"President Obama has authorized these drones to take to the skies, converting the land of the free into the land of the watched. Drone technology developed for the military will soon be deployed in the domestic skies and citizens will be instantly transformed into suspects."

Is the Fear of Domestic Deployment of Drones Hysterical?

Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

An NBC story on the domestic use of drones carried the following headline: “Drones over America: How unmanned fliers are already helping cops.”

The author of the “puff piece” begins by recounting the story of Rodney Brossart of North Dakota. From the first paragraph, it is easy to see which side NBC comes down on in the drone debate. From the article:

It was getting dark, and the sheriff of Nelson County, N.D., was in a standoff with a family of suspected cattle rustlers. They were armed, and the last thing anybody wanted was a shoot out.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which monitors police radio chatter, offered to help. Their Predator was flying back to its roost at the Grand Forks Air Force base and could provide aerial support. Did the sheriff want the assist?

Yep.

“We were able to detect that one of the sons was sitting at the end of the driveway with a gun. We also knew that there were small children involved,” Sheriff Kelly Janke told NBC News, remembering that tricky encounter in the early summer of 2011. “Someone would have gotten seriously injured if we had gone in on the farm that night.” He decided to wait.

The next day, the drone gave them an edge again by helping them choose the safest moment to make a move. “We were able to surprise them … took them into custody,” Janke said. They also collected six stolen cows.

Rodney Brossart, the arrested farmer, sued the state, in part because of the cop’s use of a drone. But a district judge ruled that the Predator’s service was not untoward.

The New American has covered this story since the beginning, and there are several problems with NBC’s retelling of the events, problems that go beyond the merit of the charges against Brossart and his family.

In the original version of the story, the sheriff’s department placed a call to Grand Forks Air Force Base to see about getting a loaner drone to help them track and arrest Brossart.

In the story told by NBC, however, Customs and Border Protection (a division of the Department of Homeland Security) was “monitor[ing] police radio chatter” and “offered to help.”

Is it the practice of Homeland Security to listen to local law enforcement communication and to ride to the rescue of cops with military-grade weapons? Remember, Brossart was charged with stealing cattle (he was eventually charged with threatening peace officers, as well). Is it within the purview of federal agents to assist police in apprehending a suspected thief?

What of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unlawful searches and seizures” and the requirement that warrants be supported by affidavits “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized?”

Last summer, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill to “protect individual privacy against unwarranted governmental intrusion through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles commonly called drones.” Paul’s bill mandates:

A person or entity acting under the authority [of], or funded in whole or in part by, the Government of the United States shall not use a drone to gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a statute or regulation except to the extent authorized in a warrant that satisfies the requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Senator Paul explained, “Americans going about their everyday lives should not be treated like criminals or terrorists and have their rights infringed upon by military tactics.”

Perhaps Americans don’t care anymore. Perhaps we have become so accustomed to the growth of the surveillance state that we have become immured to deprivations of our civil liberties and consider such violations routine. As Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic asks, “Does anyone else feel as though a majority of Americans are unenthusiastic about living in a surveillance state yet rapidly resigning themselves to the inevitability of living in a surveillance state?”

The NBC pro-drone propaganda says almost with a perceptible yawn that “a flying robot doing a cop’s dirty work, and this kind of intervention is likely to be more and more commonplace, as the FAA fulfills a congressional mandate to increase its granting of drone permits.”

Don’t worry, is the message written between the lines. These drones are doing the “dirty work” and making us safer.

In almost every case, when government claims to be increasing safety, they are proportionally decreasing liberty.

Does the “dirty work” these drones are doing include violating pesky things like the Fourth Amendment? The Fourth Amendment exists to protect people from being treated like criminals and from having the never-blinking eye of government constantly monitoring their activity.

If one is suspected of criminal behavior, then law enforcement may seek a warrant. To be legally valid, that warrant must specify “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This protection from tyranny has a long history in Anglo-American jurisprudence.

Speaking of the specificity requirement of arrest warrants, the imminent and influential jurist William Blackstone wrote in 1768:

An arrest must be by corporal seising or touching the defendant’s body; after which the bailiff may justify breaking open the house in which he is, to take him: otherwise he has no such power; but must watch his opportunity to arrest him. For every man’s house is looked upon by the law to be his castle of defence and asylum, wherein he should suffer no violence.

And:

This warrant ought to be under the hand and seal of the justice, should set forth the time and place of making, and the cause for which it is made, and should be directed to the constable, or other peace officer, requiring him to bring the party either generally before any justice of the peace for the county, or only before the justice who granted it; the warrant in the latter case being called a special warrant. A general warrant to apprehend all persons suspected, without naming or particularly describing any person in special, is illegal and void for it’s uncertainty; for it is the duty of the magistrate, and ought not to be left to the officer, to judge of the ground of suspicion.

There is little argument that in the case of Rodney Brossart, the sheriff took upon himself the role of “judge of the ground of suspicion.” Furthermore, he violated the Fourth Amendment by sending an all-seeing robot to track Brossart on his own property, doing the “dirty work” of going where the police could not.

In fairness, judges are in need of more specific guidance in their understanding of the Fourth Amendment and the scope of its prohibitions. State legislatures should pass laws declaring that citizens can never be subject to surveillance without notice.

These laws would help judges apply the principles of the Fourth Amendment to drones in a very specific way. The standards presently used to judge the constitutionality of observation by helicopter or patrol car, for example, would be altered appropriately to fit the rapidly advancing drone technology. The improved legal framework would help law enforcement avoid legally suspect surveillance and would maintain the public’s protection against unconstitutional searches and seizures.

The potential weaponization of police drones is another important consideration, one that combines both constitutional issues of due process and the Fourth Amendment’s search and seizure limitations.

NBC says such concerns are unfounded.

“This hysteria of [a drone] hovering outside your backyard taking a video of you smoking a joint, it’s just that — hysteria,” said Al Frazier, an ex-cop from Los Angeles who is now an assistant professor of aeronautics at the University of North Dakota, and a deputy at the Grand Forks sheriff’s office,” writes NBC.

Writing in the Guardian (U.K.), Glen Greenwald recognizes the clear and present danger in the rise of drone use domestically. Writes Greenwald, “This dismissive posture is grounded not only in soft authoritarianism (a religious-type faith in the Goodness of US political leaders and state power generally) but also ignorance over current drone capabilities, the ways drones are now being developed and marketed for domestic use, and the activities of the increasingly powerful domestic drone lobby.”

President Obama has authorized these drones to take to the skies, converting the land of the free into the land of the watched. Drone technology developed for the military will soon be deployed in the domestic skies and citizens will be instantly transformed into suspects. States and cities must now step into the gap and defend citizens from being deprived of their most fundamental rights.

Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/14964-is-the-fear-of-domestic-deployment-of-drones-hysterical

“Production, Coercion and Theft”

Economics 101: Production, coercion and theft

Mike Adams

I’d like to share a lesson in economics today, and I call it the “Production, Coercion and Theft” lesson.

There are only three ways to accumulate money and wealth in world (other than stumbling across a hidden treasure and actually finding money, that is):

#1) Production: Offer something of value in exchange for money voluntarily traded by recipients

#2) Coercion: Confiscate money (or stores of value) by claiming authority over those who earn it

#3) Theft: Steal money (or stores of value) from those who already have it

Every person in society today acquires money in these three ways (with “gifting” being a fourth way that’s in a separate category because it’s passive, not active). The office worker, the entrepreneur, the laborer, the weekend burglar and even the professional politician all acquire money in one of these three primary ways.

Production means offering something of value to another party who is willing to trade you dollars for it. It can include both goods and services. A 9-5 office worker, for example, offers the value of their time and effort, and in exchange they are compensated at an agreed upon pay rate.

Production can also mean adding value to physical goods. We do this at the Natural News Store by sourcing organic superfoods from around the world and packaging them in pouches and cans for retail in the USA. This is a classic example of value-added production.

Out of the three methods of money accumulation covered here, production is the only one that adds abundance to the economy. The other two methods reduce wealth and ultimately promote poverty.

Coercion means forcing someone to give you money. This is the default method of all government bodies, from your local property tax collector to the federal IRS. Coercion means extracting money from someone in a non-mutually-agreed (i.e. “non-voluntary”) way.

A mugging is money extraction via coercion. Ironically, it is almost identical to taxation: There is a threat of force stated or implied, followed by a request for a certain amount of money: “Give me your wallet” or “Pay $12,453.24.” Your compliance results in the source of the coercion taking your money then moving on to their next victim. Non-compliance results in you either being shot, stabbed, arrested at gunpoint or stripped of other possessions you may own.

Theft is different from coercion in that there is no interaction at all between two parties. Theft is when someone breaks into your house and steals your flat screen TV when you’re not even there. Or it’s when someone breaks into your online bank account and transfers all your money to an offshore crime haven in Nigeria.

Theft is what recently happened in Cyprus, where banksters stole 40% or more of private account balances, later stealing 60% or more of many business accounts. It wasn’t coercion because there was no threat of force, nor any compliance on your part. You simply wake up one morning and find that your bank account, your truck, your wallet or your laptop computers is missing. That’s theft… and that’s how the global banking system fundamentally functions.

Another advanced kind of theft is committed by the Federal Reserve. By printing new money, it steals the value of all the money you currently hold. This is called “currency theft” but a full discussion of it is beyond the scope of this lesson. For now, let’s stick to simple theft and coercion.

The illusion of compliance

Governments typically shy away from engaging in outright theft. Why? Because they hope to create the illusion of voluntary compliance. By coercing you into giving up your money “voluntarily,” they avoid the appearance if outright stealing money or property from you. You “agreed” to pay your taxes, didn’t you?

In certain cases, of course, the government does engage in outright theft. This is called “eminent domain” and it means the government simply claims ownership of something you own (usually some land or a building), then decides how much money to pay you for it. The government claims the right to steal from you for “the common good,” implying that the benefit of some is more important than protecting the private property rights of all.

Theft is also carried out through misrepresentation and fraud. If a used car salesman sells you a 2005 Chevy pickup with “only 25,000 miles” on it, but it turns out they hacked the odometer and the vehicle actually has 300,000 miles on it, that’s misrepresentation and fraud.

This is very common in the food industry where “extra virgin olive oil” often turns out to be cut with GMO canola oil. Or where “tuna fish” actually isn’t from tuna. In the health supplements market, misrepresentation and fraud is also common among heavily-hyped “miracle” supplements that claim impossible results. Acai weight loss pills are a good example.

Misrepresentation and fraud is how virtually the entire system on Wall Street operates, by the way. It’s all a numbers game where investment houses sell stocks short while telling their customers to buy. The ratings are faked, the customers buy the stock, the investment brokers sell it short and wait for the stock to tumble from its artificial high, after which they rake in the profits.

Why governments prefer coercion to theft

By and large, governments far prefer coercion to theft. The IRS, for example, continues to insist that paying federal tax is a “voluntary” act. “Compliance is voluntary,” they admit. But this brand of volunteerism comes with the heavy hand of coercion. A typical warning letter from the IRS threatens the recipient with losing all his property and spending years in jail if they refuse to comply.

So yes, paying the IRS is “voluntary” as long as you don’t mind the consequences: Years in prison and the forfeiting of everything you own. That’s classic coercion.

By the same token, a Chicago mafia goon could walk into a popular night club in 1929 and say, “You’s gonna volunteer to pay us 20% of your profits, okay?” (Say that in your head with a cartoonish mob accent for better effect.) Followed by: “It would be a real shame to see a nice joint like this burn to ashes, y’know?”

This is not unlike the offer made by the IRS. Pay us 50% (or more) of your income, or lose your freedom.

Obamacare is implemented entirely by coercion. The gambit is this: Buy Obamacare health insurance, or we’ll just conficate money right out of your paycheck. That has very little difference from the mafia’s offer of “pay us 20% or we burn this place down.” In both cases, it’s a threat and a demand for compliance. That’s coercion.

Coercion and theft are signs of a crumbling society

When society is healthy, production is the dominant method of wealth creation. But when society begins to fall into criminality, corruption and government gone bad, coercion and theft become the dominant methods for diverting wealth from those who have earned it into the hands of those who are receiving it.

All agents and employees of the government are, by definition, beneficiaries of coercion. Their salaries are paid entirely by the government’s confiscation of wealth from private sector workers and businesses, all of whom comply solely because they are threatened with imprisonment if they fail to do so.

The ratio between production and coercion is a very good indicator of the level of freedom in any given nation. When tax rates are low, production is high because people have more incentive to start businesses, hire more people and produce more products or services. Wealth is primarily created by productivity

But when tax rates are high — more coercion — production plummets because the rewards for starting a business and hiring workers are diminished. The focus of the economy becomes government growth accompanied by increasing coercion / confiscation of private wealth.

When societies approach collapse, coercion shifts to outright theft: Stealing money right out of your bank account, for example, like we recently witnessed in Cyprus. Government also routinely target pension funds and even private retirement accounts, attempting to keep itself afloat by any means necessary.

In summary, the fall of society can be understood through these key transitions:

Abundant society = Freedom and liberty = Production and wealth creation
…then Production becomes Coercion
Coercion society = High taxes, growth of government = Wealth confiscation
…then Coercion becomes Theft
Theft society = Looting of private bank accounts, government seizure of industry = Wealth destruction
…Theft leads to Collapse

The EU has entered the stage of “coercion becoming theft.” The collapse is near.

Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039736_economics_coercion_theft.html

Would Founding Fathers be considered terrorists by our government today?

The U.S. Government Believes that the Founding Father Were Terrorists

Washington's Blog

Government agencies such as FEMA are allegedly teaching that the Founding Fathers should be considered terrorists.

Indeed, the government might consider you a potential terrorist if you take one of the following actions:
Speaking out against government policies
Protesting anything (such as participating in the “Occupy” movement)
Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this)
Having bumper stickers saying things like “Know Your Rights Or Lose Them”
Taking pictures or videos
Talking to police officers
Writing on a piece of paper
(Not having a Facebook account may soon be added)

And holding the following beliefs may also be considered grounds for suspected terrorism:
Being frustrated with “mainstream ideologies”
Valuing online privacy
Being anti-tax, anti-regulation or for the gold standard
Being “reverent of individual liberty”
“Believe in conspiracy theories” (see this)
“A belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack”
“Supported political movements for autonomy”
“Suspicious of centralized federal authority”
“Fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”
Opposing surveillance

If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they would probably run afoul of all of these categories.

As such, they could very well end up indefinitely detained at Gitmo … or assassinated.

Link to article and hyperlinks:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/the-u-s-government-believes-that-the-founding-father-were-terrorists.html

Poster of the day...

If she only knew...

To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me

If only I had a tiger mom or started a fake charity.

By SUZY LEE WEISS

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

What could I have done differently over the past years?

For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.

I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people's pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you're using someone else's misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you're golden.

Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?

Then there was summer camp. I should've done what I knew was best—go to Africa, scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life. Because everyone knows that if you don't have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you're able to talk about what other people have to deal with.

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. "Assistant Director of Mail Services." "Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics." I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

To those kids who by age 14 got their doctorate, cured a disease, or discovered a guilt-free brownie recipe: My parents make me watch your "60 Minutes" segments, and they've clipped your newspaper articles for me to read before bed. You make us mere mortals look bad. (Also, I am desperately jealous and willing to pay a lot to learn your secrets.)

To those claiming that I am bitter—you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhhh—"The Real Housewives" is on.

Ms. Weiss is a senior at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh.

Link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654.html

"Why can’t interventionists just be honest? Why do they have to use the WMDs or a purported love for the Iraqi people or some other laughable excuse for their brutal invasion, war of aggression, and occupation of Iraq? Why can’t they just admit that the sanctions and the invasion were about regime change, one of the core principles of U.S. foreign policy — the ouster of dictatorial regimes that are not submissive to the U.S. national security state and their replacement with pro-U.S. regimes?"

A Laughable Excuse for Invading Iraq
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Among the most laughable excuses for invading Iraq was the one that said that the U.S. government invaded the country to help free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. That was the big excuse that was trotted out after the WMD excuse proved to be unfounded.

For one thing, there was never any concern for the well-being of the Iraqi people prior to the invasion. Recall, for example, the 11 years of brutal sanctions that preceded the invasion. Year after year, the Iraqi people were suffering economic devastation from the sanctions. Even worse, Iraqi children were dying by the thousands every year. In fact, the mindset of U.S. officials was captured perfectly by U.S. Ambassador the United Nations Madeleine Albright, who declared that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions was “worth it.” That was in 1996, and there wasn’t a peep of protest from her boss, President Clinton, or any other U.S. official. That’s undoubtedly because they agreed with her. The sanctions lasted another seven years.

How is it possible for U.S. officials to have invaded Iraq out of love for the Iraqi people when they were so willing to sacrifice Iraqi children for regime change over a period of 11 years? After all, once a year or two went by without Saddam Hussein’s resignation or ouster from power, wouldn’t a legitimate concern for the Iraqi people be manifested by a lifting of sanctions that were killing their children? Why continue the sanctions for some 12 years?

And it’s not as though there weren’t people who were calling on U.S. officials to stop the death and destruction. Suffering a crisis of conscience over what the sanctions were doing to the Iraqi people, Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 after a 34-year career at the UN. He later said, “I was driven to resignation because I refused to take Security Council orders, the same Security Council that had imposed and sustained genocidal sanctions on the innocent of Iraq. I did not want to be complicit. I wanted to be free to speak out publicly about this crime.”

Halliday was replaced by Hans von Sponek. In February 2000, von Sponek resigned the position for the same reason that Halliday had resigned.

That still didn’t induce U.S. officials to dismantle the sanctions, which they still hoped would bring about the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power. The sanctions were maintained until 2003. There was never an upward limit on the number of Iraqi children that the U.S. government was willing to sacrifice to achieve that end. Since we’re dealing with the deaths of people’s children, it’s difficult to reconcile that mindset with one that purports to love the Iraqi people and wants to bring them freedom and democracy.

In fact, among the fascinating things about the invasion and occupation of Iraq was the U.S. government’s attitude toward ordinary Iraqis. For one thing, the Pentagon steadfastly refused to keep track of the number of the people U.S. troops were killing. That would seem an odd way to reflect love and concern for Iraqis.

Equally important was the fact that there was never an upward limit on the number of Iraqi people who could be killed to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. It really didn’t matter how many Iraqis were killed or maimed or had their houses and businesses destroyed. Any number would be considered “worth it,” just as any number of deaths of Iraqi children from the sanctions would have been “worth it.”

That is an odd way to express love and concern for people.

Proponents of the war say that all this death and destruction was worth it because Saddam Hussein was such a bad man, one who tortured and killed his own people. But there’s one big problem with that rationale, one that proponents of the war never like to talk about: The U.S. government’s partnership and alliance with this bad man during the 1980s. Yes, that’s right—the U.S. government embraced Saddam Hussein for years, just as it has embraced many dictators around the world and continues to do so today. In fact, take a wild guess who furnished Saddam Hussein with those infamous WMDs that were initially used as the excuse for invading Iraq. For the answer, click here.

Finally, we mustn’t forget the U.S. government’s fierce prosecution of American citizens who tried to help out the Iraqi people with food and medicine during the period of the sanctions. There was Burt Sacks, who was fined $10,000 for violating the sanctions, a fine that U.S. officials were still trying to collect until fairly recently, without success because a federal judge threw their case out of court. Much more serious though was the criminal conviction of Rafil Dhafir, an American physician, who is now serving a 22-year jail sentence for helping out the Iraqi people in violation of the sanctions.

How are those prosecutions consistent with love and concern for the Iraqi people?

Why can’t interventionists just be honest? Why do they have to use the WMDs or a purported love for the Iraqi people or some other laughable excuse for their brutal invasion, war of aggression, and occupation of Iraq? Why can’t they just admit that the sanctions and the invasion were about regime change, one of the core principles of U.S. foreign policy — the ouster of dictatorial regimes that are not submissive to the U.S. national security state and their replacement with pro-U.S. regimes?

Perhaps the answer is that they just want American citizens to feel good about what the U.S. national-security state does to people overseas. Or maybe it’s just because the invasion and occupation of Iraq ended up replacing one anti-U.S. dictatorial regime with another anti-U.S. dictatorial regime.

Link:
http://fff.org/2013/04/01/a-laughable-excuse-for-invading-iraq/

Teachers Attend Gun Training in Ohio...

The First Honest Cable Company...

OOPS!!! Melting ice causes growth of ice??? It is getting colder because it is getting warmer???

Global warming is one big April Fools joke...

Melt may explain Antarctica's sea ice expansion

BBC News

Climate change is expanding Antarctica's sea ice, according to a scientific study in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The paradoxical phenomenon is thought to be caused by relatively cold plumes of fresh water derived from melting beneath the Antarctic ice shelves.

This melt water has a relatively low density, so it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean.

The cool surface waters then re-freeze more easily during Autumn and Winter.

This explains the observed peak in sea ice during these seasons, a team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in De Bilt says in its peer-reviewed paper.

Climate scientists have been intrigued by observations that Antarctic sea ice shows a small but statistically significant expansion of about 1.9% per decade since 1985, while sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking over past decades.

The researchers from the KNMI suggest the "negative feedback" effect outlined in their study is expected to continue into the future.

They tried to reproduce the observed changes in a computer-based climate model.

The sea ice expanded during Southern Hemisphere autumn and winter in response to the development of this fresh, cool surface layer, which floated on the denser, warmer salty sea water below.

This fresh water is ultimately derived from enhanced melting at the base of the Antarctic ice shelves.

"Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing despite the warming global climate," said the study's lead author Richard Bintanja, from the KNMI.

"This is caused by melting of the ice sheets from below," he told the Reuters news agency.

But there are other plausible explanations for Antarctic sea-ice expansion.

Paul Holland of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) stuck to his findings last year that a shift in winds linked to climate change was blowing ice away from the coast, allowing exposed water in some areas to freeze and make yet more ice.

"The possibility remains that the real increase is the sum of wind-driven and melt water-driven effects, of course. That would be my best guess, with the melt water effect being the smaller of the two," he told the London Science Media Centre.

The study in Nature Geoscience also asserts that the cool melt water layer may limit the amount of water sucked from the oceans that falls as snow on Antarctica. Cold air can hold less moisture than warm air.

Link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21991487

Poster of the day...

Source:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/

Cyprus Crisis and the Dangers of Fractional-Reserve Banking...

"I think they're really fun because they're just soft balls so it doesn't hurt if it hits you," sixth-grade student Lindsey Stagg, who - at her tender age - spoke more truth and sanity then the four lunatics and their "special panel" who voted to end the traditional game...

Dodgeball now banned in public schools as nanny state goes insane

Monday, April 01, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes

The nanny state mentality is becoming more institutionalized in America as evidenced by the recent decision to ban the age-old gym class game of "Dodgeball" in one New Hampshire school - though trust me, others will follow suit.

In an incredible four to one decision, the five-member school board panel at Windham School voted to ban the "classic gym class game" which "has been a rite of passage for years" for kids - not to mention a whole lot of fun - according to CBSBoston. At the same time, the board voted to end all other so-called "human target" activities - games with names like "Bombardment" and "Slaughter."

"It's almost turning into a nanny state," said school board member Dennis Senibaldi, the lone school board member with enough sanity left to vote against the ban. "What happens when they replace that game with something different that another group doesn't want to play, do we eliminate that group of games?"

Yes, Dennis. The answer is, appallingly, yes.

Didn't you know? Dodgeball equals bullying

Oh, of course there were lots of touchy-feely reasons for banning a game that has been around longer than most board members have been alive, to be sure. They include a handful of complaints by whiny parents, who claimed their kids were being "bullied" - targeted by the other kids during Dodgeball games. After "studying" the issue, a "special committee" said the games should go away. After all, we can't be teaching our kids to be competitive or to learn how to adapt to adversity and overcome because, you know, the world plays be the same rules as the Autobot Society.

Needless to say, not a few students were stunned by the decision.

"I think they're really fun because they're just soft balls so it doesn't hurt if it hits you," sixth-grade student Lindsey Stagg, who - at her tender age - spoke more truth and sanity then the four lunatics and their "special panel" who voted to end the traditional game.

Stephanie Wimmer, the board's vice chair, told WBZ-TV the board is constantly "looking at our curriculum" for changes. Sure.

"We spend a lot of time making sure our kids are violence free," Windham superintendent Dr. Henry LaBranche lectured. "Here we have games where we use children as targets. That seems to be counter to what we are trying to accomplish with our anti-bullying campaign."

All of a sudden, Superintendent LaBranche?

"It's an elimination game," said Andrew Mead, program manager at the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. "Games like Dodgeball and Tag don't keep kids involved and physically active. They objectify slower students who don't catch as well."

Raising a generation of pansies who can't handle adversity

Objectify? How about motivate? Challenge? Concepts that encourage those who don't play so well to find ways to be better?

What's next, ending tackle football, basketball and track because, gee, some kids are just more physically talented than others?

There are alternative solutions other than simply banning an obviously popular activity. How about an "opt-out" clause, board members? Let kids who are getting "bullied" opt-out of this ultra-violent contact sport and do something else during gym class. That way, kids who still want to play can play. Why do you have to ban the activity?

Do you see where all of this nannyism is leading?

We are teaching an entire generation of kids that a) equality means equal outcomes, not equal opportunity; b) excelling at something should not be rewarded but criticized and the playing field "leveled;" c) that they should not have to face difficulty or adversity in life (and we wonder why so many of our kids are on psychotropic drugs); and d) choice, opportunity and freedom are archaic notions that have no place in "modern society."

Meanwhile, children in the rest of the real world are still living in it. Perhaps that is part of the reason why the U.S. lags so far behind those countries in so many categories.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/039725_dodgeball_banned_public_schools.html#ixzz2PDYAQYPQ

How's Obamacare working out for you these days???

Mirage of ‘care’ in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward ‘third-world experience’

Ethan A. Huff

A key component of the government healthcare takeover known as Obamacare is already shaping up to be a complete failure, according to reports, and it has not yet even come into effect. An official in charge of the Obamacare insurance exchange program recently told guests at a conference that the federal government is working on contingency plans for the struggling program, which was insinuated as potentially becoming a “third-world experience” if not properly handled.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HHS), the Obamacare insurance exchange, which was supposed to begin enrolling members nationwide on October 1, 2013, is no longer expected to be ready in all 50 states by that date. In fact, there is a chance that a majority of states will not be ready by the proposed start date, which means it will have to be either modified or reapportioned, or the expectations of its performance greatly lowered.

“The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,” said Henry Chao, an official at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services who is heading up the technology behind the Obamacare insurance exchange change. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

What Chao is essentially implying here is that all the grandiose claims made several years ago about the insurance exchange aspect of Obamacare are completely unrealistic, and were never actually going to happen. And based on the way things are currently going, the focus now needs to be on simply making sure the program operates at least a little bit better than government-run health care schemes in developing, third-world countries.

“We are under 200 days from open enrollment, and I’m pretty nervous,” stated Chao to an audience filled with representatives from the insurance industry.

According to the same announcement, roughly half of all states were expected to have their insurance exchanges run directly by the federal government, while some 18 states and the District of Columbia were expected to run their own insurance exchanges. Another seven-or-so states were expected to create insurance exchanges run by state-federal partnership programs.

“I think it’s only prudent to not assume everything is going to work perfectly on day one and to make sure that we’ve got plans in place to address things that may happen,” added Gary Cohen, Director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039733_Obamacare_third-world_health_care_system.html

"In reality, the mega-rich managed to get their money out either before the crisis even started or during the so-called “bank holiday” period while middle class depositors were left stranded."

Mega-Rich Withdrew Money From Cyprus Before Looting

The real targets of the “haircut” are businesses, entrepreneurs and the middle class

Paul Joseph Watson

News that the Cypriot President’s family moved 21 million euros to London days before the bank accounts of his people were looted as part of the bailout deal serves as another reminder that while the media portrays the victims of the Cyprus “haircut” as the mega rich and wealthy Russian oligarchs, the real victims are middle class families and small business owners.

“A company owned by in-laws of Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades withdrew dozens of millions from Laiki Bank on March 12 and 13, according to an article published in Cypriot newspaper Haravgi,” reports EnetEnglish.

“The newspaper, which is affiliated to the communist-rooted AKEL party, reports that three days before the Eurogroup meeting the company took five promissory notes worth €21m from Laiki Bank and transferred the money to London.”

In addition, as Reuters reports, “While ordinary Cypriots queued at ATM machines to withdraw a few hundred euros as credit card transactions stopped, other depositors used an array of techniques to access their money.”

Branches and subsidiaries of Cypriot banks in London and Russia remained open while banks in Cyprus were closed, allowing Russian oligarchs and other wealthy depositors to move their money.

When asked about the amount of money that had exited Cyprus before the bailout deal, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble refused to provide figures.

“Perhaps because if he did, it would become clear that the only entities truly punished by this weekend’s actions are not evil Russian billionaires, but small and medium domestic companies, and other moderately wealthy individuals, hardly any of them from the former “Evil Empire,” remarks Zero Hedge.

As Business Insider reports, the fact that the mega-rich – the supposed targets of Cyprus “haircut” – have already removed most of their money from the system means that, “upper middle class/entrepreneur types will feel most of the pain if the Cyprus tax is enacted.”

In other words, the very engine of the Cypriot economy, the businesses and the employers, will be the victims of the EU/IMF plundering. Middle class families are also amongst the worst affected. The Telegraph recently reported on a family who sold their villa in Cyprus for 200,000 euros right before the “haircut” was announced only to see the desperately needed cash disappear.

As we highlighted last week, a screenshot from an online bank account belonging to a medium-sized IT business in Cyprus shows over 720,000 euros in “blocked funds.” According to the owner, 80 per cent of that will be swiped and what’s left will take 6 to 7 years to get back.

After an initial attempt to plunder around 10 per cent of savings was rejected after a huge public outcry, Bank of Cyprus depositors now face losing up to 60% of their money, with Cyprus’s financial minister Michalis Sarris warning the “haircut” could even be as much as 80%.

However, since the theft has been characterized by the media as merely targeting rich Russian oligarchs and other wealthy investors, the uproar has diminished.

In reality, the mega-rich managed to get their money out either before the crisis even started or during the so-called “bank holiday” period while middle class depositors were left stranded.

Given that the looting of bank accounts has now been established as the template for future “bank recapitalizations” across Europe as well as Canada, the middle class has now been permanently put in the crosshairs and will be expected to pay for bankers’ gambling losses with their savings on a regular basis.

Link:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/mega-rich-withdrew-money-from-cyprus-before-looting.html

What Would We Do Without the State?

America's invisible victims...

The Message Sent by America's Invisible Victims

As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression

by Glenn Greenwald

Yesterday I had the privilege to watch Dirty Wars, an upcoming film directed by Richard Rowley that chronicles the investigations of journalist Jeremy Scahill into America's global covert war under President Obama and specifically his ever-growing kill lists. I will write comprehensively about this film closer to the date when it and the book by the same name will be released. For now, it will suffice to say that the film is one of the most important I've seen in years: gripping and emotionally affecting in the extreme, with remarkable, news-breaking revelations even for those of us who have intensely followed these issues. The film won awards at Sundance and rave reviews in unlikely places such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. But for now, I want to focus on just one small aspect of what makes the film so crucial.

The most propagandistic aspect of the US War on Terror has been, and remains, that its victims are rendered invisible and voiceless. They are almost never named by newspapers. They and their surviving family members are virtually never heard from on television. The Bush and Obama DOJs have collaborated with federal judges to ensure that even those who everyone admits are completely innocent have no access to American courts and thus no means of having their stories heard or their rights vindicated. Radical secrecy theories and escalating attacks on whistleblowers push these victims further into the dark.

It is the ultimate tactic of Othering: concealing their humanity, enabling their dehumanization, by simply relegating them to nonexistence. As Ashleigh Banfield put it her 2003 speech denouncing US media coverage of the Iraq war just months before she was demoted and then fired by MSNBC: US media reports systematically exclude both the perspectives of "the other side" and the victims of American violence. Media outlets in predominantly Muslim countries certainly report on their plight, but US media outlets simply do not, which is one major reason for the disparity in worldviews between the two populations. They know what the US does in their part of the world, but Americans are kept deliberately ignorant of it.

What makes Dirty Wars so important is that it viscerally conveys the effects of US militarism on these invisible victims: by letting them speak for themselves. Scahill and his crew travel to the places most US journalists are unwilling or unable to go: to remote and dangerous provinces in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, all to give voice to the victims of US aggression. We hear from the Afghans whose family members (including two pregnant women) were slaughtered by US Special Forces in 2010 in the Paktia Province, despite being part of the Afghan Police, only for NATO to outright lie and claim the women were already dead from "honor killings" by the time they arrived (lies uncritically repeated, of course, by leading US media outlets).

Scahill interviews the still-traumatized survivors of the US cruise missile and cluster bomb attack in Southern Yemen that killed 35 women and children just weeks after Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. We see the widespread anger in Yemen over the fact that the Yemeni journalist who first exposed US responsibility for that attack, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, was not only arrested by the US puppet regime but, as Scahill first reported, has been kept imprisoned to this very day at the direct insistence of President Obama. We hear from the grandfather of 16-year-old American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (he is also the father of US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki) – both before and after a CIA drone killed his son and then (two weeks later) his teenaged grandson who everyone acknowledges had nothing to do with terrorism. We hear boastful tales of summary executions from US-funded-and-directed Somali warlords.

There is an unmistakable and singular message sent by these disparate groups and events. It's one particularly worth thinking about with news reports this morning that two more Afghan children have been killed by a NATO air attack...

Read the rest here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/31/dirty-wars-terrorism-victims

"The political Left promoted rebellion against the State as long as they saw themselves outside in the cold. But when they began to realize that they were, in fact, becoming the State, with all the power of the federal government, they dropped the idea of genuine rebellion like a hot potato. They praised big government, they assured everybody it was the solution, not the problem."

How 'Kill the Pigs' Became 'Only the Police Should Have Guns'

by Jon Rappoport

In the fabled 1960s, the cops were called pigs, and anybody on the political Left who wanted a ticket to the show knew that and mouthed it often.

At rallies, protests, and riots, people said: are the pigs here yet? I heard they were three blocks away. Wonder how many pigs they’re sending today? There! There they are! The pigs!

Now, on the Left, that tradition has morphed into: repeal the 2nd Amendment; turn in your guns; citizens with guns are satanic; the police will protect us; a private citizen with a gun is a killer and needs psychiatric lockdown; suspend that five-year old with the gun screen-saver.

What happened?

In 1968, if you asked a leftie college student whether a black man living in the inner city had a right to own a gun to protect himself against the cops, the answer, ten out of ten times, would have been yes.

Now, that leftie kid will be talking about the insanity of anybody owning a gun. Except for the cops.

Well, three things have happened since the 1960s. The end of the military draft, and the end of anybody caring who smokes pot or who has sex with who. Those changes melted away the whole “movement.”

A professor friend taught at UCLA during the turbulent 60s and early 70s. He told me as soon as the Vietnam war was over, the campus transformed in a flash. Students were suddenly all about finding a niche in the job market after graduation. Boom. Switch on, switch off.

The titanic idealism was put away in a drawer and filed under “crazy shit I did.”

The one remaining piece from the 60s that has endured is hatred of big corporations. But gradually, a parallel mindset has developed. First, grudging acceptance of big government; then toleration; then admiration.

Now, the Left is all about big government and the “positive changes” it can make.

And when I say the Left, I also mean the center, and a great deal of the right, because they’ve come along for the ride, too. They are the Left now.

In 1968, a big-time liberal presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was the target of riots, by the Left, at the Democratic National Convention. Those riots tore apart half the city. Two years earlier, a march, by the Left, on the Century Plaza Hotel in LA, where Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was staying, sealed his fate. It was the last stone. Johnson, who had presided over the war on poverty and the creation of “The Great Society,” the biggest federal program since FDR’s New Deal, was mangled into oblivion.

Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for office again in 1968.

If Pelosi, Reid, Frank, and Obama had been around then, they would have been hammered in the same way by the Left. If they were for the war in Vietnam.

That was the big key, the war. Or to be precise, the military draft.

“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?!”

Meaning: “I won’t risk my neck going to Nam!”

The elite Left has become the personification of the soccer mom now. Worries about everything. Danger everywhere. Needs more helmets. Schedules more play dates. Wants more state surveillance. “If you’re against intrusion on your privacy, maybe you have something to hide.” “Keep the poor bottled up in inner cities, give them anything they want, just don’t let them into my neighborhood.”

The Left has also become the promise of a vague fairyland new age. “We’re all in this together.” “We can raise up the lowest among us (by printing more money).”

And the police are part of that fantasy. They’re the centurions at the gate. “Arm them to the teeth.” “Render the rest of us powerless.” That’s the grand solution to all our social ills. Naked, hairless, unarmed, watched around the clock, we’ll be beautifully safe, under the machine of a national police force.

You think I’m attacking a straw man here? You think I’m devising a distorted picture of the collectivist Left and their allies? You think there’s some still-powerful rebellion, on the political Left, against the State, that can put a million people on the street to protest a specific fascist program of that big power? Where is it?

What was it, really, even in 1968? If the Vietnam war had been fought with no draft, with a volunteer army, a large part of the 1960s wouldn’t have happened at all.

As the 1970s droned on into the 80s, a rapprochement was achieved between the citizens and the police. More and more, the Left came to believe the whole idea of rebellion against the State was an old delusion. It was something people like Camus and Sartre had written about. It was really a European thing, an abstract philosophical pose.

Once the dust and the smelly underwear of the 1960s had been cleared away, the real State Op came into being. Encourage, in every way possible, crime and criminals; and then come in behind that with an answer to the horrific threat: cops.

Irresistible. On the streets, in the newspapers, on television, enact crime after crime after crime…and then promote the only answer: cops. More cops. More cops with bigger and better weapons.

Disarm everybody and leave the police and the FBI and the military and numerous other government agencies with the only guns.

Does this excuse the actual perpetrators of street crimes? No, of course not. In fact, it makes them more guilty, because they’re aiding and abetting a much larger plan. I’m not here to excuse a man who picks up a gun and shoots somebody. I’m spelling out context:

Seed the whole country with violence-inducing toxic psychiatric drugs and you will get plenty of crime. Which is exactly what has happened. All the way from Ritalin (cheep speed) to the SSRI antidepressants, to the brain-hammer anti-psychotics, the drug companies and their allied psychiatrists have been creating killings.

Allow American street gangs to work for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, while providing those cartels with US government protection as they sell tons of heroin and cocaine and crack all over the country, and you will get plenty of crime.

Pour billions of dollars into “rehabilitating” inner cities and stand by while the money disappears and is stolen, dedicate funds to programs that have no chance of working, stop genuine grass roots movements to build vast urban farms and provide free food and a sense of community, and you will get plenty of crime.

These and other strategies are the actions of a war to expand crime, to necessitate massive intervention by the State. This is an Op.

Our current leader, after similar mouthpieces like Bush and Clinton, is the one man who couldn’t possibly be on board with the Op. Barack Obama. He couldn’t possibly be doing his part to destabilize the whole society. He couldn’t. Which is exactly why he is the president of the United States now. Because he seems to stand for something better. But he doesn’t. He is definitely part of the Op.

But if he really did stand for something better, he could do several things, by executive order, that would detonate a real revolution in this country. Three crazy wild out-of-left field things, just for starters.

Declare and wage an all-out war on drug cartels and their sub-contracted domestic gangs.

Kick off a huge – and I mean huge – genuine urban farming program in every city in America. Free, clean, non-GMO food for the poor, grown by the poor, shared by the poor. The ramifications of such a program, carried out swiftly, would be astonishing on every level.

And attack, with a vengeance, Big Pharma and their psychiatric drugs.

What???

Huh???

The baffled response to such a program illustrates just how deep the brainwashing in this country goes.

And some people would say, “If Obama stood up and did those things, he’d be killed tomorrow.”

That’s getting us closer to the truth. But it would be senseless to stand up alone. He would need allies. Lots of them. Where would he find them? (Assuming he would launch this three-pronged program…a ludicrous assumption.)

Would he meet with Pelosi, Frank, Reid, Hillary, Boehner, Paul Ryan, Rubio, Rachel Maddow, Rush Limbaugh….

Where in the familiar circles of power would any president find allies to turn things around?

Nowhere.

And that’s exactly why rebellion against the State isn’t just some old crusty abstract idea.

That’s why decentralization of power in America, at all levels, is THE counter-agenda. Intentional communities, nullification of unconstitutional federal laws, boycotts against corporations like Monsanto, alternative news sources, growing your own food, local parents threatening school boards to back off forcing psychiatric drugs down the throats of their children, home schooling, etc., etc.

Rendering every citizen weaponless, while at the same time giving the police every possible weapon and surveillance tool, is a solution in the same way that closing your eyes and jumping into a big barrel and pulling down the lid over your head is a solution.

300 million barrels with TV sets and smart phones is exactly what the State Corporatists are pushing.

The political Left promoted rebellion against the State as long as they saw themselves outside in the cold. But when they began to realize that they were, in fact, becoming the State, with all the power of the federal government, they dropped the idea of genuine rebellion like a hot potato. They praised big government, they assured everybody it was the solution, not the problem.

They shed bottom-up revolution because they were top-down.

There are lots of old Lefties who have been working to stop GMOs. When Obama signed the Monsanto Protection Act the other day, they paused and pondered. They began to realize they’ve been caught in a squeeze play. Their man, the president, isn’t who they thought he was. Not at all.

This disaffection is a familiar theme: outsiders feel solidarity in their revolution; then their leaders become insiders; then the ideals vanish, leaving the foot soldiers in the lurch.

Down through history, this scenario has played out countless times, in every conceivable organization that became big, bigger, and biggest. But history isn’t our strong suit. If a teacher really wanted to educate his college students, he’d put together a course on this very subject: The Carrot and the Stick.

The promise of something better, announced from a perch or pulpit of leadership; and what eventually happened to that promise.

What happens is a grand reversal. The very force that is being fought against eventually becomes the “guardian of the Good” and the supreme ruler.

The cadre who once railed against the rise of the police state is now dealing, not pot, but the surveillance of every phone call, email, text, computer keystroke, and purchase in this country. They’re dealing the TSA and the war in Afghanistan. They’re dealing covert ops in the Middle East and executing regime change, using thugs and terrorists. They’re bailing out mega-corporations and banks. They’re buying billions of rounds of ammo. They’re appointing people to hold the door open for Monsanto. They’re using psychiatry to drug the population. They’re spraying heavy metals in the sky. They’re presiding over and sustaining the economic disaster. They’re funding the transhuman future.

They’re doing all this while continuing to mouth the ideals they once swore to uphold.

In the words of the 1960s, they’re working for the Man.

The Man is the group of elite Globalists who have always followed the same plan: put the management of the planet under one roof.

To accomplish this Globalist aim, every honest cop and effective cop and idealistic cop and indifferent cop and corrupt cop will have to be turned into a faceless pig with a weapon pointed against his own people.

These “former rebels” who now rule the roost are saying, “Today, the pigs work for us. We tell them what to do. Just love the pigs and everything will be okay. You don’t need to own a gun. It’s all good. Just keep your eyes straight ahead and march into the future.”

Who would have thought rebels of bygone days would be staging their own version of neocon glory?

Anyone with a grain of sense.

Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/rappoport/rappoport25.1.html

"What we have witnessed, however, in every Western country, and not least in the United States, is the almost incessant growth in power over the lives of human beings – power that is basically the result of the gradual disappearance of all the intermediate institutions which, coming from the predemocratic past, served for a long time to check the kind of authority that almost from the beginning sprang from the new legislative bodies and executives in the modern democracies."

The New Despotism

by Robert A. Nisbet

From The New Despotism

When the modern political community was being shaped at the end of the 18th century, its founders thought that the consequences of republican or representative institutions in government would be the reduction of political power in individual lives.

Nothing seems to have mattered more to such minds as Montesquieu, Turgot, and Burke in Europe and to Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the United States than the expansion of freedom in the day-to-day existence of human beings, irrespective of class, occupation, or belief.

Hence the elaborate, carefully contrived provisions of constitution or law whereby formal government would be checked, limited, and given root in the smallest possible assemblies of the people.

The kind of arbitrary power Burke so detested and referred to almost constantly in his attacks upon the British government in its relation to the American colonists and the people of India and Ireland, and upon the French government during the revolution, was foremost in the minds of all the architects of the political community, and they thought it could be eliminated, or reduced to insignificance, by ample use of legislative and judicial machinery.

What we have witnessed, however, in every Western country, and not least in the United States, is the almost incessant growth in power over the lives of human beings – power that is basically the result of the gradual disappearance of all the intermediate institutions which, coming from the predemocratic past, served for a long time to check the kind of authority that almost from the beginning sprang from the new legislative bodies and executives in the modern democracies.

The 18th-century hope that people, by their direct participation in government, through voting and office holding, would be correspondingly loath to see political power grow, has been proved wrong. Nothing seems so calculated to expand and intensify the power of the state as the expansion of electorates and the general popularization of the uses of power.

Even so, I do not think we can properly explain the immense power that exists in modern democracies by reference solely to the enlargement of the base of government or to the kinds of parliaments Sir Henry Maine warned against in his Popular Government. Had political power remained visible, as it largely did down until about World War I, and the manifest function of legislature and executive, the matter would be very different.

What has in fact happened during the past half century is that the bulk of power in our society, as it affects our intellectual, economic, social, and cultural existences, has become largely invisible, a function of the vast infragovernment composed of bureaucracy's commissions, agencies, and departments in a myriad of areas. And the reason this power is so commonly invisible to the eye is that it lies concealed under the humane purposes that have brought it into existence.

The greatest single revolution of the last century in the political sphere has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters.

It is this kind of power that Justice Brandeis warned against in a decision nearly half a century ago.

Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the governments' purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

What gives the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness is indeed its liaison with humanitarianism, but beyond this fact is its capacity for entering into the smallest details of human life.

The most absolute authority, wrote Rousseau,

is that which penetrates into a man's inmost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.

The truth of that observation is in no way lessened by the fact that for Rousseau genuinely legitimate government, government based upon the general will, should so penetrate. Rousseau saw correctly that the kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about.

Tocqueville, from a vastly different philosophy of the state, also took note of the kind of power Rousseau described.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.

Congresses and legislatures pass laws, executives enforce them, and the courts interpret them. These, as I have said, are the bodies on which the attentions of the Founding Fathers were fixed. They are the visible organs of government to this day, the objects of constant reporting in the media. And I would not question the capacity of each of them to interfere substantially with individual freedom.

But of far greater importance in the realm of freedom is that invisible government created in the first instance by legislature and executive but rendered in due time largely autonomous, is often nearly impervious to the will of elected constitutional bodies. In ways too numerous even to try to list, the invisible government – composed of commissions, bureaus, and regulatory agencies of every imaginable kind – enters daily into what Tocqueville calls "the minor details of life."

Murray Weidenbaum, in an important study of this invisible government, Government Mandated Price Increases, has correctly referred to "a second managerial revolution" that is now well under way in American society. The first managerial revolution, described originally by A.A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means in their classic book The Modern Corporation and Private Property and given explicit identity by James Burnham, concerned, as Weidenbaum points out, the separation of management from formal ownership in the modern corporation.

The second managerial revolution is very different. "This time," writes Weidenbaum,

the shift is from the professional management selected by the corporation's board of directors to the vast cadre of government regulators that influences and often controls the key decisions of the typical business firm.

Weidenbaum concerns himself almost entirely with the business sector – pointing out incidentally that this whole cadre of regulation is a by now deeply embedded cause of inflation – but the point he makes is just as applicable to other, nonbusiness areas of society.

In the name of education, welfare, taxation, safety, health, the environment, and other laudable ends, the new despotism confronts us at every turn. Its effectiveness lies, as I say, in part through liaison with humanitarian rather than nakedly exploitative objectives but also, and perhaps most significantly, in its capacity to deal with the human will rather than with mere human actions.

"The kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about."
By the very existence of one or another of the regulatory offices of the invisible government that now occupies foremost place, the wills of educators, researchers, artists, philanthropists, and enterprisers in all areas, as well as in business, are bound to be affected: to be shaped, bent, driven, even extinguished.

Of all the social or moral objectives, however, which are the taking-off points of the new despotism in our times, there is one that stands out clearly, that has widest possible appeal, and that at the present time undoubtedly represents the greatest single threat to liberty and social initiative. I refer to equality, or, more accurately, to the New Equality.

The foremost, or indeed the sole, condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

The words are Tocqueville's, toward the end of Democracy in America, in partial summary of the central thesis of that book, which is the affinity between centralization of power and mass equalitarianism. Tocqueville yielded to no one in his appreciation of equality before the law. It was, he thought, vital to a creative society and a free state.

It was Tocqueville's genius, however, to see the large possibility of the growth in the national state of another kind of equality, more akin to the kind of leveling that war and centralization bring to a social order. It is only in our time that his words have become analytic and descriptive rather than prophetic.

There is a great deal in common between military collectivism and the kind of society that must be the certain result of the doctrines of the New Equalitarians, whose aim is not mere increase in equality before the law.

In fact this historic type of equality looms as an obstacle to the kind of equality that is desired: equality of condition, equality of result. There is nothing paradoxical in the fondness of equalitarians for centralized power, the kind that the military best evidences, and the fondness of centralizers for equality. The latter, whatever else it may signify, means the absence of the kinds of centers of authority and rank that are always dangerous to despotic governments.

Equality of condition or result is one thing when it is set in the utopian community, the commune, or the monastery. The Benedictine Rule is as good a guide as we need for the administration of this kind of equalitarian order, small enough, personal enough to prevent the dogma of equality from extinguishing normal diversity of strength and talent.

For countless centuries, everywhere in the world, religion and kinship have been contexts of this kind of equality; they still are in theme.

Equality of result is a very different thing, however, when it becomes the guiding policy of the kind of national state that exists in the West today – founded in war and bureaucracy, its power strengthened by these forces throughout modern history, and dependent from the beginning upon a degree of leveling of the population.

We may have in mind the ideal of equality that the monastery or family represents, but what we will get in actual fact in the modern state is the kind of equality that goes with uniformity and homogeneity – above all, with war society.

Tocqueville was by no means alone in his perception of the affinity between equality and power. At the very end of the 18th century, Edmund Burke had written, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of the passion for leveling that exists in the militant and the military: those, he wrote, "who attempt to level, never equalize."

"Socialists such as Jaures in France saw in the citizen army, based upon universal conscription, an admirable means of instilling in Frenchmen greater love for equality than for the liberty associated with capitalist society."
The French Revolution, Burke believed correctly, was different from any revolution that had ever taken place before. And the reason for this difference lay in its combination of eradication of social diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the relentless increase of military-political power that expressed itself in the timeworn fashion of such power.

All that tended toward the destruction of the intermediate authorities of social class, province, church, and family brought simultaneously into being, Burke noted, a social leveling and a transfer to the state alone of powers previously resident in a plurality of associations.

"Everything depends upon the army in such a government as yours," he wrote; "for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government."

In words prophetic indeed, since they were written in 1790, Burke further declared that the crisis inherent in "military democracy" could only be resolved by the rise of "some popular general who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command." Such an individual' "shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself."

The theme of military democracy, of the union of military and social equality, was strong in certain 19th-century critics. We see it in some of Burckhardt's writings, where he refers to the future rise of "military commandos" in circumstances of rampant equality.

We see it, perhaps most profoundly, in James Fitzjames Stephen's Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, though what is most evident in that remarkable work is much less the military, save by implication, than the implacable conflict Stephen discerned between equality and liberty.

There were others – Henry Adams in America, Taine in France, Nietzsche in Germany – who called attention to the problem equality creates for liberty in the modern democratic state. Nor were such perceptions confined to the pessimists.

Socialists such as Jaures in France saw in the citizen army, based upon universal conscription, an admirable means of instilling in Frenchmen greater love for equality than for the liberty associated with capitalist society.

It is evident in our day how much more of a force the ethic of equality has become since these 19th-century prophecies and prescriptions were uttered. Two world wars and a major depression have advanced bureaucracy and its inherent regimentations to a point where the ideology of equality becomes more and more a means of rationalizing these regimentations and less and less a force serving individual life or liberty.

Link:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig14/nisbet1.1.1.html

“GMO crops have never been tested for safety,” writes Emily Main for Rodale News about the experimental nature of GMOs. “The FDA determined they were ‘safe’ back in 1992, when the biotech companies that developed the crops provided the agency with their own test results, which can hardly be considered unbiased.”

GMO plague: Charts show worldwide GE crop fields cover entire size of U.S., and then some

Jonathan Benson

The amount of land currently being used to cultivate genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is the highest it has ever been throughout the world, according to a new report. Data compiled by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a pro-GMO group whose stated mission is to increase crop productivity and alleviate poverty for resource-poor farmers, reveals that an astounding 420 million acres of land in 28 countries are currently growing GM crops.

This amount is six percent higher than the roughly 410 million land acres that harbored GM crops in 2011, according to the report, and the majority of this rapid growth took place in developing countries. In fact, most of the growth in the GM crop sector throughout the past decade or more has taken place in developing countries, where biotechnology corporations apparently see the most profit and growth potential.

According to the ISAAA report, if every land acre currently sustaining GM crops was placed right next to each other, it would cover a land mass roughly the size of Alaska. And if all the land acres that have ever grown GMOs since the time they first hit the global market back in 1996 were combined, it would cover a land mass one-and-a-half times larger than the entire United States.

“The ISAAA says the area of land devoted to genetically modified crops has ballooned by 100 times since farmers first started growing the crop commercially in 1996,” writes Jaeah Lee for Mother Jones. “Over the past 17 years, millions of farmers in 28 countries have planted and replanted GMO crop seeds on a cumulative 3.7 billion acres of land — an area 50 percent larger than the total land mass of the United States.”

Of the 28 countries that planted GMOs in 2012, 20 were developing and eight were industrialized. But in 2011, only 19 developing countries were cultivating GMOs, while 10 industrialized countries at that time were growing “Frankencrops.” This seems to indicate that the developed world is gradually catching on to the fraud of GMOs and rejecting them, while an increasing number of developing nations are falling prey to biotech propaganda.

A chart included in the report illustrates a convergence of GMO crop acreage in both industrialized and non-industrialized nations that took place in 2011. And in 2012, for the first time since GMOs were first introduced, there was more biotech crop acreage in non-industrialized nations than there was in industrialized nations.

GMOs do not help farmers, increase crop yields, or benefit the environment

ISAAA presents this and other data on GMO growth in a positive light, claiming that Frankencrops have helped farmers get out of poverty and boost crop yields. But nothing could be further from the truth. As explained by Mother Jones, GMOs have led to a net increase in pesticide use; spurred the growth and spread of herbicide-resistant “superweeds;” and failed to improve crop yields.

“GMO crops have never been tested for safety,” writes Emily Main for Rodale News about the experimental nature of GMOs. “The FDA determined they were ‘safe’ back in 1992, when the biotech companies that developed the crops provided the agency with their own test results, which can hardly be considered unbiased.”

Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039731_GMO_chart_crop_fields.html

Obama urges destruction of US sovereignty...

Obama Urges Quick Adoption of Arms Trade Treaty by UN General Assembly

Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

Despite failing to be adopted by consensus vote on last Thursday, the Arms Trade Treaty’s (ATT) civilian disarmament agenda marches on.

In an interview with The New American in advance of Thursday’s ill-fated final plenary session of the conference at UN headquarters deliberating the Arms Trade Treaty, a member of the U.S. delegation said the they were prepared to vote in favor of adoption of the gun grab.

They never got the chance, however, as Iran, Syria, and North Korea objected to the treaty, declaring it to be too favorable to the interests of the United States.

That point is debatable.

As I reported from the conference, the text of the treaty mandates several infringements on the right of people to keep and bear arms as protected by the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

For example, the Preamble of the Arms Trade Treaty points to the United Nations Charter as the source of guiding principles upon which the agreement is based. Citizens of the United States, however, recognize God as the source of all rights they enjoy. Not even the Constitution claims to be the giver of rights; it is merely the protector of them.

The ultimate American statement on the issue of the provenance of rights was written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The UN would see the Declaration of Independence replaced by the Declaration of Human Rights and would have the Creator replaced with government as the source of rights.

Take, for example, the principle of the ATT declaring the “inherent right of all States to individual or collective self-defence [sic] as recognized in Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.”

States have no "right of self-defense." In fact, states have no rights at all. Men have rights and they may cede a portion of the protection of those rights to government. This is a provisional grant, revocable at the will of the people.

Ironically, moreover, it is in defense of tyranny of the government that individuals typically need to collectively exercise their natural right of self-defense.

Should those who govern ever exceed the boundaries drawn by the people around their power, the people retain the right — the natural right — of self-defense.

Furthermore, no document — not even the Constitution — grants rights. Rights are given by God and societies may draft constitutions in order to protect those rights from assault by government.

Again, the words of Thomas Jefferson pronounced in the Declaration of Independence establish the American position:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. [Emphasis in original]

Regardless of the promises of its advocates, the Arms Trade Treaty violates not only the Second Amendment, but also the American concept of the source of rights and the right of the people to defend themselves against the “long train of abuses” of any government.

President Obama will not be deterred, however. Not by the Declaration of Independence, not by the Second Amendment, and not by the failure of the ATT conference to adopt the treaty by consensus.

Peter Woolcott, president of the conference and ambassador from Australia, ordered the treaty sent to the Secretary General of the United Nations for presentation to the General Assembly for its approval.

The Obama administration is determined to make that happen.

During a phone conference held after the vote, the U.S. lead negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Tom Countryman, reaffirmed the president’s support for implementation of the treaty.

“We look forward to this text being adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in the very near future,” Countryman said. “It's important to the United States and the defense of our interests to insist on consensus. But every state in this process has always been conscious of the fact that, if consensus is not reached in this process, that there are other ways to adopt this treaty, including via a vote of the General Assembly.”

Later, Countryman predicted that barring any further alterations to the text, the General Assembly vote on the gun control treaty within days.

Predicting that the president would take such a tack in order to accelerate his drive toward the absolute disarmament of civilians and the establishment of a government monopoly over all means of armed resistance, U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) declared his intent to stand in defense of the right to keep and bear arms.

The most recent collapse of ATT negotiations should serve as a wake-up call to the world’s democracies of the inherent flaws in the U.N. treaty process that puts us on level ground with dictatorships who abuse human rights and arms terrorists.

In the coming weeks, I anticipate ATT supporters will seek new avenues for treaty adoption, such as the U.N. General Assembly. Given the apparent support of the Obama Administration for the ATT, members of the U.S. Senate must continue to make clear that any treaty that violates our Second Amendment freedoms will be an absolute nonstarter for ratification.

As The New American reported recently, Moran is the chief sponsor of a resolution, S. Con. Res. 7, that enjoys bipartisan support from 32 co-sponsors. Moran’s measure declares that it is the sense of Congress that “the President should not sign the Arms Trade Treaty, and that, if he transmits the treaty with his signature to the Senate, the Senate should not ratify the Arms Trade Treaty.”

Representative Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) has offered a companion measure in the House.

Both the Moran and Kelly resolutions declare that the Arms Trade Treaty “poses significant risks to the national security, foreign policy, and economic interests of the United States as well as to the constitutional rights of United States citizens and United States sovereignty.”

The measures also points out that UN gun grab “fails to expressly recognize the fundamental, individual right to keep and to bear arms and the individual right of personal self-defense, as well as the legitimacy of hunting, sports shooting, and other lawful activities pertaining to the private ownership of firearms and related materials, and thus risks infringing on freedoms protected by the Second Amendment.”

Others of Moran’s colleagues are riding to the defense of the right to keep and bear arms, as well.

On March 23, the Senate approved a measure sponsored by Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.” By a vote of 53-46, the Senate passed Inhofe’s amendment to the budget bill.

While all these events auger positively for the future of the Second Amendment, Americans must remain vigilant. The treaty may still be approved by a majority of the UN General Assembly, and regardless of the outcome of that vote, President Obama is intent on executing its unconstitutional mandates, seizing control of all privately owned firearms and ammunition

Link:
http://thenewamerican.com/world-news/item/14959-obama-urges-quick-adoption-of-arms-trade-treaty-by-un-general-assembly

OOPS!!! "As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth."

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

Mike Adams

If you talk to the global warming crowd, carbon dioxide — CO2 — is the enemy of mankind. Any and all creation of CO2 is bad for the planet, we’re told, and its production must be strictly limited in order to save the world.

But what if that wasn’t true? What if CO2 were actually a planet-saving nutrient that could multiply food production rates and feed the world more nutritious, healthy plants?

CO2 is a vital nutrient for food crops

As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth.

The science on this is irrefutable. As just one example, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food says:

CO2 increases productivity through improved plant growth and vigour. Some ways in which productivity is increased by CO2 include earlier flowering, higher fruit yields, reduced bud abortion in roses, improved stem strength and flower size. Growers should regard CO2 as a nutrient.

If you want to understand why CO2 is an essential nutrient for food crop growth, check out this informative slide show. It explains that “CO2 may be repidly depleted during crop production” daylight hours, because the plants pull all the CO2 out of the air and use it in photosynthesis.

The CO2 found in modern-day atmosphere is 340ppm. But food crops would grow far faster if the concentration of CO2 were closer to 1000ppm, or roughly 300% higher than current levels. In fact, most greenhouse plant production causes a “CO2 depletion” to happen, shutting down photosynthesis and limiting food production. As the “Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses” fact sheet explains:

Ambient CO2 level in outside air is about 340 ppm by volume. All plants grow well at this level but as CO2 levels are raised by 1,000 ppm photosynthesis increases proportionately resulting in more sugars and carbohydrates available for plant growth. Any actively growing crop in a tightly clad greenhouse with little or no ventilation can readily reduce the CO2 level during the day to as low as 200 ppm.

Thus, greenhouse plants are “running out” of CO2. They are starving for it. And when you add it to food crops, you get higher yields, improved taste, shorter flowering times, enhanced pest resistance and other benefits.

Why we should pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses

This brings up an obvious answer for what to do with all the CO2 produced by power plants, office buildings and even fitness centers where people exhale vast quantities of CO2. The answer is to build adjacent greenhouses and pump the CO2 into the greenhouses.

Every coal-fired power plant, in other words, should have a vast array of greenhouses surrounding it. Most of what you see emitted from power plant smokestacks is water vapor and CO2, both essential nutrients for rapid growth of food crops. By diverting carbon dioxide and water into greenhouses, the problem of emissions is instantly solved because the plants update the CO2 and use it for photosynthesis, thus “sequestering” the CO2 while rapidly growing food crops. It also happens to produce oxygen as a “waste product” which can be released into the atmosphere, (slightly) upping the oxygen level of the air we breathe.

This is a brilliant solution because humans want to live on a world with low CO2 that supports frozen ice caps in order to keep ocean water levels low, but they want to eat a volume of food that requires high CO2 for production. The answer is to concentrate CO2 into greenhouses where food production is multiplied by CO2 nutrition.

I’ll bet you’ve never heard Al Gore talk about CO2 as “nutrition.” He declares it a pollutant and wants to tax you for producing it. But CO2 is actually a key nutritive gas for food crops. Without carbon dioxide, we would all have starved to death by now.

Shutting down power plants to destroy America’s power infrastructure

The U.S. government’s solution to power plant emissions, however, is to just shut down coal-fired power plants, causing rolling blackouts across the USA, especially during hot summer days. The EPA has forced hundreds of power plants to shut down across the USA, achieving a loss of power infrastructure that vastly exceeds what would even be possible by an enemy invasion of high-altitude warplanes dropping bombs.

The EPA, under the excuse of “saving the planet,” is destroying America’s power infrastructure and leading our nation into a third-world scenario where power availability is dicey and unsustained. It seems to be just one part of the overall plan to gut America’s economy, offshore millions of jobs, put everybody on welfare and destroy small businesses.

But what if we harnessed coal-fired power plants instead of shutting them down? What if we used them as “CO2 generators” that fed CO2 into vast greenhouse operations that produced organic, high-growth foods that could feed the nation? Coal-fired power plants can produce both electricity and food nutrition at the same time.

Better yet, if you combine this concept with aquaponics, you get simultaneous production of plants and fish while using no soil, no GMOs and one-tenth the water of conventional agriculture.

See, the solutions to all our problems already exist. The only reason we are suffering as a nation is because political puppets try to brainwash us into believing complete falsehoods like, “carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant” or “the people don’t need healthy foods; they need medications and vaccines.” When societies believe falsehoods, they crumble and collapse.

That’s where America is headed, of course. And it’s all being accelerated by deceptive bureaucrats who want to convince you that growing real food is bad and we should all be punished for exhaling carbon dioxide, an essential nutrient for food crops. Carbon dioxide is not the enemy it’s been made out to be. It’s actually plant nutrition that helps regrow rainforests, food crops and wetlands. In fact, higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would make the planet more lush and abundant in terms of plant life, forests, trees and food crops.

Link:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039720_carbon_dioxide_myths_plant_nutrition.html

"Most Americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as Americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower."

Truth Is Offensive

Paul Craig Roberts

In America truth is offensive. If you tell the truth, you are offensive.

I am offensive. Michael Hudson is offensive. Gerald Celente is offensive. Herman Daly is offensive. Nomi Prins is offensive. Pam Martens is offensive. Chris Hedges is offensive. Chris Floyd is offensive. John Pilger is offensive. Norm Chomsky is offensive. Harvey Silverglate is offensive. Naomi Wolf is offensive. Stephen Lendman is offensive. David Ray Griffin is offensive. Ellen Brown is offensive.

Fortunately, many others are offensive. But how long before being offensive becomes
being “an enemy of the state”?

Throughout history truth tellers have suffered and court historians have prospered. It is
the same today. Gerald Celente illustrates this brilliantly in the next issue of the Trends
Journal.

Over the past 35 years I have learned this lesson as a columnist. If you tell readers
what is really going on, they want to know why you can’t be positive. Why are you telling
us that there are bad happenings that can’t be remedied? Don’t you know that God
gave Americans the power to fix all wrongs? What are you? Some kind of idiot, an anti-American, a pinko-liberal-commie? If you hate America so much, why don’t you move to Cuba, Iran or China (or to wherever the current bogyman is located)?

The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the prophetess who no one believed despite her 100 percent record of being right. Telling the truth to Americans or to Europeans is just as expensive as telling the truth to the Greeks in ancient mythology.

In America and everywhere in the Western world or the entire world, telling the truth is
unpopular. Indeed, in the USA telling the truth has been criminalized. Look for example at Bradley Manning, held for two years in prison without bail and without a trial in violation of the US Constitution, tortured for one year of his illegal confinement in violation of US and international law, and now put on trial by corrupt prosecutors for aiding “enemies of the US” by revealing the truth, as required of him by the US military code. US soldiers are required to report war crimes. When Bradley Manning’s superiors showed themselves to be indifferent to war crimes, Manning reported the crimes via WikiLeaks. What else does a soldier with a sense of duty and a moral conscience do when the chain of command is corrupt?

Julian Assange is another example. WikiLeaks has taken up the reporting function that the Western media has abandoned. Remember, the New York Times did publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, which undermined the lies Washington had told both to the public and to Congress to justify the costly Vietnam War. But today no newspaper or TV channel any longer accepts the responsibility to truthfully inform the public. Julian Assange stepped into the vacuum and was immediately demonized, not merely by Washington but also by left-wing and right-wing media, including Internet. It was a combination of jealousy, ignorance, and doing Washington’s bidding.

Without WikiLeaks and Assange the world would know essentially nothing. Spin from Washington, the presstitute media, and the puppet state medias would prevail. So the word went out to destroy Julian Assange.

It is amazing how many people and Internet sites obeyed Washington’s command. Assange has been so demonized that even though he has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, the British government, obeying its Washington master, refuses to allow him safe passage out of the London Ecuador Embassy. Is Assange destined to live out his life inside the Ecuador Embassy in London?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down the anti-communist revolution? Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy. Today it is “freedom and democracy” amerika that is copying Soviet practices during the cold war.

In contrast with “freedom and democracy” US and UK, the “authoritarian,” “communist,” “oppressive” Chinese government when confronted with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s defection to the US embassy in Beijing, let him go.

It is an upside down world when America and the British refuse to obey international law, but the Chinese communists uphold international law.

Insouciant americans are undisturbed that alleged terrorists are tortured, held indefinitely in prison without due process, and executed on the whim of some executive branch official without due process of law.

Most americans go along with unaccountable murder, torture, and detention without evidence, which proclaims their gullibility to the entire world. There has never in history been a population as unaware as americans. The world is amazed that an insouciant people became, if only for a short time, a superpower.

The world needs intelligence and leadership in order to avoid catastrophe, but america can provide neither intelligence nor leadership. America is a lost land where nuclear weapons are in the hands of those who are concerned only with their own power. Washington is the enemy of the entire world and encompasses the largest concentration of evil on the planet.

Where is the good to rise up against the evil?

Link:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/03/31/truth-is-offensive-paul-craig-roberts/