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Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
This is not an article. But once upon a time this was a blog where I would post my unformed personal thoughts. The thoughts eventually became articles. The articles were picked up and reprinted. But this one time, Sultan Knish will return to what it once was in a simpler time.
This is self-indulgent and personal.
Feel free to skip it.
Our lives are defined by numbers. Our deaths are defined by them too.
Somewhere out of sight, in the world or in our bodies, a clock ticks insistently away. Most of the time we are fortunate enough to be deaf to the relentless clockwork march of time.
Until we begin to hear. And are unable to stop.
There are many clocks in the hospital room where she lies dying beneath a plastic blanket inflated and deflated by one of a dozen machines in the room.
There is an old fashioned clock ticking inaudibly on the wall, there are digital clocks and timers embedded in everything. And there is the insistent count of heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen. The numbers keep going down.
The beeping is constant. One alarm, for the heart rate or the oxygen or the IV follows another. The alarms are a count. The numbers they measure are ultimately the only numbers that matter. They are the numbers of life.
I had often heard the term deathwatch, but standing on the plastic pine floor while the nurses come and go, I understand it. I am waiting for a death that I have been told is inevitable. I am waiting and dreading it all at once.
The Rabbi has come and gone. He has said his prayers and words of comfort. And I have said them with him. All the prayers in the end form one greater prayer. A fervent hope that our lives are defined by more than these numbers.
All our prayers are above all else a prayer for the existence of a G-d Whose being transcends the minutiae of material arithmetic. Whatever else we pray for, it is for a father that will never leave us and for a meaning more meaningful than our science tells us is all that there is.
We pray not merely for life but for a meaningful life. We pray not only in hope, but for hope.
We pray that there be something more on the other end of the deathwatch.
We pray that our prayers not be in vain.
Every now and then, I look from the numbers to the prayers, and back again, measuring the material life and the immaterial one, the digital prophecies of science, and the higher truth that I seek beyond the whitewashed walls, the tan blinds cutting off a view of the roof, and the endless ticking of the clocks and counts, the soft sighing of the machines trying to keep my mother comfortable and alive.
And failing at both.
Occasionally medical personnel come and go, donning purple gloves and yellow gowns, and then out again. I and she are both spectators in this play. We are amateurs at death and dying while they are the professionals. When we are gone, they will still be here, divining numbers and playing the odds.
They know secrets, not only of numbers, but of sounds and sights, and revelations of fragility and hope that the rest of us choose not to know.
But then the time comes when we poor amateurs must mount the stage and learn them anyway, when we must stumble through our paces without the benefits of schooling or script, performing poorly in our new parts.
Sometimes they ask me if I have medical training. I have. The studying of it has been more painful and expensive than theirs.
The deathwatch is a graduation. And on graduation, I will do my best to forget all that I have learned here.
After a stormy afternoon, a beam of sunlight slants through the lower half of the window.
The deathwatch has moved into the later hours of the afternoon. Perhaps it will continue on into night. I don't know and I don't want to know.
Deathwatches are always with us.
Those of us who don't fear for our loved ones, fear for our country or our way of life.
There are always things that we love and we fear losing. It is when we become aware of the very possibility of loss, as children or as adults, that we enter the outer rings of the deathwatch.
My current career began with a deathwatch of 9/11. In the ash and rubble, and the poisonous betrayals of the aftermath, the idea that we could lose our country became as real as when I first helped my mother into a wheelchair more years ago than I care to count.
I have not entered into that final deathwatch, the alarms of the end, for my country.
And I hope that I never do.
But to love something, real or ideal, or a mixture of both, is to know that it can die.
Everything we love dies. Except, perhaps our love, and the love of the Creator for his flawed creations caught between the numbers of their reason, and seeking a love and a hope that lies beyond this pale room, the fading houses stretching out in every direction, this world and all the endless worlds and stars beyond.
Hashem Hu HaElohim
The Lord is G-d, is what I will say when the deathwatch ends, and then, like Abraham and Jacob, and all my ancestors who have come before, and passed through that hope and home beyond the stars, I will seek out a place in the holy land of my ancestors to lay my dead to rest.
P.S. If you are interested in attending the funeral near Jerusalem, please contact me.
A Government Environmentalist Experiment in Brainwashing Parents Through Children in North Carolina
#C02Kult.
That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.
The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.
“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.
The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.
As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.
Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.
There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.
A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.
Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.
What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”
That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.
The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”
They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.
Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.
Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.
"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.
This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.
Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.
The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.
Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.
The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.
“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."
Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".
A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."
One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."
Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.
Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.
An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".
The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.
The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.
Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.
Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.
Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.
A child soldier.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It
“But, it’s a private company.”
It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.
In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue."
“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine."
The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.
But it overlooks two very simple facts.
The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation".
“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its ‘fact checks’.
All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.
Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?
What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?
It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?
Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.
The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.
The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA's Arpanet.
Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.
Where did Google come from? "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.
Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.
Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.
"A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right," Thomas Jefferson argued.
There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.
Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.
Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.
Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.
But there are two answers.
First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.
Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.
In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court's decision found that, "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen."
The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.
When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.
Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.
Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.
A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.
Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.
If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny. That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.
Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.
Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the ‘free market side of history’ will automatically fix the problem.
As the internet has devolved from its origins in academia to a set of handheld devices controlled by one of two companies, and then to a set of smart assistants controlled by one of two companies, it has become far less open. Even if Google were to lose its monopoly, Silicon Valley hosts a politicized workforce which allies with the media to compel any rising new company to toe the same line.
And if that fails, there are always House and Senate hearings and harder laws coming out of Europe.
We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet. Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.
The Equal Justice Tour kicked off in Chappaqua, New YorK
Americans Unite to Demand Justice
Something happened this weekend that is just too big to ignore, although It is unlikely that you will see any mention of this event on the evening news or read about it in newspapers. A spirited group of American patriots, many traveling from several hundred miles away, gathered in Chappaqua, New York, the hometown of Hillary Clinton, to demand that justice – equal justice be restored to our nation.
The Equal Justice Tour kicked off in Chappaqua, New York, where citizens assembled outside the home of Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday, May 26, 2019, to call attention to her illegal activities as documented by FBI Director James Comey during her tenure as Secretary of State.
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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used an unauthorized, unsecured server to store, send and receive classified emails, exposing some of the nation’s most sensitive information to hostile foreign powers. She deleted tens of thousands of emails, used software to irretrievably erase the server, and physically destroyed computer and telephone hardware while under FBI investigation. Despite the obvious violations of law, Clinton was “exonerated” by former FBI Director James Comey on July 5, 2016.
Hillary Clinton was also Secretary of State during the September 11, 2012 attack on the State Department sanctioned CIA compound in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including a US Ambassador, were murdered. It was during the congressional hearings about Benghazi that her personal server was discovered.
Bottom-Up Grassroots Call For Justicei
For the first time in nearly two decades, Hillary Clinton was publicly called out at her home and on her home turf by Americans concerned about restoring America to the principles of our Founders and the US Constitution. By all accounts, Hillary Clinton took notice as did so many others in Chappaqua and beyond.
At the time of this report, at least one member of the US Department of Justice was aware of the events of The Equal Justice Tour this weekend and the demand for action on the part of the Department of Justice to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton.
As Sunday progressed, the crowd of supporters for “equal justice” grew, and so did the positive reinforcement by passersby by a 7-3 margin.
This writer spoke with three separate people who were driving by our meeting point, turned around and stopped to offer their encouragement and support.
Interestingly, two of the three stated that they reside in New Castle, Westchester County, NY, and the third lives in Elmsford, NY.
“If she broke the law as [former FBI Director James] Comey said she did, then yes, she should be held accountable, especially if her emails fell into the hands of our enemies,” stated a 46-year-old female resident of Elmsford, NY. When asked for her name she declined, stating “I have to live here – you don’t know what it’s like, these people who support [Hillary Clinton] don’t care what she’s done – it’s like a cult.”
The call for equal justice extended into Memorial Day as Hillary Clinton, accompanied by former President Bill Clinton and New York Governor Cuomo marched in their hometown parade.
Participants of The Equal Justice Tour, including “Coach” Dave Daubenmire, tour founder and one of the event organizers, attended the parade in Chappaqua, holding signs and demanding justice. It was evident that Hillary and Cuomo took notice, as did many others along the parade route. It was noted that the news media appeared careful not to photograph or video any of the participants or the signs that shadowed the former Secretary of State.
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.—Benjamin Franklin
Just over three years ago, millions of Americans enthusiastically embraced the prospect of the restoration of the rule of law amid the chants of “drain the swamp.” Sick of the status quo and a two-tiered system of justice, Americans voted to return America to the rule of law and the framework of the US Constitution.
Today, a thousand days later, we are still mired in the swamp of corruption. The criminal “elite” who held positions of power continue to walk free and unencumbered by the laws that govern the rest of us. This is about to change by the works and deeds of Americans who refuse to accept inequity or remain indifferent for the sake of convenience.
The change sought by more than half of America, if it is to come, and come it must, will originate from “we, the people.” We cannot rely solely on government or expect change without our voices being heard and more importantly, without our presence being felt. It is up to us to be the impetus for change and demand action from those who work for us.
In the words of Robert Kennedy, “[T]he glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society - who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.”
The torch for equal justice was lit over the weekend, its bright light a beacon summoning all Americans who seek to restore our nation to its founding principles of equal justice and the rule of law. Now lit, it will not be easily extinguished, but only made brighter by patriotic Americans who care about the moral future and integrity of the laws of our nation.
The Equal Justice Tour is just getting started, raising awareness and demanding accountability for the crimes committed by public servants who behaved more like royalty – and were treated the same.
Actually, this is indeed a joke. Pathetic, dehumanizing and criminal, but not funny
States sue to block 1st Amendment rights as unconstitutional
Proof that progressive politics now defines education is walking the halls of justice and Congress. Disinformation regarding our founding documents has reached the point that 20 states are crying “foul” because the Trump administration is enforcing First Amendment rights.
Say again?
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The ultimate in upside-down reasoning now stands before district courts across the United States. New York to California and 18 states in-between have filed lawsuits claiming that Department of Health and Human Services rules protecting healthcare professionals’ religious beliefs are unconstitutional.
This is no joke. These states are enraged that the Trump Administration has made accommodation for doctors, nurses and other clinicians to decline participating in taking the life of a baby (unborn and upon delivery as New York and Vermont have approved).
At the last reading of the First Amendment, it was clear that government is restricted from imposing religious practices upon citizens or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The only instance where government can weigh-in on the latter is if the religious practice is harmful, injures or violates others’ freedom. The burden of proof is on the government and the bar is set high.
In the multiple suits filed, the states claim that healthcare providers who have sincerely held religious beliefs have no right to adhere to them, that they must perform abortions and other life-ending procedures if asked or ordered. The states are essentially claiming that observing their faith is unconstitutional when the states are themselves breaching the Constitution by compelling medical professionals to perform homicidal acts.
The underlying question that should be asked of legislators and states’ attorneys is when did government become the arbiter of death, infanticide in particular? Whatever happened to “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or does it?) to understand that the House of Representatives’ democrat leadership has usurped the power of life and death by impeding a vote on a bill that stops the killing of babies born alive (abortion on delivery) for the 50th time. They are going a step further by introducing a bill that would attempt to overturn state laws in Alabama, Georgia and other republics (be reminded that each state had to become a constitutional republic before voted entry in the USA), pitting the federal government against states’ rights as protected by the 10th Amendment.
Democrats are working to inflict their death-cult policies on every citizen of the nation, expecting to outlaw individual freedoms and states’ autonomy with federal legislation. The purpose of the Constitution was and is to restrain exactly this kind of smug, arrogant overreach by representatives of districts who believe their small constituency has greater authority than a president who properly won his office in a national election. (The last point was confirmed after the completion of four investigations.)
Despite appointed district judges, who also erroneously believe they have supremacy over the office of President, ruling according to whim and not duly enacted law, the voting majority will not stomach continued murder of their children. Science dispels the fallacy that fetuses are not viable or even human before birth. Nor does science support the killing of a child after delivery. Only satanism approves that practice.
Defending the First Amendment right of individuals to opt-out of murder is not a denial of healthcare to a woman, it is the preservation of life and health to a child as codified in Amendment Five: “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property…”
Efforts to strip both healthcare professionals and the innocent unborn or just-born of their rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, is unconstitutional and any argument going before a court attempting to make that case is frivolous and should be thrown out.
Aren’t these people bringing these baseless lawsuits the same ones that expect dog owners to accommodate muslims who move into their community and demand that dogs and all evidence of their existence disappear from sight? The same mentality is at play. Destroy the defenseless baby (or dog) so pregnant women (or muslims) aren’t offended by their presence.
Actually, this is indeed a joke. Pathetic, dehumanizing and criminal, but not funny.
Forget "Money": What Will Matter Are Water, Energy, Soil and Food--and a Shared National Purpose
If you want to identify tomorrow's superpowers, overlay maps of fresh water, energy, grain/cereal surpluses and arable land.
The status quo measures wealth with "money," but "money" is not what's valuable. "Money" (in quotes because the global economy operates on intrinsically valueless fiat currencies being "money") is wealth only if it can purchase what's actually valuable.
As the world slides into an era of scarcities, what will matter more than "money" are the essentials of survival: fresh water, energy, soil and the output of those three, food. The ability to secure these resources will separate nations that fail and those that survive.
In a world of abundance, it's assumed every essential resource can be bought on the open market. Surpluses are placed on the market and anyone with "money" can buy the surplus.
Things work differently in scarcity: "money" buys zip, zero, nada because nobody with what's scarce can afford to give it away for "money" which can no longer secure what's scarce.
Parachute into a desert with gold, dollars, euros, yen and yuan, and since there's nothing to buy, all your money is worthless. Once you're thirsting to death, you'd give all your money away for a liter of fresh water. But why would anyone who needs that liter for their on survival trade it for useless "money"?
Imagine the longevity of a regime which sold the nation's food while its populace went hungry. Not very long once the truth comes out.
Having resources is only one component: consumption is the other half of the picture. Having 4 million barrels a day of oil (MBPD) is nice if you're only using 3 MBPD, but if you're consuming 8 MBPD, you still need to import 4 MBPD.
Water and soil are not tradable commodities. Nations which share water resources (rivers and watersheds) have to negotiate (or fight wars over) the division of that scarce resource, but as a generality, fresh water and fertile soil can't be bought and sold like grain and oil.
The number of nations with surplus energy and food to export is small. As I noted in Superbugs and the Ultimate Economic Weapon: Food, there are contingencies in food production which could quickly erase surpluses and exports and trigger widespread shortages that have the potential to unleash social unrest.
Energy exports are also a natural economic weapon with which to reward needy friends or punish desperate enemies (no oil or natural gas for you!).
But energy exports are also contingent: natural gas and oil pipelines can be blown up by non-state players, shipping chokepoints can be closed or mined, regimes can change overnight and so on.
The value of a nation's currency can be understood as a reflection of its essential resources, what I have called the FEW resources (food, energy, water) which I would now amend to FEWS (food, energy, water, soil).
Nations which are frugal about creating currency (either via printing/issuance or borrowing it into existence) while prudently managing their fresh water, energy, soil and food will in effect be "backing" their currency with their surpluses of what will be increasingly scarce.
Nations which borrow into existence or emit currency profligately while having scarce FEWS resources and enormous needs for imported food and energy will find their currency rapidly loses value.
When there's not enough energy and food to go around, who will trade what's scarce and valuable for what's abundant and worthless ("money")? The answer is no one.
If you want to identify tomorrow's superpowers, overlay maps of fresh water, energy, grain/cereal surpluses and arable land: those nations with abundances that can yield sustainable surpluses in food and energy while taking care of domestic needs will have wealth and power.
Those with diminishing resources that are inadequate to meet domestic demand will have very little wealth, no matter how much "money" they print or borrow into existence or how much consumerist "stuff" they produce.
There are two other attributes that matter: being able to defend your FEWS resources from would-be thieves and a widely shared national sense of purpose that enables shared sacrifice for the common good. Without that shared source of unity, the elites with wealth and power will grab more and more, bringing down the house around them with their limitless greed.
Sacrifice either starts at the top or it means nothing. Forcing commoners to suck up sacrifices only exacerbates disunity and national dissolution.
There are two more highly valuable attributes that will separate nation-states that survive an era of scarcity and those that will fail: flexibility and a tolerance for dissent, both of which enable adaptability and social innovation, as I explain in my latest book Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic. Rigid regimes that are intolerant of dissent are brittle and incapable of the sort of adaptation and social innovation needed in the cascading crises of scarcity. They are doomed.
There are no guarantees that any nation will be able to assemble all that it will take to survive an era of scarcity. But some have better odds than others. Place your bets accordingly.
I'm reprinting these charts to emphasize how few nations have geopolitically meaningful surpluses of food.
Corn is often the primary food for livestock. No corn, not much meat.
The exportable surpluses of wheat are concentrated in a few hands.
The same is true of soybeans, a source of protein in Asia and livestock feed everywhere. This chart shows the top producers and the top consumers.
So we’re going to do this all over again? Well, not if I can help it. Not that I have much hope that I can, mind you. As the bastions of war chime on, my voice, like so many others, will be drowned out. The military industrial complex knows how to do propaganda, better than anyone. But I’ll try.
Vietnam gave the US its biggest ever defeat, both militarily and morally, and yet mere years after its deeply humiliating withdrawal was put into action, the country was back at sending its promising young boys and girls not to its school systems, but to far away battle fields to be crippled, traumatized and slaughtered.
I know, I know, the UK and France do that too, but few other places do. Russia today uses its troops to defend its territory, China has yet to reveal its intentions. But the intentions of the US have been known ever since WWII ended.
In 1956, president Eisenhower, himself a longtime military man, warned the country upon taking leave of office, of the military-industrial complex that was threatening to take over its government. Less than 10 years later, that’s exactly what the complex did, and it’s never looked back.
And I’m thinking: you never learned anything at all? Not from Ike, not from Vietnam, not from the non-existent Iraqi WMD, and not from Libya or Syria? How is that even possible? Oh wait, I know, because the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN et al is where you get your so-called news. That’s why. Gotcha.
Today, May 26 2019, and I’m deeply ashamed to say it, I have two stories, one concerning a speech by VP Mike Pence at West Point, the other from Caitlin Johnstone about a Twitter thread initiated by the US military itself. Pence’s speech is heart breaking in its ignorance of US history, Caitlin’s is heart wrenching in its acknowledgment of that same history, and what it does to young Americans.
Now, I think this is not about Trump, as many will undoubtedly claim, it’s about Trump and Pelosi and Pence and McCain and Bolton and Hillary and Pompeo and Obama and all of the people hanging around both administrations. Let’s see what YOU think.
Pence To West Point Grads: You Will Fight On a Battlefield for America at Some Point in Your Life
Vice President Mike Pence told the graduating class of the West Point Military Academy on Saturday that the world is “a dangerous place” and they should expect to see combat. “Men and women of West Point, no matter where you’re deployed, you will be the vanguard of freedom, and you know that the “soldier does not bear the sword in vain.” The work you do has never been more important. America will always seek peace, but peace comes through strength. And you are now that strength. It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.
Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of you will join the fight on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region. Some of you will join the fight in Europe, where an aggressive Russia seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. And some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere. And when that day comes, I know you will move to the sound of the guns and do your duty, and you will fight, and you will win. The American people expect nothing less.”
Mike Pence is a very dangerous person. He’s planning to send American children into endless wars once again, 45-odd years after Vietnam and 20-odd years after Iraq. And there’s no-one left to stop him, other than Trump, Not exactly a solid guarantee. The Democrats will cheer this on, and their media will too. They always have.
Now, I’m not old enough to remember the whole story of the US involvement in Vietnam, but I do recall this 1985 video from Paul Hardcastle, which stated that the average age of the US soldier in Vietnam -towards the end- was 19. I have also seen Coppola’s movie “Apocalypse Now”, and many others, and yes, I’m wondering where today’s versions of these movies are.
Because, you know, when I read the Twitter thread picked up by Caitlin Johnstone listing what was supposed to be a promo thing from the army, my heart sinks and hurts and in the end is downright defeated. It’s like reading the accounts from Vietnam, and nothing has changed in 50+ years. How can that be? Says innocent me.
But religious nut Mike Pence has the guts to present this as some sort of heroic thing. For young Americans to go die in a desert for nothing at all other than Exxon’s access to oil and the profits of Boeing and Raytheon. And of course they’ve been setting this up for decades, that young kids -certainly blacks- who have no shot at a proper education, can get one only if they agree to become cannon fodder.
That’s ‘Nam, guys, that’s the 1960’s, history. And just look at how terribly that failed. Well, Mike Pence would like to repeat that failure.
The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut-Wrenching.
After posting a video of a young recruit talking to the camera about how service allows him to better himself “as a man and a warrior”, the US Army tweeted, “How has serving impacted you?” As of this writing, the post has over 5,300 responses. Most of them are heartbreaking. “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”
“I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another. Tweet after tweet after tweet, people used the opportunity that the Army had inadvertently given them to describe how they or their loved one had been chewed up and spit out by a war machine that never cared about them. This article exists solely to document a few of the things that have been posted in that space, partly to help spread public awareness and partly in case the thread gets deleted in the interests of “national security”.
“my grandpa served in vietnam from when he was 18–25. he’s 70 now and every night he still has nightmares where he stands up tugging at the curtains or banging on the walls screaming at the top of his lungs for someone to help him. he refuses to talk about his time and when you mention anything about the war to him his face goes white and he has a panic attack. he cries almost every day and night and had to spend 10 years in a psychiatric facility for suicidal ideations from what he saw there.”
“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.”
“My best friend from high school was denied his mental health treatment and forced to return to a third tour in Iraq, despite having such deep trauma that he could barely function. He took a handful of sleeping pills and shot himself in the head two weeks before deploying.”
If you got the stomach for it, guys, do read it. But I got to tell you, I find it hard.
The US killed millions of people and maimed ten times that in Vietnam, and that very much includes its own young and promising American citizens, and they did it again in Iraq. Mike Pence wants to repeat that in Iran and other theaters. Supported by Pelosi, Pompeo, Schumer, Bolton etc. Shame for them John McCain passed.
There’s only one US presidential candidate who’s explicitly spoken out against this mad repeat of Vietnam, and that’s Tulsi Gabbard, who actually “served” in Iraq. So she will be pushed aside by the DNC. Who are funded by the military industrial complex, don’t you know. Must serve the machine. We have a long way to go.
I always thought that Springsteen talking about Vietnam from Born In The USA is sort of like a haiku, encompassing the essence in just a few words, even if he doesn’t catch all the misery and bloodshed and mental anguish and broken lives and all of it (but how could you?):
I had a brother at Khe San; Fighting off the Viet Cong They’re still there, he’s all gone He had a woman he loved in Saigon I got a picture of him in her arms now
I know people older than me have many more examples of this and from the time when the ‘war’ was actually ongoing. Eve of Destruction? Creedence? Please send suggestions.
But also, please recognize the similarities in the madness then and now.
And let’s try and make it stop.
Let’s try and stop history from even rhyming, let alone repeating.
Nassim Taleb likes to point out that in olden days those who declared wars would also be first in line to fight them. By design. The fair thing to do.
Let’s send Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and all of their families into Iran first. And then we can talk.
I am Joseph F Barber,is a Builder /Contractor/ Freelance Writer and Editor of the blog FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience,Founder of the Veterans Project & The Family Assistance Campaign.it is my message to We the people and the citizens of our world That the time has come were we must stand and be counted and to have are voices be heard to stand free and our ground feed another if we can ,I tell you this as it come from with in my soul There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.
That which is Free cannot ALSO be that which is governed. One is free. Or one is not free .There is no apprenticeship for freedom a man or a women they are free or they are not
Memorize this traffic stop script for your next police encounter!??
NOTE: YOU HAVE TO MEMORIZE THIS! DO NOT READ IT TO AN OFFICER!
The first (and biggest) step is to get your mind right. Then it won’t matter what they try to throw at you, you will know how to counter every attack. Spend ample time learning and practicing BEFORE manifesting any of this outwardly. You need to have confidence, and knowledge provides this confidence, then the combination of the knowledge and confidence will guide what you manifest externally. My goal is to be honorable, I want to give them proper notice, and I want to make a record of everything just like I am gathering evidence for a lawsuit.
Remember: To stay in common law your entity must be from common law. A wo/man cannot act in commerce. It runs entities but never is an entity.
DONT EVEN TRY THIS WITH ANY TYPE OF STATE PLATE ON YOUR CAR, they have been trained to believe that any car with a public brand (state plate) is also public property (meaning it is their property). You cannot be double minded it is all or nothing. You cannot give them evidence that shows you have contracted with the state.
DO NOT GET EMOTIONAL except for filling yourself with love. Use the golden rule:??Dont think of others as an enemy or competition think of others as YOUR alternate self. Do you love yourself? Then treat both your-self AND your alternate-selves like it. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. We are all one.This is the ONLY way that we will be able to conclude peace.
First off, always find a safe place to pull over NOT ON THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY (A church parking lot is best). Always greet the officer in a friendly manner and ask them for their name and badge number (you may remind them that Officer is a title and not their name if you want), and then continue using the following:
(Im gonna boil it down to one question on my next encounter (that is if I decide to speak at all).)
The question is:
Do you have probable cause to believe that I have committed a crime involving a victim; because if you do I would like you to articulate that to me , otherwise this is an unlawful detention and I have no obligation to provide you with anything and I should be free to go on my way Right? ~
There are a few more appropriate questions you can ask for example; if??they ask for any documentation from you ask them if they plan on using any of it against you in court. And if they want to give you a citation, ask Are you authorized to NEGOTIATE a FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT????When they ask: What is your name? it would be fair to ask: Are you asking me legally or lawfully? His answer: Legally. Your response: Please show me where I am legally required to have a NAME or better yet, where is the law which states that I am lawfully required to have a NAME? They will likely respond with: I do not understand. and in that case, all I would want to know is which one of those corporate officers has a CLAIM against me? If they have a claim; they will have no problem articulating it, and if NOT they need to leave me the hell alone. NEVER make statements!
tThe other strategy that you can use is when the agent asks for “License, insurance, and registration…” ask if he plans on using any of those against you in court, and it doesn’t even matter what his answer to that question is because then you tell him that in order for him to get anything from you, he is going to have to perform a warrantless search and siezure to get it because you are not going to give him anything (testify against yourself). Then if he takes anything from you, you can have any of that evidence excluded using the courts own exclusionary rule.
If you are still not getting anywhere, ask for a supervisor and then shut the hell up except to repeat the same thing to the supervisor.
Important notes to remember:
To detain is to arrest. Look it up in Blacks Law, in fact here you go read and learn.
Detain To retain as the possession of personalty. To arrest, to check, to delay, to hinder, to hold, or keep in custody, to retard, to restrain from proceeding, to stay, to stop. People v. Smith, 17 Cal.App.2d 468, 62 P.2d 436, 438; State v. King, 303 S.W.2d 930, 934. See Confinement; Custody.
Ask, no DEMAND them to articulate their probable cause, otherwise it is an unlawful detention. By the way, it is not a crime to refuse to give the cops ANYTHING unless you have victimized someone.??WE ARE KINGS! NOT SLAVES!??The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that ???each man???s home is his castle???, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law.
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If they say you fit the description of someone who they are looking for make them produce the report number and prove it.
If you don’t already have one or three get a dashcam. Cameras help you create a record. Tell them that the video is streaming live to YouTube (they are likely too dumb to know better if you aren’t live streaming).
Get Cell 411 so that you can call for REAL help. It also has a live video streaming feature if you have signal.??http://safearx.com/
Be prepared because corporate POLICYMEN have little to no knowledge of de jure law or law enforcement and they do not understand the unalienable and imprescriptable Rights of the American people in the fifty states either. Most have no idea what their own state and federal constitutions say nor do they understand what actual laws they are supposed to be enforcing in the first place.
Police officers in America are not doing their job and they probably never will. They seem to exhibit minimal knowledge of law and law enforcement. They are tyrants and just an extension of political aims for ill-gotten gains, theft within the special maritime jurisdiction, piracy and extortion. Police are Corporate Revenue Collection Officers who are para-military trained to kill and take your unalienable Right to do something, away from you. The??American Gestapo are protected by the foreign BAR attorneys as officers of the corporate commercial court systems. The so-called courts are operating in bankruptcy and the police are an extension of those private tribunals to enforce the bankruptcy (and collect $) against what are deemed corporate US citizens. You are tried as a corporation.
Think about this: There is not any legitimate job you can have where you act in the capacity as a domestic terrorist with a corporate badge to get away with it. Police officers are domestic and do not possess lawful venue and jurisdiction. The American people in the fifty states are all non-domestic.
A police officer is not doing his/her job when they initiate threat, duress and coercion at automobile stops and take people’s Rights away if they don’t waive them during a corporate administrative proceeding on the side of the road.
A COP is not doing his/her job when they step on State and federal constitutions and commit high treason against the Constitution for these united states of America.
A police officer is not doing their job when they operate under State statutory color of law and make legal determinations contrary to the forty-three Supreme Court decisions regarding the right to travel, right of way, right of free passage. Police officers will take away your right to travel on the postal rural routes of passage in a private automobile for non-commercial purposes.
Police will violate our Right to locomotion to travel freely, safely and unencumbered for such non-commercial purposes as ordinary travel, recreation or pleasure in any given day.
Police are not doing their job when they rip off your car or make criminal conversions and fraudulent conveyances (tow/impound) of private property over to the financial benefit of third parties without our consent.
COPS break the law when they force you and intimidate you into surrendering your persons, houses, papers and effects and implement para-military trained Gestapo style tactics to force you to bear false witness against yourself.
COPS are not doing their job when they are in contempt of the current Chapter eleven reorganization bankruptcy of the United States, violate public policy and try to steal your labor.
Police are not doing their job when they force you into commerce, force you to CONTRACT with them (against your will), write a SECURITY (commercial traffic ticket) absent a public hazard or surety bond (violation of the SEC Act of 1933/1934 -Secureties and Exchange Commission) while acting in the public.
A police officer is not doing their job when they cite a FICTIONAL State statute, practice law without a license and act in the capacity as PROSECUTOR, executioner, judge and jury over the lives of innocent men and women within the fifty-states.
Police are not doing their job when they waste tax payer dollars protecting State and municipal property and the financial assets of STATE corporations and their crooked politicians.
Since when does a POLICE OFFICER within the several states for the union of fifty-states, ever do their job as it was originally intended and for the protection of the of the Rights of men and women? As most Americans will agree, the police do not work for the people anymore. They are predatory, dishonest, liars and are quite possibly more dangerous to our liberties (as a free people) than standing armies.
