Oklahoma Police Can Seize Your Entire Bank Account on a Traffic Stop Without Any Charges
By Martin Armstrong
The one state that has gone complete anti-democratic is Oklahoma. It is wise not to travel in that state at all. Oklahoma should be on a no-fly zone. Now, Oklahoma police can outright seize everything you have from debit cards to bank accounts on a traffic stop without any criminal charges being filed. If some policeman thinks you’re doing something illegal, your life is over. Without money, you cannot hire a lawyer and they can just rob everything you have on a whim.
The Oklahoma Highway Patrol has introduced a device called Electronic Recovery and Access to Data (ERAM) that allows police officers to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards. State police began using 16 of these machines last month, and now the police have become literal highway robbers. This makes the traffic cops in Russia, who you can bribe to go away if they pull you over for a speeding ticket, as a far more civilized arrangement. Here, they can rob you of everything.
Let’s say a state trooper suspects or just thinks you may have money tied to any sort of crime. He can now scan any cards you have and seize the money in your wallet. He does not have to charge you with a crime. There is no right to remain silent, for he is not charging you. He is after all your money because the governments is broke.
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent said, “We’re gonna look for if there’s a difference in your story. If there’s some way that we can prove that you’re falsifying information to us about your business.” So all he has to do is “believe” you lied about anything and he has the right to take everything you have. They justify this by claiming it is not about seizing money. Of course not. It is criminal prosecution but there is no crime. Forget innocent until proven guilty. That will not apply. They pretend the money committed the crime – not you.
This is simply nullifying the Constitution. You have absolutely ZERO rights. He can rob you of everything and leave you with not even enough money for gas. The police have become the criminals. This is precisely how Rome fell. When they could not pay the army, they began sacking their own cities. This is exactly what the police are doing now and there is nobody to defend us against this new criminal organization.
Just stay out of Oklahoma at all costs. If other states follow, you better migrate to another country and fast. Look for a country not based on common law (English countries). This will destroy the freedom to travel for broke police have become highway criminals with guns.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/martin-armstrong/cops-will-seize-everything/
Friday, June 10, 2016
More JFK...
CIA & JFK: Postscript: Toward October 2017
By Jefferson Morley
The following is the final chapter in the new ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.
So, who killed President Kennedy?
The CIA’s last assassination-related files might help us answer that question. These files constitute a significant body of material — more than 1,100 files containing up to 50,000 pages of material. As we have seen, these are the files of senior is that this trove of long-secret intelligence files — if declassified in its entirety — will support the notion that the president was ambushed by enemies within his own government But that is only a hunch. New information might point us toward another conclusion. We have to see the documents to decide, and that won’t happen until October 2017.
The qualifier is important — if declassified in its entirety — because it raises a tougher question: Can online civil society force top CIA officials to make public information they obviously would prefer to keep a secret?
That is the fundamental question raised — but not answered — by this book. “Who killed JFK?” is a fascinating and significant question, but I have to admit it can sound like so much banter in a Baby Boomer bar room. The JFK story has no particular urgency in millennial America. I’m talking about a single homicide that happened before most of you were born. But the CIA’s last JFK files raise a contemporary political issue that couldn’t be more timely and relevant for the millennial generation: the role of extreme secrecy in a democratic society.
Extreme Secrecy
We can debate the causes of November 22, 1963, until the bartenders turn up the lights but no one can dispute its effects on our American government today. JFK’s assassination inspired and justified the extreme and extraordinary secrecy measures that remain in effect today.
This veil of secrecy descended on the day Kennedy died, as senior agency officials concealed their ongoing conspiracies to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro and their pre-assassination knowledge of suspected JFK assassin Lee Oswald. This veil of secrecy impeded the investigations of the assassination by the Warren Commission in 1964, by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in 1967–1989, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975–1976, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976–79, and by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1994–98. In every investigation relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA concealed information relevant to the JFK story that could have and should have been made public.
In 2016, this veil of secrecy continues to conceal 1,100 files concerning the likes of CIA officials Bill Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, David Morales, Ann Goodpasture, and George Joannides, as well as the surveillance operations that picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas.
Rule of Law
The rule of law has not proven entirely ineffectual in piercing the veil of secrecy around the JFK story.
Public skepticism about the findings of the Warren Commission contributed to the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s. JFK researchers used the FOIA in the 1970s to open the records of the Warren Commission. The investigations of Jim Garrison, the Church Committee, and the HSCA forced more of the story into public view, but CIA stonewalling still kept much of it under lock and key.
Hollywood has played a role. In 1992, the box office and critical success of Oliver Stone’s JFK shamed the Congress into passing the JFK Records Act. The law required government agencies to make public any and all records related to JFK’s assassination. The will of the people could not have been clearer. The law was approved unanimously by a Democratic Congress in a vote of 435 to zero. President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed the bill into law and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, implemented it.
The CIA and other federal agencies were given the right to postpone the release of material for reasons of privacy and national security for up to 25 years. The law was passed in October 1992. Twenty-three and half years have passed since Congress acted. In October 2017, the last JFK files are supposed to become public.
Can the rule of law prevail? Unfortunately, the JFK Records Act has a proverbial loophole, which could prove fatal to the near-universal desire for full JFK disclosure. A provision of the law allows for federal agencies to petition the White House to delay the release of JFK material beyond October 2017. CIA officials quietly insisted on this provision in 1992 and I am personally convinced that they full intend to exploit it in 2017.
There is no reason to believe that the CIA’s institutional commitment to JFK secrecy has been curbed, controlled, or in any way affected by the letter and spirit of the JFK Records Act. The CIA has its loophole and they will almost certainly exploit it, the petterublic be damned. Such is the state of American democracy.
The Question
Can the CIA’s arrogance and penchant for secrecy be checked, at least with respect to the Kennedy assassination?
The divided and dysfunctional Congress is not capable of holding the agency accountable. The shrinking Washington press corps is not willing or able to confront the CIA over what it considers to be an ancient issue. The men and women running for president have not addressed the issue.
The only check on those senior CIA officials who wish to continue the JFK assassination cover-up in 2016 is online civil society.
Online civil society consists of citizens of the United States (and the world) who are empowered by the Internet to find and share information. Thanks to the World Wide Web, all people everywhere now have access to the historical record of JFK’s assassination (via websites like MaryFerrell.org, JFKLancer.com and JFKFacts.org) and to powerful communications channels (like Facebook and Twitter).
The combination of 1) widespread public knowledge about how CIA secrecy works and 2) social media conversation about the continuing JFK cover-up could (emphasis on the conditional) raise awareness on the Internet, in Congress, in elite news organizations, and the presidential campaigns. Such public exposure might, in turn, affect the CIA’s calculations.
It won’t be easy. Those who favor full JFK disclosure confront a secretive government agency with an enormous budget, a stable of high-paid lawyers, and a cadre of experienced bureaucrats who will resolutely insist that their privileges of secrecy should not be pierced. But the very extremism of the CIA’s position is actually a weakness.
We can be sure that CIA will claim “national security” requires continuing secrecy around certain JFK files. The argument that release of such ancient material might threaten the safety of any American today is frankly preposterous. If John Brennan and other top CIA officials are forced to state publicly that they wish to continue concealing JFK assassination records to protect the lives of Americans from the Islamic State, they will risk public ridicule and shame. The prospect of personal and institutional embarrassment might — again with emphasis on the conditional — force them to respect the will of the public.
Leverage
We the people have only two points of leverage, both grounded in the principle of the public’s right to know.
One point of leverage is the 2016 presidential election. If the leaders of the CIA want to keep secret any portion of the last JFK files, they will have to get the approval of the White House. The next president will have to listen to the legal issues as understood by his or her legal advisers and then make a decision before October 2017. Hence the pressing question for presidential aspirants, “Do you favor full disclosure of the CIA’s JFK files in October 2017?”
The other point of leverage is the October 2017 deadline itself. The CIA will be hard pressed to justify the continuing censorship of all 1,100 still-secret files. Most of this material is not historically important, so the CIA is likely to release some or most of it, probably with fanfare and self-congratulation. So news organizations and the blogosphere and social media channels will be paying attention to what is made public — and not to what the CIA seeks to conceal.
I think that speculation about what might be in the files is a big mistake. The overriding question is, Why would the CIA insist on continued secrecy with respect to its JFK assassination-related files? The secondary question is, Can the CIA be shamed or coerced or persuaded to obey the law and release all of the remaining JFK assassination files by October 2017 without exception?
The answer to the second question is yes — if you share this book with a friend and insist, via social media, that the CIA obey the law. (Hashtags #CIAObey and #JFK2017). If we, the American people, fail to take a firm public stand against the CIA’s continued secrecy, the JFK cover-up will continue indefinitely. The October 2017 deadline for the release of the JFK assassination-related files looms as a test of American democracy. You can duck it or face it, but it is not going away.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/no_author/secret-assassination-files/
By Jefferson Morley
The following is the final chapter in the new ebook CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley.
So, who killed President Kennedy?
The CIA’s last assassination-related files might help us answer that question. These files constitute a significant body of material — more than 1,100 files containing up to 50,000 pages of material. As we have seen, these are the files of senior is that this trove of long-secret intelligence files — if declassified in its entirety — will support the notion that the president was ambushed by enemies within his own government But that is only a hunch. New information might point us toward another conclusion. We have to see the documents to decide, and that won’t happen until October 2017.
The qualifier is important — if declassified in its entirety — because it raises a tougher question: Can online civil society force top CIA officials to make public information they obviously would prefer to keep a secret?
That is the fundamental question raised — but not answered — by this book. “Who killed JFK?” is a fascinating and significant question, but I have to admit it can sound like so much banter in a Baby Boomer bar room. The JFK story has no particular urgency in millennial America. I’m talking about a single homicide that happened before most of you were born. But the CIA’s last JFK files raise a contemporary political issue that couldn’t be more timely and relevant for the millennial generation: the role of extreme secrecy in a democratic society.
Extreme Secrecy
We can debate the causes of November 22, 1963, until the bartenders turn up the lights but no one can dispute its effects on our American government today. JFK’s assassination inspired and justified the extreme and extraordinary secrecy measures that remain in effect today.
This veil of secrecy descended on the day Kennedy died, as senior agency officials concealed their ongoing conspiracies to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro and their pre-assassination knowledge of suspected JFK assassin Lee Oswald. This veil of secrecy impeded the investigations of the assassination by the Warren Commission in 1964, by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison in 1967–1989, by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975–1976, by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976–79, and by the Assassination Records Review Board in 1994–98. In every investigation relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA concealed information relevant to the JFK story that could have and should have been made public.
In 2016, this veil of secrecy continues to conceal 1,100 files concerning the likes of CIA officials Bill Harvey, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, David Morales, Ann Goodpasture, and George Joannides, as well as the surveillance operations that picked up on Lee Harvey Oswald as he made his way from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas.
Rule of Law
The rule of law has not proven entirely ineffectual in piercing the veil of secrecy around the JFK story.
Public skepticism about the findings of the Warren Commission contributed to the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s. JFK researchers used the FOIA in the 1970s to open the records of the Warren Commission. The investigations of Jim Garrison, the Church Committee, and the HSCA forced more of the story into public view, but CIA stonewalling still kept much of it under lock and key.
Hollywood has played a role. In 1992, the box office and critical success of Oliver Stone’s JFK shamed the Congress into passing the JFK Records Act. The law required government agencies to make public any and all records related to JFK’s assassination. The will of the people could not have been clearer. The law was approved unanimously by a Democratic Congress in a vote of 435 to zero. President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed the bill into law and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, implemented it.
The CIA and other federal agencies were given the right to postpone the release of material for reasons of privacy and national security for up to 25 years. The law was passed in October 1992. Twenty-three and half years have passed since Congress acted. In October 2017, the last JFK files are supposed to become public.
Can the rule of law prevail? Unfortunately, the JFK Records Act has a proverbial loophole, which could prove fatal to the near-universal desire for full JFK disclosure. A provision of the law allows for federal agencies to petition the White House to delay the release of JFK material beyond October 2017. CIA officials quietly insisted on this provision in 1992 and I am personally convinced that they full intend to exploit it in 2017.
There is no reason to believe that the CIA’s institutional commitment to JFK secrecy has been curbed, controlled, or in any way affected by the letter and spirit of the JFK Records Act. The CIA has its loophole and they will almost certainly exploit it, the petterublic be damned. Such is the state of American democracy.
The Question
Can the CIA’s arrogance and penchant for secrecy be checked, at least with respect to the Kennedy assassination?
The divided and dysfunctional Congress is not capable of holding the agency accountable. The shrinking Washington press corps is not willing or able to confront the CIA over what it considers to be an ancient issue. The men and women running for president have not addressed the issue.
The only check on those senior CIA officials who wish to continue the JFK assassination cover-up in 2016 is online civil society.
Online civil society consists of citizens of the United States (and the world) who are empowered by the Internet to find and share information. Thanks to the World Wide Web, all people everywhere now have access to the historical record of JFK’s assassination (via websites like MaryFerrell.org, JFKLancer.com and JFKFacts.org) and to powerful communications channels (like Facebook and Twitter).
The combination of 1) widespread public knowledge about how CIA secrecy works and 2) social media conversation about the continuing JFK cover-up could (emphasis on the conditional) raise awareness on the Internet, in Congress, in elite news organizations, and the presidential campaigns. Such public exposure might, in turn, affect the CIA’s calculations.
It won’t be easy. Those who favor full JFK disclosure confront a secretive government agency with an enormous budget, a stable of high-paid lawyers, and a cadre of experienced bureaucrats who will resolutely insist that their privileges of secrecy should not be pierced. But the very extremism of the CIA’s position is actually a weakness.
We can be sure that CIA will claim “national security” requires continuing secrecy around certain JFK files. The argument that release of such ancient material might threaten the safety of any American today is frankly preposterous. If John Brennan and other top CIA officials are forced to state publicly that they wish to continue concealing JFK assassination records to protect the lives of Americans from the Islamic State, they will risk public ridicule and shame. The prospect of personal and institutional embarrassment might — again with emphasis on the conditional — force them to respect the will of the public.
Leverage
We the people have only two points of leverage, both grounded in the principle of the public’s right to know.
One point of leverage is the 2016 presidential election. If the leaders of the CIA want to keep secret any portion of the last JFK files, they will have to get the approval of the White House. The next president will have to listen to the legal issues as understood by his or her legal advisers and then make a decision before October 2017. Hence the pressing question for presidential aspirants, “Do you favor full disclosure of the CIA’s JFK files in October 2017?”
The other point of leverage is the October 2017 deadline itself. The CIA will be hard pressed to justify the continuing censorship of all 1,100 still-secret files. Most of this material is not historically important, so the CIA is likely to release some or most of it, probably with fanfare and self-congratulation. So news organizations and the blogosphere and social media channels will be paying attention to what is made public — and not to what the CIA seeks to conceal.
I think that speculation about what might be in the files is a big mistake. The overriding question is, Why would the CIA insist on continued secrecy with respect to its JFK assassination-related files? The secondary question is, Can the CIA be shamed or coerced or persuaded to obey the law and release all of the remaining JFK assassination files by October 2017 without exception?
The answer to the second question is yes — if you share this book with a friend and insist, via social media, that the CIA obey the law. (Hashtags #CIAObey and #JFK2017). If we, the American people, fail to take a firm public stand against the CIA’s continued secrecy, the JFK cover-up will continue indefinitely. The October 2017 deadline for the release of the JFK assassination-related files looms as a test of American democracy. You can duck it or face it, but it is not going away.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/no_author/secret-assassination-files/
Thursday, June 9, 2016
"The Founding Fathers were not unaware that "times change." But in the whirlwind of life they saw that reason and experience could and had demonstrated that there were unchanging qualities to the human condition. They understood the various mantles that tyranny could take on - including the cloak of false benevolence and promises of national "greatness" if only a strong man was put in charge to set things right, unrestrained by traditional conceptions of individual rights and liberty and constitutional limitations."
American Forefathers Were Not Paternalistic
by Richard Ebeling
OPINION - America! For more than 250 years the word has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance, and freedom. In America the accident of a man's birth did not have to serve as an inescapable weight that dictated a person's fate or that of his family. The American identity is shaped, not predetermined. We are a society of the free.
Once a newcomer - the immigrant - stepped on American soil he left the political tyrannies and economic barriers of the "old world" behind. A willingness to work hard and to bear the risks of one's own decisions, the possession of a spirit of enterprise, and a little bit of luck were the keys to the doors of success in their "new world" home.
Visitors from Europe traveling to America in the nineteenth century, Frenchmen like Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier, marveled at the energy and adaptability of the ordinary American. An American paid his own way, took responsibility for his actions, and showed versatility in the face of change, often switching his occupation, profession, or trade several times during his life, and frequently moving about from one part of the country to another.
American Ideals Don't Need Regulating
What's more, individual Americans demonstrated a generous spirit of charity and voluntary effort to assist those who had fallen upon hard times, as well as to deal with a wide variety of common community services in their cities, towns, and villages.
Those foreign observers of American life noted that no man bowed to another because of the hereditary accident of birth. Each man viewed himself as good as any other, to be judged on the basis of his talents and abilities as well as his character and conduct as a human being.
Even the scar of slavery that blemished the American landscape through more than half of the nineteenth century stood out as something inherently inconsistent and untrue to the vision and conception of a society of free men laid down by those Founding Fathers. The logic of liberty meant that slavery, and all other denials of equal rights before the law, would eventually have to end, in one way or another, if the claim of freedom for all was not to remain confronted with a cruel hypocrisy to the ideal.
A Free America's Wondrous Fruits
What a glorious country this America was. Here was a land of free individuals who were able to pursue their dreams and fulfill their peaceful desires. They were free men who could put their own labor to work, acquire property, accumulate wealth, and fashion their own lives. They associated on the basis of freedom of exchange, and benefited each other by trading their talents through a network of division of labor that was kept in order through the competitive processes of market-guided supply and demand.
In this free marketplace, the creative entrepreneurial spirit was set free. Every American was at liberty to try his hand, if he chose, to start his own business and devise innovative ways to offer new and better products to the market, through which he hoped to earn his living. No man was bond to the soil upon which he was born or tied to an occupation or profession inherited from his ancestors. Every individual had an opportunity to be the master of his own fate, with the freedom to move where inclination led him and choose the work that seemed most profitable and attractive.
The Counter-Revolution of Collectivism
Then something began to happen in America. The socialist and collectivist ideas that were growing in influence in Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century began to spread over to the United States. Two generations of young American scholars went off to study in Europe, particularly Germany, in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. They became imbued with socialist and state paternalistic conceptions, especially the interventionist and pro-welfare-state ideas that were being taught at the universities in Bismarck's Germany.
These scholars came back to the United States enthusiastic about their newly learned ideas, convinced that the "negative" idea of freedom dominant in America - an idea of freedom that argued that government's role was only to secure each individual in his life, liberty, and property - needed to be replaced by a more "positive" notion of freedom. Government should not merely protect citizens from violence and fraud. It should guarantee their health care and retirement pensions; it should regulate their industry and trade, including their wages and conditions of work. The government needed to secure the members of society from all the uncertainties of life, "from cradle to grave" - a phrase that was first popularized during this time.
These European-trained students and academics soon filled the teaching positions in the colleges and universities around the country; they occupied a growing number of jobs in the federal and state bureaucracies; they became the fashionable and "progressive" forward- looking authors of books and magazine articles; they came to dominate the culture of ideas in America.
Progressivism's Attack on Enduring Principles
How did they sway an increasing number of Americans? They asked people to look around them and observe the radical changes in technologies and styles of life. They pointed to the rapid shift from the countryside to growing urban areas. And they asked, how could such a transformed and transforming society remain wedded to the ideas of men who had lived so long ago, in the eighteenth century? How could a great and growing country be tied down to a Constitution written for a bygone era?
The Constitution, these "progressives" argued, had to reflect the changing times - it had to be a "living" and "evolving" document. Progress, for these proselytizers of Prussian paternalism, required a new political elite who would guide and lead the nation into a more collectivist future.
Results of Collectivism in America
The fruits of their work are, now, after a century all around us. At the beginning of the twentieth century all levels of government in the United States took in taxes an amount less than 8 percent of the people's wealth and income. Now all levels of government extract, directly or indirectly, often 50 percent of our earnings, in one way or another. One hundred years ago, government hardly regulated and controlled any of the personal and commercial affairs of the American citizenry. Now, government's hand intrudes into every corner of our private, business, and social affairs. Indeed, it is hard to find one area of our daily lives that does not pass through the interventionist sieve of state management, oversight, restriction, and command.
Perhaps worst of all, too many of our fellow Americans have become accustomed to and, indeed, demanding of government protection or subsidy of their personal and economic affairs. We are no longer free, self-supporting individuals who solely make our ways through the peaceful transactions and exchanges of the marketplace. We have become collective "interest groups" who lobby and pressure those in political office for favors and privileges at the expense of our neighbors. And the political officeholders are only too happy to grant these political gifts to those who supply campaign contributions and votes as the avenue to their own desires for power and control over those whom they claim to serve.
It is sometimes said, "But we are still the freest country in the world. Our wealth and standard of living are the envy of tens of millions all around the globe. We should be proud of what and who we are."
The Standard for Judging America
Our present greatness in terms of these things, however, is only relative to how much farther other countries have gone down the path of government paternalism and regulation during these past one hundred years. The benchmark of comparison should not be America in relation to other countries in the contemporary world. The standard by which we should judge, especially, our economic liberty should be how much freer the American people were from the stranglehold of government more than one hundred years ago, before those proselytizers of paternalism began to change the political and cultural character of the United States.
By this standard, today's American people are extremely unfree. We have all become wards of the state. And like the convict who has spent so many years in prison that he is afraid of being released and no longer having his jail keepers to tell him what to do and how to live, we are fearful of even the thought of a life without government caring for us, protecting us, subsidizing us, guiding us, and educating us.
Too many in the older generation in America have lost their understanding of what freedom means and why constitutionally limited government is both necessary and desirable. And the vast majority of the young have never been taught in our government-run schools the ideas, ideals, and political institutional foundations upon which this country of ours was created.
Too many younger Americans presume and take for granted a politically provided financial horn-of-plenty that is to supply all the material means of everyday life and ease, whether it be "free" college tuition or guaranteed healthcare. The recently reawakened interest and sympathy for "democratic" socialism among a significant number of younger voters is one indicator of this trend.
The Damage Done by Political Paternalism
What those earlier German-trained political and cultural paternalists set out to do in America at the beginning of the twentieth century has been to a great extent accomplished. We are threatened with becoming a people who have no sense of an invariant nature of man, and who possess no idea of those values and attitudes in the human character so necessary for preserving freedom and prosperity.
The Founding Fathers were not unaware that "times change." But in the whirlwind of life they saw that reason and experience could and had demonstrated that there were unchanging qualities to the human condition. They understood the various mantles that tyranny could take on - including the cloak of false benevolence and promises of national "greatness" if only a strong man was put in charge to set things right, unrestrained by traditional conceptions of individual rights and liberty and constitutional limitations.
They established a constitutional order that was meant to guard us from the plunder of violent and greedy and power-hungry men and women, while leaving each of us that wide latitude of personal and economic freedom in which we could find our own meanings for life, and adapt to new circumstances consistent with our conscience and concerns.
This is what made America great. This is what made a country in which individuals could say without embarrassment or conceit that they were proud to be Americans. That is the America we are losing.
Link:
http://www.epictimes.com/06/08/2016/american-forefathers-not-paternalistic/
by Richard Ebeling
OPINION - America! For more than 250 years the word has represented hope, opportunity, a second chance, and freedom. In America the accident of a man's birth did not have to serve as an inescapable weight that dictated a person's fate or that of his family. The American identity is shaped, not predetermined. We are a society of the free.
Once a newcomer - the immigrant - stepped on American soil he left the political tyrannies and economic barriers of the "old world" behind. A willingness to work hard and to bear the risks of one's own decisions, the possession of a spirit of enterprise, and a little bit of luck were the keys to the doors of success in their "new world" home.
Visitors from Europe traveling to America in the nineteenth century, Frenchmen like Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier, marveled at the energy and adaptability of the ordinary American. An American paid his own way, took responsibility for his actions, and showed versatility in the face of change, often switching his occupation, profession, or trade several times during his life, and frequently moving about from one part of the country to another.
American Ideals Don't Need Regulating
What's more, individual Americans demonstrated a generous spirit of charity and voluntary effort to assist those who had fallen upon hard times, as well as to deal with a wide variety of common community services in their cities, towns, and villages.
Those foreign observers of American life noted that no man bowed to another because of the hereditary accident of birth. Each man viewed himself as good as any other, to be judged on the basis of his talents and abilities as well as his character and conduct as a human being.
Even the scar of slavery that blemished the American landscape through more than half of the nineteenth century stood out as something inherently inconsistent and untrue to the vision and conception of a society of free men laid down by those Founding Fathers. The logic of liberty meant that slavery, and all other denials of equal rights before the law, would eventually have to end, in one way or another, if the claim of freedom for all was not to remain confronted with a cruel hypocrisy to the ideal.
A Free America's Wondrous Fruits
What a glorious country this America was. Here was a land of free individuals who were able to pursue their dreams and fulfill their peaceful desires. They were free men who could put their own labor to work, acquire property, accumulate wealth, and fashion their own lives. They associated on the basis of freedom of exchange, and benefited each other by trading their talents through a network of division of labor that was kept in order through the competitive processes of market-guided supply and demand.
In this free marketplace, the creative entrepreneurial spirit was set free. Every American was at liberty to try his hand, if he chose, to start his own business and devise innovative ways to offer new and better products to the market, through which he hoped to earn his living. No man was bond to the soil upon which he was born or tied to an occupation or profession inherited from his ancestors. Every individual had an opportunity to be the master of his own fate, with the freedom to move where inclination led him and choose the work that seemed most profitable and attractive.
The Counter-Revolution of Collectivism
Then something began to happen in America. The socialist and collectivist ideas that were growing in influence in Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century began to spread over to the United States. Two generations of young American scholars went off to study in Europe, particularly Germany, in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s. They became imbued with socialist and state paternalistic conceptions, especially the interventionist and pro-welfare-state ideas that were being taught at the universities in Bismarck's Germany.
These scholars came back to the United States enthusiastic about their newly learned ideas, convinced that the "negative" idea of freedom dominant in America - an idea of freedom that argued that government's role was only to secure each individual in his life, liberty, and property - needed to be replaced by a more "positive" notion of freedom. Government should not merely protect citizens from violence and fraud. It should guarantee their health care and retirement pensions; it should regulate their industry and trade, including their wages and conditions of work. The government needed to secure the members of society from all the uncertainties of life, "from cradle to grave" - a phrase that was first popularized during this time.
These European-trained students and academics soon filled the teaching positions in the colleges and universities around the country; they occupied a growing number of jobs in the federal and state bureaucracies; they became the fashionable and "progressive" forward- looking authors of books and magazine articles; they came to dominate the culture of ideas in America.
Progressivism's Attack on Enduring Principles
How did they sway an increasing number of Americans? They asked people to look around them and observe the radical changes in technologies and styles of life. They pointed to the rapid shift from the countryside to growing urban areas. And they asked, how could such a transformed and transforming society remain wedded to the ideas of men who had lived so long ago, in the eighteenth century? How could a great and growing country be tied down to a Constitution written for a bygone era?
The Constitution, these "progressives" argued, had to reflect the changing times - it had to be a "living" and "evolving" document. Progress, for these proselytizers of Prussian paternalism, required a new political elite who would guide and lead the nation into a more collectivist future.
Results of Collectivism in America
The fruits of their work are, now, after a century all around us. At the beginning of the twentieth century all levels of government in the United States took in taxes an amount less than 8 percent of the people's wealth and income. Now all levels of government extract, directly or indirectly, often 50 percent of our earnings, in one way or another. One hundred years ago, government hardly regulated and controlled any of the personal and commercial affairs of the American citizenry. Now, government's hand intrudes into every corner of our private, business, and social affairs. Indeed, it is hard to find one area of our daily lives that does not pass through the interventionist sieve of state management, oversight, restriction, and command.
Perhaps worst of all, too many of our fellow Americans have become accustomed to and, indeed, demanding of government protection or subsidy of their personal and economic affairs. We are no longer free, self-supporting individuals who solely make our ways through the peaceful transactions and exchanges of the marketplace. We have become collective "interest groups" who lobby and pressure those in political office for favors and privileges at the expense of our neighbors. And the political officeholders are only too happy to grant these political gifts to those who supply campaign contributions and votes as the avenue to their own desires for power and control over those whom they claim to serve.
It is sometimes said, "But we are still the freest country in the world. Our wealth and standard of living are the envy of tens of millions all around the globe. We should be proud of what and who we are."
The Standard for Judging America
Our present greatness in terms of these things, however, is only relative to how much farther other countries have gone down the path of government paternalism and regulation during these past one hundred years. The benchmark of comparison should not be America in relation to other countries in the contemporary world. The standard by which we should judge, especially, our economic liberty should be how much freer the American people were from the stranglehold of government more than one hundred years ago, before those proselytizers of paternalism began to change the political and cultural character of the United States.
By this standard, today's American people are extremely unfree. We have all become wards of the state. And like the convict who has spent so many years in prison that he is afraid of being released and no longer having his jail keepers to tell him what to do and how to live, we are fearful of even the thought of a life without government caring for us, protecting us, subsidizing us, guiding us, and educating us.
Too many in the older generation in America have lost their understanding of what freedom means and why constitutionally limited government is both necessary and desirable. And the vast majority of the young have never been taught in our government-run schools the ideas, ideals, and political institutional foundations upon which this country of ours was created.
Too many younger Americans presume and take for granted a politically provided financial horn-of-plenty that is to supply all the material means of everyday life and ease, whether it be "free" college tuition or guaranteed healthcare. The recently reawakened interest and sympathy for "democratic" socialism among a significant number of younger voters is one indicator of this trend.
The Damage Done by Political Paternalism
What those earlier German-trained political and cultural paternalists set out to do in America at the beginning of the twentieth century has been to a great extent accomplished. We are threatened with becoming a people who have no sense of an invariant nature of man, and who possess no idea of those values and attitudes in the human character so necessary for preserving freedom and prosperity.
The Founding Fathers were not unaware that "times change." But in the whirlwind of life they saw that reason and experience could and had demonstrated that there were unchanging qualities to the human condition. They understood the various mantles that tyranny could take on - including the cloak of false benevolence and promises of national "greatness" if only a strong man was put in charge to set things right, unrestrained by traditional conceptions of individual rights and liberty and constitutional limitations.
They established a constitutional order that was meant to guard us from the plunder of violent and greedy and power-hungry men and women, while leaving each of us that wide latitude of personal and economic freedom in which we could find our own meanings for life, and adapt to new circumstances consistent with our conscience and concerns.
This is what made America great. This is what made a country in which individuals could say without embarrassment or conceit that they were proud to be Americans. That is the America we are losing.
Link:
http://www.epictimes.com/06/08/2016/american-forefathers-not-paternalistic/
Guess they'll be going after Lincoln's monument next...
“What Shall We Do With the Negroes After They Are Free?”
Thomas DiLorenzo
So asked Abraham Lincoln of General Benjamin Butler in early 1865 (page 19 of the linked article). Lincoln answered his own question: Deport them all out of America, he said. After complimenting Butler on his ability to move large numbers of people by water during the war, Lincoln asked him if he could work up a plan to deport every last black person in America by sea. This was all well known to prior generations of historians before the Great PC Whitewashing of Civil War History commenced, as discussed in this 1919 article in the Journal of Negro History. (Thanks to Tom Mullen).
Could this mean that Lincoln was not quite the racial saint that the Republican Party (among others) has portrayed him as being for the past 150 years?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/shall-blacks-freed/
Thomas DiLorenzo
So asked Abraham Lincoln of General Benjamin Butler in early 1865 (page 19 of the linked article). Lincoln answered his own question: Deport them all out of America, he said. After complimenting Butler on his ability to move large numbers of people by water during the war, Lincoln asked him if he could work up a plan to deport every last black person in America by sea. This was all well known to prior generations of historians before the Great PC Whitewashing of Civil War History commenced, as discussed in this 1919 article in the Journal of Negro History. (Thanks to Tom Mullen).
Could this mean that Lincoln was not quite the racial saint that the Republican Party (among others) has portrayed him as being for the past 150 years?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/shall-blacks-freed/
The RFK assassination.
What did The Death of Bobby Kennedy Mean?
And Who Was the Second Shooter?
By Jeff Schechtman
In commemoration of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on this day nearly half a century ago, WhoWhatWhy offers a real treat to students of history. In an extensive podcast, Kennedy confidante Paul Schrade, who was also shot that fateful night, talks about his relationship to RFK and reveals insights never heard before. The 91-year-old Schrade begins with a leisurely reminiscence on early labor and political days, of special interest to those with some background in those issues. Starting nine minutes in, he turns to the RFK assassination.
Paul Schrade had known Bobby Kennedy for years. They had worked in the political trenches, helped organize the farmworkers in California and developed a close bond. That night in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Schrade was shot in the head and Kennedy was killed. For years, Schrade has maintained that Sirhan Sirhan was not the lone shooter. He has devoted himself to proving that assertion.
In this conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, Schrade, now 91, talks at great length about his relationship with Bobby and what happened that night.
He tells stories that will certainly add to the historical record of Bobby Kennedy and his assassination. Listening to Schrade is like sitting back and settling in to look at a long and compelling audio documentary of events from 48 years ago.
After taking us through the events and the subsequent investigation, you can hear the pain and reluctance from Schrade when he talks about how Bobby might have changed the country, had he lived...
Read the rest here:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/05/death-bobby-kennedy-mean/
And Who Was the Second Shooter?
By Jeff Schechtman
In commemoration of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination on this day nearly half a century ago, WhoWhatWhy offers a real treat to students of history. In an extensive podcast, Kennedy confidante Paul Schrade, who was also shot that fateful night, talks about his relationship to RFK and reveals insights never heard before. The 91-year-old Schrade begins with a leisurely reminiscence on early labor and political days, of special interest to those with some background in those issues. Starting nine minutes in, he turns to the RFK assassination.
Paul Schrade had known Bobby Kennedy for years. They had worked in the political trenches, helped organize the farmworkers in California and developed a close bond. That night in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Schrade was shot in the head and Kennedy was killed. For years, Schrade has maintained that Sirhan Sirhan was not the lone shooter. He has devoted himself to proving that assertion.
In this conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman, Schrade, now 91, talks at great length about his relationship with Bobby and what happened that night.
He tells stories that will certainly add to the historical record of Bobby Kennedy and his assassination. Listening to Schrade is like sitting back and settling in to look at a long and compelling audio documentary of events from 48 years ago.
After taking us through the events and the subsequent investigation, you can hear the pain and reluctance from Schrade when he talks about how Bobby might have changed the country, had he lived...
Read the rest here:
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/06/05/death-bobby-kennedy-mean/
"Wake up, America. How many congressional assaults on the Constitution will we tolerate?"
Wake Up, America!
By Andrew P. Napolitano
While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling in their final round in the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump is arguing that Clinton should be in prison for failing to safeguard state secrets while she was secretary of state, the same FBI that is diligently investigating her is quietly and perniciously seeking to cut more holes in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
That amendment — which requires the government to obtain a search warrant issued by a judge based upon some evidence of criminal wrongdoing, called probable cause, before the government can search persons, houses, papers or effects — is the linchpin of the right to privacy, famously referred to by Justice Louis Brandeis as the right to be let alone.
The Fourth Amendment has a painful yet unambiguous history. The essence of that history is the well-documented and nearly universal Colonial revulsion to the British use of general warrants.
General warrants, which were usually issued in secret in London, permitted British soldiers and agents in America to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. General warrants were not based upon any individualized suspicion, much less any probable cause. Their stated purpose was the need to enforce the Stamp Act, a totalitarian measure that cost more to enforce than it generated in revenue.
The Stamp Act required all colonists to purchase and affix stamps to all legal, financial, political, personal and public documents. It was billed as a revenue-gathering measure, but it truly was used as an excuse to humiliate the colonists by permitting soldiers and agents to enter their homes ostensibly looking for the stamps. They were really looking for evidence of revolutionary ideas and plans against the king.
After Americans won the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, they did so with the determination never to permit the new government here to do to Americans what the pre-Revolutionary British government had done to the colonists. Their chosen instrument of that prevention was the Fourth Amendment.
But the feds have been wearing away at the right to privacy for generations. The Right to Financial Privacy Act (which has nothing to do with protecting privacy) permits federal agents to obtain certain bank records with search warrants issued by other federal agents — as opposed to judges — as long as they are looking for mobsters or drug dealers. The Patriot Act (which has nothing to do with patriotism) enables FBI agents to issue search warrants to other FBI agents for certain business records — including doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, car and jewelry dealers, and the post office — as long as they are looking for threats to national security. And the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (which interferes with the privacy of almost all electronic communications) permits FBI agents to access certain metadata (the who, where and when of emails, but not their contents), as long as one FBI agent issues the warrant to another and as long as the recipient uses it for national security purposes.
Now the FBI wants access to everyone’s internet browser history, as long as its agents are looking for spies or terrorists; and again, it proposes that rather than present probable cause to a judge and seek a warrant as the Fourth Amendment requires, one FBI agent be authorized to issue a search warrant to another.
The federal government’s antipathy to the Fourth Amendment is palpable and well-known — notwithstanding that everyone who works for the feds has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, not evade or avoid it. Last week, FBI Director James Comey effectively told the Senate committee that is writing this damnable new legislation that complying with the Fourth Amendment is a pain in the neck and his agents could operate more efficiently without it.
Wake up, America. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to be a pain in the neck for the government.
The Fourth Amendment was expressly written to protect our individual right to privacy from the voracious and insatiable appetite of government to assault it. It was also written to ensure that government can seek evidence against bad guys, but it was meant to force the government to target them based on real evidence, not to let it sweep them up in a suspicionless net along with the innocent.
When Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of domestic spying on everyone in America three years ago, he revealed a secret that somehow 60,000 federal agents and contractors were able to keep. That secret was a novel and perverse interpretation of certain federal statutes so as to use them to justify spying on innocents.
But what we have here with this FBI request to access our browsing history — which reveals deeply personal, political, medical, legal and intimate data about us — is coming about openly through our elected representatives. It is not only the FBI that secretly wants this but also members of Congress who are on the verge of openly approving it.
And don’t expect your internet service provider to tell you that the FBI has come calling, as this legislation would prohibit the service provider from telling you that your records have been accessed. This provision violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
Wake up, America. How many congressional assaults on the Constitution will we tolerate?
Since the government obviously does not take its obligation to uphold the Constitution seriously, why bother with requiring one FBI agent to authorize another? Why not let any FBI agent search wherever he or she wants, break down any door, seize any records and invade anyone’s privacy, lest compliance with the Constitution be a pain in the neck.
Wake up, America. The Constitution has become a pain in the neck to our personal liberties, because as a safeguard of them, it obviously no longer works.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/andrew-p-napolitano/wake-america/
By Andrew P. Napolitano
While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are battling in their final round in the Democratic primaries and Donald Trump is arguing that Clinton should be in prison for failing to safeguard state secrets while she was secretary of state, the same FBI that is diligently investigating her is quietly and perniciously seeking to cut more holes in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
That amendment — which requires the government to obtain a search warrant issued by a judge based upon some evidence of criminal wrongdoing, called probable cause, before the government can search persons, houses, papers or effects — is the linchpin of the right to privacy, famously referred to by Justice Louis Brandeis as the right to be let alone.
The Fourth Amendment has a painful yet unambiguous history. The essence of that history is the well-documented and nearly universal Colonial revulsion to the British use of general warrants.
General warrants, which were usually issued in secret in London, permitted British soldiers and agents in America to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. General warrants were not based upon any individualized suspicion, much less any probable cause. Their stated purpose was the need to enforce the Stamp Act, a totalitarian measure that cost more to enforce than it generated in revenue.
The Stamp Act required all colonists to purchase and affix stamps to all legal, financial, political, personal and public documents. It was billed as a revenue-gathering measure, but it truly was used as an excuse to humiliate the colonists by permitting soldiers and agents to enter their homes ostensibly looking for the stamps. They were really looking for evidence of revolutionary ideas and plans against the king.
After Americans won the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, they did so with the determination never to permit the new government here to do to Americans what the pre-Revolutionary British government had done to the colonists. Their chosen instrument of that prevention was the Fourth Amendment.
But the feds have been wearing away at the right to privacy for generations. The Right to Financial Privacy Act (which has nothing to do with protecting privacy) permits federal agents to obtain certain bank records with search warrants issued by other federal agents — as opposed to judges — as long as they are looking for mobsters or drug dealers. The Patriot Act (which has nothing to do with patriotism) enables FBI agents to issue search warrants to other FBI agents for certain business records — including doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, car and jewelry dealers, and the post office — as long as they are looking for threats to national security. And the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (which interferes with the privacy of almost all electronic communications) permits FBI agents to access certain metadata (the who, where and when of emails, but not their contents), as long as one FBI agent issues the warrant to another and as long as the recipient uses it for national security purposes.
Now the FBI wants access to everyone’s internet browser history, as long as its agents are looking for spies or terrorists; and again, it proposes that rather than present probable cause to a judge and seek a warrant as the Fourth Amendment requires, one FBI agent be authorized to issue a search warrant to another.
The federal government’s antipathy to the Fourth Amendment is palpable and well-known — notwithstanding that everyone who works for the feds has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, not evade or avoid it. Last week, FBI Director James Comey effectively told the Senate committee that is writing this damnable new legislation that complying with the Fourth Amendment is a pain in the neck and his agents could operate more efficiently without it.
Wake up, America. The Fourth Amendment is supposed to be a pain in the neck for the government.
The Fourth Amendment was expressly written to protect our individual right to privacy from the voracious and insatiable appetite of government to assault it. It was also written to ensure that government can seek evidence against bad guys, but it was meant to force the government to target them based on real evidence, not to let it sweep them up in a suspicionless net along with the innocent.
When Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of domestic spying on everyone in America three years ago, he revealed a secret that somehow 60,000 federal agents and contractors were able to keep. That secret was a novel and perverse interpretation of certain federal statutes so as to use them to justify spying on innocents.
But what we have here with this FBI request to access our browsing history — which reveals deeply personal, political, medical, legal and intimate data about us — is coming about openly through our elected representatives. It is not only the FBI that secretly wants this but also members of Congress who are on the verge of openly approving it.
And don’t expect your internet service provider to tell you that the FBI has come calling, as this legislation would prohibit the service provider from telling you that your records have been accessed. This provision violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
Wake up, America. How many congressional assaults on the Constitution will we tolerate?
Since the government obviously does not take its obligation to uphold the Constitution seriously, why bother with requiring one FBI agent to authorize another? Why not let any FBI agent search wherever he or she wants, break down any door, seize any records and invade anyone’s privacy, lest compliance with the Constitution be a pain in the neck.
Wake up, America. The Constitution has become a pain in the neck to our personal liberties, because as a safeguard of them, it obviously no longer works.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/andrew-p-napolitano/wake-america/
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Clinton on guns...
Clinton: If gun ownership is a constitutional right, it’s one that we’ve taken away before
by Sam Rolley
Hillary Clinton is looking to gain support for her flaccid Democratic presidential campaign by wooing anti-2nd Amendment fanatics. And she’s not leaving the promise of an end to American gun ownership off the table.
That, at least, is the sense one might have gotten from a recent interview between the former first lady and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Referencing GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s accusation that Clinton would abolish the 2nd Amendment if elected, Stephanopoulos asked Clinton point blank: “Do you believe that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right, that it’s not linked to service in a militia?”
Clinton danced around the issue, claiming that the un-infringed right of the individual to bear arms was created by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I think that for most of our history, there was a nuanced reading of the Second Amendment until the decision by the late Justice Scalia, and there was no argument until then that localities and states and the federal government had a right, as we do with every amendment, to impose reasonable regulations,” she said. “So I believe we can have common-sense gun safety measures consistent with the Second Amendment.”
Notice she didn’t answer the question.
But what Clinton did do is suggest that gun control laws have a rich history in the United States.
When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Clinton had ignored his original question, she replied: “If it is a constitutional right, then it, like every other constitutional right, is subject to reasonable regulations, and what people have done with that decision is to take it as far as they possibly can and reject what has been our history from the very beginning of the republic, where some of the earliest laws that were passed were about firearms.”
I happen to agree that gun control has a rich history in the U.S. But Clinton is leaving out some very important details when she says we’ve always had “common sense” gun laws.
Many of the historical gun control laws Clinton is painting as perfect evidence that tough gun control has and can work in the U.S. were aimed at disarming black Americans and maintaining slavery and, later, racial discrimination.
I wrote about this back in 2013:
Throughout the Nation’s history, the gun-control laws that have been the harshest are those that were levied against blacks, who, as any compassionate, serious and well-informed student of history would be remiss to deny, have endured tyrannical force at many times since the Nation’s founding.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, States all over the Nation grew increasingly fearful of the prospect of a black uprising that they felt could be carried out by slaves or freed blacks. Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 kicked off a number of gun-control laws aimed at blacks in America’s States.
Virginia responded to the rebellion by prohibiting free blacks the right “to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead…” Later, in 1834, the Tennessee Constitution was changed from “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” to “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.” The antebellum South was rife with racist calls for gun control.
These abuses did not stop following the Civil War with the onset of black freedom and, in fact, continued through the Jim Crow-era South right up until the civil rights era.
Martin Luther King Jr., upon whose Bible Obama swore to uphold the Constitution…, reportedly kept an arsenal of firearms in his home to ease his mind about the near-constant death threats he received. The peace-promoting civil rights leader even applied for an Alabama concealed carry permit, but was denied due to racism on the part of the police that had the authority to issue the permit.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/clinton-if-gun-ownership-is-a-constitutional-right-its-one-that-weve-taken-away-before/
by Sam Rolley
Hillary Clinton is looking to gain support for her flaccid Democratic presidential campaign by wooing anti-2nd Amendment fanatics. And she’s not leaving the promise of an end to American gun ownership off the table.
That, at least, is the sense one might have gotten from a recent interview between the former first lady and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
Referencing GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s accusation that Clinton would abolish the 2nd Amendment if elected, Stephanopoulos asked Clinton point blank: “Do you believe that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right, that it’s not linked to service in a militia?”
Clinton danced around the issue, claiming that the un-infringed right of the individual to bear arms was created by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I think that for most of our history, there was a nuanced reading of the Second Amendment until the decision by the late Justice Scalia, and there was no argument until then that localities and states and the federal government had a right, as we do with every amendment, to impose reasonable regulations,” she said. “So I believe we can have common-sense gun safety measures consistent with the Second Amendment.”
Notice she didn’t answer the question.
But what Clinton did do is suggest that gun control laws have a rich history in the United States.
When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Clinton had ignored his original question, she replied: “If it is a constitutional right, then it, like every other constitutional right, is subject to reasonable regulations, and what people have done with that decision is to take it as far as they possibly can and reject what has been our history from the very beginning of the republic, where some of the earliest laws that were passed were about firearms.”
I happen to agree that gun control has a rich history in the U.S. But Clinton is leaving out some very important details when she says we’ve always had “common sense” gun laws.
Many of the historical gun control laws Clinton is painting as perfect evidence that tough gun control has and can work in the U.S. were aimed at disarming black Americans and maintaining slavery and, later, racial discrimination.
I wrote about this back in 2013:
Throughout the Nation’s history, the gun-control laws that have been the harshest are those that were levied against blacks, who, as any compassionate, serious and well-informed student of history would be remiss to deny, have endured tyrannical force at many times since the Nation’s founding.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, States all over the Nation grew increasingly fearful of the prospect of a black uprising that they felt could be carried out by slaves or freed blacks. Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 kicked off a number of gun-control laws aimed at blacks in America’s States.
Virginia responded to the rebellion by prohibiting free blacks the right “to keep or carry any firelock of any kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead…” Later, in 1834, the Tennessee Constitution was changed from “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” to “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.” The antebellum South was rife with racist calls for gun control.
These abuses did not stop following the Civil War with the onset of black freedom and, in fact, continued through the Jim Crow-era South right up until the civil rights era.
Martin Luther King Jr., upon whose Bible Obama swore to uphold the Constitution…, reportedly kept an arsenal of firearms in his home to ease his mind about the near-constant death threats he received. The peace-promoting civil rights leader even applied for an Alabama concealed carry permit, but was denied due to racism on the part of the police that had the authority to issue the permit.
Link:
http://personalliberty.com/clinton-if-gun-ownership-is-a-constitutional-right-its-one-that-weve-taken-away-before/
"Muhammad Ali stood his ground and said No the all-powerful national-security establishment and its illegal, immoral, and destructive war on Vietnam. He didn’t permit them to warp his mind, conscience, and spirit with their Cold War anti-communist crusade. He was a real profile in courage, a genuine patriot, and a true hero. Too bad there aren’t many like him today."
Muhammad Ali versus the National Security State
by Jacob G. Hornberger
While everyone today is celebrating the life of Muhammad Ali, who passed away last Friday, such was clearly not the case back in the 1960s, when Ali took on the vast and powerful U.S. national-security establishment with his steadfast refusal to be conscripted to “serve” in the U.S. Army, which would have sent him to Vietnam to fight and die for “freedom.”
As Ali put it so succinctly, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” That was 1966, three years after the assassination of President Kennedy, when his successor Lyndon Johnson was ramping up U.S. involvement in Vietnam’s civil war.
Ali didn’t let it go at that. He also stated:
Why should me and other so-called “negroes” go 10,000 miles away from home, here in America, to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who’s never bothered us and I will say directly: No, I will not go.
Here was the clincher:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again: The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Needless to say, Ali’s words were heresy to the U.S. national-security establishment, which was telling Americans how necessary it was to invade Vietnam to save America from the Vietcong and North Vietnamese communists. If Americans weren’t force to kill and die in Vietnam, they said, the dominoes would start falling to the communists, with the big, final domino being the United States.
The attack against Ali leveled by sports broadcaster David Susskind reflected the predominant view of the pro-draft, pro-war establishment at that time:
I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He is a simplistic fool and a pawn.
Yes, if only Ali had behaved like Elvis and loyally and dutifully complied with the state’s decision to conscript him into serving the national-security state. If only he had supported the troops, who were fighting and dying for “freedom” and “defending our rights and liberties” in a faraway land thousands of miles away from American shores.
Of course, never mind that North Vietnam and the Vietcong never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
Unfortunately, the professional sports world back then was as intertwined with the national-security establishment as it is today. Upon his conviction for draft resistance (which the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned), they stripped him of his boxing title and refused to let him fight during three of what would have been his most productive years.
But Ali’s words were, indeed, dangerous and constituted a grave threat to “national security.” After all, if millions of American blacks took them to heart, who would have been left to draft and serve as their cannon fodder in Vietnam except poor white guys?
Obviously, they had to make Ali an example. They had to send a message to all other blacks (and whites as well): “Don’t even think about it!” And so they went after him with a vengeance for daring to stand up to the national-security state and its gigantic anti-communist crusade. They prosecuted him, convicted him, and sentenced him to serve 5 years in their federal jails.
All for refusing to go along with their immoral and illegal undeclared war against the Vietnamese people.
“But Jacob, what about the communists? Weren’t they coming to get us! If Americans didn’t permit themselves to be drafted, every state in the union would have become Red.”
Ali saw through all it all — he recognized it as a crock, much as President Kennedy did in the months before his assassination (as Martin Luther King, who was also considered a threat to national security, did too). (See Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger and JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.) That’s what made Ali a grave threat to the national-security racket, just like Kennedy and King. All three of them were questioning a war racket that was set to enrich lots of people during succeeding decades in what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.”
Muhammad Ali stood his ground and said No the all-powerful national-security establishment and its illegal, immoral, and destructive war on Vietnam. He didn’t permit them to warp his mind, conscience, and spirit with their Cold War anti-communist crusade. He was a real profile in courage, a genuine patriot, and a true hero. Too bad there aren’t many like him today.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/06/muhammad-ali-versus-national-security-state/
by Jacob G. Hornberger
While everyone today is celebrating the life of Muhammad Ali, who passed away last Friday, such was clearly not the case back in the 1960s, when Ali took on the vast and powerful U.S. national-security establishment with his steadfast refusal to be conscripted to “serve” in the U.S. Army, which would have sent him to Vietnam to fight and die for “freedom.”
As Ali put it so succinctly, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” That was 1966, three years after the assassination of President Kennedy, when his successor Lyndon Johnson was ramping up U.S. involvement in Vietnam’s civil war.
Ali didn’t let it go at that. He also stated:
Why should me and other so-called “negroes” go 10,000 miles away from home, here in America, to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who’s never bothered us and I will say directly: No, I will not go.
Here was the clincher:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again: The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
Needless to say, Ali’s words were heresy to the U.S. national-security establishment, which was telling Americans how necessary it was to invade Vietnam to save America from the Vietcong and North Vietnamese communists. If Americans weren’t force to kill and die in Vietnam, they said, the dominoes would start falling to the communists, with the big, final domino being the United States.
The attack against Ali leveled by sports broadcaster David Susskind reflected the predominant view of the pro-draft, pro-war establishment at that time:
I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty. He is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He is a simplistic fool and a pawn.
Yes, if only Ali had behaved like Elvis and loyally and dutifully complied with the state’s decision to conscript him into serving the national-security state. If only he had supported the troops, who were fighting and dying for “freedom” and “defending our rights and liberties” in a faraway land thousands of miles away from American shores.
Of course, never mind that North Vietnam and the Vietcong never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
Unfortunately, the professional sports world back then was as intertwined with the national-security establishment as it is today. Upon his conviction for draft resistance (which the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned), they stripped him of his boxing title and refused to let him fight during three of what would have been his most productive years.
But Ali’s words were, indeed, dangerous and constituted a grave threat to “national security.” After all, if millions of American blacks took them to heart, who would have been left to draft and serve as their cannon fodder in Vietnam except poor white guys?
Obviously, they had to make Ali an example. They had to send a message to all other blacks (and whites as well): “Don’t even think about it!” And so they went after him with a vengeance for daring to stand up to the national-security state and its gigantic anti-communist crusade. They prosecuted him, convicted him, and sentenced him to serve 5 years in their federal jails.
All for refusing to go along with their immoral and illegal undeclared war against the Vietnamese people.
“But Jacob, what about the communists? Weren’t they coming to get us! If Americans didn’t permit themselves to be drafted, every state in the union would have become Red.”
Ali saw through all it all — he recognized it as a crock, much as President Kennedy did in the months before his assassination (as Martin Luther King, who was also considered a threat to national security, did too). (See Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger and JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.) That’s what made Ali a grave threat to the national-security racket, just like Kennedy and King. All three of them were questioning a war racket that was set to enrich lots of people during succeeding decades in what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.”
Muhammad Ali stood his ground and said No the all-powerful national-security establishment and its illegal, immoral, and destructive war on Vietnam. He didn’t permit them to warp his mind, conscience, and spirit with their Cold War anti-communist crusade. He was a real profile in courage, a genuine patriot, and a true hero. Too bad there aren’t many like him today.
Link:
http://fff.org/2016/06/06/muhammad-ali-versus-national-security-state/
Scanners...
Scanners
by Eric Peters
The criteria for defining an illegal search has never been whether you’re aware of the search having been performed. If, for instance, investigators sneak into your house, go through your things – but leave everything so it appears nothing was touched, so you never suspect they were there – it’s still illegal, if it was done without a warrant.
Even to this very day – at least, kinda sorta.
So how about these license plate scanners that cops are using to – yes – search us without our knowledge, much less a warrant?
Maybe you haven’t heard about the scanners – more correctly, these Automated License Plate Readers (APLRs). They are a device that integrates a Panopticon-style camera system with a computer database.
The ALPR – usually there are several, mounted on all four corners of a cop car – scans the plates of all the cars that pass by the cop (if he’s parked) or the cars the cop passes (if he’s moving). The numbers scanned are then automatically filtered through various databases (we’re not allowed to know exactly what data these databases contain) and if there is a “hit” – such as for a stolen car or a car tied to a crime – the cop is aroused from his sugary slumbers to go after the evildoer.
But the point is, we’ve all just been examined, identified and catalogued; that is, searched.
What else is it when we are scanned like a herd of beef cattle with tags in our ears – a “computer cop” checking us each out before we’re allowed to proceed through the chute? The fact that you’re not aware you’ve just been through the chute isn’t the point. The point is, you just got examined, identified and catalogued – they “checked you out” – without your having done a thing to warrant the once-over (much less an actual warrant being involved).
This is creepy, especially the general indifference of the population to this sort of thing – which is arguably even more creepy than the thing itself. One expects government – our “farmers” – to wax tyrannical.
It is, after all, what government does.
But why do the cattle – whoops, the people – accept it so passively?
Probably because they are cattle.
I got really depressed way back in the early 2000s, after the government announced that the Fight For Freedom would include a “Homeland” Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsamt) and that people/cattle would be searched in just about the most degrading way imaginable short of actually having to spread their cheeks, bend over and cough (which is probably coming) just to queue up for an airplane ride.
But it was to be expected; the logical next step (one of them) resulting from the general acceptance, years prior, of this business of randomly stopping and (at least cursorily) searching (and interrogating) drivers for no particular reason other than that they happened to be driving down the road where the “safety” checkpoint was erected.
Obviously – if you’re not an illiterate – a random search is the very definition of an unreasonable search – prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
Well, used to be.
If it’s not unreasonable to stop and search people at random, people who’ve done nothing whatsoever to suggest they may have committed some crime or other, then what would be “unreasonable”? Racking them until they confess they had one too many?
It will probably come to that, in time.
So, that’s the first objection – but of course, it’s already been rendered irrelevant as a matter of law by the Volksgerichthoff (Well, why not? The government seems increasingly infatuated with things… German.)
“Reasonable” is now whatever they say it is, no matter how textbook definition (if words have precise meaning, which of course they no longer do) unreasonable it actually happens to be.
Which brings us to the next item.
We are told – soothingly – that only bad guys (the evildoers) need fear. The authorities are Keeping us Safe.
They are always Keeping us Safe.
They are also keeping track of us. In real time and very possibly forever.
Just like the farmer does his livestock.
Remember that your plate number is tied to you – the registered (with the farmer) owner of the car. And while the ranch hand/cop running ALPR won’t be coming after you (for now) unless you’ve got warrants out on you – the computer cop has just noted and stored the data about your presence at that particular spot at that particular moment. This may not ruffle your feathers much (unless you’re a guy sweating an angry ex’s divorce lawyer, who may be very interested in data about where you’ve been today) but it should.
The very idea of such a thing – paraphrasing JFK – ought to be repugnant in a free society. The notion that you are being watched – and recorded.
For no particular reason.
Just because they can.
It has been said – rightly, I think – that privacy is what defines freedom. Your right to not be monitored, scrutinized, categorized, catalogued and (ultimately) controlled.
To be left alone.
These Clovers (see here for the etymology) pushing ALPRs, the “checkpoints,” the “Homeland” stuff and all the rest of it are the mortal enemies of privacy. They realize, instinctively, that to respect our space is to respect our freedom. And that cannot be permitted.
They will never say it openly, of course. Like the rancher, they are are smart enough to not alarm the herd needlessly.
But they know it in their bones.
And so should we.
Link:
http://ericpetersautos.com/2016/06/07/scanners/
by Eric Peters
The criteria for defining an illegal search has never been whether you’re aware of the search having been performed. If, for instance, investigators sneak into your house, go through your things – but leave everything so it appears nothing was touched, so you never suspect they were there – it’s still illegal, if it was done without a warrant.
Even to this very day – at least, kinda sorta.
So how about these license plate scanners that cops are using to – yes – search us without our knowledge, much less a warrant?
Maybe you haven’t heard about the scanners – more correctly, these Automated License Plate Readers (APLRs). They are a device that integrates a Panopticon-style camera system with a computer database.
The ALPR – usually there are several, mounted on all four corners of a cop car – scans the plates of all the cars that pass by the cop (if he’s parked) or the cars the cop passes (if he’s moving). The numbers scanned are then automatically filtered through various databases (we’re not allowed to know exactly what data these databases contain) and if there is a “hit” – such as for a stolen car or a car tied to a crime – the cop is aroused from his sugary slumbers to go after the evildoer.
But the point is, we’ve all just been examined, identified and catalogued; that is, searched.
What else is it when we are scanned like a herd of beef cattle with tags in our ears – a “computer cop” checking us each out before we’re allowed to proceed through the chute? The fact that you’re not aware you’ve just been through the chute isn’t the point. The point is, you just got examined, identified and catalogued – they “checked you out” – without your having done a thing to warrant the once-over (much less an actual warrant being involved).
This is creepy, especially the general indifference of the population to this sort of thing – which is arguably even more creepy than the thing itself. One expects government – our “farmers” – to wax tyrannical.
It is, after all, what government does.
But why do the cattle – whoops, the people – accept it so passively?
Probably because they are cattle.
I got really depressed way back in the early 2000s, after the government announced that the Fight For Freedom would include a “Homeland” Security Department (Heimatsicherheitsamt) and that people/cattle would be searched in just about the most degrading way imaginable short of actually having to spread their cheeks, bend over and cough (which is probably coming) just to queue up for an airplane ride.
But it was to be expected; the logical next step (one of them) resulting from the general acceptance, years prior, of this business of randomly stopping and (at least cursorily) searching (and interrogating) drivers for no particular reason other than that they happened to be driving down the road where the “safety” checkpoint was erected.
Obviously – if you’re not an illiterate – a random search is the very definition of an unreasonable search – prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.
Well, used to be.
If it’s not unreasonable to stop and search people at random, people who’ve done nothing whatsoever to suggest they may have committed some crime or other, then what would be “unreasonable”? Racking them until they confess they had one too many?
It will probably come to that, in time.
So, that’s the first objection – but of course, it’s already been rendered irrelevant as a matter of law by the Volksgerichthoff (Well, why not? The government seems increasingly infatuated with things… German.)
“Reasonable” is now whatever they say it is, no matter how textbook definition (if words have precise meaning, which of course they no longer do) unreasonable it actually happens to be.
Which brings us to the next item.
We are told – soothingly – that only bad guys (the evildoers) need fear. The authorities are Keeping us Safe.
They are always Keeping us Safe.
They are also keeping track of us. In real time and very possibly forever.
Just like the farmer does his livestock.
Remember that your plate number is tied to you – the registered (with the farmer) owner of the car. And while the ranch hand/cop running ALPR won’t be coming after you (for now) unless you’ve got warrants out on you – the computer cop has just noted and stored the data about your presence at that particular spot at that particular moment. This may not ruffle your feathers much (unless you’re a guy sweating an angry ex’s divorce lawyer, who may be very interested in data about where you’ve been today) but it should.
The very idea of such a thing – paraphrasing JFK – ought to be repugnant in a free society. The notion that you are being watched – and recorded.
For no particular reason.
Just because they can.
It has been said – rightly, I think – that privacy is what defines freedom. Your right to not be monitored, scrutinized, categorized, catalogued and (ultimately) controlled.
To be left alone.
These Clovers (see here for the etymology) pushing ALPRs, the “checkpoints,” the “Homeland” stuff and all the rest of it are the mortal enemies of privacy. They realize, instinctively, that to respect our space is to respect our freedom. And that cannot be permitted.
They will never say it openly, of course. Like the rancher, they are are smart enough to not alarm the herd needlessly.
But they know it in their bones.
And so should we.
Link:
http://ericpetersautos.com/2016/06/07/scanners/
"Maybe the elite believe that welfare, unemployment compensation and possibly engaging in illegal activities are a superior alternative to earning an honest and respectable living on a cashier’s salary. That is a despicable vision."
The Arrogant Elite
By Walter E. Williams
A basic economic premise holds that when the price of something rises, people seek to economize on its use. They seek substitutes for that which has risen in price. Recent years have seen proposals for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Some states and localities, such as Seattle, have already legislated a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Nobody should be surprised that fast-food companies such as Wendy’s, Panera Bread, McDonald’s and others are seeking substitutes for employees who are becoming costlier. One substitute that has emerged for cashiers is automated kiosks where, instead of having a person take your order, you select your meal and pay for it using a machine. Robots are also seen as an alternative to a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In fact, employee costs are much higher than an hourly wage suggests. For every employee paid $15 an hour, a company spends an additional $10 an hour on non-wage benefits, such as medical insurance, Social Security, workers’ compensation and other taxes. That means the minimum hourly cost of hiring such an employee is close to $25.
The vision that higher mandated wages (that exceed productivity) produce no employment effects is what economists call a zero-elasticity view of the world — one in which there is no response to price changes. It assumes that customers are insensitive to higher product prices and investors are insensitive to a company’s profits. There is little evidence that people are insensitive to price changes, whether they be changes in taxes, gas prices, food prices, labor prices or any other price. The issue is not whether people change their behavior when relative prices rise or fall; it is always how soon and how great the change will be. Thus, with minimum wage increases, it is not an issue of whether firms will economize on labor but an issue of how much they will economize and who will bear the burden of that economizing.
Fast-food restaurants must respond to higher prices because they have two sets of ruthless people to deal with. We can see that with a hypothetical example. Imagine that faced with higher employee costs, Burger King automates and, as a result of finding cheaper ways to do things, it can sell its hamburgers for $3. Its competitor McDonald’s does not automate and keeps the same number of employees in the face of higher wages, maybe to be nice and caring. McDonald’s might try to forestall declining profits by attempting to recover higher labor costs by raising product prices — say, charging $5 for a hamburger. However, consumers are not insensitive to higher prices. They would seek cheaper substitutes, thereby patronizing Burger King. The bottom line is that in the wake of higher minimum wages, surviving companies will be those that find ways to economize on labor usage.
There is another ruthless set of people. They are investors. If customers were to flock to Burger King, McDonald’s profits would fall. What is your guess as to what investors would do? My guess is they would sell shares in McDonald’s. An even more dismal picture for McDonald’s would be the specter of corporate takeover attempts. Somebody would see that money could be made by bringing McDonald’s to its senses.
The saddest aspect of the minimum wage story is the damage it does to human beings. The current hourly wage for a fast-food restaurant cashier is $7.25 to $9 per hour. That produces a yearly salary of $15,000 to $20,000, plus fringes. That’s no great shakes, but it is honest work and a start in life. It might be the very best some people could do. Enter the arrogance and callousness of the elite. Their vision of what a person should earn, expressed by higher minimum wages, destroys people’s best alternative without offering a superior one in its place. Maybe the elite believe that welfare, unemployment compensation and possibly engaging in illegal activities are a superior alternative to earning an honest and respectable living on a cashier’s salary. That is a despicable vision.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/walter-e-williams/arrogant-elite/
By Walter E. Williams
A basic economic premise holds that when the price of something rises, people seek to economize on its use. They seek substitutes for that which has risen in price. Recent years have seen proposals for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Some states and localities, such as Seattle, have already legislated a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Nobody should be surprised that fast-food companies such as Wendy’s, Panera Bread, McDonald’s and others are seeking substitutes for employees who are becoming costlier. One substitute that has emerged for cashiers is automated kiosks where, instead of having a person take your order, you select your meal and pay for it using a machine. Robots are also seen as an alternative to a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In fact, employee costs are much higher than an hourly wage suggests. For every employee paid $15 an hour, a company spends an additional $10 an hour on non-wage benefits, such as medical insurance, Social Security, workers’ compensation and other taxes. That means the minimum hourly cost of hiring such an employee is close to $25.
The vision that higher mandated wages (that exceed productivity) produce no employment effects is what economists call a zero-elasticity view of the world — one in which there is no response to price changes. It assumes that customers are insensitive to higher product prices and investors are insensitive to a company’s profits. There is little evidence that people are insensitive to price changes, whether they be changes in taxes, gas prices, food prices, labor prices or any other price. The issue is not whether people change their behavior when relative prices rise or fall; it is always how soon and how great the change will be. Thus, with minimum wage increases, it is not an issue of whether firms will economize on labor but an issue of how much they will economize and who will bear the burden of that economizing.
Fast-food restaurants must respond to higher prices because they have two sets of ruthless people to deal with. We can see that with a hypothetical example. Imagine that faced with higher employee costs, Burger King automates and, as a result of finding cheaper ways to do things, it can sell its hamburgers for $3. Its competitor McDonald’s does not automate and keeps the same number of employees in the face of higher wages, maybe to be nice and caring. McDonald’s might try to forestall declining profits by attempting to recover higher labor costs by raising product prices — say, charging $5 for a hamburger. However, consumers are not insensitive to higher prices. They would seek cheaper substitutes, thereby patronizing Burger King. The bottom line is that in the wake of higher minimum wages, surviving companies will be those that find ways to economize on labor usage.
There is another ruthless set of people. They are investors. If customers were to flock to Burger King, McDonald’s profits would fall. What is your guess as to what investors would do? My guess is they would sell shares in McDonald’s. An even more dismal picture for McDonald’s would be the specter of corporate takeover attempts. Somebody would see that money could be made by bringing McDonald’s to its senses.
The saddest aspect of the minimum wage story is the damage it does to human beings. The current hourly wage for a fast-food restaurant cashier is $7.25 to $9 per hour. That produces a yearly salary of $15,000 to $20,000, plus fringes. That’s no great shakes, but it is honest work and a start in life. It might be the very best some people could do. Enter the arrogance and callousness of the elite. Their vision of what a person should earn, expressed by higher minimum wages, destroys people’s best alternative without offering a superior one in its place. Maybe the elite believe that welfare, unemployment compensation and possibly engaging in illegal activities are a superior alternative to earning an honest and respectable living on a cashier’s salary. That is a despicable vision.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/walter-e-williams/arrogant-elite/
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
"The findings are particularly troubling given how many studies have shown that antidepressants have little, if any, benefit over a placebo – but with a much higher rate of potentially dangerous side effects, including suicide."
Medical journal openly admits 50% of people on antidepressants don't even have depression
by: David Gutierrez
Nearly half of people taking depressants are not suffering from depression at all, according to a study conducted by researchers from McGill University in Montreal, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
These people have been prescribed the drugs for "off label" uses not approved by drug regulatory agencies. These uses have never been proven safe or effective.
"It's an interesting phenomenon," author Jenna Wong said. "We had heard that in the scientific community there has been a suspicion among doctors that physicians are commonly prescribing antidepressants for uses other than depression. We also found that for the major classes of antidepressants, there was an increasing prescribing trend over time."
Treatments not backed by evidence
The researchers reviewed 10 years of antidepressant prescription records, containing data on more than 100,000 prescriptions written by approximately 160 doctors for nearly 20,000 patients. They analyzed trends of prescribing for every antidepressant class except monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which are almost never prescribed as antidepressants anymore and therefore rarely occurred in the records.
They found that only 55 percent of the prescriptions were written for depression. The other 45 percent were written for anxiety (18.5 percent), insomnia (10 percent), pain (6 percent), panic disorders (4 percent), and for a slew of conditions that are off-label for every antidepressant, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), digestive disorders, eating disorders, migraine and vasomotor menopause symptoms.
Twenty-nine percent of antidepressant prescriptions were written for a use that was off-label for that particular drug. Fully 66 percent of prescriptions written for conditions other than depression were off label.
If nothing else, the study shows that rates of antidepressant prescriptions are a not a good indicator of the rate at which depression is being diagnosed, or treated, the authors noted. It also raises concerns that the drugs are being so widely used for conditions not backed by scientific research.
"The findings indicate that the mere presence of an antidepressant prescription is a poor proxy for depression treatment, and they highlight the need to evaluate the evidence supporting off-label antidepressant use," the authors wrote.
Deadly placebos
Wong noted that off-label uses have never been proven effective, and may also carry a risk of unknown side effects.
"I can't make a statement to say that for sure they don't work or that they are exposing patients to health risks but there's the possibility that they could be causing adverse health effects or that they may not be effective for the conditions," Wong said. "Without any scientific evidence, it's hard to be able to say."
"It raises the question of why they are prescribing them," she said.
The authors speculated that many doctors are relying on tradition or informal channels of information, rather than scientific research.
"Physicians may be talking to their colleagues and saying, 'Hey, I've used this drug in my patient population and it works,'" Wong said. "So it's more word of mouth."
Other potential reasons for off-label prescribing may be marketing by pharmaceutical companies or simply the use of antidepressants as a last resort when other treatments have failed.
"Some of these conditions are things where there is no exact treatment," Wong said. "The patients may be desperate for something to treat their ailments."
The findings are particularly troubling given how many studies have shown that antidepressants have little, if any, benefit over a placebo – but with a much higher rate of potentially dangerous side effects, including suicide.
In an article published last year in the British Medical Journal, esteemed evidence-based medicine researcher Peter Gotzsche argued that nearly all psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, could be discontinued without harming public health. In fact, he said, there would probably be a benefit; currently, these drugs kill 500,000 people per year – and that's just for people over the age of 65 living in Western countries.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054281_antidepressants_off-label_use_dangerous_drugs.html#ixzz4AtOAFFEm
by: David Gutierrez
Nearly half of people taking depressants are not suffering from depression at all, according to a study conducted by researchers from McGill University in Montreal, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
These people have been prescribed the drugs for "off label" uses not approved by drug regulatory agencies. These uses have never been proven safe or effective.
"It's an interesting phenomenon," author Jenna Wong said. "We had heard that in the scientific community there has been a suspicion among doctors that physicians are commonly prescribing antidepressants for uses other than depression. We also found that for the major classes of antidepressants, there was an increasing prescribing trend over time."
Treatments not backed by evidence
The researchers reviewed 10 years of antidepressant prescription records, containing data on more than 100,000 prescriptions written by approximately 160 doctors for nearly 20,000 patients. They analyzed trends of prescribing for every antidepressant class except monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which are almost never prescribed as antidepressants anymore and therefore rarely occurred in the records.
They found that only 55 percent of the prescriptions were written for depression. The other 45 percent were written for anxiety (18.5 percent), insomnia (10 percent), pain (6 percent), panic disorders (4 percent), and for a slew of conditions that are off-label for every antidepressant, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), digestive disorders, eating disorders, migraine and vasomotor menopause symptoms.
Twenty-nine percent of antidepressant prescriptions were written for a use that was off-label for that particular drug. Fully 66 percent of prescriptions written for conditions other than depression were off label.
If nothing else, the study shows that rates of antidepressant prescriptions are a not a good indicator of the rate at which depression is being diagnosed, or treated, the authors noted. It also raises concerns that the drugs are being so widely used for conditions not backed by scientific research.
"The findings indicate that the mere presence of an antidepressant prescription is a poor proxy for depression treatment, and they highlight the need to evaluate the evidence supporting off-label antidepressant use," the authors wrote.
Deadly placebos
Wong noted that off-label uses have never been proven effective, and may also carry a risk of unknown side effects.
"I can't make a statement to say that for sure they don't work or that they are exposing patients to health risks but there's the possibility that they could be causing adverse health effects or that they may not be effective for the conditions," Wong said. "Without any scientific evidence, it's hard to be able to say."
"It raises the question of why they are prescribing them," she said.
The authors speculated that many doctors are relying on tradition or informal channels of information, rather than scientific research.
"Physicians may be talking to their colleagues and saying, 'Hey, I've used this drug in my patient population and it works,'" Wong said. "So it's more word of mouth."
Other potential reasons for off-label prescribing may be marketing by pharmaceutical companies or simply the use of antidepressants as a last resort when other treatments have failed.
"Some of these conditions are things where there is no exact treatment," Wong said. "The patients may be desperate for something to treat their ailments."
The findings are particularly troubling given how many studies have shown that antidepressants have little, if any, benefit over a placebo – but with a much higher rate of potentially dangerous side effects, including suicide.
In an article published last year in the British Medical Journal, esteemed evidence-based medicine researcher Peter Gotzsche argued that nearly all psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, could be discontinued without harming public health. In fact, he said, there would probably be a benefit; currently, these drugs kill 500,000 people per year – and that's just for people over the age of 65 living in Western countries.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/054281_antidepressants_off-label_use_dangerous_drugs.html#ixzz4AtOAFFEm
We’ve been warned...
Endorse Your Enemy – And We’ll Let You Live.
Christopher Manion
Support Trump and get assaulted. Put a Trump bumper sticker on your car and get a smashed window. A Trump yard sign makes you a target for home invaders.
And it’s YOUR fault!
And Trump’s, of course. Because he’s Hitler, you know (long ago our national consciousness lost all sense of evil, and “Hitler” is now the Manichaean universal to designate people who make you feel bad).
Ever since, the world has been full of Hitlers – and they’ve all been assassinated. Saddam Hussein; Osama Bin Laden; Muammar Gaddafi.
R.I.P.
Next on the list? According to Hillary, Donald Trump. And Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is not amused.
He’s been remarkably adept as assessing the rhetorical devices employed in the campaign, and Hillary, he says, is so desperate that she’s turning a dangerous corner.
So for safety’s sake – his safety –he’s endorsing her.
“If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.
“So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.”
We’ve been warned.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/
Christopher Manion
Support Trump and get assaulted. Put a Trump bumper sticker on your car and get a smashed window. A Trump yard sign makes you a target for home invaders.
And it’s YOUR fault!
And Trump’s, of course. Because he’s Hitler, you know (long ago our national consciousness lost all sense of evil, and “Hitler” is now the Manichaean universal to designate people who make you feel bad).
Ever since, the world has been full of Hitlers – and they’ve all been assassinated. Saddam Hussein; Osama Bin Laden; Muammar Gaddafi.
R.I.P.
Next on the list? According to Hillary, Donald Trump. And Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is not amused.
He’s been remarkably adept as assessing the rhetorical devices employed in the campaign, and Hillary, he says, is so desperate that she’s turning a dangerous corner.
So for safety’s sake – his safety –he’s endorsing her.
“If Clinton successfully pairs Trump with Hitler in your mind – as she is doing – and loses anyway, about a quarter of the country will think it is morally justified to assassinate their own leader. I too would feel that way if an actual Hitler came to power in this country. I would join the resistance and try to take out the Hitler-like leader. You should do the same. No one wants an actual President Hitler.
“So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.”
We’ve been warned.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/
"The criminals running the System at the top are terrified and striking back viciously. But their days are now short."
Americans Are Waking Up to the System
By Jack D. Douglas
As far as I can remember, I have known commonsensically from about the second or third grade [around 1947] that activities like cigarette smoking, boxing, drinking while driving, and many other mass activities in our society are dangerous for your health, your mind [in the case of boxing], and your life [especially in the case of driving while drinking].
I was not a medical genius. I did not know that sunburns could lead over many years to dangerous and life-threatening skin cancers. I did not know of the dangers of long-run sugar consumption. etc.
But those first three dangers seemed obvious from what I could see and heard of routinely in American schools around the country. I saw the coughing fits in the morning and so on among big cigarette smokers like my mother. In the second grade some older boys in Baltimore convinced me to try a cigarette. I couched badly and it hurt. I assumed from then on it was harmful.
From some time early in life I knew about “punch drunk” boxers and I never tried boxing, though I loved sports in general and was very athletic.
Everyone knew that drinking much and driving had deadly relations [later defined as positive correlations].
I’m sure lots of other people have had the same experiences over the centuries. There were doctors two centuries ago who discovered in cases that what we call Parkinson symptoms were probably caused by head blows over years in boxing.
I have “discovered” many other obvious facts about dangers in our society over my long life and actually written a great deal about them over the decades before they were officially discovered. The horrific dangers of multi-drug users by older Americans, especially in the brain, is one example of that. I’ve written lots on that. It’s obvious with no billion-dollar studies that multi-drug use, especially involving brain-mood changes, are a major cause of the soaring Alzheimer’s Medical Plague in our society and other Western societies.
If you are intelligent and follow what is happening in our society, I expect you have the same experience. It’s easy and obvious.
The same things are true about the total corruption at the top of our society in politics, law and judges, the Big Media, etc etc.
Intelligent people see through all the mass mistakes, Big Pharma propaganda, political lies etc. It takes most people many years to “catch on,” but they do eventually. The slaves of totalitarian societies eventually realize their “freedoms” are staged propaganda.
They then revolt against the System and it collapses.
This is happening very fast in America now and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are helping people to see the total corruption, total lies, total propaganda, hidden evils of the System.
The criminals running the System at the top are terrified and striking back viciously. But their days are now short.
Once people see how the Evil Wizards at the top are rigging the System, they never forget and the whole System soon implodes.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/jack-d-douglas/americans-waking/
By Jack D. Douglas
As far as I can remember, I have known commonsensically from about the second or third grade [around 1947] that activities like cigarette smoking, boxing, drinking while driving, and many other mass activities in our society are dangerous for your health, your mind [in the case of boxing], and your life [especially in the case of driving while drinking].
I was not a medical genius. I did not know that sunburns could lead over many years to dangerous and life-threatening skin cancers. I did not know of the dangers of long-run sugar consumption. etc.
But those first three dangers seemed obvious from what I could see and heard of routinely in American schools around the country. I saw the coughing fits in the morning and so on among big cigarette smokers like my mother. In the second grade some older boys in Baltimore convinced me to try a cigarette. I couched badly and it hurt. I assumed from then on it was harmful.
From some time early in life I knew about “punch drunk” boxers and I never tried boxing, though I loved sports in general and was very athletic.
Everyone knew that drinking much and driving had deadly relations [later defined as positive correlations].
I’m sure lots of other people have had the same experiences over the centuries. There were doctors two centuries ago who discovered in cases that what we call Parkinson symptoms were probably caused by head blows over years in boxing.
I have “discovered” many other obvious facts about dangers in our society over my long life and actually written a great deal about them over the decades before they were officially discovered. The horrific dangers of multi-drug users by older Americans, especially in the brain, is one example of that. I’ve written lots on that. It’s obvious with no billion-dollar studies that multi-drug use, especially involving brain-mood changes, are a major cause of the soaring Alzheimer’s Medical Plague in our society and other Western societies.
If you are intelligent and follow what is happening in our society, I expect you have the same experience. It’s easy and obvious.
The same things are true about the total corruption at the top of our society in politics, law and judges, the Big Media, etc etc.
Intelligent people see through all the mass mistakes, Big Pharma propaganda, political lies etc. It takes most people many years to “catch on,” but they do eventually. The slaves of totalitarian societies eventually realize their “freedoms” are staged propaganda.
They then revolt against the System and it collapses.
This is happening very fast in America now and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are helping people to see the total corruption, total lies, total propaganda, hidden evils of the System.
The criminals running the System at the top are terrified and striking back viciously. But their days are now short.
Once people see how the Evil Wizards at the top are rigging the System, they never forget and the whole System soon implodes.
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/jack-d-douglas/americans-waking/
Absurdity...
The Absurdity of “Gender Identity”
By Laurence M. Vance
Due to the ongoing transgender controversies at public schools around the country, the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, and the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, have joined forces to issue a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students.”
The letter begins:
In recent years, we have received an increasing number of questions from parents, teachers, principals, and school superintendents about civil rights protections for transgender students. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) and its implementing regulations prohibit sex discrimination in educational programs and activities operated by recipients of Federal financial assistance. This prohibition encompasses discrimination based on a student’s gender identity, including discrimination based on a student’s transgender status.
That “this prohibition encompasses discrimination based on a student’s gender identity, including discrimination based on a student’s transgender status” is, as far as I know, not yet enshrined in federal law. But let’s continue anyway.
Regarding schools receiving federal funds, the letter goes on to say:
As a condition of receiving Federal funds, a school agrees that it will not exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat differently on the basis of sex any person in its educational programs or activities unless expressly authorized to do so under Title IX or its implementing regulations.
Regarding the definition of the word “sex,” the letter explains:
The Departments treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations. This means that a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity. The Departments’ interpretation is consistent with courts’ and other agencies’ interpretations of Federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.
And as it specifically concerns restrooms and locker rooms, the letter states:
A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity. A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual user facilities when other students are not required to do so. A school may, however, make individual user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy.
But since “gender identity refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender,” and therefore has nothing to do with sex-change surgery, hormones, clothing, sexual orientation, body transformation, sexual practices, or even outward appearance—
Can someone identify as a senior citizen and collect Social Security?
Can someone identify as a resident of Colorado, Alaska, Washington, or Oregon and legally use marijuana recreationally?
Can someone identify as a resident of Missouri and only pay a 17-cents-per-pack tax on cigarettes?
Can someone identify as a college graduate and qualify for a job?
Can someone identify as a new parent and take advantage of a company’s paid family leave?
Can someone identify as a TSA agent and grope people in airports?
Can someone identify as an ex-con and be released from prison?
Can someone identify as a cop and seize cash from motorists?
Can someone identify as a NASCAR driver and disregard the speed limit?
Can someone identify as a minority and take advantage of a company’s Affirmative Action policy to land a good job?
Can someone identify as an unwed mother with three children and get a huge Earned Income Tax Credit?
Can someone identify as a resident of Seattle and get paid a minimum wage of $15 an hour?
Can someone identify as having an income below the poverty level and receive welfare benefits?
Can someone identify as a veteran and get a free or discounted meal on Veterans Day?
Can someone identify as a U.S. Air Marshall and board an airplane with a gun?
Can someone identify as a resident of a state where medical marijuana is legal and smoke a joint when he gets a headache?
Can someone identify as the president and have a hit list of people to be killed?
Can someone identify as a season ticket holder and get free access to Yankee games?
Can someone identify as a senior citizen and get a senior citizen discount?
Can someone identify as a child and take advantage of a “kids eat free” promotion at a restaurant?
If the answer to all of these things is no, then why should a boy be able to identify as a girl and use the girl’s restroom? Why isn’t that idea viewed as just as absurd as all the others I have mentioned?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/laurence-m-vance/absurdity-gender-identity/
By Laurence M. Vance
Due to the ongoing transgender controversies at public schools around the country, the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, and the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, have joined forces to issue a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students.”
The letter begins:
In recent years, we have received an increasing number of questions from parents, teachers, principals, and school superintendents about civil rights protections for transgender students. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) and its implementing regulations prohibit sex discrimination in educational programs and activities operated by recipients of Federal financial assistance. This prohibition encompasses discrimination based on a student’s gender identity, including discrimination based on a student’s transgender status.
That “this prohibition encompasses discrimination based on a student’s gender identity, including discrimination based on a student’s transgender status” is, as far as I know, not yet enshrined in federal law. But let’s continue anyway.
Regarding schools receiving federal funds, the letter goes on to say:
As a condition of receiving Federal funds, a school agrees that it will not exclude, separate, deny benefits to, or otherwise treat differently on the basis of sex any person in its educational programs or activities unless expressly authorized to do so under Title IX or its implementing regulations.
Regarding the definition of the word “sex,” the letter explains:
The Departments treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations. This means that a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity. The Departments’ interpretation is consistent with courts’ and other agencies’ interpretations of Federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination.
And as it specifically concerns restrooms and locker rooms, the letter states:
A school may provide separate facilities on the basis of sex, but must allow transgender students access to such facilities consistent with their gender identity. A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual user facilities when other students are not required to do so. A school may, however, make individual user options available to all students who voluntarily seek additional privacy.
But since “gender identity refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender,” and therefore has nothing to do with sex-change surgery, hormones, clothing, sexual orientation, body transformation, sexual practices, or even outward appearance—
Can someone identify as a senior citizen and collect Social Security?
Can someone identify as a resident of Colorado, Alaska, Washington, or Oregon and legally use marijuana recreationally?
Can someone identify as a resident of Missouri and only pay a 17-cents-per-pack tax on cigarettes?
Can someone identify as a college graduate and qualify for a job?
Can someone identify as a new parent and take advantage of a company’s paid family leave?
Can someone identify as a TSA agent and grope people in airports?
Can someone identify as an ex-con and be released from prison?
Can someone identify as a cop and seize cash from motorists?
Can someone identify as a NASCAR driver and disregard the speed limit?
Can someone identify as a minority and take advantage of a company’s Affirmative Action policy to land a good job?
Can someone identify as an unwed mother with three children and get a huge Earned Income Tax Credit?
Can someone identify as a resident of Seattle and get paid a minimum wage of $15 an hour?
Can someone identify as having an income below the poverty level and receive welfare benefits?
Can someone identify as a veteran and get a free or discounted meal on Veterans Day?
Can someone identify as a U.S. Air Marshall and board an airplane with a gun?
Can someone identify as a resident of a state where medical marijuana is legal and smoke a joint when he gets a headache?
Can someone identify as the president and have a hit list of people to be killed?
Can someone identify as a season ticket holder and get free access to Yankee games?
Can someone identify as a senior citizen and get a senior citizen discount?
Can someone identify as a child and take advantage of a “kids eat free” promotion at a restaurant?
If the answer to all of these things is no, then why should a boy be able to identify as a girl and use the girl’s restroom? Why isn’t that idea viewed as just as absurd as all the others I have mentioned?
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/laurence-m-vance/absurdity-gender-identity/
Culling the population...
We Can’t Afford To Cure Cancer
By Bill Sardi
Someone has said there are just too many jobs in the pursuit of a cancer cure to allow any therapy to be proven and put into practice. Recognize the nation is dotted with cancer research centers that hold billions of dollars of debt. For example, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington holds $176 million of debt. [Moody’s Investor Service] Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the nation’s cancer research center, holds $1.9 billion of debt. [Moody’s Investor Service] A cancer cure would leave research centers like these on the hook for loans that could not possibly be paid back.
Better for cancer research centers to live off the $4.95 billion of research grants that get divvied out by the National Institutes of Health each year than to find a cure.
In light of this revelation, the public may be better served by private enterprise that is not reliant on public funding to find a cure for cancer.
While Facebook co-founder Sean Parker has pledged $250 million towards a “moon shot” attempt to cure cancer, donating his money to six cancer research centers [USA Today April 13, 2016], another entrepreneur operating clinics he founded in Austria and Germany is way ahead of the pack having successfully treated thousands of patients, though he had to resurrect a dismissed cancer therapy from its grave, undergo closure of his company by health authorities and incur severe criticism to do it.
New era of immunotherapy
Before I get to that compelling story, let me say cancer therapy is undergoing a massive change. The slash-burn-poison era of cancer therapy may be over. The age of cancer immunotherapy has begun. And I’m not the person saying this. Many cancer researchers are saying immunotherapy is already replacing chemo. Just how much longer conventional oncologists can continue to subject their patients to harsh of cancer treatments is unknown.
An article entitled: “Cancer Immunotherapy: The Beginning Of The End Of Cancer,” says: “the tide has finally changed and immunotherapy has become a clinically validated treatment for cancer cancers.” [BMC Medicine]
The futility of chemotherapy is revealed by the very fact toxic anti-cancer drugs impair a type of white blood cell known as natural killer cells, thus limiting the cancer patient’s chances for a cure altogether. [Molecular Cancer Therapy]
The clock is counting down on chemotherapy as immunotherapy is already producing long-term remissions for some types of cancer, particularly non-solid tumors. Toxic chemotherapy finally comes to the end of its product life cycle.
The goal of cancer immunotherapy is to stimulate a patient’s immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign and attack them.
The four white blood cells that kill cancer
Cancer immunologists are presently unleashing four types of white blood cells against cancer:
1. Neutrophils, which produced “cancer-proof mice” at Duke University. [Knowledge of Health] Neutrophils track down, dock up next to tumor cells and blow them up with a burst of oxygen free radicals. However, a trial was proposed to glean activated neutrophils from healthy patients and instill them in cancer patients, but it never materialized. It became apparent healthy young subjects exhibit the same immunity from cancer in summer months as laboratory mice bred for their ability to produce neutrophils. This strongly suggests sunlight exposure in summer produces sufficient amounts of vitamin D to reduce cancer risk.
However, instead of launching a vitamin D trial, vitamin-averse researchers ludicrously proposed the removal of activated neutrophils from healthy subjects and instillation in cancer patients because it needed a profitable business model to be successful. What can be concluded is that any natural and inexpensive cancer therapy will be summarily dismissed.
2. T-cells are successfully being harvested from cancer patients, grown in numbers and then activated and instilled back into the patient to produce long-lasting cures for non-solid tumors like leukemia (cancer of the blood) and lymphoma (cancer of the lymph system). [Knowledge of Health]
3. Natural killer cell therapy involves NK cells that inject toxins directly into cancer cells. This is considered the most direct way to conquer cancer because NK cells do not depend on the development of antibodies like T-cells do. [International Journal Molecular Sciences;ResveratrolNews.com]
4. Macrophages that literally digest or engulf roaming cancer cells and are abundant in the environment surrounding solid tumors have long been considered for use in cancer therapy. Since most immunotherapies for cancer have had limited success in solid tumors, focus on macrophages has been intense. [Immunology]
Macrophages (pronunciation) are not all beneficial. There is a Janus face to macrophages.
One type of macrophage actually induces biological chaos at tumor sites – uncontrolled inflammation and suppression of tumor-fighting white blood cells. Tumor cells escape what is called “immune surveillance” via inflammation and produce immune suppressors. Out-of-control macrophages even facilitate the spread (metastasis) of cancer. [Immunity]
Reckless macrophages
Reckless macrophages via their ability to wreak havoc by inducing uncontrolled inflammation not only interfere with the immune system’s ability to ward off cancer but also can, for example, induce inflammation in the lungs due to a viral infection that fills the lungs with fluid, with a potentially deadly outcome. [Respiratory Research] Out of control macrophages are also a major cause of morbidity and mortality in childhood arthritis. [Current Opinion Rheumatology]
These uncontrolled macrophages are responsible for legal blindness induced by wet macular degeneration, a condition where the visual center of the eye (macula) leaks fluid or produces new blood vessels (angiogenesis) in an attempt to deliver oxygen to eye tissues. [Cell Reports; Knowledge of Health]
One group of cancer researchers describe macrophages as “unwitting accomplices in cancer malignancy.” [NPJ Breast Cancer] Another report characterizes macrophages as “corrupt policemen in cancer-related inflammation.” [Advances Cancer Research] A damning revelation here is that conventional chemotherapy can in many instances inhibit the anti-tumor properties of macrophages. [Journal Experimental Medicine]
Dietary factors control macrophage-induced inflammation
Dietary factors may determine whether macrophages are cancer killing or not. For example, it has been demonstrated that high intake of salt converts macrophages into devilish villains that impair the ability of T-cells to control cancer. [Journal Clinical Investigation] Salt is highly alkaline (so much for the alkaline theory of cancer).
A high-fat diet also predisposes macrophages to become inflammatory. [Diabetes]
What can entrain macrophages to seek out and eradicate tumor cells without inducing inflammation and suppression of the very immune system that is attempting to do the same thing?
Enter vitamin D binding protein
Enter vitamin D binding protein, a molecule that facilitates the transport of vitamin D throughout the body. When two enzymes (galactosidase and sialidase) knock off two sugar-like molecules off of vitamin D binding protein, this becomes a unique molecular entity called Gc protein-macrophage activating factor, or gcMAF.
The discovery of the process by which gcMAF is produced was published in 1991 and 1993 by Nobuto Yamamoto, then a noted immunologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. [Immunology]
Dr. Yamamoto comes from a prestigious background having been appointed a full professor of microbiology and immunology at Hahnemann University School of Medicine. [Bloomberg News]
It was Dr. Yamamoto who noted that gcMAF greatly enhances the cancer ingesting properties of macrophages by 3-7 fold. [Proceedings National Academy Sciences 1991]
In 2003 Dr. Yamamoto also noted that gcMAF increased tumoricidal activity without releasing two known activators of inflammation- tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and nitric oxide (NO). [Anticancer Research] GcMAF was like taking wild horses and saddling them to work together as a team against cancer. Were cancer biologists paying attention?
Just 10-50 picograms (a trillionth of a gram) of gcMAF was demonstrated to stimulate the activity of macrophages by 7-9 fold in laboratory mice. [Molecular Immunology]
Dr. Yamamoto fails to carry the torch for gcMAF
Dr. Yamamoto advanced further into his research with gcMAF by administering this blood protein in minuscule amounts to laboratory mice that had tumor cells implanted. A single injection of gcMAF resulted in an average survival time of 21 days (one mouse survived beyond 60 days) whereas untreated mice survived an average of 13 days. Dr. Yamamoto described this curative therapy as “a consequence of sustained macrophage activation by inflammation resulting from the macrophage tumoricidal process. “ [Proceedings Society Experimental Biology Medicine]
Are nagalase enzyme levels a marker of gcMAF activity?
Dr. Yamamoto took another step forward in 1996 by instilling gcMAF into a lab dish with macrophages taken from cancer patients. Dr. Yamamoto reported that an enzyme is known as nagalase (aka alpha-N-acetylgalactosaminidase) was blocking the conversion of vitamin D binding protein to gcMAF. [Cancer Research] Later Dr. Yamamoto reported nagalase enzyme levels correlate with the size of tumors. [Cancer Research]
Here was Dr. Yamamoto pioneering cancer immunotherapy two decades before it is now being given the spotlight in cancer therapy. Dr. Yamamoto’s work was also validated by other researchers in the field. [Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy] Yet there was no impetus to advance it from the laboratory bench to the bedside of cancer patients.
Then Dr. Yamamoto embarked upon a series of published human studies conducted in Japan and published in 2008 to demonstrate gcMAF had remarkable ability to inhibit nagalase and reduce the size of tumors and produce tumor-free individuals. Dr. Yamamoto’s gcMAF was positively reported to rescue patients battling prostate, breast, lung and colon cancer. [Translational Oncology; International Journal Cancer 2008; Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy]
It was then, in 2008 that I was alerted by a laboratory researcher, Timothy Hubbell, that I should examine the published works of Dr. Yamamoto dealing with gcMAF and cancer. I published an online report about Dr. Yamamoto’s seemingly remarkable discoveries and wondered why the research community wasn’t paying attention. My report drew worldwide attention and broke the story to the public. [LewRockwell.com]
Unexpectedly, Dr. Yamamoto was not pleased with issuance of the report. He claimed only his gcMAF was safe to use. But when asked what plans he had to market it, he provided nebulous answers. I arranged for a major worldwide Fortune-500 company to enter into discussions about licensing his gcMAF, but he never responded to that offer. Cancer patients called him frantically begging for gcMAF, to no avail. Dr. Yamamoto advised me to get a job writing about other topics.
By 2014 the editors of a cancer journal retracted Dr. Yamamoto’s report involving gcMAF and nagalase in breast cancer patients citing irregularities in documentation for institutional review board approval. [International Journal Cancer]
Retraction Watch pilloried Dr. Yamamoto, discrediting his work completely. Inexplicably, the 90+-year old researcher did not respond or comment about the retraction. [Retraction Watch] Was Dr. Yamamoto guilty of fabricating or was he being silenced?
But, as it is pointed out by the besmirched clinic in Europe that is administering gcMAF to cancer patients, there are 142 scientists that have penned research papers regarding gcMAF. [gcMAF.se] If Dr. Yamamoto produced fraudulent research, then what are all these other research scientists doing studying it?
Since 1998 Dr. Yamamoto works at a tax-exempt foundation he established, the Socrates Institute in Philadelphia, which appears to be a very modest operation. [NonProfits] From 1993 thru 2015 he filed for 13 patents involving gcMAF. [Justia Patents]
Yamamoto’s studies questioned
In 2014 The Anticancer Fund pf Belgium delved into the human gcMAF studies conducted under Dr. Yamamoto. They have a Big Pharma director on their board, appear to be funded by Big Pharma, and put forward entirely fraudulent science to get two of Yamamoto’s papers retracted. [gcMAF Truth] They report that institutional review boards for these trials “do not exist.” Dr. Yamamoto’s co-authors “could not be found.” They claim naturally occurring gcMAF in cancer patients is about 4 milligrams/liter of blood, “making the 100 nanograms (used by Yamamoto) meaningless.”
But were researchers in Japan clamming up, cowering from pressure that would surely come and ruin their careers?
These Belgian researchers demanded “adequate randomized controlled trials,” full well knowing they would be unethical. You can’t ethically leave cancer patients to take placebos and die. GcMAF must be compared against existing conventional therapy, and not chemo that degrades it. [Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy] I often remind skeptics that insulin, penicillin, aspirin, nitroglycerin, digoxin and most vaccines came into common use without long-term double-blind placebo-controlled studies.
In the modern pharmaceutical world, drugs are approved if they marginally improve markers of disease, not the disease itself. For example, statin drugs are widely prescribed for cholesterol reduction but have never been shown to significantly reduce mortality, though they do marginally reduce the risk for a non-mortal heart attack (by 3% over 5 years). Cancer drugs are approved if they reduce the size of a tumor by 50% in 30 days regardless of whether they improve survival or not.
Searching for an alternative hypothesis
Another troubling report published in 2009 probed into the mechanism that converts vitamin D binding protein to gcMAF. The claim is that an enzyme, nagalase, degrades gcMAF in cancer patients.
In fact, these researchers show there is a significant amount of the precursor for gcMAF in blood serum of cancer patients (~4 milligrams/liter), which “makes it unlikely there is a depleted gcMAF precursor in cancer patients.” These researchers say “alternative hypotheses must be considered to explain the relative inability of patient serum to activate macrophages.” [Protein Science]
But then again, we refer to the previously mentioned paper published in PLos One in 2010 where it was shown that gcMAF exhibits “a direct and potent effect upon tumor cells in the absence of macrophages.” [PLoS One] GcMAF is taking us on a scientific roller coaster. GcMAF exhibits very potent ability to inhibit tumor cell growth directly. Was this the alternative hypothesis gcMAF researchers were searching for?
Another research study, authored by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Kentucky, showed gcMAF produces “strong inhibitory activity on prostate tumor cells independent of macrophage activation.” By the way, that study was funded by a Department of Defense grant. [PLoS One]
Should gcMAF be renamed DNMAF — direct non-macrophage activating factor?
The unexpected occurred in another recent study. Macrophages were instilled into a dish of breast cancer cells and nothing happened. Tumor cells were unaltered. But when human breast cancer cells were cultured with macrophages that had been previously activated by gcMAF, these macrophages surrounded the breast cancer cells and induced their death. This was anticipated, but the following experiment wasn’t.
Even more striking was when gcMAF was added to a lab dish with breast cancer cells only (no macrophages). Researchers at the University of Firenze, Italy, showed gcMAF-treated tumor cells reverted back to healthy cells! [Multifaceted immunotherapeutic effects of vitamin D-binding protein, 15th International Congress of Immunology, Milan, Italy, Aug. 2013; Anticancer Research] This direct reversion of tumor cells to a healthy state without macrophages should have provoked a top-to-bottom re-think on the dynamic mechanisms exhibited by gcMAF. To view macrophages turning cancer cells back to healthy cells click here.
Maybe gcMAF had little to do with nagalase levels. But researchers could not rule out that the dramatic reduction in breast cancer cells observed in a lab dish emanated from the ability of gcMAF to inhibit angiogenesis.
GcMAF and angiogenesis
Angiogenesis (pronounced an-gee-oh-gen-esis) is a biological phenomenon where blood vessels near oxygen-starved tissues develop new tributaries to nourish tissues with oxygen and other nutrients. In this case, angiogenesis facilitates tumor growth by provision of nutrients.
GcMAF has been shown to inhibit the sprouting of new blood vessels that feed tumors . [Angiogenesis; Neoplasia]
Researchers also demonstrated vitamin D3, the natural form of D, works synergistically with gcMAF. [Nutrients]
These researchers showed gcMAF has multiple biological activities, notably its interaction with the cell surface receptor for vitamin D, that could be responsible for its seven anti-cancer effects.” GcMAF’s ability to activate macrophages may be overemphasized. It exerts other powerful biological actions to quell cancer.
This compelling experiment involving the vitamin D cell surface receptor was performed by the very same researchers affiliated with Immuno Biotech Ltd., the maligned company in Europe that makes gcMAF (more below).
And let’s not overlook the fact that vitamin D itself, a synergistic co-factor with gcMAF, activate two other classes of cancer-killing white blood cells – neutrophils and natural killer cells. [Journal Pediatric Hematology Oncology; Knowledge of Health; Clinical Immunology Immunopathology]
Attempts to make a synthetic gcMAF
If gcMAF were an outright fraud, then why are research centers attempting to develop look-alike molecules (analogues) to make into patentable drugs? Efforts to synthetically produce molecular mimics of gcMAF date back to 2002. [Anticancer Research] Other researchers reported their attempt to produce a patentable gcMAF synthetic in 2006. [Journal American Chemical Society]
David Noakes, uncloaked
That businessman mentioned in the opening page of this report, who has founded the gcMAF clinics in Europe, is tech entrepreneur David Noakes. His broad-based team of researchers has, like Dr. Yamamoto, shown that gcMAF decreases nagalase levels in patients with advanced-stage cancer. As nagalase activity diminished with weekly gcMAF injections, patients experienced improvement. [Oncoimmunology]
Mr. Noakes’ company, Immuno Biotech, sponsored another study that demonstrated how gcMAF complexes with olive oil (oleic acid) to further stimulate its immune-therapeutic effect. This curative effect was visibly observed in ultrasound images of human cancer that confirmed reduction in tumor size from 8.7 to 49.2% within 1-4 weeks of gcMAF/oleic acid treatment among humans with stage-4 cancer.
This answers the criticism lodged at Dr. Yamamoto that he never provided evidence of tumor shrinkage, only evidence of reduced nagalase activity, and he only chose patients with early-stage cancer. [American Journal Immunology] David Noakes finally provided the evidence Dr. Yamamoto couldn’t produce. The absence of side effects was also noted.
Immuno Biotech provides evidence for examination
Immuno Biotech has 33 scientific research papers currently published on the mechanisms and results of gcMAF therapy for cancer, autism and other disorders. There are now over 200 scientists who have published over 120 research papers on gcMAF. [Immuno Biotech] Its website cites an 80% response rate (reduction in tumor size for Stage 1 and Stage II cancer).
In their experience at Immuno Biotech, late-stage cancer may require up to 18 months of treatment to become cancer free.
Immuno Biotech asks all of its cancer patients to adhere to a no-added sugar/ low carbohydrate diet and to supplement their diet with 10,000 units of vitamin D. [gcMAF Science]
Typical experiences of individual patients who have undergone gcMAF treatment during the years 2011-2013 are also provided online. [gcMAF Participants]
As a human protein, GcMAF has no side effects. [gcMAF Side Effects]
David Noakes can be heard delivering an oral presentation on YouTube about Immuno Biotech’s gcMAF cancer therapy. [YouTube]
According to information obtained online, Immuno Biotech currently employs five doctors at its clinics. GcMAF is injected directly into the tumor using ultrasound imaging. Mr. Noakes clinics generally provide gcMAF for a period of 3-4 weeks and then patients are sent home to receive it on their own. In general by the first week a 25% reduction in tumor size is achieved (range 8-40% reduction).
He says his company has supplied gcMAF now to 11,000 patients. He also supplies 100 clinics and 250 doctors around the world with genuine gcMAF. His company also offers an improved dropper form of gcMAF.
Recognize, it is difficult for a company like Immuno Biotech to provide data on cure rates since 5-year survival is the gold standard.
Is this a health quack?
A distant assessment does not reveal David Noakes to be acting like the health quack he is portrayed to be online. In fact, all of the evidence demanded of Dr. Nobuto Yamamoto, David Noakes seems to have provided – mechanism studies, survival data, ultrasound images of shrinking tumor volume that correlate with gcMAF therapy.
Authorities close in
Despite his transparency, David Noakes has undergone considerable scrutiny by authorities. Shamefully, that oversight was coming from a country whose cancer survival rate is the worst in western Europe. [Telegraph UK]
Where are the dead bodies?
As we ask in the natural medicine business, “where are the dead bodies?” With all of the clamor about gcMAF being branded as an unlicensed health product that poses “a significant risk to health,” [ITV.com] it is difficult to find a cancer patient who feels he was bilked by Mr. Noakes.
While the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), an agency bereft with corruption itself [MHRA Corrupt], raised concerns whether the gcMAF product is sterile and free from contamination, no product-related infections were reported. [BBC News] Mr. Noakes explains his company’s gcMAF product goes through 22 steps of purification. Batch testing for sterility by an independent laboratory are reported to show perfect sterility for 5 years.
Hundreds of people in Guernsey applied pressure on their doctors and politicians to maintain gcMAF therapy but it was banned on the isle Guernsey in February of 2015 anyway. [Guernsey Press]
Health authorities demand gcMAF be synthetically produced and undergo drug testing, something that would, according to Mr. Noakes, cost around $20 million and take 5 years to gain approval. Immuno Biotech’s laboratories have made two forms of a synthetic gcMAF, but human drug trials are not likely to happen, says Mr. Noakes.
In The Guernsey Press, a letter (abridged) to the editor read:
Mike13768
July 18, 2014 7:32 pm
Up until recently I was a complete skeptic about Gcmaf, however events in the last few weeks have made me reconsider my position.
I have recently met with several people who have been told that they have terminal cancer and there were no avenues left for their treatment.
These people have taken Gcmaf and also have changed their lifestyle and have fantastic results. One lady who was diagnosed as terminal is now completely clear, whilst another gentleman has had his tumor shrunk by over 50%
I was at David Noakes house two weeks ago along with over 80 other people there, deputies from the local cancer charities and people who were currently receiving treatment. What strikes me about this treatment is the conspiracy of silence about it. For example I know of a local cancer charity whose board members will not actively talk about it for fear of upsetting certain other board members.
I am also aware that the local clinicians refuse to acknowledge this treatment for fear of upsetting Health & Social Services Department (HSSD). People who are in hospices are not made aware of this potential treatment and let’s be brutal about this if you are dying what have you got to lose.
I urge the cancer charities to acknowledge this is your job is to promote treatments to get rid of this disease. If charities fail to acknowledge this, the question begs to be asked “WHY,” what are they hiding from?
[Guernsey Press July 18, 2014]
Deaths of researchers surrounds gcMAF
This report will not delve into the unexplained deaths of clinicians and researchers associated with gcMAF [Global Research] except to say that early on in 2009, Narasimha Swamy PhD of Brown University, who had knowledge how to produce gcMAF, died suddenly at age 39 without a history of any health problems. He authored and co-authored papers on gcMAF. [National Library of Medicine] It was an untimely if not a suspicious death. Did Dr. Swamy plan to bring gcMAF back to his homeland of India where generic drug makers would distribute it globally without regulatory approvals? Who knows?
Health product licensing and manufacturing oversight have become roadblocks to innovation, not assurances a product is safe and effective. The public can see through this now.
Culling the population
In the UK the National Health Service is billions of dollars in debt. [The Guardian UK] Hospitals there have resorted to withdrawing drinking water from bedridden patients, which is the perfect way to cull this patient population, as it leaves no fingerprints. According to one news report, 12,000 are “killed” annually in British hospitals due to dehydration. [Mirror UK] Elderly patients report they have averted dehydration by drinking water from flower vases.
A more horrific report delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine in London by a leading professor of medicine claims 130,000 patients annually in the National Health Service system have been placed on a “death pathway” instead of a “care pathway.” [Daily Mail UK]
It’s not just physician greed nor Big Pharma profiteering, it’s something much more ghastly that keeps cancer from being cured. Health systems worldwide are underfunded. Health systems can’t afford a cancer cure. For the good of insolvent retirement and health trust funds and life insurance companies the elderly must die on time. That is the hidden determinant that blocks adoption of any cancer cure.
For those who wish to learn more about gcMAF, Dr. Tim Smith has written a free online book on the topic. [gcMAF book]
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/bill-sardi/cant-afford-cure-cancer/
By Bill Sardi
Someone has said there are just too many jobs in the pursuit of a cancer cure to allow any therapy to be proven and put into practice. Recognize the nation is dotted with cancer research centers that hold billions of dollars of debt. For example, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington holds $176 million of debt. [Moody’s Investor Service] Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the nation’s cancer research center, holds $1.9 billion of debt. [Moody’s Investor Service] A cancer cure would leave research centers like these on the hook for loans that could not possibly be paid back.
Better for cancer research centers to live off the $4.95 billion of research grants that get divvied out by the National Institutes of Health each year than to find a cure.
In light of this revelation, the public may be better served by private enterprise that is not reliant on public funding to find a cure for cancer.
While Facebook co-founder Sean Parker has pledged $250 million towards a “moon shot” attempt to cure cancer, donating his money to six cancer research centers [USA Today April 13, 2016], another entrepreneur operating clinics he founded in Austria and Germany is way ahead of the pack having successfully treated thousands of patients, though he had to resurrect a dismissed cancer therapy from its grave, undergo closure of his company by health authorities and incur severe criticism to do it.
New era of immunotherapy
Before I get to that compelling story, let me say cancer therapy is undergoing a massive change. The slash-burn-poison era of cancer therapy may be over. The age of cancer immunotherapy has begun. And I’m not the person saying this. Many cancer researchers are saying immunotherapy is already replacing chemo. Just how much longer conventional oncologists can continue to subject their patients to harsh of cancer treatments is unknown.
An article entitled: “Cancer Immunotherapy: The Beginning Of The End Of Cancer,” says: “the tide has finally changed and immunotherapy has become a clinically validated treatment for cancer cancers.” [BMC Medicine]
The futility of chemotherapy is revealed by the very fact toxic anti-cancer drugs impair a type of white blood cell known as natural killer cells, thus limiting the cancer patient’s chances for a cure altogether. [Molecular Cancer Therapy]
The clock is counting down on chemotherapy as immunotherapy is already producing long-term remissions for some types of cancer, particularly non-solid tumors. Toxic chemotherapy finally comes to the end of its product life cycle.
The goal of cancer immunotherapy is to stimulate a patient’s immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign and attack them.
The four white blood cells that kill cancer
Cancer immunologists are presently unleashing four types of white blood cells against cancer:
1. Neutrophils, which produced “cancer-proof mice” at Duke University. [Knowledge of Health] Neutrophils track down, dock up next to tumor cells and blow them up with a burst of oxygen free radicals. However, a trial was proposed to glean activated neutrophils from healthy patients and instill them in cancer patients, but it never materialized. It became apparent healthy young subjects exhibit the same immunity from cancer in summer months as laboratory mice bred for their ability to produce neutrophils. This strongly suggests sunlight exposure in summer produces sufficient amounts of vitamin D to reduce cancer risk.
However, instead of launching a vitamin D trial, vitamin-averse researchers ludicrously proposed the removal of activated neutrophils from healthy subjects and instillation in cancer patients because it needed a profitable business model to be successful. What can be concluded is that any natural and inexpensive cancer therapy will be summarily dismissed.
2. T-cells are successfully being harvested from cancer patients, grown in numbers and then activated and instilled back into the patient to produce long-lasting cures for non-solid tumors like leukemia (cancer of the blood) and lymphoma (cancer of the lymph system). [Knowledge of Health]
3. Natural killer cell therapy involves NK cells that inject toxins directly into cancer cells. This is considered the most direct way to conquer cancer because NK cells do not depend on the development of antibodies like T-cells do. [International Journal Molecular Sciences;ResveratrolNews.com]
4. Macrophages that literally digest or engulf roaming cancer cells and are abundant in the environment surrounding solid tumors have long been considered for use in cancer therapy. Since most immunotherapies for cancer have had limited success in solid tumors, focus on macrophages has been intense. [Immunology]
Macrophages (pronunciation) are not all beneficial. There is a Janus face to macrophages.
One type of macrophage actually induces biological chaos at tumor sites – uncontrolled inflammation and suppression of tumor-fighting white blood cells. Tumor cells escape what is called “immune surveillance” via inflammation and produce immune suppressors. Out-of-control macrophages even facilitate the spread (metastasis) of cancer. [Immunity]
Reckless macrophages
Reckless macrophages via their ability to wreak havoc by inducing uncontrolled inflammation not only interfere with the immune system’s ability to ward off cancer but also can, for example, induce inflammation in the lungs due to a viral infection that fills the lungs with fluid, with a potentially deadly outcome. [Respiratory Research] Out of control macrophages are also a major cause of morbidity and mortality in childhood arthritis. [Current Opinion Rheumatology]
These uncontrolled macrophages are responsible for legal blindness induced by wet macular degeneration, a condition where the visual center of the eye (macula) leaks fluid or produces new blood vessels (angiogenesis) in an attempt to deliver oxygen to eye tissues. [Cell Reports; Knowledge of Health]
One group of cancer researchers describe macrophages as “unwitting accomplices in cancer malignancy.” [NPJ Breast Cancer] Another report characterizes macrophages as “corrupt policemen in cancer-related inflammation.” [Advances Cancer Research] A damning revelation here is that conventional chemotherapy can in many instances inhibit the anti-tumor properties of macrophages. [Journal Experimental Medicine]
Dietary factors control macrophage-induced inflammation
Dietary factors may determine whether macrophages are cancer killing or not. For example, it has been demonstrated that high intake of salt converts macrophages into devilish villains that impair the ability of T-cells to control cancer. [Journal Clinical Investigation] Salt is highly alkaline (so much for the alkaline theory of cancer).
A high-fat diet also predisposes macrophages to become inflammatory. [Diabetes]
What can entrain macrophages to seek out and eradicate tumor cells without inducing inflammation and suppression of the very immune system that is attempting to do the same thing?
Enter vitamin D binding protein
Enter vitamin D binding protein, a molecule that facilitates the transport of vitamin D throughout the body. When two enzymes (galactosidase and sialidase) knock off two sugar-like molecules off of vitamin D binding protein, this becomes a unique molecular entity called Gc protein-macrophage activating factor, or gcMAF.
The discovery of the process by which gcMAF is produced was published in 1991 and 1993 by Nobuto Yamamoto, then a noted immunologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. [Immunology]
Dr. Yamamoto comes from a prestigious background having been appointed a full professor of microbiology and immunology at Hahnemann University School of Medicine. [Bloomberg News]
It was Dr. Yamamoto who noted that gcMAF greatly enhances the cancer ingesting properties of macrophages by 3-7 fold. [Proceedings National Academy Sciences 1991]
In 2003 Dr. Yamamoto also noted that gcMAF increased tumoricidal activity without releasing two known activators of inflammation- tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and nitric oxide (NO). [Anticancer Research] GcMAF was like taking wild horses and saddling them to work together as a team against cancer. Were cancer biologists paying attention?
Just 10-50 picograms (a trillionth of a gram) of gcMAF was demonstrated to stimulate the activity of macrophages by 7-9 fold in laboratory mice. [Molecular Immunology]
Dr. Yamamoto fails to carry the torch for gcMAF
Dr. Yamamoto advanced further into his research with gcMAF by administering this blood protein in minuscule amounts to laboratory mice that had tumor cells implanted. A single injection of gcMAF resulted in an average survival time of 21 days (one mouse survived beyond 60 days) whereas untreated mice survived an average of 13 days. Dr. Yamamoto described this curative therapy as “a consequence of sustained macrophage activation by inflammation resulting from the macrophage tumoricidal process. “ [Proceedings Society Experimental Biology Medicine]
Are nagalase enzyme levels a marker of gcMAF activity?
Dr. Yamamoto took another step forward in 1996 by instilling gcMAF into a lab dish with macrophages taken from cancer patients. Dr. Yamamoto reported that an enzyme is known as nagalase (aka alpha-N-acetylgalactosaminidase) was blocking the conversion of vitamin D binding protein to gcMAF. [Cancer Research] Later Dr. Yamamoto reported nagalase enzyme levels correlate with the size of tumors. [Cancer Research]
Here was Dr. Yamamoto pioneering cancer immunotherapy two decades before it is now being given the spotlight in cancer therapy. Dr. Yamamoto’s work was also validated by other researchers in the field. [Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy] Yet there was no impetus to advance it from the laboratory bench to the bedside of cancer patients.
Then Dr. Yamamoto embarked upon a series of published human studies conducted in Japan and published in 2008 to demonstrate gcMAF had remarkable ability to inhibit nagalase and reduce the size of tumors and produce tumor-free individuals. Dr. Yamamoto’s gcMAF was positively reported to rescue patients battling prostate, breast, lung and colon cancer. [Translational Oncology; International Journal Cancer 2008; Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy]
It was then, in 2008 that I was alerted by a laboratory researcher, Timothy Hubbell, that I should examine the published works of Dr. Yamamoto dealing with gcMAF and cancer. I published an online report about Dr. Yamamoto’s seemingly remarkable discoveries and wondered why the research community wasn’t paying attention. My report drew worldwide attention and broke the story to the public. [LewRockwell.com]
Unexpectedly, Dr. Yamamoto was not pleased with issuance of the report. He claimed only his gcMAF was safe to use. But when asked what plans he had to market it, he provided nebulous answers. I arranged for a major worldwide Fortune-500 company to enter into discussions about licensing his gcMAF, but he never responded to that offer. Cancer patients called him frantically begging for gcMAF, to no avail. Dr. Yamamoto advised me to get a job writing about other topics.
By 2014 the editors of a cancer journal retracted Dr. Yamamoto’s report involving gcMAF and nagalase in breast cancer patients citing irregularities in documentation for institutional review board approval. [International Journal Cancer]
Retraction Watch pilloried Dr. Yamamoto, discrediting his work completely. Inexplicably, the 90+-year old researcher did not respond or comment about the retraction. [Retraction Watch] Was Dr. Yamamoto guilty of fabricating or was he being silenced?
But, as it is pointed out by the besmirched clinic in Europe that is administering gcMAF to cancer patients, there are 142 scientists that have penned research papers regarding gcMAF. [gcMAF.se] If Dr. Yamamoto produced fraudulent research, then what are all these other research scientists doing studying it?
Since 1998 Dr. Yamamoto works at a tax-exempt foundation he established, the Socrates Institute in Philadelphia, which appears to be a very modest operation. [NonProfits] From 1993 thru 2015 he filed for 13 patents involving gcMAF. [Justia Patents]
Yamamoto’s studies questioned
In 2014 The Anticancer Fund pf Belgium delved into the human gcMAF studies conducted under Dr. Yamamoto. They have a Big Pharma director on their board, appear to be funded by Big Pharma, and put forward entirely fraudulent science to get two of Yamamoto’s papers retracted. [gcMAF Truth] They report that institutional review boards for these trials “do not exist.” Dr. Yamamoto’s co-authors “could not be found.” They claim naturally occurring gcMAF in cancer patients is about 4 milligrams/liter of blood, “making the 100 nanograms (used by Yamamoto) meaningless.”
But were researchers in Japan clamming up, cowering from pressure that would surely come and ruin their careers?
These Belgian researchers demanded “adequate randomized controlled trials,” full well knowing they would be unethical. You can’t ethically leave cancer patients to take placebos and die. GcMAF must be compared against existing conventional therapy, and not chemo that degrades it. [Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy] I often remind skeptics that insulin, penicillin, aspirin, nitroglycerin, digoxin and most vaccines came into common use without long-term double-blind placebo-controlled studies.
In the modern pharmaceutical world, drugs are approved if they marginally improve markers of disease, not the disease itself. For example, statin drugs are widely prescribed for cholesterol reduction but have never been shown to significantly reduce mortality, though they do marginally reduce the risk for a non-mortal heart attack (by 3% over 5 years). Cancer drugs are approved if they reduce the size of a tumor by 50% in 30 days regardless of whether they improve survival or not.
Searching for an alternative hypothesis
Another troubling report published in 2009 probed into the mechanism that converts vitamin D binding protein to gcMAF. The claim is that an enzyme, nagalase, degrades gcMAF in cancer patients.
In fact, these researchers show there is a significant amount of the precursor for gcMAF in blood serum of cancer patients (~4 milligrams/liter), which “makes it unlikely there is a depleted gcMAF precursor in cancer patients.” These researchers say “alternative hypotheses must be considered to explain the relative inability of patient serum to activate macrophages.” [Protein Science]
But then again, we refer to the previously mentioned paper published in PLos One in 2010 where it was shown that gcMAF exhibits “a direct and potent effect upon tumor cells in the absence of macrophages.” [PLoS One] GcMAF is taking us on a scientific roller coaster. GcMAF exhibits very potent ability to inhibit tumor cell growth directly. Was this the alternative hypothesis gcMAF researchers were searching for?
Another research study, authored by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Kentucky, showed gcMAF produces “strong inhibitory activity on prostate tumor cells independent of macrophage activation.” By the way, that study was funded by a Department of Defense grant. [PLoS One]
Should gcMAF be renamed DNMAF — direct non-macrophage activating factor?
The unexpected occurred in another recent study. Macrophages were instilled into a dish of breast cancer cells and nothing happened. Tumor cells were unaltered. But when human breast cancer cells were cultured with macrophages that had been previously activated by gcMAF, these macrophages surrounded the breast cancer cells and induced their death. This was anticipated, but the following experiment wasn’t.
Even more striking was when gcMAF was added to a lab dish with breast cancer cells only (no macrophages). Researchers at the University of Firenze, Italy, showed gcMAF-treated tumor cells reverted back to healthy cells! [Multifaceted immunotherapeutic effects of vitamin D-binding protein, 15th International Congress of Immunology, Milan, Italy, Aug. 2013; Anticancer Research] This direct reversion of tumor cells to a healthy state without macrophages should have provoked a top-to-bottom re-think on the dynamic mechanisms exhibited by gcMAF. To view macrophages turning cancer cells back to healthy cells click here.
Maybe gcMAF had little to do with nagalase levels. But researchers could not rule out that the dramatic reduction in breast cancer cells observed in a lab dish emanated from the ability of gcMAF to inhibit angiogenesis.
GcMAF and angiogenesis
Angiogenesis (pronounced an-gee-oh-gen-esis) is a biological phenomenon where blood vessels near oxygen-starved tissues develop new tributaries to nourish tissues with oxygen and other nutrients. In this case, angiogenesis facilitates tumor growth by provision of nutrients.
GcMAF has been shown to inhibit the sprouting of new blood vessels that feed tumors . [Angiogenesis; Neoplasia]
Researchers also demonstrated vitamin D3, the natural form of D, works synergistically with gcMAF. [Nutrients]
These researchers showed gcMAF has multiple biological activities, notably its interaction with the cell surface receptor for vitamin D, that could be responsible for its seven anti-cancer effects.” GcMAF’s ability to activate macrophages may be overemphasized. It exerts other powerful biological actions to quell cancer.
This compelling experiment involving the vitamin D cell surface receptor was performed by the very same researchers affiliated with Immuno Biotech Ltd., the maligned company in Europe that makes gcMAF (more below).
And let’s not overlook the fact that vitamin D itself, a synergistic co-factor with gcMAF, activate two other classes of cancer-killing white blood cells – neutrophils and natural killer cells. [Journal Pediatric Hematology Oncology; Knowledge of Health; Clinical Immunology Immunopathology]
Attempts to make a synthetic gcMAF
If gcMAF were an outright fraud, then why are research centers attempting to develop look-alike molecules (analogues) to make into patentable drugs? Efforts to synthetically produce molecular mimics of gcMAF date back to 2002. [Anticancer Research] Other researchers reported their attempt to produce a patentable gcMAF synthetic in 2006. [Journal American Chemical Society]
David Noakes, uncloaked
That businessman mentioned in the opening page of this report, who has founded the gcMAF clinics in Europe, is tech entrepreneur David Noakes. His broad-based team of researchers has, like Dr. Yamamoto, shown that gcMAF decreases nagalase levels in patients with advanced-stage cancer. As nagalase activity diminished with weekly gcMAF injections, patients experienced improvement. [Oncoimmunology]
Mr. Noakes’ company, Immuno Biotech, sponsored another study that demonstrated how gcMAF complexes with olive oil (oleic acid) to further stimulate its immune-therapeutic effect. This curative effect was visibly observed in ultrasound images of human cancer that confirmed reduction in tumor size from 8.7 to 49.2% within 1-4 weeks of gcMAF/oleic acid treatment among humans with stage-4 cancer.
This answers the criticism lodged at Dr. Yamamoto that he never provided evidence of tumor shrinkage, only evidence of reduced nagalase activity, and he only chose patients with early-stage cancer. [American Journal Immunology] David Noakes finally provided the evidence Dr. Yamamoto couldn’t produce. The absence of side effects was also noted.
Immuno Biotech provides evidence for examination
Immuno Biotech has 33 scientific research papers currently published on the mechanisms and results of gcMAF therapy for cancer, autism and other disorders. There are now over 200 scientists who have published over 120 research papers on gcMAF. [Immuno Biotech] Its website cites an 80% response rate (reduction in tumor size for Stage 1 and Stage II cancer).
In their experience at Immuno Biotech, late-stage cancer may require up to 18 months of treatment to become cancer free.
Immuno Biotech asks all of its cancer patients to adhere to a no-added sugar/ low carbohydrate diet and to supplement their diet with 10,000 units of vitamin D. [gcMAF Science]
Typical experiences of individual patients who have undergone gcMAF treatment during the years 2011-2013 are also provided online. [gcMAF Participants]
As a human protein, GcMAF has no side effects. [gcMAF Side Effects]
David Noakes can be heard delivering an oral presentation on YouTube about Immuno Biotech’s gcMAF cancer therapy. [YouTube]
According to information obtained online, Immuno Biotech currently employs five doctors at its clinics. GcMAF is injected directly into the tumor using ultrasound imaging. Mr. Noakes clinics generally provide gcMAF for a period of 3-4 weeks and then patients are sent home to receive it on their own. In general by the first week a 25% reduction in tumor size is achieved (range 8-40% reduction).
He says his company has supplied gcMAF now to 11,000 patients. He also supplies 100 clinics and 250 doctors around the world with genuine gcMAF. His company also offers an improved dropper form of gcMAF.
Recognize, it is difficult for a company like Immuno Biotech to provide data on cure rates since 5-year survival is the gold standard.
Is this a health quack?
A distant assessment does not reveal David Noakes to be acting like the health quack he is portrayed to be online. In fact, all of the evidence demanded of Dr. Nobuto Yamamoto, David Noakes seems to have provided – mechanism studies, survival data, ultrasound images of shrinking tumor volume that correlate with gcMAF therapy.
Authorities close in
Despite his transparency, David Noakes has undergone considerable scrutiny by authorities. Shamefully, that oversight was coming from a country whose cancer survival rate is the worst in western Europe. [Telegraph UK]
Where are the dead bodies?
As we ask in the natural medicine business, “where are the dead bodies?” With all of the clamor about gcMAF being branded as an unlicensed health product that poses “a significant risk to health,” [ITV.com] it is difficult to find a cancer patient who feels he was bilked by Mr. Noakes.
While the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), an agency bereft with corruption itself [MHRA Corrupt], raised concerns whether the gcMAF product is sterile and free from contamination, no product-related infections were reported. [BBC News] Mr. Noakes explains his company’s gcMAF product goes through 22 steps of purification. Batch testing for sterility by an independent laboratory are reported to show perfect sterility for 5 years.
Hundreds of people in Guernsey applied pressure on their doctors and politicians to maintain gcMAF therapy but it was banned on the isle Guernsey in February of 2015 anyway. [Guernsey Press]
Health authorities demand gcMAF be synthetically produced and undergo drug testing, something that would, according to Mr. Noakes, cost around $20 million and take 5 years to gain approval. Immuno Biotech’s laboratories have made two forms of a synthetic gcMAF, but human drug trials are not likely to happen, says Mr. Noakes.
In The Guernsey Press, a letter (abridged) to the editor read:
Mike13768
July 18, 2014 7:32 pm
Up until recently I was a complete skeptic about Gcmaf, however events in the last few weeks have made me reconsider my position.
I have recently met with several people who have been told that they have terminal cancer and there were no avenues left for their treatment.
These people have taken Gcmaf and also have changed their lifestyle and have fantastic results. One lady who was diagnosed as terminal is now completely clear, whilst another gentleman has had his tumor shrunk by over 50%
I was at David Noakes house two weeks ago along with over 80 other people there, deputies from the local cancer charities and people who were currently receiving treatment. What strikes me about this treatment is the conspiracy of silence about it. For example I know of a local cancer charity whose board members will not actively talk about it for fear of upsetting certain other board members.
I am also aware that the local clinicians refuse to acknowledge this treatment for fear of upsetting Health & Social Services Department (HSSD). People who are in hospices are not made aware of this potential treatment and let’s be brutal about this if you are dying what have you got to lose.
I urge the cancer charities to acknowledge this is your job is to promote treatments to get rid of this disease. If charities fail to acknowledge this, the question begs to be asked “WHY,” what are they hiding from?
[Guernsey Press July 18, 2014]
Deaths of researchers surrounds gcMAF
This report will not delve into the unexplained deaths of clinicians and researchers associated with gcMAF [Global Research] except to say that early on in 2009, Narasimha Swamy PhD of Brown University, who had knowledge how to produce gcMAF, died suddenly at age 39 without a history of any health problems. He authored and co-authored papers on gcMAF. [National Library of Medicine] It was an untimely if not a suspicious death. Did Dr. Swamy plan to bring gcMAF back to his homeland of India where generic drug makers would distribute it globally without regulatory approvals? Who knows?
Health product licensing and manufacturing oversight have become roadblocks to innovation, not assurances a product is safe and effective. The public can see through this now.
Culling the population
In the UK the National Health Service is billions of dollars in debt. [The Guardian UK] Hospitals there have resorted to withdrawing drinking water from bedridden patients, which is the perfect way to cull this patient population, as it leaves no fingerprints. According to one news report, 12,000 are “killed” annually in British hospitals due to dehydration. [Mirror UK] Elderly patients report they have averted dehydration by drinking water from flower vases.
A more horrific report delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine in London by a leading professor of medicine claims 130,000 patients annually in the National Health Service system have been placed on a “death pathway” instead of a “care pathway.” [Daily Mail UK]
It’s not just physician greed nor Big Pharma profiteering, it’s something much more ghastly that keeps cancer from being cured. Health systems worldwide are underfunded. Health systems can’t afford a cancer cure. For the good of insolvent retirement and health trust funds and life insurance companies the elderly must die on time. That is the hidden determinant that blocks adoption of any cancer cure.
For those who wish to learn more about gcMAF, Dr. Tim Smith has written a free online book on the topic. [gcMAF book]
Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/06/bill-sardi/cant-afford-cure-cancer/
Saturday, June 4, 2016
NATO Needs Enemies to Justify Its Existence...
Provoking Moscow: NATO Needs Enemies to Justify Its Existence
By Stephen Lendman
NATO was always more about offense than defense, about America controlling the policies of Alliance members, increasing their numbers, pressuring them to stress militarism more than they’d chose otherwise – and selling them lots of US weapons.
When founded in April 1949, Soviet Russia was a North Atlantic Alliance enemy in name only, ravaged by WW II – needing years after Stalin’s April 1953 death to regain pre-war normality, peace essential to restore it.
Washington controls NATO, covering 75% of its budget, calling the shots, installing subservient Alliance officials to serve its agenda.
At a time when no US enemies exist, they’re invented to justify NATO’s existence – including Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yemeni Houthis, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and independent democratic leaders everywhere America doesn’t control.
Cold War II is much more intense than its earlier version, Putin bashed and denigrated shamelessly for not bowing to Washington’s will, for wanting multi-world polarity according to international rule of law principles.
Russia’s envoy to NATO, Alexandr Grushkko, understands how US-dominated NATO operates, its aims and ways whereby it justifies its existence.
It pressured Europe to treat peaceful, good neighbor Russia as a major adversarial threat – at a time it seeks mutual cooperation among all nations, a world at peace, and nuclear disarmament, polar opposite to America’s agenda.
Russian diplomacy can’t change US-led NATO’s rage for war, waging endless ones, spurning peace and stability, promoting American interests belligerently “from Greenland to the Caspian Sea, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Levant,” said Grushko.
“The question is where is the US and where is the Caspian Sea,” each distant from the other, Moscow not about to let it become a US-dominated NATO lake – while concentrating its own military strength within its borders, polar opposite America’s empire of bases.
Provoking Moscow with US-led NATO combat troops and warships near its borders, so-called missile defense systems entirely for offense, hyping nonexistent “Russian aggression,” denigrating its legitimacy, and falsely calling it America’s greatest threat risks East/West confrontation with super-weapons able to end life on earth.
Speaking in Warsaw on Tuesday, US-installed NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hyped “the importance of collective security (and) NATO’s (so-called) essential role in continuing to keep the peace” while claiming a nonexistent “more assertive Russia intimidat(es) its neighbors and chang(es) borders by force.”
Truth is polar opposite his willful Big Lies, bashing Putin, claiming he threatens continental security, ignoring his preeminent peacemaker role.
Instead of Europe seeking peaceful, cooperative relations with its important Russian neighbor, it lets Washington bully it into being an imperial tool – harming its welfare and security in the process.
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/provoking-moscow-nato-needs-enemies-to-justify-its-existence/5528577
By Stephen Lendman
NATO was always more about offense than defense, about America controlling the policies of Alliance members, increasing their numbers, pressuring them to stress militarism more than they’d chose otherwise – and selling them lots of US weapons.
When founded in April 1949, Soviet Russia was a North Atlantic Alliance enemy in name only, ravaged by WW II – needing years after Stalin’s April 1953 death to regain pre-war normality, peace essential to restore it.
Washington controls NATO, covering 75% of its budget, calling the shots, installing subservient Alliance officials to serve its agenda.
At a time when no US enemies exist, they’re invented to justify NATO’s existence – including Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Yemeni Houthis, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, and independent democratic leaders everywhere America doesn’t control.
Cold War II is much more intense than its earlier version, Putin bashed and denigrated shamelessly for not bowing to Washington’s will, for wanting multi-world polarity according to international rule of law principles.
Russia’s envoy to NATO, Alexandr Grushkko, understands how US-dominated NATO operates, its aims and ways whereby it justifies its existence.
It pressured Europe to treat peaceful, good neighbor Russia as a major adversarial threat – at a time it seeks mutual cooperation among all nations, a world at peace, and nuclear disarmament, polar opposite to America’s agenda.
Russian diplomacy can’t change US-led NATO’s rage for war, waging endless ones, spurning peace and stability, promoting American interests belligerently “from Greenland to the Caspian Sea, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Levant,” said Grushko.
“The question is where is the US and where is the Caspian Sea,” each distant from the other, Moscow not about to let it become a US-dominated NATO lake – while concentrating its own military strength within its borders, polar opposite America’s empire of bases.
Provoking Moscow with US-led NATO combat troops and warships near its borders, so-called missile defense systems entirely for offense, hyping nonexistent “Russian aggression,” denigrating its legitimacy, and falsely calling it America’s greatest threat risks East/West confrontation with super-weapons able to end life on earth.
Speaking in Warsaw on Tuesday, US-installed NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg hyped “the importance of collective security (and) NATO’s (so-called) essential role in continuing to keep the peace” while claiming a nonexistent “more assertive Russia intimidat(es) its neighbors and chang(es) borders by force.”
Truth is polar opposite his willful Big Lies, bashing Putin, claiming he threatens continental security, ignoring his preeminent peacemaker role.
Instead of Europe seeking peaceful, cooperative relations with its important Russian neighbor, it lets Washington bully it into being an imperial tool – harming its welfare and security in the process.
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/provoking-moscow-nato-needs-enemies-to-justify-its-existence/5528577
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