Tuesday, October 18, 2016
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
"What an ingenious plan to limit the power of government over a free people! And yet we have Time magazine, the voice of the liberal elite, advocating the shredding of the United States Constitution because it is an obstacle to total government."
The True Meaning of Independence Day
Written by Sam Blumenfeld
In the American holiday calendar no day is more significant than the Fourth of July, in which we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. That Declaration proclaimed to the world our separation from Great Britain and our emergence as a new sovereign nation, as we state in the pledge to our flag, "under God, with liberty and justice for all."
The Declaration stated unequivocally: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."
Those few words sum up the divine source of our unalienable rights and our philosophy of government. Nothing quite so revolutionary had been proclaimed anywhere by any people. But those beliefs had to be affirmed by a long, bloody war, which was finally won. The result has been this shining light on a hill, the United States of America, the freest, most creative, productive, and richest nation in the history of mankind.
The Beginning of the End for Slavery
Today, the Declaration of Independence is celebrated as the centerpiece of American political philosophy. It clearly spells out the purpose of government, which is to secure our God-given unalienable rights. A government limited by its basic purpose does not need to incur a back-breaking debt of trillions of dollars. Our legislators have obviously forgotten what is written in the Declaration.
But what about slavery, you might ask? Why didn't the liberty-loving Declaration also abolish slavery? First, the Declaration was not a set of laws. It was a statement of principles — and its principles clearly were anti-slavery. However, they could only be implemented after winning a long, bloody war. Also, at the time the Declaration was written, indentured servitude and slavery were centuries-old worldwide practices that could not be done away with overnight. The truth is that the Declaration did serve as the basis on which slavery was finally abolished in the United States, for it was the Declaration that Lincoln insisted on using in his argument for abolishing what the great Southern statesman Henry Clay called "a foul blot upon our nation."
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln declared:
There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
It should be noted that even though Lincoln abhorred slavery, he was still not ready to accept total social equality. In 1858 most Americans shared Lincoln's views. Maine was the only state in the Union where African-Americans could vote or hold public office. It took the horrible ordeal of the Civil War to speed up the cause of social equality for the ex-slaves. And it took another hundred years to finally get rid of racial segregation. But the leaven of the Declaration's "self-evident truths" finally did work its way so that "all men" could be free.
The Soul of America
It is interesting that we do not widely celebrate Constitution Day, although the United States Constitution provides the legal framework of our form of representative government. The aim of the framers of the Constitution was to make it as difficult as possible for any person or group of persons to establish a despotic regime over the people of this country. They therefore broke up the government into three branches -— Executive, Legislative, and Judicial -— in order to disperse power as widely as possible. And they divided the legislature into two bodies: the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The House of Representatives, representing local Congressional districts, brought the citizen as close to the seat of government as possible. The large states, with their larger number of delegates, could exert power over the smaller states. However, in the Senate the smaller states could exert power over the larger ones. In the Senate, little Rhode Island or Delaware has as much clout as California or New York.
What an ingenious plan to limit the power of government over a free people! And yet we have Time magazine, the voice of the liberal elite, advocating the shredding of the United States Constitution because it is an obstacle to total government.
During the last century, many in the cultural and political elite have favored socialism, a political and economic doctrine contrary to the political beliefs of our Founding Fathers. With this powerful liberal elite pushing for government control over every area of our lives, for over 100 years, how have we managed to retain so many of our freedoms... and even exercise the almost lost freedom to homeschool? It's largely owing to the appetite for freedom still spread by the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence.
Yet, the New World Order socialists would prefer that we write a new Declaration of Interdependence, and joyfully accept the chains of statist tyranny.
But that is why we must celebrate the Fourth of July -— Independence Day -— with all the fervor and joy that the American people can muster. We do so to inform our would-be masters that we are not interested in the collectivist utopia based on atheistic Marxism they wish to impose on us. And that is why we humbly thank the men who gave us our Declaration of Independence, which will remain for future generations of Americans the beacon of liberty, the upholder of our divine unalienable rights, the guardian of our independence. Its words must be written in the hearts and minds of our citizens, so that we never forget the price paid for our freedom ... and the reasons why freedom is worth paying the price.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/10811-the-true-meaning-of-independence-day
Written by Sam Blumenfeld
In the American holiday calendar no day is more significant than the Fourth of July, in which we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. That Declaration proclaimed to the world our separation from Great Britain and our emergence as a new sovereign nation, as we state in the pledge to our flag, "under God, with liberty and justice for all."
The Declaration stated unequivocally: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."
Those few words sum up the divine source of our unalienable rights and our philosophy of government. Nothing quite so revolutionary had been proclaimed anywhere by any people. But those beliefs had to be affirmed by a long, bloody war, which was finally won. The result has been this shining light on a hill, the United States of America, the freest, most creative, productive, and richest nation in the history of mankind.
The Beginning of the End for Slavery
Today, the Declaration of Independence is celebrated as the centerpiece of American political philosophy. It clearly spells out the purpose of government, which is to secure our God-given unalienable rights. A government limited by its basic purpose does not need to incur a back-breaking debt of trillions of dollars. Our legislators have obviously forgotten what is written in the Declaration.
But what about slavery, you might ask? Why didn't the liberty-loving Declaration also abolish slavery? First, the Declaration was not a set of laws. It was a statement of principles — and its principles clearly were anti-slavery. However, they could only be implemented after winning a long, bloody war. Also, at the time the Declaration was written, indentured servitude and slavery were centuries-old worldwide practices that could not be done away with overnight. The truth is that the Declaration did serve as the basis on which slavery was finally abolished in the United States, for it was the Declaration that Lincoln insisted on using in his argument for abolishing what the great Southern statesman Henry Clay called "a foul blot upon our nation."
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Lincoln declared:
There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
It should be noted that even though Lincoln abhorred slavery, he was still not ready to accept total social equality. In 1858 most Americans shared Lincoln's views. Maine was the only state in the Union where African-Americans could vote or hold public office. It took the horrible ordeal of the Civil War to speed up the cause of social equality for the ex-slaves. And it took another hundred years to finally get rid of racial segregation. But the leaven of the Declaration's "self-evident truths" finally did work its way so that "all men" could be free.
The Soul of America
It is interesting that we do not widely celebrate Constitution Day, although the United States Constitution provides the legal framework of our form of representative government. The aim of the framers of the Constitution was to make it as difficult as possible for any person or group of persons to establish a despotic regime over the people of this country. They therefore broke up the government into three branches -— Executive, Legislative, and Judicial -— in order to disperse power as widely as possible. And they divided the legislature into two bodies: the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The House of Representatives, representing local Congressional districts, brought the citizen as close to the seat of government as possible. The large states, with their larger number of delegates, could exert power over the smaller states. However, in the Senate the smaller states could exert power over the larger ones. In the Senate, little Rhode Island or Delaware has as much clout as California or New York.
What an ingenious plan to limit the power of government over a free people! And yet we have Time magazine, the voice of the liberal elite, advocating the shredding of the United States Constitution because it is an obstacle to total government.
During the last century, many in the cultural and political elite have favored socialism, a political and economic doctrine contrary to the political beliefs of our Founding Fathers. With this powerful liberal elite pushing for government control over every area of our lives, for over 100 years, how have we managed to retain so many of our freedoms... and even exercise the almost lost freedom to homeschool? It's largely owing to the appetite for freedom still spread by the ringing words of the Declaration of Independence.
Yet, the New World Order socialists would prefer that we write a new Declaration of Interdependence, and joyfully accept the chains of statist tyranny.
But that is why we must celebrate the Fourth of July -— Independence Day -— with all the fervor and joy that the American people can muster. We do so to inform our would-be masters that we are not interested in the collectivist utopia based on atheistic Marxism they wish to impose on us. And that is why we humbly thank the men who gave us our Declaration of Independence, which will remain for future generations of Americans the beacon of liberty, the upholder of our divine unalienable rights, the guardian of our independence. Its words must be written in the hearts and minds of our citizens, so that we never forget the price paid for our freedom ... and the reasons why freedom is worth paying the price.
Link:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/10811-the-true-meaning-of-independence-day
The American secession...
Nine Points to Ponder About the Fourth of July
by Jacob G. Hornberger
There are some significant points to ponder about the Fourth of July, among which are:
1. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not American citizens. They were British citizens. They were every much citizens of England as Americans today are citizens of the United States. They were simply British citizens living abroad, much as many Americans today live abroad.
2. Once the fighting started, British citizens, both here and at home, were exhorted to support the troops. It has been estimated that about 1/3 of the British citizens living here did support the troops and thanked them for their service. Another 1/3 stayed neutral. But the remaining one-third, including those who signed the Declaration, refused to support the troops. In fact, not only did they refuse to support the troops (and thank them for their service), they actually did their best to shoot them and kill them. Keep in mind that the troops were the soldiers who were loyally obeying the orders of their superiors to shoot and kill their own citizens — specifically, the 1/3 of the British people over here who had chosen to rebel against their government.
3. If the troops had prevailed against the British rebels, the men who signed the Declaration would have gone down in history as nothing more than criminals, terrorists, brigands, and traitors. Even today, the British still do not honor such former British citizens as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Nathan Hale for their courage and patriotism. For the British, citizens who refuse to support the troops, refuse to thank them for their service, and do their best to shoot and kill them are not worth honoring. In fact, those men who signed the Declaration of Independence were essentially signing their death warrants because if they had lost, there is little doubt that their government would have executed them as criminals, terrorists, brigands, and traitors, especially after many of them had shot and killed British soldiers.
4. If the troops had succeeded in confiscating the weapons of their fellow citizens at Concord and Lexington and elsewhere, there wouldn’t have been a revolution. That’s because the British citizens living here would have lacked the means to resist the tyranny of their own government, which was being enforced by the troops.
5. The American Revolution wasn’t actually a revolution but instead was a secession. A revolution is when citizens are trying to oust a ruling regime and take control over their own government. That’s not what happened during the Revolutionary War. The British citizens living here were not trying to take control over the British government over there. Instead, the message simply was: “We don’t want to be part of your nation anymore and instead want to form our own nation.” In fact, that act of secession in 1776 was really no different in principle from the act of secession that would take place on the part of the Confederacy in 1861, where the citizens of the South said the same thing: “We don’t want to be part of your nation anymore and instead want to form our own nation.”
6. Among the acts of tyranny against which the British citizens here were rebelling were immigration controls. The king — their king (because it was their government, not some foreign government) — had restricted the entry of foreigners into New World colonies. The British citizens living over here considered such immigration controls to be tyrannical and expressly enumerated them in the Declaration among the reasons for declaring independence from their own government.
7. It wasn’t just “taxation without representation” that the colonists objected to. It was taxation itself. That position was reflected in the Articles of Confederation, under which America lived for more than a decade after the Declaration was signed. Under the Articles, the federal government lacked the power to tax, and the federal government complied with that restriction on its power. Even under the Constitution, which replaced the Articles, the federal government was denied the power to levy direct taxes, which resulted in a nation in which there was no income taxation and IRS for more than a century.
8. The Constitution, which called the federal government into existence, was guided by the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. That’s why the American people, notwithstanding slavery, tariffs, and other exceptions to freedom, ended up with a nation with no income tax, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, drug laws, DEA, Departments of Labor, Agriculture, Housing, Homeland Security, Education, and others, public (i.e., government) schooling, immigration controls, minimum-wage laws, Federal Reserve System, fiat (i.e., paper) money, gun control, military-industrial complex, enormous standing army, CIA, NSA, national-security state, and foreign military bases. Needless to say, that way of life was the most radical political and economic system in history, one that has never again been replicated. For more than 100 years, that way of life was what our American ancestors celebrated as freedom every Fourth of July.
9. The most important aspect of the Revolution was the message regarding fundamental rights found in the Declaration. It stated that all men are born with fundamental, unalienable rights that preexist government and that no government can legitimately take away. Such rights include, but are not limited to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That message shocked the world because throughout history people have believed that their lives and fortunes are subject to whatever their government dictates, especially with respect to economic activity. Even today, many Americans believe what people throughout history have believed — that government can legitimately do whatever it deems is in the best interests of the citizenry and the nation. The result is a way of life that we now know as the “welfare-warfare state,” a way of life that many modern-day Americans celebrate as “freedom” on the Fourth of July. Not so, of course, for libertarians, who still celebrate the concept of freedom that guided those British citizens who signed the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, 1776.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/07/05/eight-points-ponder-fourth-july/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
There are some significant points to ponder about the Fourth of July, among which are:
1. The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not American citizens. They were British citizens. They were every much citizens of England as Americans today are citizens of the United States. They were simply British citizens living abroad, much as many Americans today live abroad.
2. Once the fighting started, British citizens, both here and at home, were exhorted to support the troops. It has been estimated that about 1/3 of the British citizens living here did support the troops and thanked them for their service. Another 1/3 stayed neutral. But the remaining one-third, including those who signed the Declaration, refused to support the troops. In fact, not only did they refuse to support the troops (and thank them for their service), they actually did their best to shoot them and kill them. Keep in mind that the troops were the soldiers who were loyally obeying the orders of their superiors to shoot and kill their own citizens — specifically, the 1/3 of the British people over here who had chosen to rebel against their government.
3. If the troops had prevailed against the British rebels, the men who signed the Declaration would have gone down in history as nothing more than criminals, terrorists, brigands, and traitors. Even today, the British still do not honor such former British citizens as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Nathan Hale for their courage and patriotism. For the British, citizens who refuse to support the troops, refuse to thank them for their service, and do their best to shoot and kill them are not worth honoring. In fact, those men who signed the Declaration of Independence were essentially signing their death warrants because if they had lost, there is little doubt that their government would have executed them as criminals, terrorists, brigands, and traitors, especially after many of them had shot and killed British soldiers.
4. If the troops had succeeded in confiscating the weapons of their fellow citizens at Concord and Lexington and elsewhere, there wouldn’t have been a revolution. That’s because the British citizens living here would have lacked the means to resist the tyranny of their own government, which was being enforced by the troops.
5. The American Revolution wasn’t actually a revolution but instead was a secession. A revolution is when citizens are trying to oust a ruling regime and take control over their own government. That’s not what happened during the Revolutionary War. The British citizens living here were not trying to take control over the British government over there. Instead, the message simply was: “We don’t want to be part of your nation anymore and instead want to form our own nation.” In fact, that act of secession in 1776 was really no different in principle from the act of secession that would take place on the part of the Confederacy in 1861, where the citizens of the South said the same thing: “We don’t want to be part of your nation anymore and instead want to form our own nation.”
6. Among the acts of tyranny against which the British citizens here were rebelling were immigration controls. The king — their king (because it was their government, not some foreign government) — had restricted the entry of foreigners into New World colonies. The British citizens living over here considered such immigration controls to be tyrannical and expressly enumerated them in the Declaration among the reasons for declaring independence from their own government.
7. It wasn’t just “taxation without representation” that the colonists objected to. It was taxation itself. That position was reflected in the Articles of Confederation, under which America lived for more than a decade after the Declaration was signed. Under the Articles, the federal government lacked the power to tax, and the federal government complied with that restriction on its power. Even under the Constitution, which replaced the Articles, the federal government was denied the power to levy direct taxes, which resulted in a nation in which there was no income taxation and IRS for more than a century.
8. The Constitution, which called the federal government into existence, was guided by the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. That’s why the American people, notwithstanding slavery, tariffs, and other exceptions to freedom, ended up with a nation with no income tax, IRS, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, drug laws, DEA, Departments of Labor, Agriculture, Housing, Homeland Security, Education, and others, public (i.e., government) schooling, immigration controls, minimum-wage laws, Federal Reserve System, fiat (i.e., paper) money, gun control, military-industrial complex, enormous standing army, CIA, NSA, national-security state, and foreign military bases. Needless to say, that way of life was the most radical political and economic system in history, one that has never again been replicated. For more than 100 years, that way of life was what our American ancestors celebrated as freedom every Fourth of July.
9. The most important aspect of the Revolution was the message regarding fundamental rights found in the Declaration. It stated that all men are born with fundamental, unalienable rights that preexist government and that no government can legitimately take away. Such rights include, but are not limited to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That message shocked the world because throughout history people have believed that their lives and fortunes are subject to whatever their government dictates, especially with respect to economic activity. Even today, many Americans believe what people throughout history have believed — that government can legitimately do whatever it deems is in the best interests of the citizenry and the nation. The result is a way of life that we now know as the “welfare-warfare state,” a way of life that many modern-day Americans celebrate as “freedom” on the Fourth of July. Not so, of course, for libertarians, who still celebrate the concept of freedom that guided those British citizens who signed the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, 1776.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/07/05/eight-points-ponder-fourth-july/
The way you lead your life every single day can be a personal Declaration of Independence...
How to Make Your Life a Declaration of Independence
Daisy Luther
This year, the 4th of July simply makes me sad.
I was trying to summon up a rush of pride to write about what makes our country great, and all I could think about was how far we’ve sunk. How distant we’ve ventured from those original settlers who said, “No more!” and declared their independence. They fought and sacrificed to be free of a government that oppressed them, taxed them, stole from them, and enforced rules without any type of representation upon them.
We have somehow forgotten what freedom really means and so we have lost it, incrementally and for many people, voluntarily.
Here we stand today, on July 4, 2016, with a government that has systematically crushed the rights that were demanded 240 years ago when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.
They tax us unreasonably, and if we don’t pay, they will take the money right from our bank accounts or steal our possessions.
In many states, we must ask for permission to catch a fish, drive a car, own a gun, or build an extra room onto our homes, just to name a few.
Permits and licenses are big revenue generators from start to finish – and if you proceed without asking permission, they will extort more money from you in the form of fines. If you refuse to pay the fines (or if you can’t) they’ll kidnap you and lock you in a cage, where you’ll be forced to perform manual labor for 10 cents an hour for whatever length of time the legal authorities feel is sufficient to teach you a lesson.
Then there’s civil asset forfeiture. In many instances, without due process or a trial, our possessions and money can be taken from us on the “suspicion” that they are the benefits of some crime we haven’t been convicted of.
We’re unable to voice our opinions without incurring the wrath of so-called social justice warriors, who may actually mean well in an idealistic kind of way, but end up causing more oppression when they try to right a wrong by forcing people to abide by their way of thinking.
Every time a bad act occurs, people plead to give away even more of their freedom because they believe it will make them safer. They are willing to be fondled and naked-body-scanned by the TSA in order to board a plane. They want to make a phone call and wait for the police to save them instead of picking up their own firearm and refusing to be a victim. They want to be surrounded by gun free zones, rainbows, and armed guards instead of taking responsibility for their own safety.
People believe that they must go and vote and choose “the lesser of two evils” in a presidential election that has been shown to be a sham directed by the media and social networks. Why must we choose between evils? Are there really no good people in America that could take on that office? Perhaps the candidates we get are the candidates we deserve when we refuse to demand better.
Somehow, this land of rugged individuals has become populated with scared children, who expect to be cared for, fed, protected, and made to feel good about themselves, all by government mandate. Many people seem to have no desire whatsoever to earn their keep, provide for their families, or take responsibility for their own safety. They expect the workplace to be one of sunshine and lollipops, with ample time off, equal pay for all, and. don’t forget, lots of kind words for everyone.
Our culture is just so incredibly dependent.
And to some extent, we’ve let this happen because they are louder than us.
Freedom is terrifying to most people because it means that they and they alone, are responsible for the actions that they take. An independent person succeeds or fails on his or her own merit. Independence by its very nature means that the possibility of failure exists. It requires a sense of adventure, confidence, and the ability to fail and get right back up again, and it seems like these things are being bred out of the American people.
What “independence” actually means
“Independent”, by definition, is the opposite of dependent. Here’s a whole list of definitions:
1. not influenced or controlled by others in matters of opinion, conduct, etc.; thinking or acting for oneself.
2. not subject to another’s authority or jurisdiction; autonomous; free
3. not influenced by the thought or action of others.
4. not dependent; not depending or contingent upon something else for existence, operation, etc.
5. not relying on another or others for aid or support.
6. rejecting others’ aid or support; refusing to be under obligation to others.
7. possessing a competency.
So, if you are, at heart, a free person, the above is the description of your character.
Maybe you read that list and realized it doesn’t describe you. With some hard work and a big dose of courage, it can. Here’s how:
You must reduce your dependence on everything that is out of your control.
You must reduce your dependence on the government, the large corporations, the transportation system, money, the banking system, entities like the FDA and the USDA. All of these are marketed to us to make it seem like we can’t survive without them.
Those who signed the Declaration of Independence, hundreds of years ago, knew this was the case. When Britain tried to coerce them and convince them that they needed help and governance from the other side of the ocean, those patriots decided that there was not one single thing that England could provide for them that they needed enough to remain under the rule of the King. (Click here to read about how high the cost of freedom was for some of those men.)
Once you decide that there’s nothing that you need, then the boogeymen who would control us all lose their power. That’s why nearly everything you need to do to become self-sustaining is either illegal or strongly discouraged: milk straight from the cow, water collection, front-yard vegetable gardens, carrying a firearm. They need you to need them.
“Government” is a giant scam.
The government is not really made up of the elected officials that it purports. It’s made up, mostly, by people who sell their souls to huge corporations that have an interest in beneficial laws being passed and laws that would harm their businesses shut down before they ever reach the desk of the presidents.
As well, the supposed watchdog entities, like the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture are also populated by those who have been hand-picked to support corporations, no matter what the detriment to the American people whom they pretend to protect. If Congress was like Nascar, the members would have to wear uniforms emblazoned with their sponsors. However, Washington DC does not have the transparency of professional car racing, so we must guess at the sponsors of our members.
We are buried under silly laws with the sole purpose of generating revenue or adding to the slave labor force in the for-profit prison system. We must work most of our waking hours to be able to pay for our basic necessities. We are convinced repeatedly that we must have things that our ancestors would never have considered owning, much less requiring.
Hand in hand, the mega-corporations and the government entities work together to keep us subservient and in our places. The corporations create products, the watchdog agencies “test” the products, and the government mandates an artificial need for these products.
They have most people convinced that they must follow the food pyramid, the vaccine schedule, and the rules that force us to have licenses for every darned thing we do. We must pay for and be granted permission to feed ourselves, transport ourselves, build shelter for ourselves, unite in matrimony, and even to own pets.
Like some kind of frighteningly authoritarian parent, they assure us that it’s for our own safety, these breaches in our independence, and that we must comply or face the consequences. They ground us by taking away our licenses. They send us to our rooms that just happen to be located in for-profit prisons. They don’t “allow” us to pursue life, liberty, and happiness because once we taste that sweet freedom, we won’t want to be under their oppressive thumbs anymore.
But some of us have seen the corporate government for what it is: a bully that reigns through fear of reprisal. They hold over us these fears:
We will die if we don’t eat things that were inspected and approved by them.
We will be jailed, fined, or have our children taken from us if we don’t toe the line.
We are unable to figure things out for ourselves because we are not “experts” and therefore we must suppress our own judgments and bow to their far greater knowledge.
We will die if we don’t follow their expert health and nutrition advice.
We’ll be murdered by scary foreign terrorists if we don’t allow the TSA to fondle our private parts, make us walk barefoot for 30 yards, and perform x-rays that show us naked before we fly.
Because some people fear these things and believe these tales so thoroughly, they allow the government to enforce ridiculous, unconstitutional laws “for our own safety.” They say, “Better that I give up my rights as a human being and save the world from a terrorist.” They justify, “These agents are only doing their jobs.” Heck, I’ve even heard people in line at the airport thank the TSA for patting them down.
Stockholm Syndrome and the government
Our government strives to create in its citizens a dependency. They want us to feel as though we actually can’t survive without them.strive to induce Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological term that was coined after
There’s a name for this: Stockholm Syndrome., a psychological term that was coined after
Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological term that was coined after 6-day siege at a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. The 4 hostages began to feel affection, even love, for their captors.
The phrase was reported to have been coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot. Psychiatrist Dr Frank Ochberg was intrigued by the phenomenon and went on to define the syndrome for the FBI and Scotland Yard in the 1970s…
…His criteria included the following: “First people would experience something terrifying that just comes at them out of the blue. They are certain they are going to die.
“Then they experience a type of infantilisation – where, like a child, they are unable to eat, speak or go to the toilet without permission.”
Small acts of kindness – such as being given food – prompts a “primitive gratitude for the gift of life,” he explains.
“The hostages experience a powerful, primitive positive feeling towards their captor. They are in denial that this is the person who put them in that situation. In their mind, they think this is the person who is going to let them live.” (source)
Stockholm Syndrome is defined as “feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.”
Sounds familiar, right?
So here’s how the government does it.
The corporate system is constructed around making us feel as though we need what they are offering. They want us to believe we need their expertise, their handouts, their approvals, and their protection. They want us to feel that we are not capable of making our own decisions without their input.
Once they create this insecurity in you, then you have become their slave.
You must work, almost non-stop, to be able to afford the lifestyle they tell you to have. Your home must meet their standards, your dependence upon the grid is absolute, and you must never, ever partake of a food that has not passed their approval process. You should call the experts to protect you, via 911, as opposed to taking care of your own security. Your children must be supervised constantly, unable to grow and seek adventures, in order to create the next generation of adults who submit without even realizing they are doing so.
When it’s put like that, you can see how absolutely ridiculous it all is, right?
Let’s take food, for example.
Historically, in nearly every takeover of the modern world, food was involved. Think of communist China in the early 1960s or the Holodomor, for two examples. The government took control of the farms “for the good of the people.” They controlled all of the food – every single bite. If you complied, you ate. If you rebelled, you starved.
Back 100 years ago, people drank milk. You got it from cows as opposed to the store. Now, the substance they drank is called “raw milk” and it’s the subject of taboos, warnings, and legal hoops that must be jumped through. It’s a million times easier to purchase a known carcinogen (cigarettes) or a mood-altering substance (alcohol) than it is to get fresh, creamy milk from a cow and drink it. We’ve been brainwashed into believing our milk must be heated to the point that the good bacteria is exterminated and then approved by the USDA before we’re able to drink it. Milk is controlled like a dangerous Level 1 narcotic, for crying out loud. But pasteurized milk from the store, originated from cows that were given recombinant bovine growth hormone and antibiotics, is perfectly fine. It’s USDA approved.
In a million small ways, folks are being brainwashed that we require permission to do nearly everything. Think of an abusive relationship, because our relationship with the government is a classic example of such a thing.
The abuser says things like this to the victim:
“You’d never survive without me.”
“You obviously need me to take care of you because you aren’t smart enough to take care of yourself.”
“Why did you do that without my permission? Now, you’re going to be punished.”
“I’m doing this for your own good.”
The abuser keeps track of your time, makes you account for your earnings, seizes your personal belongings, coerces you into doing things you don’t want to do, and harshly discourages any vestiges of independence. Because if you are independent, they have lost control of you. Compliance is rewarded and rebellion is punished.
Let the TSA pat you down, you are allowed to travel. Refuse to be groped and you lose the price of your plane ticket and your opportunity to go to your cousin’s wedding by air. Sell a homemade edible product that hasn’t been “inspected” and approved by local officials, they will fine your business out of existence. Not only this, but occasionally we’re allowed to feel we’re independent and do these things, and we pay extra for the privileges for living our lives, traveling, and earning a living.
There is is something you can do.
Whether you call it freedom, liberty, sovereignty, or self-governance, the point remains the same: if you’re reading this, you probably want to determine your own life, whether the result is success or failure. You want to have control over your ability to live, truly live, and not merely exist as a slave to the powers that be.
There actually is something we can do.
We can say no.
Hell, no.
We can be the squeaky wheel.
We can be louder than those dependent, noisy individuals who want to throw away liberty. We can.
You may feel like you aren’t in the right place in life to declare your independence. Perhaps you don’t have room to raise your own food. Perhaps you have a physical handicap that bars you from living 30 miles from civilization in a yurt located down a dirt road, over a creek, and in the woods. Maybe it’s all you can do financially to keep the refrigerator full of groceries for the week.
But wherever you are right now, that’s okay. Wherever you are, know that every single person, even the very free-est person you know, started at a place that was less free than where they are right now. The most important thing is to begin to recognize the chains that are on you so that you can begin, link by link, to break them.
How do you break free of the life that nearly every single person around you lives?
It’s simple, yet so complicated. Here it is, the ultimate act of insurrection:
You have to need less.
When you need less, you have less to fear.
Now, every year when I write about this topic, a few people come out of the woodwork to claim, “It’s not enough.” Not everyone is a warrior, but taking steps to become freer than you were the day before is a cause for celebration.
It is simply reality that most of us cannot make a stand in every single aspect of our lives. We have children that could be taken away from us. We have homes that could be seized. We fear being imprisoned in a cage. I get that, truly. I don’t want to lose my daughter or my home or be thrown in jail either. The folks in control have done their job in that respect, but we can work around it.
We can refuse to eat the poisoned apple that they graciously hand to us. We can stop sending their children to public school for “free” education.We can all stop purchasing processed food that originated as the bastard child of factory farming and a chemistry project. We can refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, K-mart, or any of those corporate discount stores that have their products manufactured in sweat shops overseas so that they can undercut the Mom & Pop stores right out of business.
I use well water . I raise as much food as I can and I buy the stuff I can’t raise from farmer friends who treat their animals well. I don’t watch television and haven’t seen a commercial in more than a year, so I’m not really sure what it is I “need”. I buy things I actually do need from local craftsmen and I have things repaired instead of replaced. I don’t pay interest to the banks, heck – I don’t even leave money in the bank. 911 is not my default for home security. We don’t have Obamacare, cable TV, a major credit card, or a home phone. I live my life quietly, and without many of the things that others consider “necessities.”
You might be thinking, “What about the children? Don’t they feel deprived?”
I don’t believe that they do. My oldest daughter graduated from college, debt free. We budgeted carefully, she won scholarships, and she gets to start her life without being in the hole. She can take her time and travel the world before she gets a “real” job, because she doesn’t have a student loan hanging over her head that requires her to dive into full-time permanent servitude right now.
My youngest daughter stays up until midnight and sleeps until noon all year round, because she is not subject to school bells at specific times. Her grades are very good, and she has far more free time than her public-schooled friends. She takes care of horses, dogs, and cats. She actually earns a substantial amount of money shoveling poop for people who don’t have the time or inclination to do so. For fun, she hikes, plays with animals, and shoots her long bow. She meets up with other home-schooled kids to hang out because they aren’t tied to an arbitrary schedule either.
I spend my mornings outside with the animals. I check on the vegetable garden and see if there will soon be something to harvest. Instead of an iPod, my music is the birds, the wild turkeys, the happy chickens, eager to get out and start looking for bugs. I spend my days learning: about health, nutrition, natural remedies, old methods of gardening and preservation, and needlecraft. I read the books I always wanted to read. We don’t spend a lot of money and that decreases a great deal of our need for money. I don’t have to sell the majority of the hours in my day for enough money to survive the other hours.
Every single day, I strive to reduce my vulnerability to coercion. Because the less I need, the more difficult I am to manipulate.
And you?
You don’t need this stuff they are offering, either. There is so much that you can do to free yourself from them.
You have a natural human right to be free.
This freedom is also supposed to be protected by our Constitution, which gets undermined on a regular basis. If you aren’t free, then revolution is your duty. Part of the power that the government holds over people is the fact that they hold the keys to the stuff we need. So, true independence is not to need the stuff they have. When there is nothing that you require enough to submit, then bullying you becomes much more difficult.
Make your life a declaration of independence.
Here are a few steps you can take to make yourself less dependent on the whims of the economy, the government, and corporate interests. Don’t worry if they seem impractical to you. They may not all be possible right this moment. Pick one and act on it, then another. Every journey begins with the decision to start the trip.
If you reduce your consumerist habits, you will lower your cost of living. Then, you’ll need less money.
If you need less money, you can stop exchanging as much of your time for dollars.
If you grow your own food, you will never be dependent on the government to help you to afford to buy food made more expensive by their onerous regulations and made less healthy by for-profit companies that process it beyond recognition, all with a government stamp of approval. (Not to mention how much better the quality will be.)
If you barter your goods or services for someone else’s goods or services, then no one else needs to be involved. (Although I’m sure both parties will be happy to pay the government the taxes due for the barter exchange. *cough*)
If you don’t send your kids to school, and instead, educate them at home, then you don’t need to get them vaccinated so they can attend school. You don’t have to watch them get brainwashed into dependency like the other kids. You don’t have to send them to a place that is so akin to prison that they can only go to the bathroom in the minutes between bells.
If you don’t make much money, you don’t pay much in the way of taxes.
If you are self-employed, you can’t be threatened with the loss of your job for non-compliance with *pick a ridiculous law*
If you shop locally, from farms and craftsmen, you don’t need the big box stores.
If you have the ability and equipment to defend yourself, you don’t need to call 911.
If you always object to unfairness, unconstitutional behavior, and dishonesty, you can help shed light on the issues at hand, and that is always the first step towards resolving them.
The way you lead your life every single day can be a personal Declaration of Independence.
By refusing to concede your natural rights, quietly and resolutely, you are performing an act of revolution.
This only requires one thing: your consistent determination not to be infringed upon.
Go ahead. Be free.
Link:
http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/9166-07042016
Daisy Luther
This year, the 4th of July simply makes me sad.
I was trying to summon up a rush of pride to write about what makes our country great, and all I could think about was how far we’ve sunk. How distant we’ve ventured from those original settlers who said, “No more!” and declared their independence. They fought and sacrificed to be free of a government that oppressed them, taxed them, stole from them, and enforced rules without any type of representation upon them.
We have somehow forgotten what freedom really means and so we have lost it, incrementally and for many people, voluntarily.
Here we stand today, on July 4, 2016, with a government that has systematically crushed the rights that were demanded 240 years ago when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.
They tax us unreasonably, and if we don’t pay, they will take the money right from our bank accounts or steal our possessions.
In many states, we must ask for permission to catch a fish, drive a car, own a gun, or build an extra room onto our homes, just to name a few.
Permits and licenses are big revenue generators from start to finish – and if you proceed without asking permission, they will extort more money from you in the form of fines. If you refuse to pay the fines (or if you can’t) they’ll kidnap you and lock you in a cage, where you’ll be forced to perform manual labor for 10 cents an hour for whatever length of time the legal authorities feel is sufficient to teach you a lesson.
Then there’s civil asset forfeiture. In many instances, without due process or a trial, our possessions and money can be taken from us on the “suspicion” that they are the benefits of some crime we haven’t been convicted of.
We’re unable to voice our opinions without incurring the wrath of so-called social justice warriors, who may actually mean well in an idealistic kind of way, but end up causing more oppression when they try to right a wrong by forcing people to abide by their way of thinking.
Every time a bad act occurs, people plead to give away even more of their freedom because they believe it will make them safer. They are willing to be fondled and naked-body-scanned by the TSA in order to board a plane. They want to make a phone call and wait for the police to save them instead of picking up their own firearm and refusing to be a victim. They want to be surrounded by gun free zones, rainbows, and armed guards instead of taking responsibility for their own safety.
People believe that they must go and vote and choose “the lesser of two evils” in a presidential election that has been shown to be a sham directed by the media and social networks. Why must we choose between evils? Are there really no good people in America that could take on that office? Perhaps the candidates we get are the candidates we deserve when we refuse to demand better.
Somehow, this land of rugged individuals has become populated with scared children, who expect to be cared for, fed, protected, and made to feel good about themselves, all by government mandate. Many people seem to have no desire whatsoever to earn their keep, provide for their families, or take responsibility for their own safety. They expect the workplace to be one of sunshine and lollipops, with ample time off, equal pay for all, and. don’t forget, lots of kind words for everyone.
Our culture is just so incredibly dependent.
And to some extent, we’ve let this happen because they are louder than us.
Freedom is terrifying to most people because it means that they and they alone, are responsible for the actions that they take. An independent person succeeds or fails on his or her own merit. Independence by its very nature means that the possibility of failure exists. It requires a sense of adventure, confidence, and the ability to fail and get right back up again, and it seems like these things are being bred out of the American people.
What “independence” actually means
“Independent”, by definition, is the opposite of dependent. Here’s a whole list of definitions:
1. not influenced or controlled by others in matters of opinion, conduct, etc.; thinking or acting for oneself.
2. not subject to another’s authority or jurisdiction; autonomous; free
3. not influenced by the thought or action of others.
4. not dependent; not depending or contingent upon something else for existence, operation, etc.
5. not relying on another or others for aid or support.
6. rejecting others’ aid or support; refusing to be under obligation to others.
7. possessing a competency.
So, if you are, at heart, a free person, the above is the description of your character.
Maybe you read that list and realized it doesn’t describe you. With some hard work and a big dose of courage, it can. Here’s how:
You must reduce your dependence on everything that is out of your control.
You must reduce your dependence on the government, the large corporations, the transportation system, money, the banking system, entities like the FDA and the USDA. All of these are marketed to us to make it seem like we can’t survive without them.
Those who signed the Declaration of Independence, hundreds of years ago, knew this was the case. When Britain tried to coerce them and convince them that they needed help and governance from the other side of the ocean, those patriots decided that there was not one single thing that England could provide for them that they needed enough to remain under the rule of the King. (Click here to read about how high the cost of freedom was for some of those men.)
Once you decide that there’s nothing that you need, then the boogeymen who would control us all lose their power. That’s why nearly everything you need to do to become self-sustaining is either illegal or strongly discouraged: milk straight from the cow, water collection, front-yard vegetable gardens, carrying a firearm. They need you to need them.
“Government” is a giant scam.
The government is not really made up of the elected officials that it purports. It’s made up, mostly, by people who sell their souls to huge corporations that have an interest in beneficial laws being passed and laws that would harm their businesses shut down before they ever reach the desk of the presidents.
As well, the supposed watchdog entities, like the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture are also populated by those who have been hand-picked to support corporations, no matter what the detriment to the American people whom they pretend to protect. If Congress was like Nascar, the members would have to wear uniforms emblazoned with their sponsors. However, Washington DC does not have the transparency of professional car racing, so we must guess at the sponsors of our members.
We are buried under silly laws with the sole purpose of generating revenue or adding to the slave labor force in the for-profit prison system. We must work most of our waking hours to be able to pay for our basic necessities. We are convinced repeatedly that we must have things that our ancestors would never have considered owning, much less requiring.
Hand in hand, the mega-corporations and the government entities work together to keep us subservient and in our places. The corporations create products, the watchdog agencies “test” the products, and the government mandates an artificial need for these products.
They have most people convinced that they must follow the food pyramid, the vaccine schedule, and the rules that force us to have licenses for every darned thing we do. We must pay for and be granted permission to feed ourselves, transport ourselves, build shelter for ourselves, unite in matrimony, and even to own pets.
Like some kind of frighteningly authoritarian parent, they assure us that it’s for our own safety, these breaches in our independence, and that we must comply or face the consequences. They ground us by taking away our licenses. They send us to our rooms that just happen to be located in for-profit prisons. They don’t “allow” us to pursue life, liberty, and happiness because once we taste that sweet freedom, we won’t want to be under their oppressive thumbs anymore.
But some of us have seen the corporate government for what it is: a bully that reigns through fear of reprisal. They hold over us these fears:
We will die if we don’t eat things that were inspected and approved by them.
We will be jailed, fined, or have our children taken from us if we don’t toe the line.
We are unable to figure things out for ourselves because we are not “experts” and therefore we must suppress our own judgments and bow to their far greater knowledge.
We will die if we don’t follow their expert health and nutrition advice.
We’ll be murdered by scary foreign terrorists if we don’t allow the TSA to fondle our private parts, make us walk barefoot for 30 yards, and perform x-rays that show us naked before we fly.
Because some people fear these things and believe these tales so thoroughly, they allow the government to enforce ridiculous, unconstitutional laws “for our own safety.” They say, “Better that I give up my rights as a human being and save the world from a terrorist.” They justify, “These agents are only doing their jobs.” Heck, I’ve even heard people in line at the airport thank the TSA for patting them down.
Stockholm Syndrome and the government
Our government strives to create in its citizens a dependency. They want us to feel as though we actually can’t survive without them.strive to induce Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological term that was coined after
There’s a name for this: Stockholm Syndrome., a psychological term that was coined after
Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological term that was coined after 6-day siege at a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. The 4 hostages began to feel affection, even love, for their captors.
The phrase was reported to have been coined by criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot. Psychiatrist Dr Frank Ochberg was intrigued by the phenomenon and went on to define the syndrome for the FBI and Scotland Yard in the 1970s…
…His criteria included the following: “First people would experience something terrifying that just comes at them out of the blue. They are certain they are going to die.
“Then they experience a type of infantilisation – where, like a child, they are unable to eat, speak or go to the toilet without permission.”
Small acts of kindness – such as being given food – prompts a “primitive gratitude for the gift of life,” he explains.
“The hostages experience a powerful, primitive positive feeling towards their captor. They are in denial that this is the person who put them in that situation. In their mind, they think this is the person who is going to let them live.” (source)
Stockholm Syndrome is defined as “feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim toward a captor.”
Sounds familiar, right?
So here’s how the government does it.
The corporate system is constructed around making us feel as though we need what they are offering. They want us to believe we need their expertise, their handouts, their approvals, and their protection. They want us to feel that we are not capable of making our own decisions without their input.
Once they create this insecurity in you, then you have become their slave.
You must work, almost non-stop, to be able to afford the lifestyle they tell you to have. Your home must meet their standards, your dependence upon the grid is absolute, and you must never, ever partake of a food that has not passed their approval process. You should call the experts to protect you, via 911, as opposed to taking care of your own security. Your children must be supervised constantly, unable to grow and seek adventures, in order to create the next generation of adults who submit without even realizing they are doing so.
When it’s put like that, you can see how absolutely ridiculous it all is, right?
Let’s take food, for example.
Historically, in nearly every takeover of the modern world, food was involved. Think of communist China in the early 1960s or the Holodomor, for two examples. The government took control of the farms “for the good of the people.” They controlled all of the food – every single bite. If you complied, you ate. If you rebelled, you starved.
Back 100 years ago, people drank milk. You got it from cows as opposed to the store. Now, the substance they drank is called “raw milk” and it’s the subject of taboos, warnings, and legal hoops that must be jumped through. It’s a million times easier to purchase a known carcinogen (cigarettes) or a mood-altering substance (alcohol) than it is to get fresh, creamy milk from a cow and drink it. We’ve been brainwashed into believing our milk must be heated to the point that the good bacteria is exterminated and then approved by the USDA before we’re able to drink it. Milk is controlled like a dangerous Level 1 narcotic, for crying out loud. But pasteurized milk from the store, originated from cows that were given recombinant bovine growth hormone and antibiotics, is perfectly fine. It’s USDA approved.
In a million small ways, folks are being brainwashed that we require permission to do nearly everything. Think of an abusive relationship, because our relationship with the government is a classic example of such a thing.
The abuser says things like this to the victim:
“You’d never survive without me.”
“You obviously need me to take care of you because you aren’t smart enough to take care of yourself.”
“Why did you do that without my permission? Now, you’re going to be punished.”
“I’m doing this for your own good.”
The abuser keeps track of your time, makes you account for your earnings, seizes your personal belongings, coerces you into doing things you don’t want to do, and harshly discourages any vestiges of independence. Because if you are independent, they have lost control of you. Compliance is rewarded and rebellion is punished.
Let the TSA pat you down, you are allowed to travel. Refuse to be groped and you lose the price of your plane ticket and your opportunity to go to your cousin’s wedding by air. Sell a homemade edible product that hasn’t been “inspected” and approved by local officials, they will fine your business out of existence. Not only this, but occasionally we’re allowed to feel we’re independent and do these things, and we pay extra for the privileges for living our lives, traveling, and earning a living.
There is is something you can do.
Whether you call it freedom, liberty, sovereignty, or self-governance, the point remains the same: if you’re reading this, you probably want to determine your own life, whether the result is success or failure. You want to have control over your ability to live, truly live, and not merely exist as a slave to the powers that be.
There actually is something we can do.
We can say no.
Hell, no.
We can be the squeaky wheel.
We can be louder than those dependent, noisy individuals who want to throw away liberty. We can.
You may feel like you aren’t in the right place in life to declare your independence. Perhaps you don’t have room to raise your own food. Perhaps you have a physical handicap that bars you from living 30 miles from civilization in a yurt located down a dirt road, over a creek, and in the woods. Maybe it’s all you can do financially to keep the refrigerator full of groceries for the week.
But wherever you are right now, that’s okay. Wherever you are, know that every single person, even the very free-est person you know, started at a place that was less free than where they are right now. The most important thing is to begin to recognize the chains that are on you so that you can begin, link by link, to break them.
How do you break free of the life that nearly every single person around you lives?
It’s simple, yet so complicated. Here it is, the ultimate act of insurrection:
You have to need less.
When you need less, you have less to fear.
Now, every year when I write about this topic, a few people come out of the woodwork to claim, “It’s not enough.” Not everyone is a warrior, but taking steps to become freer than you were the day before is a cause for celebration.
It is simply reality that most of us cannot make a stand in every single aspect of our lives. We have children that could be taken away from us. We have homes that could be seized. We fear being imprisoned in a cage. I get that, truly. I don’t want to lose my daughter or my home or be thrown in jail either. The folks in control have done their job in that respect, but we can work around it.
We can refuse to eat the poisoned apple that they graciously hand to us. We can stop sending their children to public school for “free” education.We can all stop purchasing processed food that originated as the bastard child of factory farming and a chemistry project. We can refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, K-mart, or any of those corporate discount stores that have their products manufactured in sweat shops overseas so that they can undercut the Mom & Pop stores right out of business.
I use well water . I raise as much food as I can and I buy the stuff I can’t raise from farmer friends who treat their animals well. I don’t watch television and haven’t seen a commercial in more than a year, so I’m not really sure what it is I “need”. I buy things I actually do need from local craftsmen and I have things repaired instead of replaced. I don’t pay interest to the banks, heck – I don’t even leave money in the bank. 911 is not my default for home security. We don’t have Obamacare, cable TV, a major credit card, or a home phone. I live my life quietly, and without many of the things that others consider “necessities.”
You might be thinking, “What about the children? Don’t they feel deprived?”
I don’t believe that they do. My oldest daughter graduated from college, debt free. We budgeted carefully, she won scholarships, and she gets to start her life without being in the hole. She can take her time and travel the world before she gets a “real” job, because she doesn’t have a student loan hanging over her head that requires her to dive into full-time permanent servitude right now.
My youngest daughter stays up until midnight and sleeps until noon all year round, because she is not subject to school bells at specific times. Her grades are very good, and she has far more free time than her public-schooled friends. She takes care of horses, dogs, and cats. She actually earns a substantial amount of money shoveling poop for people who don’t have the time or inclination to do so. For fun, she hikes, plays with animals, and shoots her long bow. She meets up with other home-schooled kids to hang out because they aren’t tied to an arbitrary schedule either.
I spend my mornings outside with the animals. I check on the vegetable garden and see if there will soon be something to harvest. Instead of an iPod, my music is the birds, the wild turkeys, the happy chickens, eager to get out and start looking for bugs. I spend my days learning: about health, nutrition, natural remedies, old methods of gardening and preservation, and needlecraft. I read the books I always wanted to read. We don’t spend a lot of money and that decreases a great deal of our need for money. I don’t have to sell the majority of the hours in my day for enough money to survive the other hours.
Every single day, I strive to reduce my vulnerability to coercion. Because the less I need, the more difficult I am to manipulate.
And you?
You don’t need this stuff they are offering, either. There is so much that you can do to free yourself from them.
You have a natural human right to be free.
This freedom is also supposed to be protected by our Constitution, which gets undermined on a regular basis. If you aren’t free, then revolution is your duty. Part of the power that the government holds over people is the fact that they hold the keys to the stuff we need. So, true independence is not to need the stuff they have. When there is nothing that you require enough to submit, then bullying you becomes much more difficult.
Make your life a declaration of independence.
Here are a few steps you can take to make yourself less dependent on the whims of the economy, the government, and corporate interests. Don’t worry if they seem impractical to you. They may not all be possible right this moment. Pick one and act on it, then another. Every journey begins with the decision to start the trip.
If you reduce your consumerist habits, you will lower your cost of living. Then, you’ll need less money.
If you need less money, you can stop exchanging as much of your time for dollars.
If you grow your own food, you will never be dependent on the government to help you to afford to buy food made more expensive by their onerous regulations and made less healthy by for-profit companies that process it beyond recognition, all with a government stamp of approval. (Not to mention how much better the quality will be.)
If you barter your goods or services for someone else’s goods or services, then no one else needs to be involved. (Although I’m sure both parties will be happy to pay the government the taxes due for the barter exchange. *cough*)
If you don’t send your kids to school, and instead, educate them at home, then you don’t need to get them vaccinated so they can attend school. You don’t have to watch them get brainwashed into dependency like the other kids. You don’t have to send them to a place that is so akin to prison that they can only go to the bathroom in the minutes between bells.
If you don’t make much money, you don’t pay much in the way of taxes.
If you are self-employed, you can’t be threatened with the loss of your job for non-compliance with *pick a ridiculous law*
If you shop locally, from farms and craftsmen, you don’t need the big box stores.
If you have the ability and equipment to defend yourself, you don’t need to call 911.
If you always object to unfairness, unconstitutional behavior, and dishonesty, you can help shed light on the issues at hand, and that is always the first step towards resolving them.
The way you lead your life every single day can be a personal Declaration of Independence.
By refusing to concede your natural rights, quietly and resolutely, you are performing an act of revolution.
This only requires one thing: your consistent determination not to be infringed upon.
Go ahead. Be free.
Link:
http://www.theorganicprepper.ca/9166-07042016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
"While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled."
‘We the Prisoners’: The Demise of the Fourth Amendment
By John W. Whitehead
“Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens… When the doors finally close and one finds oneself facing banishment to the carceral state—the years, the walls, the rules, the guards, the inmates—reactions vary. Some experience an intense sickening feeling. Others, a strong desire to sleep. Visions of suicide. A deep shame. A rage directed toward guards and other inmates. Utter disbelief. The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown… As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New rules must be understood.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
In a carceral state—a.k.a. a prison state or a police state—there is no Fourth Amendment to protect you from the overreaches, abuses, searches and probing eyes of government overlords.
In a carceral state, there is no difference between the treatment meted out to a law-abiding citizen and a convicted felon: both are equally suspect and treated as criminals, without any of the special rights and privileges reserved for the governing elite.
In a carceral state, there are only two kinds of people: the prisoners and the prison guards.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people”—the prisoners of the American police state—are being pushed that much further into a corner, our backs against the prison wall.
This concept of a carceral state in which we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis is the only way I can begin to comprehend, let alone articulate, the irrational, surreal, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass state of affairs that is being imposed upon us in America today.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we who pretend we are free are no different from those who spend their lives behind bars.
Indeed, we are experiencing much the same phenomenon that journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates ascribes to those who are banished to a “gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens” : a sickening feeling, a desire to sleep, hopelessness, shame, rage, disbelief, clinginess to the past and that which is familiar, and then eventually resignation and acceptance of our new “normal.”
All that we are experiencing—the sense of dread at what is coming down the pike, the desperation, the apathy about government corruption, the deeply divided partisanship, the carnivalesque political spectacles, the public displays of violence, the nostalgia for the past—are part of the dying refrain of an America that is fading fast.
No longer must the government obey the law.
Likewise, “we the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law.
While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.
For instance, in a recent 5-3 ruling in Utah v. Strieff, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for police to stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, effectively giving police a green light to embark on a fishing expedition of one’s person and property, rendering Americans completely vulnerable to the whims of any cop on the beat.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court for holding “that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.” Sotomayor continued:
This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have brokenso long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.
The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.” If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’”
If you still can’t read the writing on the wall, Sotomayor breaks it down further: “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong… So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases…”
Just consider some of the many other ways in which the Fourth Amendment—which ensures that the government can’t harass you, let alone even investigate you, without probable cause—has been weakened and undermined by the courts, the legislatures and various government agencies and operatives.
Breath tests, blood draws: Americans have no protection against mandatory breathalyzer tests at a police checkpoint, although mandatory blood draws violate the Fourth Amendment (Birchfield v. North Dakota).
Ignorance of the law is defensible if you work for the government: Police officers who violate the law can be granted qualified immunity if they claim ignorance of the law (Heien v. North Carolina). That rationale was also applied to police who clearly used excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a pregnant woman during a routine traffic stop and were granted immunity from prosecution (Brooks v. City of Seattle).
High-speed car chases: Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits (Plumhoff v. Rickard).
No-knock raids: Police can perform a “no-knock” as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile or give occupants a chance to destroy evidence of a crime (Richards v. Wisconsin). Legal ownership of a firearm is also enough to justify a no-knock raid by police (Quinn v. Texas).
Warrantless searches by police: Police can carry out warrantless searches of our homes based on a “reasonable” concern by police that a suspect (or occupant) might be attempting to destroy evidence, fleeing or hurt, even if it’s the wrong house (Kentucky v. King). Police can also, without a warrant, search anyone who has been lawfully arrested (United States v. Robinson) as well as their property post-arrest (Colorado v. Bertine) and their vehicle (New York v.Belton), search a car they suspect might contain evidence of a crime (Chambers v. Maroney), and search a home when the arrest is made on its premises (Maryland v. Buie).
Forced DNA extractions: Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. Innocent or not, your DNA will then be stored in the national FBI database (Maryland v. King).
Strip searches: Police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense” (Florence v. Board ofChosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington). This “license to probe” is now being extended to roadside stops, as police officers throughout the country have begun performing roadside strip searches—some involving anal and vaginal probes—without any evidence of wrongdoing and without a warrant.
Seizures: For all intents and purposes, you’re “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment from the moment an officer stops you (Brendlin v. California).
Search warrants on a leash: Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside (Florida v. Harris), but the use of a K-9 unit after a reasonable amount of time has passed during a stop does violate the Fourth Amendment (Rodriguez v. the United States).
Police and DUI Checkpoints: Police can conduct sobriety and “information-seeking” checkpoints (Illinois v. Lidster andMich. Dep‘t of State Police v. Sitz).
Interrogating public transit passengers: Police officers are free to board a bus, question passengers, and ask for consent to search without notifying them of their right to refuse (U.S v. Drayton).
Warrantless arrests for minor criminal offenses: Police can arrest you for minor criminal offenses, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation, punishable only by a fine (Atwater v. City of Lago Vista).
Stop and identify: Refusing to answer when a policeman asks “What’s your name?” can rightfully be considered a crime. No longer do Americans, even those not charged with any crime, have the right to remain altogether silent when stopped and questioned by a police officer (Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada).
Traffic stops: As long as police have reasonable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred, they may stop any vehicle (Whren v. U.S.). If probable cause justifies a vehicle search, then every part of the vehicle can be searched (U.S. v. Ross). A vehicle can be stopped even if the driver has not committed a traffic offense (U.S. v. Cortez).
Anonymous tips, careful driving, rigid posture and acne: Police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips (Navarette v. California). Police can also pull you over if you are driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route, and have acne (U.S. v. Westhoven).
What many Americans fail to understand is the devastating amount of damage that can be done to one’s freedoms long before a case ever makes its way to court by government agents who are violating the Fourth Amendment at every turn. This is how freedoms, long undermined, can give way to tyranny through constant erosion and become part of the fabric of the police state through constant use.
Phone and email surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: there was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.
So when you hear about the FBI hacking into Americans’ computers without a warrant with the blessing of the courts, or states assembling and making public terror watch lists containing the names of those who are merely deemed suspicious, or the police knocking on the doors of activists in advance of political gatherings to ascertain their plans for future protests, or administrative government agencies (such as the FDA, Small Business Administration, Smithsonian, Social Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Mint, and Department of Education) spending millions on guns and ammunition, don’t just matter-of-factly file it away in that part of your brain reserved for things you may not like but over which you have no control.
It’s true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we retain a speck of our independence and individuality—as long as we can resist the defeatist sense of double-consciousness (a phrase coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in which we view ourselves as inferior through the prism of our oppressors)—as long as we continue to cry out for justice for ourselves and those around us—as long as we refuse to be shackled and made prisoners—and as long as we continue to recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacency and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government’s propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now—more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology—than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts, and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the prisoners” have none.
As Sotomayor concluded in her ringing dissent in Utah v. Strieff:
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/john-w-whitehead/death-4th-amendment/
By John W. Whitehead
“Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens… When the doors finally close and one finds oneself facing banishment to the carceral state—the years, the walls, the rules, the guards, the inmates—reactions vary. Some experience an intense sickening feeling. Others, a strong desire to sleep. Visions of suicide. A deep shame. A rage directed toward guards and other inmates. Utter disbelief. The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown… As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New rules must be understood.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
In a carceral state—a.k.a. a prison state or a police state—there is no Fourth Amendment to protect you from the overreaches, abuses, searches and probing eyes of government overlords.
In a carceral state, there is no difference between the treatment meted out to a law-abiding citizen and a convicted felon: both are equally suspect and treated as criminals, without any of the special rights and privileges reserved for the governing elite.
In a carceral state, there are only two kinds of people: the prisoners and the prison guards.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people”—the prisoners of the American police state—are being pushed that much further into a corner, our backs against the prison wall.
This concept of a carceral state in which we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis is the only way I can begin to comprehend, let alone articulate, the irrational, surreal, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass state of affairs that is being imposed upon us in America today.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we who pretend we are free are no different from those who spend their lives behind bars.
Indeed, we are experiencing much the same phenomenon that journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates ascribes to those who are banished to a “gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens” : a sickening feeling, a desire to sleep, hopelessness, shame, rage, disbelief, clinginess to the past and that which is familiar, and then eventually resignation and acceptance of our new “normal.”
All that we are experiencing—the sense of dread at what is coming down the pike, the desperation, the apathy about government corruption, the deeply divided partisanship, the carnivalesque political spectacles, the public displays of violence, the nostalgia for the past—are part of the dying refrain of an America that is fading fast.
No longer must the government obey the law.
Likewise, “we the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law.
While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.
For instance, in a recent 5-3 ruling in Utah v. Strieff, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for police to stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, effectively giving police a green light to embark on a fishing expedition of one’s person and property, rendering Americans completely vulnerable to the whims of any cop on the beat.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court for holding “that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.” Sotomayor continued:
This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants—so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have brokenso long as he can later point to any possible infraction—even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.
The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal. The officer may next ask for your “consent” to inspect your bag or purse without telling you that you can decline. Regardless of your answer, he may order you to stand “helpless, perhaps facing a wall with [your] hands raised.” If the officer thinks you might be dangerous, he may then “frisk” you for weapons. This involves more than just a pat down. As onlookers pass by, the officer may “‘feel with sensitive fingers every portion of [your] body. A thorough search [may] be made of [your] arms and armpits, waistline and back, the groin and area about the testicles, and entire surface of the legs down to the feet.’”
If you still can’t read the writing on the wall, Sotomayor breaks it down further: “This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong… So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases…”
Just consider some of the many other ways in which the Fourth Amendment—which ensures that the government can’t harass you, let alone even investigate you, without probable cause—has been weakened and undermined by the courts, the legislatures and various government agencies and operatives.
Breath tests, blood draws: Americans have no protection against mandatory breathalyzer tests at a police checkpoint, although mandatory blood draws violate the Fourth Amendment (Birchfield v. North Dakota).
Ignorance of the law is defensible if you work for the government: Police officers who violate the law can be granted qualified immunity if they claim ignorance of the law (Heien v. North Carolina). That rationale was also applied to police who clearly used excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a pregnant woman during a routine traffic stop and were granted immunity from prosecution (Brooks v. City of Seattle).
High-speed car chases: Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits (Plumhoff v. Rickard).
No-knock raids: Police can perform a “no-knock” as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile or give occupants a chance to destroy evidence of a crime (Richards v. Wisconsin). Legal ownership of a firearm is also enough to justify a no-knock raid by police (Quinn v. Texas).
Warrantless searches by police: Police can carry out warrantless searches of our homes based on a “reasonable” concern by police that a suspect (or occupant) might be attempting to destroy evidence, fleeing or hurt, even if it’s the wrong house (Kentucky v. King). Police can also, without a warrant, search anyone who has been lawfully arrested (United States v. Robinson) as well as their property post-arrest (Colorado v. Bertine) and their vehicle (New York v.Belton), search a car they suspect might contain evidence of a crime (Chambers v. Maroney), and search a home when the arrest is made on its premises (Maryland v. Buie).
Forced DNA extractions: Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. Innocent or not, your DNA will then be stored in the national FBI database (Maryland v. King).
Strip searches: Police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense” (Florence v. Board ofChosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington). This “license to probe” is now being extended to roadside stops, as police officers throughout the country have begun performing roadside strip searches—some involving anal and vaginal probes—without any evidence of wrongdoing and without a warrant.
Seizures: For all intents and purposes, you’re “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment from the moment an officer stops you (Brendlin v. California).
Search warrants on a leash: Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside (Florida v. Harris), but the use of a K-9 unit after a reasonable amount of time has passed during a stop does violate the Fourth Amendment (Rodriguez v. the United States).
Police and DUI Checkpoints: Police can conduct sobriety and “information-seeking” checkpoints (Illinois v. Lidster andMich. Dep‘t of State Police v. Sitz).
Interrogating public transit passengers: Police officers are free to board a bus, question passengers, and ask for consent to search without notifying them of their right to refuse (U.S v. Drayton).
Warrantless arrests for minor criminal offenses: Police can arrest you for minor criminal offenses, such as a misdemeanor seatbelt violation, punishable only by a fine (Atwater v. City of Lago Vista).
Stop and identify: Refusing to answer when a policeman asks “What’s your name?” can rightfully be considered a crime. No longer do Americans, even those not charged with any crime, have the right to remain altogether silent when stopped and questioned by a police officer (Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of the State of Nevada).
Traffic stops: As long as police have reasonable cause to believe that a traffic violation occurred, they may stop any vehicle (Whren v. U.S.). If probable cause justifies a vehicle search, then every part of the vehicle can be searched (U.S. v. Ross). A vehicle can be stopped even if the driver has not committed a traffic offense (U.S. v. Cortez).
Anonymous tips, careful driving, rigid posture and acne: Police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips (Navarette v. California). Police can also pull you over if you are driving too carefully, with a rigid posture, taking a scenic route, and have acne (U.S. v. Westhoven).
What many Americans fail to understand is the devastating amount of damage that can be done to one’s freedoms long before a case ever makes its way to court by government agents who are violating the Fourth Amendment at every turn. This is how freedoms, long undermined, can give way to tyranny through constant erosion and become part of the fabric of the police state through constant use.
Phone and email surveillance, databases for dissidents, threat assessments, terror watch lists, militarized police, SWAT team raids, security checkpoints, lockdowns, roadside strip searches: there was a time when any one of these encroachments on our Fourth Amendment rights would have roused the public to outrage. Today, such violations are shrugged off matter-of-factly by Americans who have been assiduously groomed to accept the intrusions of the police state into their private lives.
So when you hear about the FBI hacking into Americans’ computers without a warrant with the blessing of the courts, or states assembling and making public terror watch lists containing the names of those who are merely deemed suspicious, or the police knocking on the doors of activists in advance of political gatherings to ascertain their plans for future protests, or administrative government agencies (such as the FDA, Small Business Administration, Smithsonian, Social Security, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Mint, and Department of Education) spending millions on guns and ammunition, don’t just matter-of-factly file it away in that part of your brain reserved for things you may not like but over which you have no control.
It’s true that there may be little the average person can do to push back against the police state on a national level, but there remains some hope at the local level as long as we retain a speck of our independence and individuality—as long as we can resist the defeatist sense of double-consciousness (a phrase coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in which we view ourselves as inferior through the prism of our oppressors)—as long as we continue to cry out for justice for ourselves and those around us—as long as we refuse to be shackled and made prisoners—and as long as we continue to recognize that the only way the police state can truly acquire and retain power is if we relinquish it through our negligence, complacency and ignorance.
Unfortunately, we have been utterly brainwashed into believing the government’s propaganda and lies. Americans actually celebrate with perfect sincerity the anniversary of our independence from Great Britain without ever owning up to the fact that we are as oppressed now—more so, perhaps, thanks to advances in technology—than we ever were when Redcoats stormed through doorways and subjected colonists to the vagaries of a police state.
You see, by gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts, and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants. We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”
Under the new terms of this one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the prisoners” have none.
As Sotomayor concluded in her ringing dissent in Utah v. Strieff:
By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/john-w-whitehead/death-4th-amendment/
Multiculturalism has failed...
Multiculturalism: A Failed Concept
By Walter E. Williams
German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” adding that it was an illusion to think Germans and foreign workers could “live happily side by side.” The failure of multiculturalism is also seen in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other European countries. Immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East refuse to assimilate and instead seek to import the failed cultures they fled.
Leftist diversity advocates and multiculturalists are right to argue that people of all races, religions and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one set of cultural values cannot be judged superior to another and that to do so is Eurocentrism.
That’s unbridled nonsense. Ask a diversity/multiculturalism advocate: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in northern Sudan. In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment, and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves are punished by having their hand severed. In some African and Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a crime, in some cases punishable by death. Are all these cultural values morally equivalent to those of the West?
The vital achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, which saw its birth with the Magna Carta in 1215. The idea emerged that individuals have certain inalienable rights. Individuals do not exist to serve government; governments exist to protect their rights. But it was not until the 19th century that ideas of liberty received broad recognition. In the West, it was mostly through the works of British philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
Personal liberty implies toleration of differences among people, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ideological or political. Liberty also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways. This is not the vision of the new immigrants. In some parts of Britain, Christians are threatened with violence for merely handing out Bibles. Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is seen as a hate crime. Women are accosted by Muslim men for “improper” dress. Many women are sexually assaulted. In many European countries, “no-go zones” — where civil authorities will not enter — in which Shariah is practiced have been established. According to the Express, “London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin are among the major European cities that feature on a bombshell list of 900 lawless zones with large immigrant populations” (http://tinyurl.com/hubbxuw).
Both in Europe and in the U.S., multiculturalism is a leftist elitist vision with its roots in academia. The intellectual elite, courts and government agencies push an agenda that is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from the conformity and a live-and-let-live philosophy. Instead, multiculturalism/diversity is an agenda for all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech. It calls for re-education programs where diversity managers indoctrinate students, faculty members, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct thinking. Part of that lesson is nonjudgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another and all cultures and their values are morally equivalent.
Western values are superior to all others. But one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. By the way, it is no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. There is also indisputable evidence that we in the West are unwilling to defend ourselves from barbarians. Just look at our response to the recent Orlando massacre, in which we’ve focused our energies on guns rather than on terrorists.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/walter-e-williams/diversity-strength/
By Walter E. Williams
German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” adding that it was an illusion to think Germans and foreign workers could “live happily side by side.” The failure of multiculturalism is also seen in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other European countries. Immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East refuse to assimilate and instead seek to import the failed cultures they fled.
Leftist diversity advocates and multiculturalists are right to argue that people of all races, religions and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one set of cultural values cannot be judged superior to another and that to do so is Eurocentrism.
That’s unbridled nonsense. Ask a diversity/multiculturalism advocate: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in northern Sudan. In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment, and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves are punished by having their hand severed. In some African and Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a crime, in some cases punishable by death. Are all these cultural values morally equivalent to those of the West?
The vital achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, which saw its birth with the Magna Carta in 1215. The idea emerged that individuals have certain inalienable rights. Individuals do not exist to serve government; governments exist to protect their rights. But it was not until the 19th century that ideas of liberty received broad recognition. In the West, it was mostly through the works of British philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.
Personal liberty implies toleration of differences among people, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ideological or political. Liberty also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways. This is not the vision of the new immigrants. In some parts of Britain, Christians are threatened with violence for merely handing out Bibles. Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is seen as a hate crime. Women are accosted by Muslim men for “improper” dress. Many women are sexually assaulted. In many European countries, “no-go zones” — where civil authorities will not enter — in which Shariah is practiced have been established. According to the Express, “London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin are among the major European cities that feature on a bombshell list of 900 lawless zones with large immigrant populations” (http://tinyurl.com/hubbxuw).
Both in Europe and in the U.S., multiculturalism is a leftist elitist vision with its roots in academia. The intellectual elite, courts and government agencies push an agenda that is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from the conformity and a live-and-let-live philosophy. Instead, multiculturalism/diversity is an agenda for all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech. It calls for re-education programs where diversity managers indoctrinate students, faculty members, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct thinking. Part of that lesson is nonjudgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another and all cultures and their values are morally equivalent.
Western values are superior to all others. But one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. By the way, it is no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. There is also indisputable evidence that we in the West are unwilling to defend ourselves from barbarians. Just look at our response to the recent Orlando massacre, in which we’ve focused our energies on guns rather than on terrorists.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/walter-e-williams/diversity-strength/
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
"...the mainstream media and the political establishment elite just don’t get it: They see the national-security state as a protector and as a force for good in the world, rather than as a major purveyor of death, destruction, crises, chaos, and loss of liberty, peace, and prosperity."
America Should Exit From NATO and the National Security State
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In its reporting on Brexit, the New York Times asks an interesting question: “Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?”
Hopefully, it will mean the unraveling of two of the most powerful and destructive governmental apparatuses that came out of the postwar era: NATO and the U.S. national-security state. In fact, although the mainstream media and the political establishment elites will never acknowledge it, the irony is that it is these two apparatuses that ultimately led to the Brexit vote:
The Times points out:
Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote.
But what was it that gave rise to that massive refugee crisis?
The answer: It was the U.S. national-security state’s regime change operations in the Middle East, including NATO’s bombing campaign as part of its regime-change operation in Syria.
What did U.S. and NATO officials think — that people would simply remain where they were so that they could get blown to bits with the bombs that were being dropped on them, by the U.S. assassination program, or by the massive civil-war violence that came as a result of the U.S. and NATO regime-change operations?
People don’t ordinarily behave in that fashion. Most people prefer to live rather than die and will do anything they can to survive. That’s why those refugees fled to Europe— to escape the horrific consequences of interventionism by NATO and the U.S. national security state in the Middle East.
I wonder if deep down, those who are lamenting and groaning about the Brexit vote realize that: If there had been no U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, no regime change in Libya, no U.S. and NATO bombing and interventionism in Syria, there wouldn’t have been a massive refugee crisis in Europe and, almost certainly, a rejection of Brexit by a majority of British voters.
How’s that for dark irony?
Like the U.S. national-security state, NATO is a Cold-War era governmental apparatus, one whose mission was ostensibly to protect western Europe from an attack by the Soviet Union, which was America’s and Britain’s World War II partner and ally.
But as everyone knows, the Cold War ended more than 25 years ago. A question naturally arises: Why then didn’t NATO go out of existence once the Cold War was over?
The following statement by the Times perfectly reflects how the mainstream media and the political establishment elites just don’t get it:
NATO has rediscovered its purpose in the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Yet the Baltic countries still worry whether the military alliance would truly defend them against Russian aggression, and the alliance has had trouble defining its role in fighting terrorism or dealing with the migrant flow.
What the Times is insinuating is that NATO is just as necessary today to protect western Europe (and now eastern Europe) from Russian aggressiveness as it was during the Cold War era.
But there is something wrong with that picture, something that the Times and the political establishment elites don’t want to focus on — that it was NATO and the U.S. national-security establishment that precipitated the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.
After the Cold War ended, not only did NATO decide to remain in existence, it began absorbing Eastern European countries that had formerly been in the Warsaw Pact. When the expansionary efforts finally reached Ukraine, NATO strived to absorb that country as well, which it came very close to doing thanks to a pro-U.S. coup that had all the earmarks of a successful CIA regime-change operation. Absorbing Ukraine into NATO would have meant U.S. bases, troops, tanks, and missiles on Russia’s border and the U.S. takeover of Russia’s longtime military base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
There was never any chance that Russia was going to permit that to happen, which led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the onset of the Ukraine crisis.
After all, imagine that the Warsaw Pact had remained in existence and had begun absorbing Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Nicarargua, Guatemala, and Mexico, with aims of installing Russian military bases on Mexico’s border with the United States. What do you think the reaction among U.S. officials would have been to those provocative acts?
But what do we get from the mainstream media and the political establishment elites? That NATO is just an innocent party, one that is a force for good in the world, rather than a corrupt Cold War dinosaur-like apparatus whose mission is to provoke crises in order to justify its continued existence.
As I detail in my new ebook The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State, it’s no different with the U.S. national-security apparatus that was also brought into existence to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union and which fundamentally changed America’s government structure for the worse. After all, don’t forget: China and North Korea are national-security states as well. Totalitarian regimes are almost always national security states.
So, why did U.S. officials graft a totalitarian apparatus to America’s federal governmental structure, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment? They said that a temporary totalitarian apparatus was necessary to wage a cold war against the Soviet Union’s and China’s totalitarian communist regimes.
In itself, that’s problematic, but one thing is certain: The Cold War is over. It ended more than a quarter-century ago. Rather than be dismantled, which is what should have happened back in 1989, the national-security state, having lost its official enemy with the end of the Cold War, decided to go into the Middle East and provoke trouble with invasions, occupations, sanctions, interventions, and regime-change operations. All that brought us anti-American terrorist attacks, the war on terrorism, a formal assassination program, a massive secret surveillance program, indefinite detention, torture, secret prison camps, and other dark things that characterize totalitarian and communist regimes.
And yet the mainstream media and the political establishment elite just don’t get it: They see the national-security state as a protector and as a force for good in the world, rather than as a major purveyor of death, destruction, crises, chaos, and loss of liberty, peace, and prosperity.
It’s time for Americans to do some real soul-searching. It’s time to do some fundamental post-World War II alterations here at home. A great place to begin would be a dismantling of both NATO and the national-security state. An American exit from these corrupt and expensive Cold War-era apparatuses would lead the way to freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the world.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/27/america-exit-nato-national-security-state/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In its reporting on Brexit, the New York Times asks an interesting question: “Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?”
Hopefully, it will mean the unraveling of two of the most powerful and destructive governmental apparatuses that came out of the postwar era: NATO and the U.S. national-security state. In fact, although the mainstream media and the political establishment elites will never acknowledge it, the irony is that it is these two apparatuses that ultimately led to the Brexit vote:
The Times points out:
Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote.
But what was it that gave rise to that massive refugee crisis?
The answer: It was the U.S. national-security state’s regime change operations in the Middle East, including NATO’s bombing campaign as part of its regime-change operation in Syria.
What did U.S. and NATO officials think — that people would simply remain where they were so that they could get blown to bits with the bombs that were being dropped on them, by the U.S. assassination program, or by the massive civil-war violence that came as a result of the U.S. and NATO regime-change operations?
People don’t ordinarily behave in that fashion. Most people prefer to live rather than die and will do anything they can to survive. That’s why those refugees fled to Europe— to escape the horrific consequences of interventionism by NATO and the U.S. national security state in the Middle East.
I wonder if deep down, those who are lamenting and groaning about the Brexit vote realize that: If there had been no U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, no regime change in Libya, no U.S. and NATO bombing and interventionism in Syria, there wouldn’t have been a massive refugee crisis in Europe and, almost certainly, a rejection of Brexit by a majority of British voters.
How’s that for dark irony?
Like the U.S. national-security state, NATO is a Cold-War era governmental apparatus, one whose mission was ostensibly to protect western Europe from an attack by the Soviet Union, which was America’s and Britain’s World War II partner and ally.
But as everyone knows, the Cold War ended more than 25 years ago. A question naturally arises: Why then didn’t NATO go out of existence once the Cold War was over?
The following statement by the Times perfectly reflects how the mainstream media and the political establishment elites just don’t get it:
NATO has rediscovered its purpose in the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Yet the Baltic countries still worry whether the military alliance would truly defend them against Russian aggression, and the alliance has had trouble defining its role in fighting terrorism or dealing with the migrant flow.
What the Times is insinuating is that NATO is just as necessary today to protect western Europe (and now eastern Europe) from Russian aggressiveness as it was during the Cold War era.
But there is something wrong with that picture, something that the Times and the political establishment elites don’t want to focus on — that it was NATO and the U.S. national-security establishment that precipitated the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.
After the Cold War ended, not only did NATO decide to remain in existence, it began absorbing Eastern European countries that had formerly been in the Warsaw Pact. When the expansionary efforts finally reached Ukraine, NATO strived to absorb that country as well, which it came very close to doing thanks to a pro-U.S. coup that had all the earmarks of a successful CIA regime-change operation. Absorbing Ukraine into NATO would have meant U.S. bases, troops, tanks, and missiles on Russia’s border and the U.S. takeover of Russia’s longtime military base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
There was never any chance that Russia was going to permit that to happen, which led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the onset of the Ukraine crisis.
After all, imagine that the Warsaw Pact had remained in existence and had begun absorbing Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Nicarargua, Guatemala, and Mexico, with aims of installing Russian military bases on Mexico’s border with the United States. What do you think the reaction among U.S. officials would have been to those provocative acts?
But what do we get from the mainstream media and the political establishment elites? That NATO is just an innocent party, one that is a force for good in the world, rather than a corrupt Cold War dinosaur-like apparatus whose mission is to provoke crises in order to justify its continued existence.
As I detail in my new ebook The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State, it’s no different with the U.S. national-security apparatus that was also brought into existence to wage the Cold War against the Soviet Union and which fundamentally changed America’s government structure for the worse. After all, don’t forget: China and North Korea are national-security states as well. Totalitarian regimes are almost always national security states.
So, why did U.S. officials graft a totalitarian apparatus to America’s federal governmental structure, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment? They said that a temporary totalitarian apparatus was necessary to wage a cold war against the Soviet Union’s and China’s totalitarian communist regimes.
In itself, that’s problematic, but one thing is certain: The Cold War is over. It ended more than a quarter-century ago. Rather than be dismantled, which is what should have happened back in 1989, the national-security state, having lost its official enemy with the end of the Cold War, decided to go into the Middle East and provoke trouble with invasions, occupations, sanctions, interventions, and regime-change operations. All that brought us anti-American terrorist attacks, the war on terrorism, a formal assassination program, a massive secret surveillance program, indefinite detention, torture, secret prison camps, and other dark things that characterize totalitarian and communist regimes.
And yet the mainstream media and the political establishment elite just don’t get it: They see the national-security state as a protector and as a force for good in the world, rather than as a major purveyor of death, destruction, crises, chaos, and loss of liberty, peace, and prosperity.
It’s time for Americans to do some real soul-searching. It’s time to do some fundamental post-World War II alterations here at home. A great place to begin would be a dismantling of both NATO and the national-security state. An American exit from these corrupt and expensive Cold War-era apparatuses would lead the way to freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the world.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/27/america-exit-nato-national-security-state/
Supreme Court extends the fraud...
The Fraud Goes On
By Thomas Sowell
Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voted that President Obama exceeded his authority when he granted exemptions from the immigration laws passed by Congress.
But the Supreme Court also exceeded its own authority by granting the University of Texas an exemption from the Constitution’s requirement of “equal protection of the laws,” by voting that racial preferences for student admissions were legal.
Supreme Court decisions in affirmative action cases are the longest running fraud since the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow South, on grounds that “separate but equal” facilities were consistent with the Constitution. Everybody knew that those facilities were separate but by no means equal. Nevertheless, this charade lasted until 1954.
The Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now lasted since 1974 when, in the case of “DeFunis v. Odegaard,” the Court voted 5 to 4 that this particular case was moot, which spared the justices from having to vote on its merits.
While the 1896 “separate but equal” decision lasted 58 years, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now had 42 years of evasion, sophistry, and fraud, with no end in sight.
Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?
One sign of the erosion of principles over the years is that even one of the Court’s most liberal judicial activists, Justice William O. Douglas, could not stomach affirmative action in 1974, and voted to condemn it, rather than declare the issue moot.
But now, in 2016, the supposedly conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold the University of Texas’ racial preferences. Perhaps the atmosphere inside the Washington Beltway wears down opposition to affirmative action, much as water can eventually wear down rock and create the Grand Canyon
We have heard much this year about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia — and rightly so. But there are two vacancies on the Supreme Court. The other vacancy is Anthony Kennedy.
The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds, is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.
Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.
But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.
When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors from most other academic institutions.
We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.
Such negative consequences of mismatching minority students with institutions, for the sake of racial body count, have been documented in a number of studies, most notably “Mismatch,” a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., whose sub-title is: “How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”
When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects like math, science and engineering.
But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like “diversity” — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It too is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word “diversity” was used instead of “quotas.”
Seeming to ban racial preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/thomas-sowell/diversity-fraud/
By Thomas Sowell
Last week the Supreme Court of the United States voted that President Obama exceeded his authority when he granted exemptions from the immigration laws passed by Congress.
But the Supreme Court also exceeded its own authority by granting the University of Texas an exemption from the Constitution’s requirement of “equal protection of the laws,” by voting that racial preferences for student admissions were legal.
Supreme Court decisions in affirmative action cases are the longest running fraud since the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation laws in the Jim Crow South, on grounds that “separate but equal” facilities were consistent with the Constitution. Everybody knew that those facilities were separate but by no means equal. Nevertheless, this charade lasted until 1954.
The Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now lasted since 1974 when, in the case of “DeFunis v. Odegaard,” the Court voted 5 to 4 that this particular case was moot, which spared the justices from having to vote on its merits.
While the 1896 “separate but equal” decision lasted 58 years, the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases have now had 42 years of evasion, sophistry, and fraud, with no end in sight.
Why are the most advertised Gold and Silver coins NOT the best way to invest?
One sign of the erosion of principles over the years is that even one of the Court’s most liberal judicial activists, Justice William O. Douglas, could not stomach affirmative action in 1974, and voted to condemn it, rather than declare the issue moot.
But now, in 2016, the supposedly conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold the University of Texas’ racial preferences. Perhaps the atmosphere inside the Washington Beltway wears down opposition to affirmative action, much as water can eventually wear down rock and create the Grand Canyon
We have heard much this year about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of the great Justice Antonin Scalia — and rightly so. But there are two vacancies on the Supreme Court. The other vacancy is Anthony Kennedy.
The human tragedy, amid all the legal evasions and frauds, is that, while many laws and policies sacrifice some people for the sake of other people, affirmative action manages to harm blacks, whites, Asians and others, even if in different ways.
Students who are kept out of a college because other students are admitted instead, under racial quotas, obviously lose opportunities they would otherwise have had.
But minority students admitted to institutions whose academic standards they do not meet are all too often needlessly turned into failures, even when they have the prerequisites for success in some other institution whose normal standards they do meet.
When black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math were admitted to M.I.T., where the other students scored at the 99th percentile, a significant number of black students failed to graduate there, even though they could have graduated with honors from most other academic institutions.
We do not have so many students with that kind of ability that we can afford to sacrifice them on the altar of political correctness.
Such negative consequences of mismatching minority students with institutions, for the sake of racial body count, have been documented in a number of studies, most notably “Mismatch,” a book by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., whose sub-title is: “How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”
When racial preferences in student admissions in the University of California system were banned, the number of black and Hispanic students in the system declined slightly, but the number actually graduating rose substantially. So did the number graduating with degrees in tough subjects like math, science and engineering.
But hard facts carry no such weight among politicians as magic words like “diversity” — a word repeated endlessly, without one speck of evidence to back up its sweeping claims of benefits. It too is part of the Supreme Court fraud, going back to a 1978 decision that seemingly banned racial quotas — unless the word “diversity” was used instead of “quotas.”
Seeming to ban racial preferences, while letting them continue under another name, was clever politically. But the last thing we need in Washington are nine more politicians, wearing judicial robes.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/thomas-sowell/diversity-fraud/
Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?
Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?
By Peter Dale Scott
Introduction by WhoWhatWhy
Omar Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar for some time before he opened fire at a nightclub in Florida, killing 49 and wounding 53 people. Now the public is asking why the FBI didn’t do something to prevent the tragedy.
Glenn Greenwald responded to an article in The Washington Post, “The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting”. He warned that pressure on the FBI to be more pro-active will inevitably lead to more draconian anti-terror legislation and the loss of even more civil liberties in the name of preventing the unpreventable.
But there is a legitimate reason to question the FBI. There are times when the Bureau seems to be playing dangerous games with dangerous people, as shown in the article below.
This was first published in June of 2013. At the time, we said there were ‘aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing where the official story just doesn’t add up. But what if these inconsistencies point to something amiss on a far deeper level? What if the FBI’s initial claim that it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were — when in fact it knew about them for several years — hides an even bigger embarrassment?
Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk?
Update. Last month, WhoWhatWhy’s James Henry reported that, despite public denials, the FBI secretly flagged Tamerlan as a terrorist threat in his immigration records. And the Bureau admitted that it conducted a six-month-long “assessment” of Tsarnaev, two years before the bombing. But then the FBI said it closed the investigation after it“found no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism”.
Contradicting that statement, both the FBI and CIA had actually put Tsarnaev’s name on the terrorist “watch list,” stating that he “may be armed and dangerous” — and that screening him is “mandatory” if he attempts to board an airplane.
So why didn’t they do so?
Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?
Amid the swirl of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely touched upon in the mainstream US media, stands out: There is a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, was a double agent, perhaps recruited by the FBI.
If Tsarnaev was a double agent, he would be just one of thousands of young people coerced by the FBI, as the price for settling a minor legal problem, into a dangerous career as an informant.
That he was so coerced is the easiest explanation for two seemingly incompatible incidents in his life:
The first is that he returned to Russia in 2012, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport so he could file an application for US citizenship.
The second is that Tsarnaev then jeopardized his citizenship application with conspicuous, provocative — almost theatrical — behavior that seemed more caricature than a characteristic of a Muslim extremist...
Read the rest here:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/26/classic-whowhatwhy-tamerlan-tsarnaev-double-agent-recruited-fbi/
By Peter Dale Scott
Introduction by WhoWhatWhy
Omar Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar for some time before he opened fire at a nightclub in Florida, killing 49 and wounding 53 people. Now the public is asking why the FBI didn’t do something to prevent the tragedy.
Glenn Greenwald responded to an article in The Washington Post, “The FBI Was Right Not to Arrest Omar Mateen Before the Shooting”. He warned that pressure on the FBI to be more pro-active will inevitably lead to more draconian anti-terror legislation and the loss of even more civil liberties in the name of preventing the unpreventable.
But there is a legitimate reason to question the FBI. There are times when the Bureau seems to be playing dangerous games with dangerous people, as shown in the article below.
This was first published in June of 2013. At the time, we said there were ‘aspects of the Boston Marathon bombing where the official story just doesn’t add up. But what if these inconsistencies point to something amiss on a far deeper level? What if the FBI’s initial claim that it didn’t know who the Tsarnaev brothers were — when in fact it knew about them for several years — hides an even bigger embarrassment?
Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk?
Update. Last month, WhoWhatWhy’s James Henry reported that, despite public denials, the FBI secretly flagged Tamerlan as a terrorist threat in his immigration records. And the Bureau admitted that it conducted a six-month-long “assessment” of Tsarnaev, two years before the bombing. But then the FBI said it closed the investigation after it“found no link or ‘nexus’ to terrorism”.
Contradicting that statement, both the FBI and CIA had actually put Tsarnaev’s name on the terrorist “watch list,” stating that he “may be armed and dangerous” — and that screening him is “mandatory” if he attempts to board an airplane.
So why didn’t they do so?
Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a Double Agent Recruited by the FBI?
Amid the swirl of mysteries surrounding the alleged Boston bombers, one fact, barely touched upon in the mainstream US media, stands out: There is a strong possibility that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers, was a double agent, perhaps recruited by the FBI.
If Tsarnaev was a double agent, he would be just one of thousands of young people coerced by the FBI, as the price for settling a minor legal problem, into a dangerous career as an informant.
That he was so coerced is the easiest explanation for two seemingly incompatible incidents in his life:
The first is that he returned to Russia in 2012, ostensibly to renew his Russian passport so he could file an application for US citizenship.
The second is that Tsarnaev then jeopardized his citizenship application with conspicuous, provocative — almost theatrical — behavior that seemed more caricature than a characteristic of a Muslim extremist...
Read the rest here:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/26/classic-whowhatwhy-tamerlan-tsarnaev-double-agent-recruited-fbi/
Monday, June 27, 2016
It's happened before...
How They Could Confiscate Your AR-15
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Anyone who thinks it would be difficult for U.S. officials to confiscate people’s AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons forgets how they confiscated everyone’s gold coins in the 1930s. It would be as easy to confiscate guns as it was to confiscate gold coins.
To get people’s gold coins, they didn’t send swarms of federal agents across the land to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes, businesses, and safety deposit boxes. Instead, they simply made it a felony offense to own gold coins, notwithstanding the fact that under the U.S. Constitution gold coins had been the official money of the United States for more than a century. Once that law was enacted, American citizens had a choice to make: (1) continue holding the gold coins and risk getting caught and prosecuted for a felony offense, or (2) comply with the law by delivering their gold coins to the government as the law required.
Some Americans decided to take the risk and keep their gold, believing their coins would enable them to protect their wealth against the oncoming monetary debasement (i.e., inflation) at the hands of the Federal Reserve. Others decided that avoiding confiscation of their assets through inflation wasn’t worth the risk of serving several years in a federal penitentiary.
Given the right crisis environment, the same thing could happen with assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons that are legal to own today. All that Congress would have to do is enact a law ordering all Americans to turn their high-powered weapons over to the government and making possession of all such guns a felony offense after the effective date of the law, without “grandfathering” current owners of such guns.
American gun owners would then be placed in the same position as gold owners back in the 1930s. Should a person keep his gun illegally and risk a felony conviction and long jail sentence for unlawful possession? Or should he turn in his gun and not have to worry about getting caught and suffering a felony conviction and jail time?
Why would federal officials enact such a law? To keep us safe, of course, from the enemies they are producing in the Middle East and Afghanistan with their interventionist policies.
What happens after a people are disarmed? They become compliant and obedient. Just ask people who lived in Chile under Pinochet, or those who are currently living in Egypt, or the people who have lived under any other regime that the U.S. national-security establishment has installed or supported. They will tell you why a disarmed citizenry meekly and passively complies with any and all orders issued by a regime’s national-security establishment, including orders to submit to arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, torture, rape, or execution.
And don’t count on the Supreme Court to uphold your right to keep and bear arms. The justices will inevitably defer to the wishes of the national-security branch of the government, especially in the midst of a crisis.
Keep in mind a critically important point that Judge Alex Kozinski made in his dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer: A people who permit themselves to be disarmed will make that mistake only once. That’s because once they are disarmed, the government will never permit them to arm themselves again.
Freedom is precarious. Oftentimes, it depends on how willing people are to fight for it, including when it’s threatened by their own government. Just remember: It’s a lot more difficult to get freedom back than it is to keep it.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/23/confiscate-ar-15/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Anyone who thinks it would be difficult for U.S. officials to confiscate people’s AR-15s and other semi-automatic weapons forgets how they confiscated everyone’s gold coins in the 1930s. It would be as easy to confiscate guns as it was to confiscate gold coins.
To get people’s gold coins, they didn’t send swarms of federal agents across the land to conduct warrantless searches of people’s homes, businesses, and safety deposit boxes. Instead, they simply made it a felony offense to own gold coins, notwithstanding the fact that under the U.S. Constitution gold coins had been the official money of the United States for more than a century. Once that law was enacted, American citizens had a choice to make: (1) continue holding the gold coins and risk getting caught and prosecuted for a felony offense, or (2) comply with the law by delivering their gold coins to the government as the law required.
Some Americans decided to take the risk and keep their gold, believing their coins would enable them to protect their wealth against the oncoming monetary debasement (i.e., inflation) at the hands of the Federal Reserve. Others decided that avoiding confiscation of their assets through inflation wasn’t worth the risk of serving several years in a federal penitentiary.
Given the right crisis environment, the same thing could happen with assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons that are legal to own today. All that Congress would have to do is enact a law ordering all Americans to turn their high-powered weapons over to the government and making possession of all such guns a felony offense after the effective date of the law, without “grandfathering” current owners of such guns.
American gun owners would then be placed in the same position as gold owners back in the 1930s. Should a person keep his gun illegally and risk a felony conviction and long jail sentence for unlawful possession? Or should he turn in his gun and not have to worry about getting caught and suffering a felony conviction and jail time?
Why would federal officials enact such a law? To keep us safe, of course, from the enemies they are producing in the Middle East and Afghanistan with their interventionist policies.
What happens after a people are disarmed? They become compliant and obedient. Just ask people who lived in Chile under Pinochet, or those who are currently living in Egypt, or the people who have lived under any other regime that the U.S. national-security establishment has installed or supported. They will tell you why a disarmed citizenry meekly and passively complies with any and all orders issued by a regime’s national-security establishment, including orders to submit to arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, torture, rape, or execution.
And don’t count on the Supreme Court to uphold your right to keep and bear arms. The justices will inevitably defer to the wishes of the national-security branch of the government, especially in the midst of a crisis.
Keep in mind a critically important point that Judge Alex Kozinski made in his dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer: A people who permit themselves to be disarmed will make that mistake only once. That’s because once they are disarmed, the government will never permit them to arm themselves again.
Freedom is precarious. Oftentimes, it depends on how willing people are to fight for it, including when it’s threatened by their own government. Just remember: It’s a lot more difficult to get freedom back than it is to keep it.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/23/confiscate-ar-15/
We the people???
The Constitution's Original Preamble
Gary North
This is a forgotten aspect of American history. It is worth mentioning.
The Preamble is the most famous section of the Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The phrase, "We the People of the United States," has been quoted ever since its adoption in 1788. But it was not in the original Preamble.
On August 7, the Committee of Detail submitted a tentative version of the Constitution. Here was the Preamble.
We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and Our Posterity.
There was a problem. This was not immediately recognized. The Preamble named all 13 states. But some of the states might not ratify it. Rhode Island was not expected to, and only barely did by a vote of 34 to 32: the last state to ratify.
The first Preamble, which affirmed the sovereignty of the sovereign people of specific states, might not apply. It would take only nine states to ratify in order to create a new government, in opposition to the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimity of all 13 legislatures.
On September 8, the Constitution was turned over to the Committee on Style and Arrangement. The Committee consisted of five men: Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, James Madison, and Gouverneur Morris. As with the committee of five that was assigned the task of writing the Declaration of Independence, it assigned most of the work to one man: Morris. James Madison later wrote: "The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris." Morris took 23 articles and converted them into seven. He also completely rewrote the Preamble. It took him three days. The Committee presented its work on September 12.
The Preamble moved the locus of sovereignty from the states to the nation as a whole. This became the declaration of dependence: dependence on a geographically rootless nation. This is what outraged Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention.
And here I would make this enquiry of those worthy characters who composed a part of the late Federal Convention. I am sure they were fully impressed with the necessity of forming a great consolidated Government, instead of a confederation. That this is a consolidated Government is demonstrably clear, and the danger of such a Government, is, to my mind, very striking. I have the highest veneration of those Gentlemen,--but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People. My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorised them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.
He lost the vote. The Constitution was ratified by all 13 states. So, the original Preamble could have been kept in. That would have changed the rhetoric of nationalism ever since...
Read the rest here:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/15367.cfm
Gary North
This is a forgotten aspect of American history. It is worth mentioning.
The Preamble is the most famous section of the Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The phrase, "We the People of the United States," has been quoted ever since its adoption in 1788. But it was not in the original Preamble.
On August 7, the Committee of Detail submitted a tentative version of the Constitution. Here was the Preamble.
We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and Our Posterity.
There was a problem. This was not immediately recognized. The Preamble named all 13 states. But some of the states might not ratify it. Rhode Island was not expected to, and only barely did by a vote of 34 to 32: the last state to ratify.
The first Preamble, which affirmed the sovereignty of the sovereign people of specific states, might not apply. It would take only nine states to ratify in order to create a new government, in opposition to the Articles of Confederation, which required unanimity of all 13 legislatures.
On September 8, the Constitution was turned over to the Committee on Style and Arrangement. The Committee consisted of five men: Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, James Madison, and Gouverneur Morris. As with the committee of five that was assigned the task of writing the Declaration of Independence, it assigned most of the work to one man: Morris. James Madison later wrote: "The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris." Morris took 23 articles and converted them into seven. He also completely rewrote the Preamble. It took him three days. The Committee presented its work on September 12.
The Preamble moved the locus of sovereignty from the states to the nation as a whole. This became the declaration of dependence: dependence on a geographically rootless nation. This is what outraged Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention.
And here I would make this enquiry of those worthy characters who composed a part of the late Federal Convention. I am sure they were fully impressed with the necessity of forming a great consolidated Government, instead of a confederation. That this is a consolidated Government is demonstrably clear, and the danger of such a Government, is, to my mind, very striking. I have the highest veneration of those Gentlemen,--but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People. My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorised them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of a confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.
He lost the vote. The Constitution was ratified by all 13 states. So, the original Preamble could have been kept in. That would have changed the rhetoric of nationalism ever since...
Read the rest here:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/15367.cfm
Banksters for Hillary...
Surprise! Most Corrupt Bankster in U.S. Endorses Hillary Clinton
By Thomas DiLorenzo
It’s hard to imagine a better endorsement of Donald Trump’s economic policies – whatever they may be, whenever he finds the time to explain them – than the recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton by former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. As the man in charge of the biggest explosion of corporate welfare in world history – the “TARP” bailouts, he defined himself as a sworn enemy of capitalism and a socialist when it comes to the capital markets. Socializing billions of dollars in investment bank, insurance company, and automobile industry losses with taxpayer dollars qualifies Paulson as deserving of the S-word label. As such, Hillary Clinton may well have found a new political and financial soulmate.
Paulson began his career and cut his political teeth with some of the sleaziest and most disastrous political hacks in American history – first as a Pentagon assistant to the secretary of defense from 1970-1972, then as a Nixon administration assistant to John Ehrlichman, the convicted Watergate felon. Such sterling credentials earned him a position at Goldman Sachs, where he presumably mastered the political dirty trick skills that he must have learned from Ehrlichman and the rest to eventually claw his way up to the CEO position.
Paulson and Hillary Clinton might as well be cloned twins when it comes to using their positions of political power to line the pockets of the wealthiest people in America in return for kickbacks and political support. As the chief corporate welfare czar during the Bush administration, a first order of business was the $180 billion bailout of the insurance company AIG, ninety percent of which was totally solvent, as documented by David Stockman in his book, The Great Deformation (p. 6). Rather than allowing a healthy free-market purge of AIG’s bad assets, Paulson showered the company with taxpayer dollars in a totally unnecessary bailout.
The real purpose of the bailout, Stockman shows, was “protecting short-term earnings and current-year executive and trader bonuses,” not saving the company from bankruptcy. “The bailout’s primary effect was to provide a wholly unwarranted private benefit at public expense; namely, the shielding of highly paid bank traders and executives who had exposed their institutions to embarrassing losses from taking the fall . .. . “ Not that saving the company from bankruptcy with tax dollars would be wise or desirable. Capitalism is a profit and loss system, not an I-keep-the-profits/you-pay-for-my-losses system.
Paulson’s employer, Goldman Sachs, was paid nearly $19 billion on various claims against AIG, which means that the “AIG bailout” was also a giant bailout of Goldman Sachs. Then there was the $13 billion bailout of General Motors, “justified” by Paulson by the outrageously false theory that GM did not have enough assets to justify private loans to keep the company afloat. He warned America that the bankruptcy of GM could cost a million jobs even though the entire industry employs only about 750,000 workers according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The real purpose of the bailout of GM (and Chrysler) was a demonstration of why the Republican Party is known in some quarters as The Stupid Party. Had those two companies downsized or even declared bankruptcy, and the free market was allowed to work, there would have simply been a transfer of automobile production (and jobs) from the older, less-efficient, unionized factories to the mostly non-union factories in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. These are all right-to-work states where Republicans are more prevalent than in the heavily unionized “rust belt” states. The “GM bailout” was partly bailout of the United Autoworkers Union and its bankrupted pension plan. It is safe to assume that it did not result in a single vote, or a single dollar in campaign contributions to Paulson’s Republican party.
After showering Goldman Sachs and his other Wall Street cronies with tens of billions of tax dollars, Paulson returned to Goldman where he must have been very handsomely rewarded indeed. When it comes to the Wall Street banksters like Hank Paulson, the “revolving door” between business and government is literally paved with gold. His endorsement of “pay-to-play” corporate welfare queen Hillary Clinton is as perfect a political match as one can imagine.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/thomas-dilorenzo/toss-off-gop-goldman-elite/
By Thomas DiLorenzo
It’s hard to imagine a better endorsement of Donald Trump’s economic policies – whatever they may be, whenever he finds the time to explain them – than the recent endorsement of Hillary Clinton by former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. As the man in charge of the biggest explosion of corporate welfare in world history – the “TARP” bailouts, he defined himself as a sworn enemy of capitalism and a socialist when it comes to the capital markets. Socializing billions of dollars in investment bank, insurance company, and automobile industry losses with taxpayer dollars qualifies Paulson as deserving of the S-word label. As such, Hillary Clinton may well have found a new political and financial soulmate.
Paulson began his career and cut his political teeth with some of the sleaziest and most disastrous political hacks in American history – first as a Pentagon assistant to the secretary of defense from 1970-1972, then as a Nixon administration assistant to John Ehrlichman, the convicted Watergate felon. Such sterling credentials earned him a position at Goldman Sachs, where he presumably mastered the political dirty trick skills that he must have learned from Ehrlichman and the rest to eventually claw his way up to the CEO position.
Paulson and Hillary Clinton might as well be cloned twins when it comes to using their positions of political power to line the pockets of the wealthiest people in America in return for kickbacks and political support. As the chief corporate welfare czar during the Bush administration, a first order of business was the $180 billion bailout of the insurance company AIG, ninety percent of which was totally solvent, as documented by David Stockman in his book, The Great Deformation (p. 6). Rather than allowing a healthy free-market purge of AIG’s bad assets, Paulson showered the company with taxpayer dollars in a totally unnecessary bailout.
The real purpose of the bailout, Stockman shows, was “protecting short-term earnings and current-year executive and trader bonuses,” not saving the company from bankruptcy. “The bailout’s primary effect was to provide a wholly unwarranted private benefit at public expense; namely, the shielding of highly paid bank traders and executives who had exposed their institutions to embarrassing losses from taking the fall . .. . “ Not that saving the company from bankruptcy with tax dollars would be wise or desirable. Capitalism is a profit and loss system, not an I-keep-the-profits/you-pay-for-my-losses system.
Paulson’s employer, Goldman Sachs, was paid nearly $19 billion on various claims against AIG, which means that the “AIG bailout” was also a giant bailout of Goldman Sachs. Then there was the $13 billion bailout of General Motors, “justified” by Paulson by the outrageously false theory that GM did not have enough assets to justify private loans to keep the company afloat. He warned America that the bankruptcy of GM could cost a million jobs even though the entire industry employs only about 750,000 workers according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The real purpose of the bailout of GM (and Chrysler) was a demonstration of why the Republican Party is known in some quarters as The Stupid Party. Had those two companies downsized or even declared bankruptcy, and the free market was allowed to work, there would have simply been a transfer of automobile production (and jobs) from the older, less-efficient, unionized factories to the mostly non-union factories in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. These are all right-to-work states where Republicans are more prevalent than in the heavily unionized “rust belt” states. The “GM bailout” was partly bailout of the United Autoworkers Union and its bankrupted pension plan. It is safe to assume that it did not result in a single vote, or a single dollar in campaign contributions to Paulson’s Republican party.
After showering Goldman Sachs and his other Wall Street cronies with tens of billions of tax dollars, Paulson returned to Goldman where he must have been very handsomely rewarded indeed. When it comes to the Wall Street banksters like Hank Paulson, the “revolving door” between business and government is literally paved with gold. His endorsement of “pay-to-play” corporate welfare queen Hillary Clinton is as perfect a political match as one can imagine.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/thomas-dilorenzo/toss-off-gop-goldman-elite/
World War III...
Stop Sabre-Rattling Before It’s Too Late
By Eric Margolis
War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.
As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.
Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary, of course, share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, Serbs, Russians and British.
We are seeing the same process at work today. The war party in Washington, backed by the military-industrial complex, the tame media, and the neocons, are agitating hard for war.
US and NATO combat forces are being sent to Russia’s western borders in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. NATO is arming, financing ($40 billion so far) and supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Prominent Americans are calling for the US to attack Russian forces in Syria. US warships are off Russia’s coasts in the Black Sea, Baltic, and Pacific. NATO air forces are probing Russia’s western air borders.
Instant Access to Current Spot Prices & Interactive Charts
Some of this is great power shadow boxing, trying to cow insubordinate Russia into accepting Washington’s orders. But much appears to be the work of the hard right and neocons in the US and Europe in spite of the desire of most Americans and Europeans to avoid armed conflict with Russia.
Hence the daily barrage of anti-Russian, anti-Putin invective in the US media and the European media controlled by the US. Germany’s lapdog media behaves as if the US postwar occupation is still in force – and perhaps it is. Germany has not had a truly independent foreign policy since the war.
In an amazing break with Berlin’s normally obsequious behavior, German’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, just demanded that Washington and NATO stop their ‘sabre-rattling’ against Russia. He speaks for many Germans and other Europeans who are deeply alarmed by the alliance’s provocations of Russia.
In fact, many Europeans want to see the end of NATO-imposed sanctions against Russia that were ordered by the US. No one in Europe cares about Russia’s re-occupation of Crimea. The sanctions have been a big backfire, seriously hurting EU exports to Russia at a time of marked economic weakness. Nor are any Europeans ready to fight a war, or worse, even court nuclear war, for such dark-side-of-the-moon places as eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk or Mariupol.
America’s numb-brained Republican members of Congress, who could not find Crimea on a map if their lives depended on it, may be counted on to beat the war drums to please their big donors and hard right religious donors.
The only Republican to buck this trend is Donald Trump who, for all his other foolish positions, has the clear sense to see no benefit for the US in antagonizing Russia and seeking war in Europe or the Mideast.
What the US and its sidekick NATO has done so far is to antagonize Russia and affirm its deeply held fears that the west is always an implacable enemy. But it seems very unlikely that the tough Vlad Putin and his battle-hardened nation is going to be cowed into submission by a few thousand US and NATO troops, a few frigates and some flyovers. Ever since Frederick the Great, wise European leaders have learned not to fight with Russia.
Not so President Obama’s strategic Walkures, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and, until recently, Hillary Clinton. They proved the most bungling military-strategic leadership since Madame de Pompadour was briefly given command of France’s armies by King Louis XV and proved an epic disaster.
One shudders to watch Hillary Clinton aspire to be a commander-in-chief.
It’s also inevitable that land, sea and air provocations against Russia will eventually result in accidental clashes and a stern Russian response. All one needs is a Sarajevo II terror incident to spark a big shooting war between nuclear powers.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/eric-margolis/war-russia-coming/
By Eric Margolis
War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.
As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.
Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary, of course, share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, Serbs, Russians and British.
We are seeing the same process at work today. The war party in Washington, backed by the military-industrial complex, the tame media, and the neocons, are agitating hard for war.
US and NATO combat forces are being sent to Russia’s western borders in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. NATO is arming, financing ($40 billion so far) and supplying Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Prominent Americans are calling for the US to attack Russian forces in Syria. US warships are off Russia’s coasts in the Black Sea, Baltic, and Pacific. NATO air forces are probing Russia’s western air borders.
Instant Access to Current Spot Prices & Interactive Charts
Some of this is great power shadow boxing, trying to cow insubordinate Russia into accepting Washington’s orders. But much appears to be the work of the hard right and neocons in the US and Europe in spite of the desire of most Americans and Europeans to avoid armed conflict with Russia.
Hence the daily barrage of anti-Russian, anti-Putin invective in the US media and the European media controlled by the US. Germany’s lapdog media behaves as if the US postwar occupation is still in force – and perhaps it is. Germany has not had a truly independent foreign policy since the war.
In an amazing break with Berlin’s normally obsequious behavior, German’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, just demanded that Washington and NATO stop their ‘sabre-rattling’ against Russia. He speaks for many Germans and other Europeans who are deeply alarmed by the alliance’s provocations of Russia.
In fact, many Europeans want to see the end of NATO-imposed sanctions against Russia that were ordered by the US. No one in Europe cares about Russia’s re-occupation of Crimea. The sanctions have been a big backfire, seriously hurting EU exports to Russia at a time of marked economic weakness. Nor are any Europeans ready to fight a war, or worse, even court nuclear war, for such dark-side-of-the-moon places as eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk or Mariupol.
America’s numb-brained Republican members of Congress, who could not find Crimea on a map if their lives depended on it, may be counted on to beat the war drums to please their big donors and hard right religious donors.
The only Republican to buck this trend is Donald Trump who, for all his other foolish positions, has the clear sense to see no benefit for the US in antagonizing Russia and seeking war in Europe or the Mideast.
What the US and its sidekick NATO has done so far is to antagonize Russia and affirm its deeply held fears that the west is always an implacable enemy. But it seems very unlikely that the tough Vlad Putin and his battle-hardened nation is going to be cowed into submission by a few thousand US and NATO troops, a few frigates and some flyovers. Ever since Frederick the Great, wise European leaders have learned not to fight with Russia.
Not so President Obama’s strategic Walkures, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and, until recently, Hillary Clinton. They proved the most bungling military-strategic leadership since Madame de Pompadour was briefly given command of France’s armies by King Louis XV and proved an epic disaster.
One shudders to watch Hillary Clinton aspire to be a commander-in-chief.
It’s also inevitable that land, sea and air provocations against Russia will eventually result in accidental clashes and a stern Russian response. All one needs is a Sarajevo II terror incident to spark a big shooting war between nuclear powers.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/eric-margolis/war-russia-coming/
Friday, June 10, 2016
The Wussification Of Our Young People...
Generation Snowflake: Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings And The Wussification Of Our Young People
By Michael Snyder
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them? Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world? At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Claire Fox, head of a thinktank called the Institute of Ideas, has penned a coruscating critique of “Generation Snowflake”, the name given to a growing group of youngsters who “believe it’s their right to be protected from anything they might find unpalatable”.
She said British and American universities are dominated by cabals of young women who are dead set on banning anything they find remotely offensive.
Some time ago Fox was giving a speech to a group of young women during which she brought up the subject of rape, and she was completely stunned by what happened next…
Some of the girls were sobbing and hugging each other, while others shrieked. The majority appeared at the very least shell-shocked.
It was distress on a scale appropriate for some horrible disaster. Thankfully, however, I wasn’t in a war zone or at the scene of a pile-up – but in a school hall filled with A-level students.
What had provoked such hysteria? I’d dared express an opinion that went against their accepted way of thinking.
In the western world, political correctness is often taken to absolutely ridiculous extremes in attempt to keep people from being exposed to anything that could remotely be considered “offensive”. For instance, just consider a couple of examples from the United Kingdom…
This hyper-sensitivity has prompted the University of East Anglia to outlaw sombreros in a Mexican restaurant and caused the National Union of Students to ban clapping as “as it might trigger trauma”, asking youngsters to use “jazz hands” instead.
Could you imagine banning clapping?
But this is actually happening. Anything that might make someone feel the least bit “uncomfortable” is now being labeled as a “micro-aggression”, and at schools all over America “safe spaces” are being set up where young people can avoid anyone or anything that may make them “feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged”.
The following is one definition of “safe spaces” that comes from Wikipedia…
Advocates for Youth states on their website that a safe-space is “A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect, dignity and feelings and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.
And this is not a fringe movement at all. These “safe spaces” are being established at some of the most prestigious universities in the entire country, and in at least one case a “safe space” included “calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies”…
At Brown University – like Harvard, one of the eight elite Ivy League universities – the New York Times reported students set up a “safe space” that offered calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies to help students cope with a discussion on how colleges should handle sexual assault.
A Harvard student described in the university newspaper attending a “safe space” complete with “massage circles” that was designed to help students have open conversations.
Are you kidding me?
The real world is tough, and we need to teach our kids to be tough.
Trying to recreate a kindergarten environment for men and women that are supposed to be adults is not going to help anyone.
Another big thing that students are demanding now are “trigger warnings” on any educational materials that may potentially upset someone.
According to dictionary.com, a “trigger warning” is “a stated warning that the content of a text, video, etc., may upset or offend some people, especially those who have previously experienced a related trauma.”
At Harvard, students are being told that they are now free to skip certain books if reading them would make them feel “unsafe”. I wish that I could have used this excuse back in my college days, because then I would have had much more time to spend with my friends. The following comes from the Telegraph…
Literary classics are now considered potentially “unsafe” for students to read. Reading lists at some universities are being adapted to come with warnings printed beside certain titles: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Trigger: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence) and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Trigger: suicidal tendencies).
In some colleges, professors have been known to tell students that if a book makes them feel unsafe, they are allowed to skim it, or skip it altogether, a Harvard Law professor told this newspaper.
Now that we have defined “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”, I am going to define a term that I used in the title of this article.
“Wussification” is the act of turning someone into a “wussy”. And urbandictionary.com defines “wussy” in the following manner…
A person with no guts. A person who whines all day and sits around and cries like a little baby for years over nothing. Will blow anything out of proportion and create drama to forget about their sad miserable lives.
If our young people need cookies, Play-Doh and videos of frolicking puppies to deal with the challenges in their lives right now, what in the world are they going to do when the things that I talk about in my new book start happening to America?
The real world can be exceedingly cold and cruel, and our young people need to be equipped to handle whatever life will throw at them.
Unfortunately, we have raised an entire generation of overly coddled boys and girls that have never learned to become men and women, and as a result society as a whole will suffer greatly.
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/generation-snowflake-safe-spaces-trigger-warnings-and-the-wussification-of-our-overly-coddled-young-people
By Michael Snyder
Why do so many of our young people instantly break down in tears the moment anything seriously offends them? Have we raised an entire generation that has been so coddled and that is so spineless that it is completely incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of the modern world? At colleges and universities all over America, students are now demanding “safe spaces” where anything and everything that could possibly make them feel “uncomfortable” is banned. And “trigger warnings” are being placed on some of our great literary classics because they might cause some students to feel “unsafe” because they may be reminded of a past trauma. In this day and age, our overly coddled young people have come to expect that they should be automatically shielded from anything that could remotely be considered harmful or offensive, and as a result we now have an entire generation that is completely lacking in toughness. That may be fine as long as you can depend on Mom and Dad, but how in the world are these young men and women going to handle the difficult challenges that come with living in the real world?
Author Claire Fox has a great deal of experience dealing with these overly sensitive young people, and she has dubbed them “Generation Snowflake”…
Claire Fox, head of a thinktank called the Institute of Ideas, has penned a coruscating critique of “Generation Snowflake”, the name given to a growing group of youngsters who “believe it’s their right to be protected from anything they might find unpalatable”.
She said British and American universities are dominated by cabals of young women who are dead set on banning anything they find remotely offensive.
Some time ago Fox was giving a speech to a group of young women during which she brought up the subject of rape, and she was completely stunned by what happened next…
Some of the girls were sobbing and hugging each other, while others shrieked. The majority appeared at the very least shell-shocked.
It was distress on a scale appropriate for some horrible disaster. Thankfully, however, I wasn’t in a war zone or at the scene of a pile-up – but in a school hall filled with A-level students.
What had provoked such hysteria? I’d dared express an opinion that went against their accepted way of thinking.
In the western world, political correctness is often taken to absolutely ridiculous extremes in attempt to keep people from being exposed to anything that could remotely be considered “offensive”. For instance, just consider a couple of examples from the United Kingdom…
This hyper-sensitivity has prompted the University of East Anglia to outlaw sombreros in a Mexican restaurant and caused the National Union of Students to ban clapping as “as it might trigger trauma”, asking youngsters to use “jazz hands” instead.
Could you imagine banning clapping?
But this is actually happening. Anything that might make someone feel the least bit “uncomfortable” is now being labeled as a “micro-aggression”, and at schools all over America “safe spaces” are being set up where young people can avoid anyone or anything that may make them “feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged”.
The following is one definition of “safe spaces” that comes from Wikipedia…
Advocates for Youth states on their website that a safe-space is “A place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome or challenged on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect, dignity and feelings and strongly encourage everyone to respect others.
And this is not a fringe movement at all. These “safe spaces” are being established at some of the most prestigious universities in the entire country, and in at least one case a “safe space” included “calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies”…
At Brown University – like Harvard, one of the eight elite Ivy League universities – the New York Times reported students set up a “safe space” that offered calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies to help students cope with a discussion on how colleges should handle sexual assault.
A Harvard student described in the university newspaper attending a “safe space” complete with “massage circles” that was designed to help students have open conversations.
Are you kidding me?
The real world is tough, and we need to teach our kids to be tough.
Trying to recreate a kindergarten environment for men and women that are supposed to be adults is not going to help anyone.
Another big thing that students are demanding now are “trigger warnings” on any educational materials that may potentially upset someone.
According to dictionary.com, a “trigger warning” is “a stated warning that the content of a text, video, etc., may upset or offend some people, especially those who have previously experienced a related trauma.”
At Harvard, students are being told that they are now free to skip certain books if reading them would make them feel “unsafe”. I wish that I could have used this excuse back in my college days, because then I would have had much more time to spend with my friends. The following comes from the Telegraph…
Literary classics are now considered potentially “unsafe” for students to read. Reading lists at some universities are being adapted to come with warnings printed beside certain titles: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (Trigger: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence) and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Trigger: suicidal tendencies).
In some colleges, professors have been known to tell students that if a book makes them feel unsafe, they are allowed to skim it, or skip it altogether, a Harvard Law professor told this newspaper.
Now that we have defined “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”, I am going to define a term that I used in the title of this article.
“Wussification” is the act of turning someone into a “wussy”. And urbandictionary.com defines “wussy” in the following manner…
A person with no guts. A person who whines all day and sits around and cries like a little baby for years over nothing. Will blow anything out of proportion and create drama to forget about their sad miserable lives.
If our young people need cookies, Play-Doh and videos of frolicking puppies to deal with the challenges in their lives right now, what in the world are they going to do when the things that I talk about in my new book start happening to America?
The real world can be exceedingly cold and cruel, and our young people need to be equipped to handle whatever life will throw at them.
Unfortunately, we have raised an entire generation of overly coddled boys and girls that have never learned to become men and women, and as a result society as a whole will suffer greatly.
Link:
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/generation-snowflake-safe-spaces-trigger-warnings-and-the-wussification-of-our-overly-coddled-young-people
Social justice warriors destroying free speech...
Free Speech Under Attack
By Pater Tenebrarum
Offending People Left and Right
Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets from getting offended. As far as we are concerned, we generally try not to be unnecessarily rude to people, but occasionally giving offense is not exactly beneath us either.
Some people really deserve it, after all, …which is why we often refer to modern-day central bankers as lunatics, politicians as psychopaths, governments as gangs of highway robbers waving a flag, and so forth. On one occasion we even provided a translation of Mr. Böhmermann’s “abusive criticism” of Mr. Erdogan, which fell afoul of a 19th century lèse majesté law on Germany’s statute books.
That poem really was rude and insulting, no doubt about it. However, locking up journalists and opposition politicians under the pretext that they “threaten national security”, or bombing and suppressing ethnic minorities(for narrow and selfish political goals to boot) seems a lot worse to us.
The person responsible actually deserves to be insulted day and night, and given how thin-skinned Mr. Erdogan is, insulting him is great fun to boot. Admittedly, only as long as one is not within grabbing distance of his enforcers.
Similar to Bill, we also believe in equal opportunity offending. Since we are often at odds with the mainstream narrative on a wide variety of subjects, it seems unavoidable. For all their diversity, most of the targets are united by one overarching defining characteristic: they are either exercising power over other people or dispensing advice to those exercising such power. In our opinion, this makes them fair game.
As has been pointed out in these pages, so-called “political correctness” is essentially an attempt to muzzle free speech and introduce thought control (see “Cultural Marxism and the Birth of Modern Thought Crime” by Claudio Grass for an in-depth discussion of the topic). It also has the uncanny power to transform normally intelligent people into gibbering idiots and pansies (“Reality is a Formidable Enemy” provides a few striking examples).
Unfortunately, equal opportunity offenders are an increasingly endangered species. The world’s densest concentration of powerful and unaccountable statist control freaks in Brussels has just decided that “hate speech” is in need of more policing. Given the salami tactics favored by the Eurocracy, this is quite alarming.
“Voluntary” Agreement and Official Goals
The EU Commission and three large US technology companies (Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have just signed an agreement on policing and eradicating so-called “hate speech” – under, you probably guessed it, the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.
Terrorism has become a catch-all very similar to “climate change”. Just as there is apparently no ill in this world that cannot somehow be traced to the latter (global warming is responsible for such diverse evils as heroin addiction, the rise of ISIS, a lack of red-haired people, bear attacks in Japan, collapsing gingerbread houses in Sweden and even global cooling) – there are seemingly no civil liberties that cannot be done away with at the stroke of a pen in order to “fight terrorism”.
You won’t be surprised to learn that there has been no public consultation, parliamentary debate or vote on this agreement. It has simply sprung into being overnight. After all, who could possibly be against it? No-one is in favor of hate or terrorism, and since the “code of conduct” agreement is “voluntary” and doesn’t constitute legislation, the EU bureaucrats decided no debate was necessary.
To this one must keep in mind that US technology companies are subject to regular shakedowns by the EU’s “competition commission” as if competing European companies actually existed. They don’t exist of course because innovation and capital accumulation have become nigh-impossible tasks in the sclerotic socialistic EU.
Normally, big businesses use “anti-trust” laws as a means to bludgeon the competition. In this case, though, the shakedowns are initiated by bureaucrats themselves, in the name of protecting non-existing companies. This makes the whole exercise especially bizarre, but no less costly to its victims.
The upshot is though that US technology companies are eager to please EU bureaucrats, so as to avoid getting shaken down again for big money too soon.
The official goal of these restrictions on “hate speech” is to remove messages and postings by jihadists supporting ISIS. These are held to entice impressionable youngsters living in various “no future” ghettos across Europe – the people so eagerly invited in by the very same politicians imposing these restrictions now – to join the IS in Syria or commit violence in its name.
Granted, confused young Muslims surely need and deserve better role models than propagandists of IS and the violent medieval retro-philosophy they preach. The problem is however that what constitutes “hate speech” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
A Problem of Definitions
For once we are on the same page with the usually firmly etatiste pro-establishment magazine “The Economist”, which has surprised us positively with a critical assessment of the EU’s latest move to restrict free speech. As the Economist notes:
[T]he idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offense is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary.
If one doesn’t agree with someone’s speech, one should simply counter it with more convincing speech. Suppressing views one disagrees with by law (or by means of a “voluntary” agreement as is the case here) may only end up convincing those holding these views that they have to resort to more forceful means if they want to make themselves heard. In other words, more, rather than less violence may be the result.
The “code of conduct” is supposed to be applied to speech identified as “racist and xenophobic” – as if racism and xenophobia could be eradicated by prohibiting people from voicing it!
Immigration is moreover a hot button political issue in Europe right now, so it is easy to see how the charge of “racism and xenophobia” could be misused to simply suppress political dissent. In fact, the vultures are already beginning to circle...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/pater-tenebrarum/free-speech-abolished/
By Pater Tenebrarum
Offending People Left and Right
Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets from getting offended. As far as we are concerned, we generally try not to be unnecessarily rude to people, but occasionally giving offense is not exactly beneath us either.
Some people really deserve it, after all, …which is why we often refer to modern-day central bankers as lunatics, politicians as psychopaths, governments as gangs of highway robbers waving a flag, and so forth. On one occasion we even provided a translation of Mr. Böhmermann’s “abusive criticism” of Mr. Erdogan, which fell afoul of a 19th century lèse majesté law on Germany’s statute books.
That poem really was rude and insulting, no doubt about it. However, locking up journalists and opposition politicians under the pretext that they “threaten national security”, or bombing and suppressing ethnic minorities(for narrow and selfish political goals to boot) seems a lot worse to us.
The person responsible actually deserves to be insulted day and night, and given how thin-skinned Mr. Erdogan is, insulting him is great fun to boot. Admittedly, only as long as one is not within grabbing distance of his enforcers.
Similar to Bill, we also believe in equal opportunity offending. Since we are often at odds with the mainstream narrative on a wide variety of subjects, it seems unavoidable. For all their diversity, most of the targets are united by one overarching defining characteristic: they are either exercising power over other people or dispensing advice to those exercising such power. In our opinion, this makes them fair game.
As has been pointed out in these pages, so-called “political correctness” is essentially an attempt to muzzle free speech and introduce thought control (see “Cultural Marxism and the Birth of Modern Thought Crime” by Claudio Grass for an in-depth discussion of the topic). It also has the uncanny power to transform normally intelligent people into gibbering idiots and pansies (“Reality is a Formidable Enemy” provides a few striking examples).
Unfortunately, equal opportunity offenders are an increasingly endangered species. The world’s densest concentration of powerful and unaccountable statist control freaks in Brussels has just decided that “hate speech” is in need of more policing. Given the salami tactics favored by the Eurocracy, this is quite alarming.
“Voluntary” Agreement and Official Goals
The EU Commission and three large US technology companies (Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have just signed an agreement on policing and eradicating so-called “hate speech” – under, you probably guessed it, the pretext of “fighting terrorism”.
Terrorism has become a catch-all very similar to “climate change”. Just as there is apparently no ill in this world that cannot somehow be traced to the latter (global warming is responsible for such diverse evils as heroin addiction, the rise of ISIS, a lack of red-haired people, bear attacks in Japan, collapsing gingerbread houses in Sweden and even global cooling) – there are seemingly no civil liberties that cannot be done away with at the stroke of a pen in order to “fight terrorism”.
You won’t be surprised to learn that there has been no public consultation, parliamentary debate or vote on this agreement. It has simply sprung into being overnight. After all, who could possibly be against it? No-one is in favor of hate or terrorism, and since the “code of conduct” agreement is “voluntary” and doesn’t constitute legislation, the EU bureaucrats decided no debate was necessary.
To this one must keep in mind that US technology companies are subject to regular shakedowns by the EU’s “competition commission” as if competing European companies actually existed. They don’t exist of course because innovation and capital accumulation have become nigh-impossible tasks in the sclerotic socialistic EU.
Normally, big businesses use “anti-trust” laws as a means to bludgeon the competition. In this case, though, the shakedowns are initiated by bureaucrats themselves, in the name of protecting non-existing companies. This makes the whole exercise especially bizarre, but no less costly to its victims.
The upshot is though that US technology companies are eager to please EU bureaucrats, so as to avoid getting shaken down again for big money too soon.
The official goal of these restrictions on “hate speech” is to remove messages and postings by jihadists supporting ISIS. These are held to entice impressionable youngsters living in various “no future” ghettos across Europe – the people so eagerly invited in by the very same politicians imposing these restrictions now – to join the IS in Syria or commit violence in its name.
Granted, confused young Muslims surely need and deserve better role models than propagandists of IS and the violent medieval retro-philosophy they preach. The problem is however that what constitutes “hate speech” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
A Problem of Definitions
For once we are on the same page with the usually firmly etatiste pro-establishment magazine “The Economist”, which has surprised us positively with a critical assessment of the EU’s latest move to restrict free speech. As the Economist notes:
[T]he idea has spread that people and groups have a right not to be offended. This may sound innocuous. Politeness is a virtue, after all. But if I have a right not to be offended, that means someone must police what you say about me, or about the things I hold dear, such as my ethnic group, religion, or even political beliefs. Since offense is subjective, the power to police it is both vast and arbitrary.
If one doesn’t agree with someone’s speech, one should simply counter it with more convincing speech. Suppressing views one disagrees with by law (or by means of a “voluntary” agreement as is the case here) may only end up convincing those holding these views that they have to resort to more forceful means if they want to make themselves heard. In other words, more, rather than less violence may be the result.
The “code of conduct” is supposed to be applied to speech identified as “racist and xenophobic” – as if racism and xenophobia could be eradicated by prohibiting people from voicing it!
Immigration is moreover a hot button political issue in Europe right now, so it is easy to see how the charge of “racism and xenophobia” could be misused to simply suppress political dissent. In fact, the vultures are already beginning to circle...
Read the rest here:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/pater-tenebrarum/free-speech-abolished/
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