"If the courts conscripted Apple to work for the government and thereby destroy or diminish its own product, the decision would constitute a form of slavery, which is prohibited by our values and by the Thirteenth Amendment."

Apple’s Involuntary Servitude

By Andrew P. Napolitano

“There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.” — Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016)

After the San Bernardino massacre on Dec. 2, 2015, the FBI lawfully acquired the cellphone of one of the killers and persuaded a federal judge to authorize its agents to access the contents of the phone. Some of what it found revealed that the killer used the phone to communicate with victims and perhaps confederates and even innocents who unwittingly provided material assistance.

Then the FBI hit a wall. It appears that the killer took advantage of the phone’s encryption features to protect some of his data from prying eyes unarmed with his password.

The cellphone was an iPhone, designed and manufactured by Apple, the wealthiest publicly traded corporation on the planet. Apple built the iPhone so that its users can store sensitive, private, personal data on the phone without fear of being hacked by friend or foe.

After the FBI determined it could not replicate the killer’s password without jeopardizing the phone’s content, it approached Apple, and representatives of each negotiated for weeks trying to find a way for Apple to help the FBI without compromising the security of the Internet itself. They failed.

Apple has argued that the government has no legal right to compel it to assist in a government investigation, or to compel it to alter or destroy its business model of guaranteeing the safety and privacy of its customers’ data. Apple knows that any “key” it creates for the FBI, once used on the Internet, is itself vulnerable to hacking, thereby jeopardizing all Apple products and negating the privacy of tens of millions, and even exposing the government to foreign hackers.

The Department of Justice has argued that Apple has a legal duty to help solve the mystery of who knew about the San Bernardino attacks so that the guilty can be prosecuted and the rest of us protected from future harm. Its lawyers asserted that the government would keep securing whatever key Apple created.

After the DoJ/Apple talks broke down, the DoJ made a secret application on Feb. 16, 2016, two and a half months after the massacre, to a federal judge for a search warrant for this key to access the killer’s iPhone.

The warrant was improperly granted because Apple was not given notice of the DoJ application. So, the judge who issued the order denied Apple due process — its day in court. That alone is sufficient to invalidate the order. Were Apple a defendant in a criminal case or were Apple to possess hard evidence that could exonerate or help to convict, the secret application would have been justified.

But that is not the case here.

Instead, the DoJ has obtained a unique search warrant I have ever seen in 40 years of examining them. Here, the DoJ has persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant for A THING THAT DOES NOT EXIST, by forcing Apple to create a key that the FBI is incapable of creating.

There is no authority for the government to compel a nonparty to its case to do its work, against the nonparty’s will, and against profound constitutional values. Essentially, the DoJ wants Apple to hack into its own computer product, thereby telling anyone who can access the key how to do the same.

If the courts conscripted Apple to work for the government and thereby destroy or diminish its own product, the decision would constitute a form of slavery, which is prohibited by our values and by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Yet, somewhere, the government has the data it seeks but will not admit to it, lest a myth it has foisted upon us all be burst. Since at least 2009, the government’s domestic spies have captured the metadata — the time, place, telephone numbers and duration of all telephone calls — as well as the content of telephone calls made in America under a perverse interpretation of the FISA statute and the Patriot Act, which a federal appeals court has since invalidated.

The DoJ knows where this data on this killer’s cellphone can be found, but if it subpoenas the NSA, and the NSA complies with that subpoena, and all this becomes public, that will put the lie to the government’s incredible denials that it spies upon all of us all the time. Surely it was spying on the San Bernardino killers.

There is more at stake here than the privacy of Apple’s millions of customers and the security of power grids and all that the Internet serves. Personal liberty in a free society is at stake. A government that stays within the confines of the Constitution is at stake.

The late great Justice Antonin Scalia recognized that liberty and safety are not in equipoise when he wrote that there is nothing novel about liberty trumping safety under the Constitution. The primacy of liberty and a government subject to the rule of law is the core constitutional principle that, while honored, will keep tyranny at bay. And when dishonored, will let tyranny thrive.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/andrew-p-napolitano/apples-involuntary-servitude/

Hillary Clinton getting taken to the Woodshed...

Bernie and the Pope...

Bernie Sanders “Hearts” the Pope
Thomas DiLorenzo

Not because he’s ever met the man but because, says Bernie, the pope is a fellow socialist who believes, as Bernie does, that he can help the poor by destroying capitalism, the sole source of prosperity, job creation, and poverty reduction in the world.

If this President of the United States thing doesn’t work out for him Bernie would make a good Jesuit, maybe even as president of Loyola University-New Orleans which proudly labels itself as “Social Justice University.” (“Social Justice” is of course just another euphemism for the “S” word, socialism, just like “economic democracy” or “liberation theology”).

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/bernie-sanders-hearts-pope/

Bernie and the CIA...

Good for Sanders! And Shame on Him!
by Jacob G. Hornberger

At a town hall forum in South Carolina a couple of days ago, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was asked by CNN whether he stood by recently surfaced comments he made about the CIA back in 1974, which I wrote about in my blog post yesterday. Back then, Sanders pointed out that the CIA was a dangerous institution that “had to go,” especially since it was accountable only to “right wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”

Unfortunately, Sanders took it back, partly. He responded that he doesn’t believe that the CIA should be abolished because “it plays a role” but at least he went on to point out a couple of the horrific regime-change operations that the CIA orchestrated. The two that Sanders mentioned were Iran and Chile.

Consider Iran. All the current U.S. problems with Iran are rooted in the CIA’s destruction of Iran’s democratic political system in 1953. As Sanders pointed out in his response at that forum, the CIA went into Iran and instigated a violent coup, one in which people were killed. The CIA’s mission was regime change, the very first of what would become many CIA-instigated regime-change operations extending even through today (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Cuba).

The CIA’s mission was to oust the democratically pointed prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from office and replace him with the Shah of Iran, a loyal and subservient ally of the U.S. government.

There are two important things to note about the Shah: One, he was an unelected dictator and, two, he brutalized the Iranian people for 25 years with some of the worst tyranny imaginable, with the full support of the CIA.

The excuse? That Mossadegh might be a communist and, therefore, a threat to U.S. “national security.” Another possible excuse: Mossadegh had nationalized British oil interests and so the British government had asked the CIA to help them get them back. That might have been one of the things Sanders was referring to when he said that the CIA was accountable to “right wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”

In 1979, the Iranian people revolted against the CIA-installed and CIA-supported tyranny in their country. In their anger over the CIA’s destruction of their democratic system in favor of a pro-U.S. brural 25-year tyranny, the Iranian people took American diplomats hostage. They figured that the CIA would try to do it again by reinstalling the Shah into power, and so they used the hostages to ensure that that didn’t happen again.

Through it all, U.S. officials played the innocent. The U.S. government had done nothing to deserve this mistreatment, U.S. officials maintained with straight faces. We’re just babes in the woods, dedicated to making the world safe for democracy.

Unfortunately, after the Iranian revolution, things did not return to where they were before the CIA coup. Instead, the Shah was replaced by another dictatorship, the dictatorship of the ayatollahs. And it’s been hostility with the United States ever since.

So, here is a classic instance of where the CIA’s policies produce an official enemy and then that official enemy is used to ramp up crises in which the national-security establishment adopts emergency totalitarian powers to keep Americans safe (from the enemies the CIA has produced).

Moreover, to protect America from this new official enemy (which the CIA has produced), ever-growing budgets are supposedly necessary for the national security establishment (so it can keep us safe from the enemies it has produced).

Show me a better racket than that.

It was even worse in Chile, the other example that Sanders pointed out. There, the CIA orchestrated the ouster of a president who had been democratically elected by the people of Chile, Salvador Allende.

What was the CIA’s beef with Allende? That he was a communist/socialist and, even worse, a democratically elected one. Therefore, he obviously constituted a grave threat to U.S. “national security.”

In the process of this regime-change operation, the CIA engaged in bribery, kidnapping (which resulted in the assassination of the head of Chile’s Armed Forces, who was opposing the CIA coup), and the intentional destruction of Chile’s economy (so that Chileans would welcome the coup). Perhaps I should mention that when Congress asked the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, about the CIA’s role leading up to the coup, he intentionally lied to them, to the cheers of his compatriots back at the agency.

The man they installed into power was a military general, a man for whom “law and order” was extremely important — Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he turned out to be one of history’s most brutal dictators. He had his goons round up, torture, rape, and incarcerate some 60,000 innocent people — no trials, no indictments. Just torture and incarceration, just like Gitmo for the past 15 years. Pinochet ended up killing around 3,000 of his victims.

And it was all done with the full support of the CIA and the rest of the U.S. national-security establishment. In fact, the CIA even became a partner in Operation Condor, a super-secret international assassination ring run out of Chile, a ring that ended up assassinating thousands of innocent people, including a former Allende official named Orlando Letelier on the streets of Washington, D.C.

Americans still don’t know the full extent of the CIA’s involvement in Operation Condor because the CIA won’t permit them to know — national security. For that matter, Americans still don’t know the precise role that the CIA played in the execution of two young American men, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, during the Chilean coup. We do know that a State Department memo ultimately surfaced concluding that U.S. intelligence played a role in their murders and that called for a complete investigation. Not surprisingly, no such investigation was ever held.

Of course, those two regime-change operations are only the tip of the iceberg. There was MKULTRA, the top-secret medical experimentation program that bore many similarities to that of the Nazis. In fact, MKULTRA might well have been the reason that the CIA secretly hired Nazi war criminals after World War II. There were also the many other regime-change operations, including through assassination, in Cuba (Castro), Congo (Lamumba), Guatemala (Arbenz), and many others. And let’s not forget Operation Mockingbird, by which the CIA maintained assets in the mainstream press to ensure pro-CIA articles and op-eds.

It goes without saying that Hillary Clinton is remaining silent on the entire matter. If there is any candidate who would never take on at a fundamental level any part of the national-security establishment, especially the CIA, it’s Hillary Clinton.

The real shame of it is that Sanders has backtracked on his call for the abolition of the CIA. Why would he do that when he knows that nothing fundamental has changed and that everything is much worse than it was in 1974? Certainly Sanders knows that a society can never be free and prosperous as long as it has this type of totalitarian apparatus grafted onto its governmental system.

Realistically, I can think of only two reasons why Sanders is now backtracking:

One, he might think that people won’t vote for him if he comes out in favor of abolishing this Cold-War-era agency that has done so much damage to the America and the world.

Or, two, he’s afraid of what this Cold-War-era agency will do to him if he is still determined to abolish it. (See: Regime Change: The Kennedy Assassination by Jacob Hornberger; The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger; and JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

Link:
http://fff.org/2016/02/25/good-for-bernie-sanders-and-shame-on-him/

Cartoon of the day...

Bernie Sanders to the Woodshed...

"And, needless to say, not one single presidential candidate since then, including Bernie Sanders, has dared to call for the dismantling of America’s totalitarian structure known as the national security state."

Sanders, Clinton, the CIA, and the JFK Assassination
by Jacob G. Hornberger

An article this week in Politico reveals that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for the abolition of the CIA during the 1970s. Apparently it is a position that Sanders is now running away from because he certainly hasn’t repeated it during the presidential race, and when the Politico reporter who uncovered the story asked the Sanders campaign to comment on it, the reporter was met with silence.

Sanders told a Vermont audience in 1974 that the CIA “is a dangerous institution that has got to go.” According to the Politico article, Sanders “described the agency as a tool of American corporate interests that repeatedly toppled democratically elected leaders — including, he said, Mosaddegh.” The CIA, Sanders stated, was accountable to no one “except right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”

Sanders, of course, was referring to the CIA-instigated coup in 1953 that ousted the democratically appointed prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, from power and re-installed the dictatorial regime of the Shah of Iran. The CIA then proceeded to train the Shah’s national-security state forces on how to torture and oppress the Iranian people, so that the Shah would remain their dictator for the indefinite future.

That regime-change operation was followed by the one in Guatemala in 1954, where the CIA ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, from power and replaced him with a brutal pro-U.S. dictator from the Guatemalan military establishment. Sanders might have been described the CIA as “a tool of American corporate interests” since the CIA’s coup restored land belonging to United Fruit Company, whose tentacles reached deep into the Washington, D.C., establishment — lands that Arbenz had nationalized for the benefit of the poor.

The reasons for these regime-change operations against democratic regimes? Why, national security. What else? The U.S. national-security establishment had concluded that Mossadegh and Arbenz posed a grave threat to U.S. national security and, therefore, had to be ousted from office and replaced with an unelected dictator who didn’t pose a threat to U.S. national security.

That pattern would be repeated in the years 1970-1973, when the U.S. national-security establishment ousted the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a military coup by which military strongman Gen. Augusto Pinochet became dictator of Chile.

And also in Cuba from 1960-1963, where the national-security state would invade the island and engage in repeated attempts at assassination with the aim of achieving regime change against a country that, like Iran, Guatemala, and later Chile, was viewed as a grave threat to U.S. national security, notwithstanding the fact that it had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.

But as interesting as Sanders’ position was in the 1970s, what is arguably more interesting is the response to the Politico article by a man named Jeremy Bash, who currently serves an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In response to the Politico revelations, Bash stated:

Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength.

Why is Bash’s statement interesting?

Two reasons.

First, Bash served as chief of staff to CIA director Leon Panetta.

Second, his mindset was the same mindset that guided the national-security establishment during the John Kennedy administration.

First of all, what is the national-security establishment? It is the part of the federal government that consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. None of these agencies were part of America’s original federal governmental structure. In fact, they weren’t part of America’s governmental structure for the first 150 years or so of U.S. history.

There is a simple reason for that. The Founding Fathers, the Framers, and our American ancestors had a deep antipathy toward things like standing armies, militarism, secret intelligence forces, secret surveillance schemes, indefinite detention, torture, coups, assassination, regime-change operations, foreign aid, and partnerships with dictatorial regimes.

Second, a national security governmental apparatus is inherent to totalitarian regimes. China, for example, is also a national-security state. So is North Korea. So is Iran.

So, how then did the United States become a national security state too?

It happened at the end of World War II. After defeating Nazi Germany, advocates of converting the United States to a national-security state said that such a conversion was “temporarily” necessary to oppose America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, in a “cold war.”

Thus, in order to wage a cold war against the Soviet national-security state, the United States itself became a national-security state, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.

That’s when the regime-change operations began — Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Indonesia, Congo, Chile, and many, many more.

The justification for all those regime-change operations?

National security!

In fact, Bash misses the point. In the 1970s the big bugaboo was the same as it was in the 1960s and 1950s and late 1940s. That bugaboo was communism, not terrorism. The problem with terrorism in the Middle East would not arise until the 1990s, when the U.S. national-security establishment, in search of new official enemies given that the Cold War was now over, went into the Middle East and began killing people, which ultimately generated enough anger and rage as to produce an ongoing threat of anti-American terrorism.

But in the 1970s, the anti-communist obsession and the Cold War were still in full bloom, which the U.S. national security state continued to use to justify its existence and its ever-growing budgets. In fact, Bash might have forgotten that the CIA was ardently and enthusiastically supporting radical Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, many of whom would later become anti-American terrorists, when it was the Soviet Union, rather than the United States, doing the occupying of that country.

When he came into office, Kennedy had bought into the national-security state’s anti-communist, Cold War mindset. But after the CIA’s disastrous invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, an invasion that had been planned during the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy achieved a breakthrough with respect to the CIA. Clearly realizing what a sinister force this totalitarian agency with virtually omnipotent power had become within America’s governmental structure, he vowed to tear it into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds. As part of his war against the CIA, he fired its much revered director Allen Dulles (who Lyndon Johnson would later appoint to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of JFK) and two of his high subordinates.

It was clear that JFK had reached the same breakthrough on the CIA that his predecessor Eisenhower had reached about the other principal component of the national-security establishment — what Ike called the military-industrial complex. In his Farewell Address, Ike warned the American people that this apparatus that had been attached to their federal governmental structure posed a grave threat to their liberties and democratic processes.

As the Kennedy administration proceeded, it was clear that Kennedy’s mindset toward the military establishment was becoming similar to Eisenhower’s. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Kennedy left the meeting indignantly, saying to an aide, “And we call ourselves the human race.” His reaction was the same when the JCS unanimously presented Operation Northwoods to him, a plan that called for terrorist attacks against American citizens by U.S. agents posing as Cuban terrorists, so as to provide Kennedy with an excuse to order an invasion of Cuba for another regime-change operation.

Moreover, Kennedy was clearly aware of the dangers to himself by taking on the national-security establishment. After reading the novel Seven Days in May, which posited a national-security state regime-change operation against a U.S. president, Kennedy recommended that it be made into a movie, to serve as a warning for the American people — the same warning that Ike had issued.

It’s important to understand the mindset of the national-security establishment towards Kennedy. Their mindset was the same as that of Jeremy Bash today — that the abolition of the CIA would be a grave threat to national security. It would mean, they believed, exposing America to being taken over by the communists. The national-security establishment was determined to not let that happen.

The war between Kennedy and the national-security establishment came to a head after the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that point, Kennedy made a dramatic move, one that ended up sealing his fate. He decided to end the Cold War entirely and have the United States peacefully coexist and even cooperate with the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. That meant, of course, that there would be no more need for a national-security establishment in America.

That shift was manifested in Kennedy’s now-famous “Peace Speech” at American University, a speech that he didn’t even advise the Pentagon or the CIA he planned to deliver — a speech that threw down the gauntlet to the national-security establishment. He also ordered the Pentagon to begin withdrawing troops from Vietnam. He entered into the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets. Most dangerous of all, he instigated secret personal communications with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban president Fidel Castro with the aim of ending the Cold War. In fact, JFK’s emissary was speaking to Castro at the very moment of his assassination.

It is not difficult to imagine the effect that Kennedy’s actions must have had on the national-security establishment. After Kennedy had rejected the military’s recommendations to invade Cuba during the Missile Crisis, which would have undoubtedly led to all-out nuclear war, Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay called the settlement of the crisis the biggest defeat in U.S. history and compared it to Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich.

In the eyes of the national-security state, Kennedy was hopelessly naïve if he thought that he could ever peacefully coexist with the communist world. Communists could never be trusted on anything. This was a fight to the finish. The communists were lulling Kennedy into disarming, after which the dominoes would begin falling, with the final result being a communist conquest of the United States.

If you want to get a good grasp on how the national-security establishment viewed Kennedy, all you have to do is read the two anti-Kennedy advertisements – one titled “Wanted for Treason” and the other titled “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas” — that were run in the Dallas Morning News on the morning of November 22, 1963. While the advertisements were purchased by anti-communist right-wingers, they also expressed the sentiments that the anti-communist national-security establishment held about Kennedy.

To get a good grasp of how Kennedy viewed the way that the national-security establishment viewed him, consider what JFK said to his wife Jacqueline on reading those advertisements before heading to Dallas. He told her that they were headed into “nut country.”

Thirty days after JFK’s assassination, former President Harry Truman, who had brought the CIA into existence in 1947, wrote an op-ed that appeared in the Washington Post stating that the CIA had become a sinister force and had far exceeded the intelligence-gathering mission Truman had intended the CIA to have.

Of course, the war between Kennedy and the national-security establishment came to an end on November 22, 1963. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, reversed course on Vietnam and ended up sending some 58,000 men to their deaths.

The Cold War continued.

The national security establishment remained a permanent and ever-growing part of America’s governmental structure.

Once the Cold War finally ended in 1989, it was replaced by the “war on terrorism” after the national-security establishment went into the Middle East and began killing large numbers of people, many of whom were Muslims.

NATO, which had been formed to protect Western Europe from a Soviet attack, remained in existence and began absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, thereby moving ever closer to Russia’s borders. Not surprisingly, that gave rise to Russia’s invasion of Crimea to avoid a U.S.-NATO takeover of that region.

Thus, the national security state now has a double enemy for America — terrorism and Russia (i.e., communism) — to justify its permanent part of America’s governmental structure.

And, needless to say, not one single presidential candidate since then, including Bernie Sanders, has dared to call for the dismantling of America’s totalitarian structure known as the national security state.

Link:
http://fff.org/2016/02/24/sanders-clinton-the-cia-and-the-jfk-assassination/

"It's remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs..."

'We kill so many citizens with drugs,' says doctor exposing Big Pharma's deadly medical racket

by: J. D. Heyes

A renowned academic who is the co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, one of the world's top organizations for assessing medical evidence, believes that Big Pharma is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche, who arrived in Australia recently to talk to citizens Down Under about their use of prescription medications, estimates that some 100,000 Americans die each year from the side effects of medications they have actually taken as directed.

As reported by Health Nut News, many of the most commonly prescribed medications, such as antidepressants and painkillers, are actually incredibly dangerous, and are killing more people than need be.

"It's remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs," he said, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.

See a real-time count of pharmaceutical deaths at PharmaDeathClock.com

Hitting the elderly especially hard

His biggest knock is against anti-depressants and painkillers such as ibuprofen, diclofenac and celecoxib. He also said he has problems with their claims that they are anti-inflammatory, because he says that claim is not supported by scientific evidence.

As the Australian paper continued:

Another, sold under the brand name Vioxx, was withdrawn after it emerged it had caused up to 140,000 cases of serious heart disease in the US alone in the five years it was on the market - during which time its manufacturer, Merck was withholding information about its risks. About half the cases were thought to be fatal.

"These terms for our drugs are invented by the drug industry," he said. "They had a huge financial interest in calling these things anti-inflammatory. It lured doctors into believing that these drugs somehow also had an effect on the disease process and reduced the joint damage."

Added Erin Elizabeth of Health Nut News:

[A] Lancet review last year found ibuprofen to be as toxic to the heart as Vioxx, a drug that was withdrawn after it caused up to 140,000 cases of serious heart disease- half the cases were thought to be fatal.

Gotzsche, who authored the study, says he believes those deaths are just the beginning, and that they are indicative of a broken, flawed medical system that fails to protect patients. Elizabeth added that the system is skewed for profits as it really sees patients as "dollar signs."

He also said that as evidence against once-popular drugs Valium and Xanax became known, they were replaced by anti-depressants that are as addictive and just as filled with side effects as their predecessors.

'Withdrawal, not depression'

Furthermore, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, additional research shows that small benefits over placebos was biased, because it failed to properly mask whether patients were given the active drug, or were in the placebo group.

Gotzsche says the biggest victims in all of this are elderly patients who are over-prescribed such drugs. He points to research published in 2011 in the British Medical Journal, in which researchers found that for every 28 elderly people treated with an anti-depressant for a year, one will die who otherwise would have lived, from various causes including heart attack, stroke or a fall.

"Those who use arthritis drugs are mostly the elderly who are most at risk of dying of a heart attack caused by the drug or a bleeding ulcer," Gotzsche said. "We have a high use of psychiatric drugs by the elderly and we kill an enormous amount of them."

"These people get shoved in a nursing home and they get aggravated, so they're knocked out with an antipsychotic drug - it's very inhumane," he said.

Gotzsche said he's been criticized for recommending that people should consider slowly weaning themselves from taking any anti-depressants, if their physicians approve. He says he believes that sometimes doctors mistake post-anti-depressant depression as a return of original symptoms, and reinstate the medication.

"If you get depressed by lowering the dose and then immediately increase it to the normal dose, you will usually be well in a couple of hours," he said. "But if you get better straight away it is withdrawal, not depression."

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053084_Big_Pharma_addiction_painkillers.html#ixzz415NyecFu

"The idea that the school should not simply teach subjects, but should educate the “whole child” in all phases of life, is obviously an attempt to arrogate to the State all the functions of the home."

Rothbard and the Importance of Freedom in Education

By Ryan McMaken

In his monograph on public education, Education: Free and Compulsory, Murray Rothbard writes:

The idea that the school should not simply teach subjects, but should educate the “whole child” in all phases of life, is obviously an attempt to arrogate to the State all the functions of the home. It is an attempt to accomplish the molding of the child without actually seizing him as in the plans of Plato…Unquestionably, the effect of all this is to foster dependence of the individual on the group and on the State.

These words were featured today in the National Catholic Register as part of an analysis of a new report on global educational freedom. The report, titled Index of Freedom of Education 2015/16, attempts to rank freedom based on the ability of private persons to create and manage an independent and non-governmental school.

The US is ranked at 17th behind Ireland (1st), Denmark (5th), Chile (7th), and Australia (15th).

These rankings should be approached with some caution since the methodology appears to award “freedom points,” if you will, to systems that employ government-subsidized private schools for a large share of education. Moreover, it’s unclear to what extent curriculum at these government-financed “private” institutions are regulated. For example, during the administration of socialist Jose Zapatero in Spain (2004-2011), Zapatero pushed through a government mandate of “citizenship education” which the Council of Europe had lobbied for, and was designed to indoctrinate children into the values of the Spanish state.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church in Spain opposed the measure as pro-government, anti-religious propaganda.

In this, one might argue that the Spaniards were just getting caught up to the Germans who today still defend their Nazi-era ban on homeschooling, claiming that without state control of education, people might actually come to diverse and non-government-approved conclusions about ideology, religion, economics, science, and other topics. Apparently, for the German state, that sort of thing isn’t to be tolerated.

Certainly, it seems that the Index of Freedom of Education would take the German ban into account, but would the Spanish mandate for “citizenship education” be covered? That remains unclear.

The report is right, however, that at the core of freedom in education is the issue of diversity and competition in educational institutions.

Ron Paul explained this in his book on education, and in this interview. As is so often the case, the key to freedom in education is to just respect ordinary property rights, since education is something people value, and people will use their property to create educational institutions and provide educational services. The more states control the creation or management of non-government educational institutions, the less freedom of education there will be, and thus less freedom in thought, ideology, religion, and speech as well.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/ryan-mcmaken/importance-freedom-education/

"Too many Americans believe in the possibility of a free lunch. Politicians exploit that gullibility. The unpleasant task of a good economist is to teach that fundamental principle: One cannot get something for nothing."

Gullible Americans

By Walter E. Williams

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), satirist, essayist and political pamphleteer, is a favorite of mine. He wrote “Gulliver’s Travels.” One of Gulliver’s voyages was to Laputa, where he visited the grand academy of Lagado, whose scientists have visions, not unlike today’s politicians who exploit mankind’s gullibility.

Before getting around to our politicians, how about a quick synopsis of Gulliver’s visit to the grand academy of Lagado, where scientists were trying to solve important problems? To wage war against famine, one scientist was trying to convert excrement back into food. For eight years, another scientist was engaged in a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. An architect was trying to find a way to build houses starting from the roof down so as to provide shelter for construction workers as they completed their work during inclement weather. Then there was sheer lunacy in the case of a professor who claimed that conspiracies against the government could be discovered by studying the excrement of subjects. All of these projects of the grand academy of Lagado scientists were doomed to failure primarily because of the immutable prohibitions of the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

How, you might ask, do these laws apply to politicians and gullible Americans? The first law of thermodynamics, translated into plain English, states that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Conservation of energy is a basic law of physics that cannot be violated. My question to Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, with his promise of free college tuition, is: Has he discovered a way around the laws of physics? Or is he lying about getting something for nothing and really means that he plans to take the earnings of one American in order to provide “free” college tuition? Of course, he might have a more horrible method in mind as a way to provide free tuition, namely the enslavement of professors. One wonders whether Sanders would receive as much cheer from his youthful supporters if he were honest with them and told them he was going to provide for their “free” education by taking the earnings of another or by enslaving professors.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump promised, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” To assist in accomplishing that goal he has vowed to impose a 35 percent tariff on imported Ford vehicles from Mexico. More recently, he threatened to impose tariffs on Carrier air conditioners because its parent company, United Technologies Corp., announced plans to move to Mexico.

Trump’s battle is not against Mexico, Ford or United Technologies. Instead, his real battle is against American people who would buy goods made abroad. This is readily seen by asking the question: Would Trump and other anti-free traders be concerned if Americans voluntarily refused to purchase foreign goods? Donald Trump and business and labor groups, who are against Americans purchasing goods made in other countries, can simply ask the American people not to purchase from abroad. Tyrants would never buy that strategy. Tyrants do not trust free markets and what they imply, voluntary exchange because people acting voluntarily might not do what the tyrant thinks they should do. That is why they favor compulsion in the forms of tariffs and quotas to stifle peaceable, voluntary exchange with foreigners.

By the way, some of the political obfuscation about a foreign trade are lifted when we recognize that it is not really nations trading with one another. In other words, the U.S. Congress does not trade with the federal government of Mexico, England’s or France’s parliaments or Japan’s Diet. It’s individual Americans who, through private intermediaries, trade with Mexican Ford manufacturers, English clothing manufacturers, French wine producers and Japanese automakers.

Too many Americans believe in the possibility of a free lunch. Politicians exploit that gullibility. The unpleasant task of a good economist is to teach that fundamental principle: One cannot get something for nothing.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/walter-e-williams/economic-nonsense-politicians/

"If the elites think they can not only deny Trump the nomination but turn back this revolution and re-establish themselves in the esteem of the people, they delude themselves."

Nationalism and Populism Propel Trump

By Patrick J. Buchanan

As the returns came in from South Carolina Saturday night, showing Donald Trump winning a decisive victory, a note of nervous desperation crept into the commentary.

Political analysts pointed out repeatedly that if all of the votes for Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson were added up, they far exceeded the Trump vote.

Why this sudden interest in arithmetic?

If the field can be winnowed, we were told, if Carson and Kasich can be persuaded to follow Bush and get out if Cruz can be sidelined, if we can get a one-on-one Rubio-Trump race, Trump can be stopped.

Behind the thought is the wish. Behind the wish is the hope, the prayer that all the (SET ITAL) non-Trump (END ITAL) voters are (SET ITAL) anti-Trump (END ITAL) voters.

But is this true? Or are the media deluding themselves?

Watching these anchors, commentators, consultants and pundits called to mind the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964.

Sen. Goldwater had just won the winner-take-all California primary, defeating Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, assuring himself of enough delegates to go over the top on the first ballot at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

But with polls showing Barry losing massively to LBJ, the panicked governors at Cleveland conspired to block his nomination.

Michigan Gov. George Romney and Pennsylvania Gov. Bill Scranton were prodded to enter the race. Scranton would declare his availability in San Francisco with a letter accusing Goldwater of hostility toward civil rights — Barry had voted against the 1964 bill — and of excessive tolerance toward right-wing extremists such as the John Birch Society.

And what became of them all?

Goldwater won his nomination and went down in a historic defeat, but became a beloved figure and the father of modern conservatism.

Of those who turned their backs on Goldwater that fall, none ever won a presidential nomination. Of those who stood by Barry that fall, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, both would win the GOP nomination twice, and the presidency twice.

And the conservative movement would hold veto power over party nominees and become the dominant philosophy of the GOP.

Folks forget. Not only were there “liberal Republicans” and “moderate Republicans” back then, they dominated the landscape. Yet rare is the Republican today who would describe himself in such terms.

Which brings us back to the anti-Trump cabal.

While their immediate goal is to deny him the nomination, do they really think that if the party nominates Rubio, things can be again as they were before Trump? Do they not see that America and the West are undergoing a series of crises that will change our world forever?

Bernie Sanders is not all wrong. There is a revolution going on.

Late in the last century, when Robert Bartley was an editorial editor, The Wall Street Journal championed a constitutional amendment of five words — “There shall be open borders.”

Bartley, who told colleague Peter Brimelow, “I think the nation-state is finished,” wanted U.S. borders thrown open to people and goods from all over the world. To Bartley and his acolytes, what made America one nation and one people were simply an ideology.

But what was silly then is suicidal today.

Whatever one may think of Trump’s talk of building a wall, does anyone think the United States is not going to have to build a security fence to defend our bleeding 2,000-mile border?

Given the huge trade deficits with China, Japan, Mexico and the EU, the hemorrhaging of manufacturing, the stagnation of wages and the decline of the middle class, does anyone think that if Trump is turned back, the GOP can continue on being a free-trade party financed by the Beltway agents of transnational corporations?

Absent some major attack on the homeland, do our foreign policy elites believe the American people would support new U.S. interventions to defeat, occupy and tutor Third World nations in the liberal democracy?

Trump is winning because, on immigration, amnesty, securing our border and staying out of any new crusades for democracy, he has tapped into the most powerful currents in politics: economic populism and “America First” nationalism.

Look at the crowds Trump draws. Look at the record turnouts in Republican caucuses and primaries.

If Beltway Republicans think they can stop Trump and turn back the movement behind him, and continue on with today’s policies on trade, immigration, and intervention, they will be swept into the same dustbin of history as the Rockefeller Republicans.

America is saying, “Goodbye to all that.”

For Trump is not only a candidate. He is a messenger from Middle America. And the message he is delivering to the establishment is: We want an end to your policies and we want an end to you.

If the elites think they can not only deny Trump the nomination but turn back this revolution and re-establish themselves in the esteem of the people, they delude themselves.

This is hubris of a high order.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/patrick-j-buchanan/trump-buchananite/

FLASHBACK: Former CIA Head blows the lid off the fraudulent Wars, live on CNN (reporters shocked)...

The FBI, the San Bernardino shootings and JFK...

The FBI vs. Apple and the JFK Assassination
by Jacob G. Hornberger

There is one indisputable fact in the fight that the FBI is waging against Apple: In the criminal investigation of the San Bernardino shootings, U.S. officials are pulling out all the stops. In a desperate attempt to secure the information on the alleged shooters’ iphone, the feds have even secured a court order commanding Apple to effectively work for the government.

What for? After all, both alleged shooters are dead. What’s the point of getting their iphone information if they’re both already dead?

The point is that the shooters might have had confederates, or to use a term that is popularly used in federal criminal indictments, “co-conspirators.”

As I wrote in my ebook Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, this is how we would expect the feds to operate, especially in a case involving mass murder.

Imagine that all the people killed had instead been federal officers. In that case, no one can reasonably doubt that the feds would be doubling their efforts to ferret out whether anyone else was involved in the crime. That was borne out back in 1979, when the feds were investigating the assassination of U.S. District Judge John Wood. They really pulled out all the stops in that investigation, even to the point of surreptitiously monitoring communications between the alleged conspirators and their attorneys, which most everyone knows is a grave violation of ethical principles under the law.

But that’s not what happened in the JFK assassination. In that case, the exact opposite happened. Rather than pursue the aggressive type of investigation that we would expect the feds to conduct, especially in a murder of a U.S. president, federal officials did everything they could to shut down any investigation into whether JFK’s assassination may have involved a conspiracy.

For example, only three days after JFK’s assassination and the day after Jack Ruby forever silenced Lee Harvey Oswald with another assassination, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach issued a memo that stated in part:

The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

But how could Katzenbach know for certain that Oswald was the assassin? This was only 3 days after the assassination, after all — hardly enough time to make that type of determinative conclusion.

After all, one possibility is that Oswald was being framed for the crime, which he himself claimed up until the day he died.

Another possibility is that if Oswald really did shoot at the president, he had co-conspirators.

Why would an Assistant U.S. Attorney General be so insistent on quickly shutting down the investigation into the assassination of a U.S. president? Isn’t that enough to at least raise eyebrows?

At the very least, wouldn’t we expect the feds to at least aggressively investigate the second possibility? That’s why they’re going after Apple – to see if they can determine whether other people were involved in the crime. Why not the same aggressive investigation into the JFK assassination?

And, hey, it’s not as though there wasn’t any evidence that shots had been fired from Kennedy’s front. There were the Dallas treating physicians who stated that there was an orange-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head, indicating an exit wound. There were the two Dallas treating physicians who held a press conference immediately after the president was declared dead during which they stated that the president had been shot from the front — both through the throat and the head. There were the many witnesses who heard the shots coming from the front as well as those who saw smoke from the grassy knoll area in front of the president.

Shouldn’t that be enough evidence to get the feds at least a little bit interested in exploring whether shots were in fact fired from the front? If so, then why quickly shut down the investigation by pinning the crime on someone supposedly firing from the rear, especially a man who was claiming he was being framed?

Consider all of the unusual activity surrounding the autopsy on the president’s body, as I detail in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, (which has been on Amazon’s list of top-selling books on 20th-century American history for more than a year and is currently ranked #11 and has received 194 comments and a 4-star rating). Brandishing guns, a team of Secret Service agents forced their way out of Dallas’ Parkland Hospital with the president’s body, expressly prohibiting the Dallas medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, from conducting an autopsy, as required by state law.

That’s not the type of thing we would expect federal officials to do in a murder case, is it? In the San Bernardino shootings, they are presumably working closely with state law-enforcement officials. Yet, in the Kennedy assassination, they were threatening to use deadly force on any state law-enforcement official who interfered with their removal of the president’s body from Parkland Hospital.

Why is an autopsy important? Because it can tell the cause of death. It can tell whether bullets have been fired from the rear or from the front or both.

What did those Secret Service agents do with the president’s body? They transported it to Air Force One, where new President Lyndon’s Johnson was waiting for it; aides had removed seats at the back of the plane to make room for it. Then, after the plane arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, the body was secretly transported to Bethesda National Medical Center, where all sorts of strange shenanigans took place, as I detail in The Kennedy Autopsy.

For example, as the Assassination Records Review Board determined in the 1990s, after more than 30 years of military secrecy surrounding the autopsy — there were two separate brain examinations as part of the autopsy.

Why is that unusual?

Two reasons: First, an autopsy ordinarily has only one examination of the brain. Second, the two examinations in the JFK autopsy involved two different brains, one that obviously did not belong to the president. See a 1998 article on this issue by George Lardner Jr. in the Washington Post entitled “Archive Photos Not of JFK’s Brain, Concludes Aide to Review Board.”

Another interesting aspect to the brain-examination mystery is that the photo of the president’s brain in the official autopsy photos depicts a full-sized brain. Moreover, the official supplemental autopsy report depicts the weight of a full-sized brain. Yet everyone who saw the brain taken out of the president’s head at the autopsy said that it was missing at 1/3-1/2 of its mass because of the gun shot that hit Kennedy in the head. At the risk of stating the obvious, a brain does not regenerate itself, especially after a person is dead.

As one reads through all the other strange occurrences surrounding the autopsy, it becomes clear that the last thing any of these military people were concerned about during the autopsy was that they would ultimately have to testify about the autopsy in a trial. It’s as if they knew that there was never going to be a trial at all. Yet, at that point — Friday night — Oswald was still alive.

Let’s not forget role of state authorities in all this. After all, in actuality the feds had no legitimate role in the investigation into JFK’s assassination, including conducting their top-secret autopsy at a military installation in Maryland. At that time, the assassination of the president was a state crime and not a federal crime.

Yet, almost immediately the feds were doing everything they could to prevent state officials from investigating whether the suspect Oswald might have had confederates. When the Dallas District Attorney’s office, for example, began alleging that Oswald shot the president as part of a communist conspiracy, Johnson and his people immediately ordered the District Attorney’s office to stop making that allegation and to simply say that Oswald alone shot the president.

Moreover, on the very day that the president was assassinated, state law enforcement officials could not study the limousine in which the president for forensics evidence. That’s because the Secret Service took it back to Washington on the very afternoon of the president’s assassination, cleaned it up, and immediately shipped it out for repairs.

Perhaps I should also mention that when the official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was asked to identify the official autopsy photos in the official record, he testified that the collection contained photos he didn’t take and omitted photos that he did take. When Navy official Saundra Spencer, who worked in the White House photo lab, was asked by the ARRB to look at the collection of official photos, she testified that those were not the autopsy photos she developed on the weekend of the assassination. For example, one of the photos Spencer developed showed an orange-sized hole in the back of Kennedy’s head while the official autopsy photos show the back of Kennedy’s head to be fully intact. Finally, the official social photographer for President Kennedy, Robert Knudsen, told people that he was the official photographer for the autopsy, and yet Stringer said he was never present during the autopsy.

Of course, the mainstream media looks at all this and sees nothing abnormal. For more than 50 years, they have held that all of these occurrences are absolutely normal, notwithstanding the fact that they would (I think) scream like banshees if the same unusual conduct and passivity were to characterize the killings in San Bernardino, Boston, and others.

In fact, whenever anyone raises the notion that all of these things are somewhat bizarre, the mainstream media immediately responds with their favorite epithet: “Conspiracy theory!” Their mindset is that it is simply inconceivable that the feds were up to no good that weekend. In their minds, it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment was orchestrating a regime-change operation on November 22, 1963.

Of course, I’m sure that there are still people in the mainstream press who also believe that it is simply inconceivable that the U.S. national-security establishment conspired to effect regime-change operations in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1960-1963), Congo (1961), Vietnam (1963), Chile (1970-1973), and others.

Indeed, there are undoubtedly people in the mainstream press who hold that it is simply inconceivable that federal officials conspired with respect to Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Iran-Contra arms, and even Watergate.

It is simply inconceivable, the mainstream argument goes, that U.S. national-security state officials would ever conspire to do anything bad, even if they determined that it was necessary to do so to protect “national security.” (See FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board).

Link:
http://fff.org/2016/02/23/the-fbi-vs-apple-and-the-jfk-assassination/

Be careful what you wish for...

This is Why the Minimum Wage Is Such A Horrible Idea

Joshua Krause

In case you haven’t heard, the Oregon state legislature has recently approved a new minimum wage, and Governor Kate Brown has already agreed to sign it. This minimum wage law will be very different from the wage laws of most states, in that it will vary on a region by region basis. There will be gradual increases in each city and rural county until the year 2022. At that point, the city of Portland will have a minimum wage of $14.75, smaller cities will be at $13.50, and rural areas will be at $12.50.

But for all their good intentions, the leftists that pushed this legislation through have no idea what they’re in for. It will be rife with unintended consequences. Take for instance, what happened in Seattle shortly after their city council approved a $15 minimum wage. Before the wage increase even went into effect, restaurants all over the city crunched the numbers for what it would mean to their bottom line, and shuttered their doors. And for those who are still employed, the minimum wage increase hasn’t really helped them at all. Here’s what two cleaning ladies told the Seattle Times last year:

The cleaning woman responded, “It sounds good, but it’s not good,”

“Why?” I asked.

“I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation,” she responded. “No more free food,” she added.

The hotel used to feed her. Now, she has to bring her own food. Also, no overtime, she said. She used to work extra hours and received overtime pay.

“What else?” I asked.

“I have to pay for parking,” she said.

I then asked the part-time waitress, who was part of the catering staff.

“Yes, I’ve got $15 an hour, but all my tips are now much less,” she said. Before the new wage law was implemented, her hourly wage was $7. But her tips added to more than $15 an hour. Yes, she used to receive free food and parking. Now, she has to bring her own food and pay for parking.

It’s simple economics really, which apparently the purveyors of the minimum wage have no knowledge of. They artificially raised the price of services across the board, and look what happened? The businesses that couldn’t afford it either shut down or laid off workers, and the businesses that could afford it simply shifted some money around by eliminating benefits and putting those dollars toward wages.

Big surprise right? We’ll probably see the same thing happen in Oregon before these wage increases are enforced. Businesses owners in that state are saying and thinking the same thing the restaurateurs were saying in Seattle last year.

What the supporters of a higher minimum wage just don’t get, is that it hurts poor unskilled workers the most. They want to believe that it will help these people attain a livable wage, but it won’t. In fact, when states or cities try to raise the minimum wage, it often forces their low skilled workers to move to different states for better work opportunities. The minimum wage is a job killer that takes work away from people who need it the most. And in any case, those who do still have a job now have to pay more for goods and services in certain industries, now that there is no cheap labor.

It also sets the bar too high for workers that lack experience. Think about it. Whenever a business hires a new employee, they’re taking on a big risk. It costs money to train new people, and they have no idea if these people will work out. The less experienced they are, the more risk it entails, and thus they pay these workers less money to hedge those risks. With any minimum wage, it’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the newest members of the job market to attain their first work experience. Is it any wonder why all over the developed world, the youngest demographics have the highest unemployment rates? Surely this is a contributing factor.

To those that support a higher minimum wage, or any minimum wage for that matter, this isn’t rocket science. At the end of the day, some jobs simply aren’t worth that much money, no matter how much you pout about how unfair the world is. And when you set a minimum wage, what you’re really doing it outlawing all jobs that are worth less than that arbitrary amount.

It sounds pretty dumb when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

Link:
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/this-is-why-the-minimum-wage-is-such-a-horrible-idea_022016

"It has more recently been discovered that turmeric has the potential to replace chemotherapy and radiation in the treatment of certain cancers – and it has been proven to prevent and fight virtually every type of cancer."

Turmeric able to 'smart kill' cancer cells... chemotherapy and radiation now medically obsolete

by: Daniel Barker

Turmeric has long been one of the most prized spices from the East, but its benefits extend far beyond the wonderful flavor and color it lends to many recipes. The health-promoting properties of turmeric have been known for millennia, but only recently has it been discovered that the bright orange spice is also a powerful ally in preventing and curing cancer.

It's been cultivated for more than 5,000 years in the tropics of Asia, where the brown-skinned root with the bright-orange flesh has been valued for the treatment of a number of conditions including "toothache, chest pain, urinary tract infection, flatulence, jaundice, menstrual discomforts, bruises, hemorrhage, and colic."

The spice made its way to the West through Arab trade routes during the 13th century and has become popular throughout the world. Turmeric is now grown in tropical regions such as India, the Philippines and the Caribbean, and is probably best known as one of the fundamental ingredients of curry dishes.

It has more recently been discovered that turmeric has the potential to replace chemotherapy and radiation in the treatment of certain cancers – and it has been proven to prevent and fight virtually every type of cancer.

From TheTruthAboutCancer.com:

Turmeric's active ingredient is an extracted compound called curcumin. Studies have shown that curcumin helps prevent several forms of cancer including breast, lung, stomach, liver, and colon because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. It stops the development of cancer by interfering with the cellular signaling aspects of the chronic disease.

Curcumin's nearly miraculous "smart kill" properties work to inhibit the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer in fundamental ways at the cellular level. It has the laboratory-proven capability to inhibit a particular cancer-promoting enzyme (COX-2), impede blood supply to cancer cells, induce tumor-suppressing genes, stop metastasis (the spread of cancer throughout the body's organs), kill lymphoma cells and prevent the regrowth of cancer stem cells.

The ability to target cancer stem cells is one of curcumin's most powerful anti-cancer properties, as a recent study revealed.

From GreenMedInfo.com:

[T]he study describes the wide range of molecular mechanisms presently identified by which curcumin attacks cancer stem cells (CSCs), which are the minority subpopulation of self-renewing cells within a tumor colony, and which alone are capable of producing all the other cells within a tumor, making them the most lethal, tumoriogenic of all cells within most if not all cancers. Because CSCs are resistant to chemotherapy, radiation, and may even be provoked towards increased invasiveness through surgical intervention, they are widely believed to be responsible for tumor recurrence and the failure of conventional treatment.

It can only be hoped that the FDA and Big Pharma don't find a way to outlaw curcumin, since it seems to have as much promise as marijuana as a cancer preventative and cure. That statement is made only partly in jest because, as always, if a potential cure for a disease can be found in Nature, the pharmaceutical drug makers have no use for it since it cuts into their profit margins.

When natural cures and preventatives are proven to have merit, the drug industry will typically go to great lengths to denounce and prevent their use, or at least find ways to synthesize and patent them so that they can be sold to the public for enormous profits, whether their versions are safe and effective or not – and often the pharmaceutical versions are neither.

So it's a good idea to begin introducing turmeric into your diet now (if you haven't already) – and it happens to be a very versatile spice.

Curries wouldn't be the same without turmeric – it's one of the main spices found in most variations of the dish and provides its distinctive color and taste – but it's also a fantastic ingredient that can be used in many other recipes, including soups, meats, rice dishes, and stews. It's also great with eggs, potatoes and even smoothies. In addition, you can also pair it with black pepper, which helps make curcumin more effective.

The amazing spice turmeric is yet another proof that Mother Nature provides us with everything we need...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053073_turmeric_cancer_cells_conventional_medicine.html#ixzz40zaTUTEl

American police state...

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

By John W. Whitehead

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy… But I knew it wasn’t a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head… The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

Don’t believe me?

Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself. The landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

The Executive Branch: Whether it’s the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, the systematic surveillance of journalists and regular citizens, the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, or the occupation of Afghanistan, Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in terms of his abuse of the Constitution and the rule of law. President Obama, like many of his predecessors, has routinely disregarded the Constitution when it has suited his purposes, operating largely above the law and behind a veil of secrecy, executive orders and specious legal justifications. Rest assured that no matter who wins this next presidential election, very little will change. The policies of the American police state will continue.

The Legislative Branch: It is not overstating matters to say that Congress may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America. Abuses of office run the gamut from elected representatives neglecting their constituencies to engaging in self-serving practices, including the misuse of eminent domain, earmarking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracting in return for personal gain and campaign contributions, having inappropriate ties to lobbyist groups and incorrectly or incompletely disclosing financial information. Pork barrel spending, hastily passed legislation, partisan bickering, a skewed work ethic, graft and moral turpitude have all contributed to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with congressional leadership. No wonder 86 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing.

The Judicial Branch: The Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the United States Supreme Court have become the guardians of the American police state in which we now live. As a result, sound judgment and justice have largely taken a back seat to legalism, statism and elitism, while preserving the rights of the people has been deprioritized and made to play second fiddle to both governmental and corporate interests.

Shadow Government: America’s next president will inherit more than a bitterly divided nation teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe when he or she assumes office. He or she will also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. Referred to as the Deep State, this shadow government is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.

Law Enforcement: By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, local police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace but now extensions of the military, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. In the latest move to insulate police from charges of misconduct, Virginia lawmakers are considering legislation to keep police officers’ names secret, ostensibly creating secret police forces.

A Suspect Surveillance Society: Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging at this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. By tapping into your phone lines and cell phone communications, the government knows what you say. By uploading all of your emails, opening your mail, and reading your Facebook posts and text messages, the government knows what you write. By monitoring your movements with the use of license plate readers, surveillance cameras and other tracking devices, the government knows where you go. By churning through all of the detritus of your life—what you read, where you go, what you say—the government can predict what you will do. By mapping the synapses in your brain, scientists—and in turn, the government—will soon know what you remember. And by accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Consequently, in the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Military Empire: America’s endless global wars and burgeoning military empire—funded by taxpayer dollars—have depleted our resources, over-extended our military and increased our similarities to the Roman Empire and its eventual demise. The U.S. now operates approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries around the globe at an annual cost of at least $156 billion. The consequences of financing a global military presence are dire. In fact, David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., believes there are “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that contributed to the fall of Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

That brings me to the final and most important factor in bringing about America’s shift from authoritarianism: “we the people.” We are the government. Thus, if the government has become a tyrannical agency, it is because we have allowed it to happen, either through our inaction or our blind trust.

Essentially, there are four camps of thought among the citizenry when it comes to holding the government accountable. Which camp you fall into says a lot about your view of government—or, at least, your view of whichever administration happens to be in power at the time.

In the first camp are those who trust the government to do the right thing, despite the government’s repeated failures in this department. In the second camp are those who not only don’t trust the government but think the government is out to get them. In the third camp are those who see government neither as an angel nor a devil, but merely as an entity that needs to be controlled, or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, bound “down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Then there’s the fourth camp, comprised of individuals who pay little to no attention to the workings of government, so much so that they barely vote, let alone know who’s in office. Easily entertained, easily distracted, easily led, these are the ones who make the government’s job far easier than it should be.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of the presidential candidates, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good evangelism that passes for religion today. What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms.

The powers-that-be wants us to remain divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

The only distinction that matters anymore is where you stand in the American police state. In other words, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/john-w-whitehead/government-politicians-generals-cronies/

Keynesianism on steroids...

Bernie Sanders: Keynesian on Steroids

By Gary North

If Forrest Gump’s mother were around, she would remind us of this fundamental truth: “Socialism is as socialism does.” With all the hoopla surrounding Bernie Sanders’ campaign, let us apply this principle to his message.

As far as I have read, he has not recommended that the federal government nationalize America’s industries. He has not called for government ownership of much of anything.

If socialism does not mean state ownership of the means of production, then what does it mean? If the distinguishing feature of the socialist ideology is not government ownership, then how can we distinguish socialism from run-of-the-mill welfare state/Keynesian policies? If socialism is simply an extension of the principal of Keynesian government deficits and central bank monetary inflation, then how is it distinguishable from what we have today?

In other words, from what we can see from Bernie Sanders’ campaign rhetoric, he is simply another version of what we have had in the United States ever since the end of World War II. I call it Keynesianism on steroids.

I realize that he calls himself a socialist. I also realize that virtually every Keynesian calls himself a capitalist. The question is this: what is the economic content, analytically speaking, of what a self-proclaimed socialist or a self-proclaimed capitalist actually teaches?

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Let us go back to Karl Marx’s famous 10 points that define the transitional socialist order after the proletarian revolution but before the arrival of the Communist paradise, which Marx prudently never defined or even described for more than a paragraph in an unpublished manuscript.

For as long as I can remember, which goes back to about 1956, I have heard conservatives supposedly quoting this portion of The Communist Manifesto. “We have most of these 10 points today,” they have argued.

No, we have not. And it is unlikely that we ever will.

Here are the 10 points, verbatim

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

The second point has been applied in the West: progressive income tax. The tenth point, tax-funded education, began in Massachusetts a decade before The Communist Manifesto appeared anonymously in German.

Other than these two, we have none of the other eight points in the West. And in each of these two areas, things have gotten better.

1. Abolition of property in land. Enough said.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. The federal government did impose a horrendously graduated income tax, but that came under Woodrow Wilson as a wartime measure. It certainly did not come as a result of any socialist political party. We had a 91% top bracket rate under Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Rates at the very top were dropped under Lyndon Johnson to 70%, and again under Ronald Reagan to 29%. There are horrendously high rates of marginal tax rates in Scandinavian countries, and Britain had high rates for a long time. But high marginal tax rates on the rich have always been popular with voters. This is not because they were socialists; they are just run-of-the-mill thieves who believed in a reworked commandment: “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” This outlook has been basic to Western political theory for well over a century. But the people who favor this do not call themselves socialists, and they are correct in this regard. They are just people who believe that it is legitimate to impose high marginal tax rates on the rich. So, the super-rich hire lawyers and donate to PAC’s, so the effective tax rate imposed on them in the United States is well under 20%. Nothing the Democrats have done under Obama or Clinton has changed this. It is business as usual in Washington.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/gary-north/real-bernie/

Believing the hype...

Paranoid Politics

By Thomas Sowell

Amid all the media analyses of the prospects of each of the candidates in both political parties, there is a remarkably little discussion of the validity — or lack of validity — of the arguments these candidates are using.

It is as if what matters this election year is the fate of a relative handful of people— currently seven — running for their respective parties’ nominations. Meanwhile, the fate of the 320 million Americans who are going to be affected by the outcome of this year’s election fades into the background.

The fact that Hillary Clinton’s election prospects, for example, depend on her ability to get the black vote has been talked about in the media numerous times. But what about the fate of millions of black people, and how that will be affected by the way Hillary Clinton is trying to get their votes?

Her basic pitch to black voters is that they have all sorts of enemies and that blacks need her to protect them, which she is ready to do if they vote for her. In short, Hillary’s political fate depends on spreading fear and, if possible, paranoia.

Similar attempts to get the votes of women are based on conjuring up enemies who are waging a “war on women,” with Hillary again cast in the role of someone ready to come to their rescue, if they will give her their votes.

In both cases, rhetoric and repetition take the place of hard evidence. The closest thing to evidence being offered is that the average income of blacks is not the same as the average income of whites, and the average income of women is not the same as the average income of men.

But the average incomes of people in their twenties is usually lower than the average income of people in their forties — and by a greater amount than the income difference between women and men, or the income difference between blacks and whites. Does that mean that middle-aged people are enemies of young adults?

In countries around the world, and for centuries of recorded history, people living up in the mountains have usually been poorer than people living on the land below. Does this mean that people in the lowlands have somehow been robbing mountain people? Or does it mean that the circumstances of people living in mountains have usually been less promising than the circumstances of others?

If poverty among blacks is due to whites, why has the poverty rate among black married couples been in single digits every year since 1994, despite far higher poverty rates among other blacks? Do most white employers even know — or care — which blacks are married?

When the imprisonment rate of blacks with a college education is a fraction of the imprisonment rate of other blacks, does that mean that white cops check out the education of blacks before they decide to arrest them?

Or does it mean that blacks who have chosen one way of life have very different prospects than those who have chosen a very different way of life — as is true among whites, Asians, Hispanics and others?

Economic differences between women and men are not wholly due to personal choices, since only women have babies, and it is usually mothers who take time out from the job market to raise them.

When women work fewer hours per year than men and do not work continuously for as many years as men, how surprised should we be that the sexes have different incomes on average?

Anyone who is being serious — as distinguished from being political — would have to take many factors into account before saying that male-female income differences, or black-white differences, are due to people with identical qualifications and experience being paid differently.

Any number of studies, including studies by female scholars, have shot down the oft-repeated claim that women are paid less than men with identical work qualifications. But that will not stop that same bogus claim from being made repeatedly this election year.

What about blacks, women or others who believe the political hype? Will that help them improve their lives, or will it be anther counterproductive distraction for them and another polarization of society that helps nobody, except those who seeking votes? As for the media, they are covering the political contests, not the effects of the lies generated in these contests.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/thomas-sowell/hillary-preaches-racial-paranoia/

War criminals...

Bush Haunts the GOP
By Eric Margolis

“The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote Shakespeare. A prime example, former US President George W. Bush who appeared last week campaigning in South Carolina for his amiable younger brother, Jeb.

George W. continues to haunt the Republican Party and damage its electoral chances. At home, Bush has been staying out of public gaze; abroad, he is widely hated and limits overseas travel due to fear of war crimes arrest for his 2003 invasions of Iraq.

Republican spin doctors and the rightwing US media has been trying to soft soap Bush and his mentor, Dick Cheney, for years and slowly expunge their disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that opened a Pandora’s Box of horrors across the Muslim world. Democrats who cheered the war have equally sought to dodge responsibility. However, Hillary Clinton can’t seem to escape her tawdry war record.

The US, claim the Bush/Cheney amen chorus, was “misled” into invading Iraq by “faulty intelligence,” misled by the hope to promote democracy among the benighted Muslims; on a noble quest to remove a frightful dictator Saddam; and, of course, the famous missing “weapons of mass destruction.”

As candidate Donald Trump said last week, these were all bare-faced lies. These spurious allegations had one purpose: to mislead Americans into believing that Bush’s aggression in Iraq was a crusade for justice rather than a crude attempt to turn Iraq, with the world’s second biggest oil reserves, into an American vassal petrostate.

Unfortunately, mainstream America has not yet understood the enormity of the crimes that were committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. These include some one million civilians, cities destroyed, death squads, drone wars, kidnapping, torture and turning the US into a Stasi-like police state. And the destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment plants by US air attacks, spreading disease and pestilence across the nation.

Washington claimed these crimes against humanity were justified by the 9/11 attacks though the real culprits came from Saudi Arabia, not remote Afghanistan or Iraq. Osama bin Laden was rubbed out so he could never voice the truth in a fair court.

Almost as bad was the continuing evil from Bush/Cheney’s so-called “war on terror.” Concocted and run by neocons, the faux war served to expand US control of the Muslim world (which I term ‘the American Raj’ in my book) and destroy enemies of Israel. This ‘war’ continues today, 13 years later, with military budgets doubled in size, a 100% increase in spending on all sorts of spies, mercenaries and private armies, militarized police forces, and endless funds to fuel America’s Mideast, African and Asian imperial wars.

There should be special taxes to pay for these conflicts, but all are dumped onto the national debt, driving America ever deeper into hock. CIA founded to provide analysis, assassinates alleged enemies across the world. The US government now shamelessly spies on all of us, exceeding even the intrusions of the old KGB and Stasi. Thank you, George W. Bush for supposedly defending America.

Bush ruined America’s name across the globe, making us look no better, maybe even worse, than the Soviet Union. Today’s witch hunt in the US against Muslims began during the Bush years. The Bush administration made many Americans feel that Uncle Sam was their enemy, not their friend. Of course, to many of American hard right and neocons – Bush was a saint. He remains so today in the Bible Belt and West. South Carolina, with its evangelicals and retired military communities, venerates Bush. A survey taken just before the invasion of Iraq showed that over 70% of evangelical Christians ardently backed the impending war.

Bush/Cheney aggressions led directly to the spread of the al-Qaida movement whose goal was to drive western influence from the Muslim world. The more lethal ISIS was born in US prison camps in Iraq. Somalia’s Shebab arose after the US and Ethiopia overthrew Somalia’s legitimate government. Now, the US in fast blundering into a major new Mideast War in Iraq and Syria that could provoke a nuclear confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

Unfortunately, too few Americans understand these legacies of Bush, Cheney, Hillary Clinton and the neocons. Who even remembers former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright actually saying that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraq children (UN figures) caused by US sanctions were “worth the price.”

George Bush is no cowboy saint. He, Cheney and their henchmen should all face justice for the invasions of Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.

Link:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/02/eric-margolis/w-no-cowboy-saint/

Intervention Fail: Back to Libya...

Are you ready???

Why are CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI and FEMA retirees all bugging out in preparation for something big?

by: J. D. Heyes

Former newspaper journalist and bestselling conspiracy author Jim Marrs told radio talk show host Dave Hodges in December that some 400-500 top bank executives had left their positions and had gone into seclusion.

Marrs said at the time that the elite had fallback positions from a chaotic society: seed vaults to which only they had access.

"Marrs was clearly alluding to the fact that some very bad events are coming and the global elite are aware of it and are moving to meet the threat," Hodges wrote on his radio show website.

Hodges went on to say his sources tell him that the same thing is occurring with people who have recently retired from a number of federal agencies including the CIA, DHS, NSA and FEMA.

"This fact is indisputable," Hodges wrote. "I have firsthand knowledge of four ex-Fed officials and their families who have relocated to safety enclaves when doing so was very disruptive to their respective [families'] lives." He said that "increasingly," it appears as though major events are coming -- life- and history-changing events that have these folks seeking "to remove themselves from harm's way."

Top DHS positions vacant; morale low

Hodges further stated:

When government officials, from the various alphabet soup agencies, retire en masse, it is not necessarily a noteworthy event. However, when the same officials retire en masse and then relocate to form their own survivalist enclaves, then this is something that we should all sit up and take notice of, especially when we are seeing the same behavior on the part of Wall Street executives.

Only, it is a newsworthy event; no less than The Washington Post reported recently that several top positions at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are currently vacant, and morale is extremely poor.

"The Department's Web site shows 40 percent of positions on the DHS's leadership list are filled by 'acting' officials or are vacant -- including the top four slots," the Post reported.

In a separate story, the Post also reported in August 2013 that a wave of retirements from the federal workforce were taking place -- a phenomenon that the paper blamed largely on age (many of those retiring were 60 or older). But the report also said that a number of very skilled workers were leaving federal service -- and the more skilled tend to be better paid (and, hence, better able to feather a distant nest).

Home to NORAD, NORTHCOM

As for Hodges, he says he has recently been having conversations with a pair of insiders, as well as the relative of another insider, "who tell similar stories of a coming series of apocalyptic events."

He also wrote that it is "a matter of official agency policy" that some of the current DHS and CIA officials and their families will be given safe haven in various locations in Colorado, in turbulent times (Colorado is home to several vital military bases -- one Army and five Air Force bases, all near the vicinity of Colorado Springs; the area is also home to Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Aerospace Command, or NORAD, the nation's early-warning center, and NORTHCOM, or Northern Command, the Army command in charge of homeland security and response).

"Most people in the know are aware of the underground facilities which lie below the Denver International Airport which has an underground connected railway to the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD/Fort Carson/Peterson Air Force Base underground facilities," Hodges wrote. "The structures are part of the Continuity of Government program developed by the United States government in the early days of the Cold War. However these facilities are increasingly becoming the planned refuge for many of the global elite residing within the United States when all hell breaks loose."

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/053056_government_retirees_bugging_out_prepping.html#ixzz40tjHxxCT