria and they are now concentrated in the western half of the country, where they are fighting the regime along with other factions.
So these folks were fighting both of Washington’s declared enemies—–the Assad regime and ISIS—but it obliterated them anyway, and some of their women and children, too. That apparently makes for a
three-front war, as the WSJ further explained:
Many Islamist rebel groups are allied to the Nusra Front and these factions are the dominant force in non-Islamic State territories in Syria, wielding more power than the moderate groups backed by the U.S……. further civilian casualties or targeting of fighters affiliated with the Nusra Front could…..” turn it into a real enemy of all the other forces” such as the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, said Mohammad al-Salloum, an activist from Idlib previously held hostage by Islamic State and currently based across the border in neighboring Turkey.
Needless to say, opening up a third front against Nusra and its Al-Qaeda affiliated fighters as the first item of business during Monday night’s bombing debut must have come as a welcome surprise to Damascus. Presumably, Bashar Assad can now redeploy the forces he had thrown up against the ferocious Nusra fighters and assign them to contend with an impending attack by “moderate rebels”—-that is, as soon as the latter are vetted by the House GOP’s defense committee in Washington and sent to the Arabian desert for six months of training in the use of lethal weapons and civilized slogans.
As a Syrian-born broadcaster with the Al Jazeera network, wrote on Twitter,
“What more can Bashar al-Assad ask for? The U.S. planes targeted first and foremost the strong factions that are fighting him”.
OK, this third front thing did complicate matters. However, the Pentagon says it was unavoidable due to an emergency—-namely, an imminent attack on the US homeland by a faction within the Nusra Front faction called Khorasan.
Or then again—-maybe not. Was the “imminent threat” just a pretext to start the Syrian air war and to “vet” the opposition rebels by means of high altitude bombers? After all, why not purge the “bad guys” before they can get their hands on the weapons Congress has already voted to give the not yet vetted “good guys” so that the latter can take on the really, really bad guys running the Islamic State?
Indeed, less than 48 hours after the fact there were plenty of hints that the “Khorasan threat” was essentially a recycling job from the Pentagon propaganda mill. In Donald Rumsfeld’s precise vernacular, the Khorasans were “known knowns”:
This is essentially the same cast of characters that we’ve had our eye on for years,” the senior US official said. “These are known operatives to us. This is more like a group of people seeking to exploit the safe haven in Syria to plot against us…..”
Thomas Joscelyn, an editor of The Long War Journal and scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the same thing, explaining that Khorasan is not some major new threat or uniquely Syrian entity but essentially a travelling recruiter squad dispatched to the Syrian front by Al Qaeda central:
These are basically senior operational guys within Al Qaeda who are operating in Syria, and using the fertile recruiting ground of Syria to identify potential terrorist operations in the west.”
Likewise, according to Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed,
“A source that was briefed on Khorasan in June said that the counterterrorism community believes that between 10 and 20 top Al Qaeda people had gone to Syria from Waziristan “to link up in Syria and establish a new AQ affiliate in Syria that would be focused on training and deploying against the West.”
In fact, the names bandied about with respect to Khorasan are the same old, same old jihadi. Its perhaps now departed leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, is or was a 33-year old jihadist circuit preacher who has been around since 2001. His sojourns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran and elsewhere were well tracked by western intelligence agencies but in 15 years he has apparently given out more sermons than notable attacks. Indeed, his most recent weapon of choice was apparently Twitter:
The source says al Fadhli is trying to emulate the success of ISIS in using social media to recruit Westerners — people who could be trained and then sent home to launch terror attacks. To this end, al Fadhli has been able to recruit a member of ISIS’ media team to help with recruitment for Khorasan.
The hysteria about an attack on the US homeland relates to Khorasan operatives who may have once been apprenticed to Ibrahim al Asiri, the putative master bombmaker of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The latter operates out of Yemen, which, incidentally, the White House claims is the success model for its current bombing campaign, but it is likely that al-Asiri’s incompetence as a bomb-maker is more responsible for this claim than the CIA’s drone missiles—-which always seem to hit the wrong target such as schools and wedding parties. In any event, al-Asiri has been trying to make an underwear or deodorant stick bomb for the better part of a decade with no success—save for the underwear bomber farce of X-mas 2009 during which the perpetrator fried his own private parts.
Indeed, the Khorasan scary stories appear to be just a recycled version of the airplane bomb plots—-based on scientifically dubious explosive clothing—- that were trotted out as a pretext to launch a drone war in Yemen in 2009-2010. Likewise, this week’s warnings about a magic liquid that can turn clothes into undetectable bombs is also an old standby—a version of a similar plot that was leaked in 2013, and died almost immediately over lack of evidence...
Read the rest here:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/09/welcome-to-barack-obamas-syrian-gong.html
By David Stockman
Folks, this war is only three days old and its already a gong show. Its become at least a four-front affair—with Obama’s “broad” coalition amounting to little more than a few stealth Arab nations renting back to Washington the equipment and American trained pilots it had earlier provided them.
The President’s shock-but-not-awe campaign apparently not with bombs on the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqah but via a tomahawk barrage on some Nusra Front rebels in northwestern Syria. These were anti-regime fighters of the not-so-moderate persuasion who had been recently driven there after a bloody struggle with ISIS. As explained by the WSJ:
In July, the Islamic State routed its rivals including the Nusra Front and allied Islamist rebels from eastern Syria and they are now concentrated in the western half of the country, where they are fighting the regime along with other factions.
So these folks were fighting both of Washington’s declared enemies—–the Assad regime and ISIS—but it obliterated them anyway, and some of their women and children, too. That apparently makes for a
three-front war, as the WSJ further explained:
Many Islamist rebel groups are allied to the Nusra Front and these factions are the dominant force in non-Islamic State territories in Syria, wielding more power than the moderate groups backed by the U.S……. further civilian casualties or targeting of fighters affiliated with the Nusra Front could…..” turn it into a real enemy of all the other forces” such as the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, said Mohammad al-Salloum, an activist from Idlib previously held hostage by Islamic State and currently based across the border in neighboring Turkey.
Needless to say, opening up a third front against Nusra and its Al-Qaeda affiliated fighters as the first item of business during Monday night’s bombing debut must have come as a welcome surprise to Damascus. Presumably, Bashar Assad can now redeploy the forces he had thrown up against the ferocious Nusra fighters and assign them to contend with an impending attack by “moderate rebels”—-that is, as soon as the latter are vetted by the House GOP’s defense committee in Washington and sent to the Arabian desert for six months of training in the use of lethal weapons and civilized slogans.
As a Syrian-born broadcaster with the Al Jazeera network, wrote on Twitter,
“What more can Bashar al-Assad ask for? The U.S. planes targeted first and foremost the strong factions that are fighting him”.
OK, this third front thing did complicate matters. However, the Pentagon says it was unavoidable due to an emergency—-namely, an imminent attack on the US homeland by a faction within the Nusra Front faction called Khorasan.
Or then again—-maybe not. Was the “imminent threat” just a pretext to start the Syrian air war and to “vet” the opposition rebels by means of high altitude bombers? After all, why not purge the “bad guys” before they can get their hands on the weapons Congress has already voted to give the not yet vetted “good guys” so that the latter can take on the really, really bad guys running the Islamic State?
Indeed, less than 48 hours after the fact there were plenty of hints that the “Khorasan threat” was essentially a recycling job from the Pentagon propaganda mill. In Donald Rumsfeld’s precise vernacular, the Khorasans were “known knowns”:
This is essentially the same cast of characters that we’ve had our eye on for years,” the senior US official said. “These are known operatives to us. This is more like a group of people seeking to exploit the safe haven in Syria to plot against us…..”
Thomas Joscelyn, an editor of The Long War Journal and scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the same thing, explaining that Khorasan is not some major new threat or uniquely Syrian entity but essentially a travelling recruiter squad dispatched to the Syrian front by Al Qaeda central:
These are basically senior operational guys within Al Qaeda who are operating in Syria, and using the fertile recruiting ground of Syria to identify potential terrorist operations in the west.”
Likewise, according to Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed,
“A source that was briefed on Khorasan in June said that the counterterrorism community believes that between 10 and 20 top Al Qaeda people had gone to Syria from Waziristan “to link up in Syria and establish a new AQ affiliate in Syria that would be focused on training and deploying against the West.”
In fact, the names bandied about with respect to Khorasan are the same old, same old jihadi. Its perhaps now departed leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, is or was a 33-year old jihadist circuit preacher who has been around since 2001. His sojourns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran and elsewhere were well tracked by western intelligence agencies but in 15 years he has apparently given out more sermons than notable attacks. Indeed, his most recent weapon of choice was apparently Twitter:
The source says al Fadhli is trying to emulate the success of ISIS in using social media to recruit Westerners — people who could be trained and then sent home to launch terror attacks. To this end, al Fadhli has been able to recruit a member of ISIS’ media team to help with recruitment for Khorasan.
The hysteria about an attack on the US homeland relates to Khorasan operatives who may have once been apprenticed to Ibrahim al Asiri, the putative master bombmaker of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The latter operates out of Yemen, which, incidentally, the White House claims is the success model for its current bombing campaign, but it is likely that al-Asiri’s incompetence as a bomb-maker is more responsible for this claim than the CIA’s drone missiles—-which always seem to hit the wrong target such as schools and wedding parties. In any event, al-Asiri has been trying to make an underwear or deodorant stick bomb for the better part of a decade with no success—save for the underwear bomber farce of X-mas 2009 during which the perpetrator fried his own private parts.
Indeed, the Khorasan scary stories appear to be just a recycled version of the airplane bomb plots—-based on scientifically dubious explosive clothing—- that were trotted out as a pretext to launch a drone war in Yemen in 2009-2010. Likewise, this week’s warnings about a magic liquid that can turn clothes into undetectable bombs is also an old standby—a version of a similar plot that was leaked in 2013, and died almost immediately over lack of evidence...
Read the rest here:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/09/welcome-to-barack-obamas-syrian-gong.html
Crony Capitalist and global warming scam...
Crony Capitalist George Soros Must Be Loaded Down with Green Energy Investments
WND reports:
A group of wealthy businessmen with ties to the Obama political machine has put out an email blast asking Americans to submit public comments to the EPA in favor of the president’s “aggressive plan to tackle climate change.”
The new EPA regulations on power plants would result in millions of lost jobs while forcing consumers to pay more for their electricity, critics say. The EPA is accepting public comments on the proposed rules through Dec. 1 but the White House has decided to bypass Congress on the issue.
Organizing for Action, funded by billionaire investor George Soros, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and other progressive rainmakers, asks recipients of the email to “Stand with the President” by submitting a public comment to the EPA before the deadline passes.
“Right now, the EPA is collecting public comments about President Obama’s Clean Power Plan,” the email says. It then provides a link tagged, “Add your name to make sure your voice is part of it – and we’ll make sure the EPA gets it.”
Organizing for Action, formed by Obama’s top political aides, has made climate change, amnesty for illegal aliens, abortion rights and gun control its top priorities since getting Soros and other wealthy businessmen to underwrite its agenda.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/09/crony-capitalist-george-soros-must-be.html
WND reports:
A group of wealthy businessmen with ties to the Obama political machine has put out an email blast asking Americans to submit public comments to the EPA in favor of the president’s “aggressive plan to tackle climate change.”
The new EPA regulations on power plants would result in millions of lost jobs while forcing consumers to pay more for their electricity, critics say. The EPA is accepting public comments on the proposed rules through Dec. 1 but the White House has decided to bypass Congress on the issue.
Organizing for Action, funded by billionaire investor George Soros, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and other progressive rainmakers, asks recipients of the email to “Stand with the President” by submitting a public comment to the EPA before the deadline passes.
“Right now, the EPA is collecting public comments about President Obama’s Clean Power Plan,” the email says. It then provides a link tagged, “Add your name to make sure your voice is part of it – and we’ll make sure the EPA gets it.”
Organizing for Action, formed by Obama’s top political aides, has made climate change, amnesty for illegal aliens, abortion rights and gun control its top priorities since getting Soros and other wealthy businessmen to underwrite its agenda.
Link:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/09/crony-capitalist-george-soros-must-be.html
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Complete foolishness...
Government Plan to Stop School Shootings: Monitor Homeschoolers
Written by Selwyn Duke
A government advisory commission assembled in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting has issued a proposal for preventing similar events that is raising eyebrows:
Monitor certain homeschoolers.
The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC), consisting of 16 educators, local and state officials, and “behavioral experts,” was created 18 months ago by Governor Dannel Malloy after 20-year-old Adam Lanza committed the Connecticut mass shooting that transfixed the nation in December 2012. Lanza, “described as being ‘dark and disturbed’ before his death ... coldly murdered his own mother in their expensive home near Newtown, Connecticut. Then he took her legally registered guns to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot and killed 20 children and six adults. Then he took a handgun and shot himself,” writes WND.com, describing the chain of events. The commission is targeting homeschooling apparently because Lanza’s mother removed him from the government school system in 10th grade and taught him at home for one and a half years.
The SHAC’s “chief recommendation” — which is for “tighter scrutiny of homeschoolers” — would only apply to home-educated students labeled with “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.” But observers worry this will be used as a pretext for gratuitous state intrusion into homeschooling families, as those with “problem” children “would have to file progress reports prepared by [government] special education program teams,” reports CTPost.com. Of special concern is the matter of who will determine what constitutes “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.”
This is especially relevant since anti-homeschooling forces have spread the notion that the practice stunts emotional, social, and behavioral development. For example, as Michael F. Haverluck reported at CBN News in 2007, “92 percent of [school] superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray.”
The above statistic relates to another reason many are concerned about the proposal: Government educators have a vested interest in eliminating homeschooling. Every child taught at home means one less student who can be indoctrinated by schools — and means less funding for them.
Observers also point out that not only is placing an onus on homeschoolers based on one anecdote unfair, but Lanza attended government school for the first 10 years of his life; moreover, there are more anecdotes indicating that SHAC’s proposed cure is worse than (or may actually be) the disease. As Kyle Olson writes at Education Action Group News:
[I]f the act of homeschooling and the perceived lack of governmental oversight is to blame, how does Sandy Hook Advisory Panel explain away these public school students:
• On March 21, 2005, Red Lake Senior High School student Jeffrey Weise killed five students, one teacher, one security guard, and then committed suicide.
• On April 20, 1999, Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher, and wounded 21 others before committing suicide.
• On March 5, 2001, student Charles Andrew Williams killed two students and wounding 13 others at Santana High School in California.
• On February 27, 2012, TJ Lane walked into the Chardon High School cafeteria and fired into a group of students sitting at a lunch table. Three students died in the attack. His “emotional disability” was such that he wore a t-shirt with “Killer” scrawled on it to his sentencing.
The examples go on and they all point back to a failed government bureaucracy that apparently didn’t adequately address the “behavioral and emotional disabilities” of the students in its care.
More significantly, studies and statistics tell the same tale. As CBN’s Haverluck also reported:
Dr. Thomas Smedley ... conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
... Research presented at the National Christian Home Educators Leadership Conference divulged that homeschool graduates far exceeded their public and private school counterparts in college by ranking the highest in 42 of 63 indicators of collegiate success. They were also ranked as being superior in four out of five achievement categories, including socialization, as they were assessed as being the most charismatic and influential.
... When the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist was administered by education researcher Dr. Larry Shyers to identify 97 problematic behaviors in two groups of children, traditionally schooled students exuded eight times as many antisocial traits than [sic] their homeschooled counterparts.
This will come as no surprise to homeschooling families, whose children figure prominently in national spelling and geography bees and other academic competitions. Labeled abnormal because it’s unfashionable, homeschooling is actually the historical norm, which always involved educating and socializing children at home and provides the balance of intense exposure to not just peers (siblings), but also adults such as parents, grandparents, and perhaps extended family. This provides more, and more frequent, modeling of mature adult behavior, and virtues are caught more than they’re taught. What is in reality abnormal is the government-school environment, in which children spend much of the day, five days a week, around 30 immature age-mates. In such a setting, a gang-culture-like milieu generally develops, with students influenced more by bad-apple bad boys than the boy wonders; just consider how the pursuit of academic excellence in the black community can be stigmatized as “acting white” or how, anywhere, a well-behaved, diligent student may be mocked as a “goody-goody.”
And the proof is in the pudding, say critics. As Haverluck wrote, “The mass socialization conducted within schools has brought about a proliferation of delinquent behavior within this nation's youth, reports education researcher, Dr. Michael Slavinski. He notes that student bodies are increasingly riddled with violence, drugs, promiscuity, emotional disorders, crime, contempt for authority, desperate behavior, illiteracy and peer dependency — just to name a few.”
Given the clash of the homeschooling and government-schooling world views, each of which considers the other abnormal, there’s good reason to fear that homeschooler status alone may often be enough to get one labeled “disordered.” After all, the two views disagree profoundly on what constitutes proper “socialization.” While homeschoolers are often believing Christians who seek to instill godly virtues in their children, “Education researcher Dr. Michael Mitchell found that being popular, aggressively competitive, materialistically driven and self-confident are traits promoted in conventional schools,” wrote Haverluck.
In particular, while “[h]ome educators examined by Mitchell strive to dismantle any selfish ambitions and self-aggrandizement seen in their children, as opposed to cultivating them,” government schools stress “self-esteem.” As to this, the self-esteem movement began decades ago with the notion that girls were faltering in school (not true at the time, actually) and that this was due to their having lower self-esteem than boys do. Overlooked, however, was that the highest scores on self-esteem tests and the lowest academic scores were both registered by the same group: black males. Explanation?
“Self-esteem” has simply become a euphemism for pride.
This is why a government-school student may be told he’s “the most important person in the world” or be instructed to expound upon his own greatness. But, critics might say, academia today is producing anything but greatness — except in ego. And if “pride goeth before a fall,” is it any surprise American schooling is falling fast?
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19201-government-plan-to-stop-school-shootings-monitor-homeschoolers
Written by Selwyn Duke
A government advisory commission assembled in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook shooting has issued a proposal for preventing similar events that is raising eyebrows:
Monitor certain homeschoolers.
The Sandy Hook Advisory Commission (SHAC), consisting of 16 educators, local and state officials, and “behavioral experts,” was created 18 months ago by Governor Dannel Malloy after 20-year-old Adam Lanza committed the Connecticut mass shooting that transfixed the nation in December 2012. Lanza, “described as being ‘dark and disturbed’ before his death ... coldly murdered his own mother in their expensive home near Newtown, Connecticut. Then he took her legally registered guns to the nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot and killed 20 children and six adults. Then he took a handgun and shot himself,” writes WND.com, describing the chain of events. The commission is targeting homeschooling apparently because Lanza’s mother removed him from the government school system in 10th grade and taught him at home for one and a half years.
The SHAC’s “chief recommendation” — which is for “tighter scrutiny of homeschoolers” — would only apply to home-educated students labeled with “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.” But observers worry this will be used as a pretext for gratuitous state intrusion into homeschooling families, as those with “problem” children “would have to file progress reports prepared by [government] special education program teams,” reports CTPost.com. Of special concern is the matter of who will determine what constitutes “emotional, social, or behavioral problems.”
This is especially relevant since anti-homeschooling forces have spread the notion that the practice stunts emotional, social, and behavioral development. For example, as Michael F. Haverluck reported at CBN News in 2007, “92 percent of [school] superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray.”
The above statistic relates to another reason many are concerned about the proposal: Government educators have a vested interest in eliminating homeschooling. Every child taught at home means one less student who can be indoctrinated by schools — and means less funding for them.
Observers also point out that not only is placing an onus on homeschoolers based on one anecdote unfair, but Lanza attended government school for the first 10 years of his life; moreover, there are more anecdotes indicating that SHAC’s proposed cure is worse than (or may actually be) the disease. As Kyle Olson writes at Education Action Group News:
[I]f the act of homeschooling and the perceived lack of governmental oversight is to blame, how does Sandy Hook Advisory Panel explain away these public school students:
• On March 21, 2005, Red Lake Senior High School student Jeffrey Weise killed five students, one teacher, one security guard, and then committed suicide.
• On April 20, 1999, Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher, and wounded 21 others before committing suicide.
• On March 5, 2001, student Charles Andrew Williams killed two students and wounding 13 others at Santana High School in California.
• On February 27, 2012, TJ Lane walked into the Chardon High School cafeteria and fired into a group of students sitting at a lunch table. Three students died in the attack. His “emotional disability” was such that he wore a t-shirt with “Killer” scrawled on it to his sentencing.
The examples go on and they all point back to a failed government bureaucracy that apparently didn’t adequately address the “behavioral and emotional disabilities” of the students in its care.
More significantly, studies and statistics tell the same tale. As CBN’s Haverluck also reported:
Dr. Thomas Smedley ... conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
... Research presented at the National Christian Home Educators Leadership Conference divulged that homeschool graduates far exceeded their public and private school counterparts in college by ranking the highest in 42 of 63 indicators of collegiate success. They were also ranked as being superior in four out of five achievement categories, including socialization, as they were assessed as being the most charismatic and influential.
... When the Direct Observation Form of the Child Behavior Checklist was administered by education researcher Dr. Larry Shyers to identify 97 problematic behaviors in two groups of children, traditionally schooled students exuded eight times as many antisocial traits than [sic] their homeschooled counterparts.
This will come as no surprise to homeschooling families, whose children figure prominently in national spelling and geography bees and other academic competitions. Labeled abnormal because it’s unfashionable, homeschooling is actually the historical norm, which always involved educating and socializing children at home and provides the balance of intense exposure to not just peers (siblings), but also adults such as parents, grandparents, and perhaps extended family. This provides more, and more frequent, modeling of mature adult behavior, and virtues are caught more than they’re taught. What is in reality abnormal is the government-school environment, in which children spend much of the day, five days a week, around 30 immature age-mates. In such a setting, a gang-culture-like milieu generally develops, with students influenced more by bad-apple bad boys than the boy wonders; just consider how the pursuit of academic excellence in the black community can be stigmatized as “acting white” or how, anywhere, a well-behaved, diligent student may be mocked as a “goody-goody.”
And the proof is in the pudding, say critics. As Haverluck wrote, “The mass socialization conducted within schools has brought about a proliferation of delinquent behavior within this nation's youth, reports education researcher, Dr. Michael Slavinski. He notes that student bodies are increasingly riddled with violence, drugs, promiscuity, emotional disorders, crime, contempt for authority, desperate behavior, illiteracy and peer dependency — just to name a few.”
Given the clash of the homeschooling and government-schooling world views, each of which considers the other abnormal, there’s good reason to fear that homeschooler status alone may often be enough to get one labeled “disordered.” After all, the two views disagree profoundly on what constitutes proper “socialization.” While homeschoolers are often believing Christians who seek to instill godly virtues in their children, “Education researcher Dr. Michael Mitchell found that being popular, aggressively competitive, materialistically driven and self-confident are traits promoted in conventional schools,” wrote Haverluck.
In particular, while “[h]ome educators examined by Mitchell strive to dismantle any selfish ambitions and self-aggrandizement seen in their children, as opposed to cultivating them,” government schools stress “self-esteem.” As to this, the self-esteem movement began decades ago with the notion that girls were faltering in school (not true at the time, actually) and that this was due to their having lower self-esteem than boys do. Overlooked, however, was that the highest scores on self-esteem tests and the lowest academic scores were both registered by the same group: black males. Explanation?
“Self-esteem” has simply become a euphemism for pride.
This is why a government-school student may be told he’s “the most important person in the world” or be instructed to expound upon his own greatness. But, critics might say, academia today is producing anything but greatness — except in ego. And if “pride goeth before a fall,” is it any surprise American schooling is falling fast?
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19201-government-plan-to-stop-school-shootings-monitor-homeschoolers
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
Keynes, Lenin, and Hyperinflation
By Gary North
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes became an international figure of considerable influence because of his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It was a critique of the Versailles Treaty’s imposition of reparations payments on Germany in the aftermath of World War I.
In that book, Keynes made the following observations.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers’, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
This became one of the most widely quoted statements from the book. Yet the book really was not about inflation, Lenin, and the destruction of capitalism. But the quotation was simply too good to resist for defenders of the traditional gold standard.
Beginning in the 1970′s, the authenticity of the quotation from Lenin was called into question by a series of economists and historians. There is no reference to this in Lenin’s collected works. The hostility to the gold standard is so great, that this is one time that Keynes was called into question by his academic acolytes. If it is a question of attacking the gold standard or calling Keynes into question, Keynesians are willing to call Keynes into question. First things first.
Yet it turns out that Keynes was right, and the critics of Keynes on this one particular point have been wrong. Lenin said far more than the brief extract attributed to him by Keynes. Lenin made it very clear why he believed that inflation will ultimately destroy capitalism. He was overseeing the process of this destruction, and his use of paper money was central in his organizational plans. Here is what he said:
Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. There is no justification for the existence of money in the Bolshevik state, where the necessities of life shall be paid for by work alone.Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation, for however ruthlessly such measures may be applied, astute speculators and obstinate survivors of the capitalist classes will always manage to evade them and continue to corrupt the life of the community. The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort.
Already even a hundred-rouble note is almost valueless in Russia. Soon even the simplest peasant will realise that it is only a scrap of paper, not worth more than the rags from which it is manufactured. Men will cease to covet and hoard it so soon as they discover it will not buy anything, and the great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.
This is the real reason why our presses are printing rouble bills day and night, without rest.
This statement was reprinted in an article by a pair of economists, Michael V. White and Kurt Schuler, who included it in their article, “Who Said ‘Debauch the Currency’: Keynes or Lenin?” It was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 23, Number 2 (Spring 2009), p. 217. This is a publication of the American Economic Association. The article is online.
The reason why scholars did not find it in the collected works of Lenin is that this was reported in newspapers at the time. The authors of the journal article describe this article. “A report of an interview with Lenin was published on April 23, 1919, by the Daily Chronicle in London and the New York Times. Dated April 22 and cabled from Geneva, the article claimed to be based on ‘authentic notes of an interview with Vladimir Ulianoff Lenin, the high priest of Bolshevism, which were communicated to me by a recent visitor to Moscow.’”
Because the author of the article was not identified, skeptics may decide to criticize it as a hoax. But Lenin never indicated that it was a hoax, nor did he challenge Keynes’s summary statement. He commented on Keynes’ book in 1920, but he did not single out Keynes’ statement as a misrepresentation...
Read the rest:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/12936.cfm
By Gary North
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes became an international figure of considerable influence because of his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It was a critique of the Versailles Treaty’s imposition of reparations payments on Germany in the aftermath of World War I.
In that book, Keynes made the following observations.
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers’, who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
This became one of the most widely quoted statements from the book. Yet the book really was not about inflation, Lenin, and the destruction of capitalism. But the quotation was simply too good to resist for defenders of the traditional gold standard.
Beginning in the 1970′s, the authenticity of the quotation from Lenin was called into question by a series of economists and historians. There is no reference to this in Lenin’s collected works. The hostility to the gold standard is so great, that this is one time that Keynes was called into question by his academic acolytes. If it is a question of attacking the gold standard or calling Keynes into question, Keynesians are willing to call Keynes into question. First things first.
Yet it turns out that Keynes was right, and the critics of Keynes on this one particular point have been wrong. Lenin said far more than the brief extract attributed to him by Keynes. Lenin made it very clear why he believed that inflation will ultimately destroy capitalism. He was overseeing the process of this destruction, and his use of paper money was central in his organizational plans. Here is what he said:
Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. There is no justification for the existence of money in the Bolshevik state, where the necessities of life shall be paid for by work alone.Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation, for however ruthlessly such measures may be applied, astute speculators and obstinate survivors of the capitalist classes will always manage to evade them and continue to corrupt the life of the community. The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort.
Already even a hundred-rouble note is almost valueless in Russia. Soon even the simplest peasant will realise that it is only a scrap of paper, not worth more than the rags from which it is manufactured. Men will cease to covet and hoard it so soon as they discover it will not buy anything, and the great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.
This is the real reason why our presses are printing rouble bills day and night, without rest.
This statement was reprinted in an article by a pair of economists, Michael V. White and Kurt Schuler, who included it in their article, “Who Said ‘Debauch the Currency’: Keynes or Lenin?” It was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 23, Number 2 (Spring 2009), p. 217. This is a publication of the American Economic Association. The article is online.
The reason why scholars did not find it in the collected works of Lenin is that this was reported in newspapers at the time. The authors of the journal article describe this article. “A report of an interview with Lenin was published on April 23, 1919, by the Daily Chronicle in London and the New York Times. Dated April 22 and cabled from Geneva, the article claimed to be based on ‘authentic notes of an interview with Vladimir Ulianoff Lenin, the high priest of Bolshevism, which were communicated to me by a recent visitor to Moscow.’”
Because the author of the article was not identified, skeptics may decide to criticize it as a hoax. But Lenin never indicated that it was a hoax, nor did he challenge Keynes’s summary statement. He commented on Keynes’ book in 1920, but he did not single out Keynes’ statement as a misrepresentation...
Read the rest:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/12936.cfm
Yes, those progressives care so much about us...
A Nation of Children
By Doug French
Imagine, as Christopher Buckley (son of William F.) did in his clever book, Boomsday, a plan to make the government solvent by offering incentives for people to kill themselves at age 70 and younger. Instead of calling it suicide, it would euphemistically be known as “Voluntary Transitioning.”
Now we have Ezekiel Emanuel, Ari and Rahm’s brother, making quite a splash with his article “Why I Hope to Die at 75” in the Atlantic. While he doesn’t plan on suicide, he will stop receiving medical treatment. He says people deteriorate, and are less productive and creative. So why stay around so long?
The former White House aid’s article makes Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet’s piece on Casey Research last December all the more interesting. She pointed out that Mr. Emanuel has written plenty about “The Complete Lives System” which:
makes crystal clear that physicians must not focus on the individual patient. Instead, medical care should be allocated based on the patient’s usefulness to the “collective good.” If you’re too old, or too young, or your ailment is too complicated, society is better off letting you die rather than paying a doctor to heal you.
One tenet of the Complete Lives system is that medical care for people under age 15 and over age 45 should be attenuated. “Attenuate” means to ration. Emanuel believes that the very young and the elderly are less valuable to society than those in the middle of the age curve.
Mr. Emanuel is likely trying to start a trend and maybe even plant the idea for legislation to stop caring for people at 75—all for the good of the country, of course.
Besides ghoulish, it’s a bit ironic, given the unwillingness of Americans to grow up. It’s telling that Obamacare covers children up to 26, as if the mid-20s is the new teenager.
There was no such thing as a teenager before 1941; there were children and there were adults, explains Diana West in her book The Death of the Grown-Up. Now, turning 13 brings on the wonderful, entitled world of being a teen instead of taking a small step toward adulthood, and according to West “due to the permanent hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, that’s where they’re likely to find most adults.”
For instance, it turns out more adults watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. And while CNN is a low bar, remembering that my old boss, the CEO of a bank, would constantly watch SpongeBob SquarePants, I can believe this.
Ms. West writes that the previous generation was “one not yet under the influence of a youth culture of licentious boys (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) and petulant girls (women’s lib), shaped [by] that most basic human instinct—survival. Elevated by a maturing belief in duty, honor, loyalty, and forbearance, the instinct to survive wasn’t just a self-concern; it was, it turned out, the saving grace of civilization.”
So what’s happened? Why the societal breakdown? We’ve had Republicans and we’ve had Democrats in charge. It doesn’t matter. It’s inflation and democracy. Both shorten people’s time horizons. As a nation, we live for the moment because our money is constantly degraded and our politicians steal from us continuously.
In his masterful examination of the Thomas Mann short story Disorder and Early Sorrow, professor Paul Cantor observes, “Mann is as acute in portraying the psychological effects of inflation as he is in portraying the economic, social and political effects.” Mann shows “inflation fundamentally changes the way people think, forcing them to live for the moment.”
With everyone’s time horizons shortened during the Weimar hyperinflation, hard work and prudent investing are believed foolish. In Death and Early Sorrow, the older generation lost its authority and youth dominated. The children acted like adults and the adults acted like children. “The young are more adaptable to changing conditions, while the old are set in their ways,” writes Cantor, “Hence the young cope better with inflation.”
Mann saw inflation change the dynamic between generations in society. With “the young [having] a huge advantage over the old,” Cantor explains. “Not having experienced economic stability, the youth of Germany are more able to go with the inflationary flow.”
Mann’s principal character, Professor Cornelius, has a servant, young Xaver, who is the perfect inflationary child. Xaver, Mann described, “utterly lacks a sense of duty and can as little be trained to the performance of the daily round and common task as some kinds of dog can be taught to jump over a stick.” Xaver has no feeling for the past and lacks the discipline so prized in Germany.
Cantor points out that the elderly “become increasingly irrelevant” in an inflationary environment. It’s well known that inflation especially punishes those on fixed incomes. “Mann fills in our sense of the psychological disruptions that accompany the economic ravages of inflation,” writes Cantor. “More than any other factor, inflation discredits the authority of the older generation and turns power over to youth.”
With prices soaring, youthful vices look like wisdom; the conservatism and prudence of the elderly are made to look silly.
In his epic Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained that democracy increases societal time preference and with democratic rule “contrary to conventional wisdom, the decivilizing forces inherent in any form of government are systematically strengthened.”
The private ownership of government (monarchy) is much more long-term oriented. Rulers may pass on a nation’s wealth to their heirs. In a democracy, politicians can only use government resources. A president has every incentive to maximize current income at the expense of capital value. A president being a temporary caretaker, explains Hoppe, “will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume.”
And since in a democracy anyone can be president or in government, “public resistance against government power is systematically weakened,” Hoppe writes. “While expropriation and taxation before may have appeared clearly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end.”
Ever oppressive government and increased taxation make saving for the future look futile. One might as well live for today if what you save will only be confiscated by government.
As democracy dictates that the haves take care of the have-nots, “there will be less productive activity, self-reliance and future-orientation, and more consumption, parasitism, dependency and shortsightedness,” Professor Hoppe writes.
What democracy and government have done is to retard the natural tendency of humanity to build an expanding stock of capital and durable consumer goods. Man, instead of becoming increasingly more farsighted and providing for ever more distant goals, is tending toward decivilization. As Hoppe describes, “formerly provident providers will be turned into drunks or daydreamers, adults into children, civilized men into barbarians, and producers into criminals.”
When someone so powerful as Emanuel, leading by example, advocates for the elderly to get out of the way, society has indeed devolved. Too much money and too much government have turned civilized people into barbaric children.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/doug-french/time-for-you-to-die/
By Doug French
Imagine, as Christopher Buckley (son of William F.) did in his clever book, Boomsday, a plan to make the government solvent by offering incentives for people to kill themselves at age 70 and younger. Instead of calling it suicide, it would euphemistically be known as “Voluntary Transitioning.”
Now we have Ezekiel Emanuel, Ari and Rahm’s brother, making quite a splash with his article “Why I Hope to Die at 75” in the Atlantic. While he doesn’t plan on suicide, he will stop receiving medical treatment. He says people deteriorate, and are less productive and creative. So why stay around so long?
The former White House aid’s article makes Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet’s piece on Casey Research last December all the more interesting. She pointed out that Mr. Emanuel has written plenty about “The Complete Lives System” which:
makes crystal clear that physicians must not focus on the individual patient. Instead, medical care should be allocated based on the patient’s usefulness to the “collective good.” If you’re too old, or too young, or your ailment is too complicated, society is better off letting you die rather than paying a doctor to heal you.
One tenet of the Complete Lives system is that medical care for people under age 15 and over age 45 should be attenuated. “Attenuate” means to ration. Emanuel believes that the very young and the elderly are less valuable to society than those in the middle of the age curve.
Mr. Emanuel is likely trying to start a trend and maybe even plant the idea for legislation to stop caring for people at 75—all for the good of the country, of course.
Besides ghoulish, it’s a bit ironic, given the unwillingness of Americans to grow up. It’s telling that Obamacare covers children up to 26, as if the mid-20s is the new teenager.
There was no such thing as a teenager before 1941; there were children and there were adults, explains Diana West in her book The Death of the Grown-Up. Now, turning 13 brings on the wonderful, entitled world of being a teen instead of taking a small step toward adulthood, and according to West “due to the permanent hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, that’s where they’re likely to find most adults.”
For instance, it turns out more adults watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. And while CNN is a low bar, remembering that my old boss, the CEO of a bank, would constantly watch SpongeBob SquarePants, I can believe this.
Ms. West writes that the previous generation was “one not yet under the influence of a youth culture of licentious boys (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) and petulant girls (women’s lib), shaped [by] that most basic human instinct—survival. Elevated by a maturing belief in duty, honor, loyalty, and forbearance, the instinct to survive wasn’t just a self-concern; it was, it turned out, the saving grace of civilization.”
So what’s happened? Why the societal breakdown? We’ve had Republicans and we’ve had Democrats in charge. It doesn’t matter. It’s inflation and democracy. Both shorten people’s time horizons. As a nation, we live for the moment because our money is constantly degraded and our politicians steal from us continuously.
In his masterful examination of the Thomas Mann short story Disorder and Early Sorrow, professor Paul Cantor observes, “Mann is as acute in portraying the psychological effects of inflation as he is in portraying the economic, social and political effects.” Mann shows “inflation fundamentally changes the way people think, forcing them to live for the moment.”
With everyone’s time horizons shortened during the Weimar hyperinflation, hard work and prudent investing are believed foolish. In Death and Early Sorrow, the older generation lost its authority and youth dominated. The children acted like adults and the adults acted like children. “The young are more adaptable to changing conditions, while the old are set in their ways,” writes Cantor, “Hence the young cope better with inflation.”
Mann saw inflation change the dynamic between generations in society. With “the young [having] a huge advantage over the old,” Cantor explains. “Not having experienced economic stability, the youth of Germany are more able to go with the inflationary flow.”
Mann’s principal character, Professor Cornelius, has a servant, young Xaver, who is the perfect inflationary child. Xaver, Mann described, “utterly lacks a sense of duty and can as little be trained to the performance of the daily round and common task as some kinds of dog can be taught to jump over a stick.” Xaver has no feeling for the past and lacks the discipline so prized in Germany.
Cantor points out that the elderly “become increasingly irrelevant” in an inflationary environment. It’s well known that inflation especially punishes those on fixed incomes. “Mann fills in our sense of the psychological disruptions that accompany the economic ravages of inflation,” writes Cantor. “More than any other factor, inflation discredits the authority of the older generation and turns power over to youth.”
With prices soaring, youthful vices look like wisdom; the conservatism and prudence of the elderly are made to look silly.
In his epic Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained that democracy increases societal time preference and with democratic rule “contrary to conventional wisdom, the decivilizing forces inherent in any form of government are systematically strengthened.”
The private ownership of government (monarchy) is much more long-term oriented. Rulers may pass on a nation’s wealth to their heirs. In a democracy, politicians can only use government resources. A president has every incentive to maximize current income at the expense of capital value. A president being a temporary caretaker, explains Hoppe, “will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume.”
And since in a democracy anyone can be president or in government, “public resistance against government power is systematically weakened,” Hoppe writes. “While expropriation and taxation before may have appeared clearly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end.”
Ever oppressive government and increased taxation make saving for the future look futile. One might as well live for today if what you save will only be confiscated by government.
As democracy dictates that the haves take care of the have-nots, “there will be less productive activity, self-reliance and future-orientation, and more consumption, parasitism, dependency and shortsightedness,” Professor Hoppe writes.
What democracy and government have done is to retard the natural tendency of humanity to build an expanding stock of capital and durable consumer goods. Man, instead of becoming increasingly more farsighted and providing for ever more distant goals, is tending toward decivilization. As Hoppe describes, “formerly provident providers will be turned into drunks or daydreamers, adults into children, civilized men into barbarians, and producers into criminals.”
When someone so powerful as Emanuel, leading by example, advocates for the elderly to get out of the way, society has indeed devolved. Too much money and too much government have turned civilized people into barbaric children.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/doug-french/time-for-you-to-die/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)