NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal

NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal

 Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful - and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

Snowden, who fled to Russia in the aftermath of the 2013 disclosures and still faces U.S. espionage charges, said on Twitter that the ruling was a vindication of his decision to go public with evidence of the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping operation.

“I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them,” Snowden said in a message posted to Twitter.

Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records - the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls - was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013.

Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all. After the program’s exposure, U.S. officials fell back on the argument that the spying had played a crucial role in fighting domestic extremism, citing in particular the case of four San Diego residents who were accused of providing aid to religious fanatics in Somalia.

U.S. officials insisted that the four - Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh - were convicted in 2013 thanks to the NSA’s telephone record spying, but the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that those claims were “inconsistent with the contents of the classified record.”

The ruling will not affect the convictions of Moalin and his fellow defendants; the court ruled the illegal surveillance did not taint the evidence introduced at their trial. Nevertheless, watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case to appeal, welcomed the judges’ verdict on the NSA’s spy program.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for our privacy rights,” the ACLU said in a statement, saying it “makes plain that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records violated the Constitution.”

Reporting by Raphael Satter;- "Source" -


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Democracy is Failing | Eric X Li | Oxford Union

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Waking the Sleeping Giant

Waking the Sleeping Giant

In recent weeks, not only have we seen some very large holes punched in the narrative of what happened to George Floyd, but we’ve also seen the very thin veil come off, as the “peaceful protests” by Black Lives Matter and Antifa rapidly devolved into perhaps the worst string of violent riots the country has ever seen.  As of this writing, the city of Portland, Oregon has been host to violent riots for 86 days straight -- nearly three months of chaos.  

As we all know, violence in the name of outrage (or really in the name of anything) is nothing new for the Left.  No one is quicker to protest violence by smashing your face with a brick than the tolerant, loving Left.  No one understands better than the Left that the way to fight perceived racism in America is with even stronger and more brazen racism.  No one -- not even L. Frank Baum -- could construct a better Straw Man to rail against than the Left, and they've built one to rival Burning Man against President Trump (see Trump as racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamaphobe, et al). 

None of this is a surprise to anyone who is actually paying attention, regardless of what side you vote for.  If you don’t see how lawless and dangerous the riots have become, then you’re not willing to see.  On a daily basis, the police are being attacked with rocks, frozen water bottles, bricks, Molotov cocktails, improvised explosive devices, and all manner of other weapons.  The attacks are coming from “peaceful protesters” clad in military style body armor and riot gear and are being directed at anyone who displeases them or seems to disagree with their narrative.  Or for that matter, anyone who is just trying to pass by, either on foot or in their vehicle.

We saw recently a charming young lad named “Keese Love” deliver the final kick to the head of an unconscious man whose grievous crime was to try to protect a transgender woman from an angry mob.  We’ve seen buildings being set on fire, looting on a scale possibly never seen before and even portions of cities being co-opted and taken over as “Autonomous Zones” where police are not allowed.  All the while, leftist governors and mayors have tied at least one arm behind the backs of their police forces and allowed the rioting and looting to continue almost unabated.

What is new is something we’re starting to see happen around the country more and more (but not if you’re watching most of the mainstream media, because they will not show it).  We are finally starting to see a pushback by John Q. Public; and I believe we’ll see more as the weeks and months go by.

The “woke” forces of Antifa and Black Lives Matter -- mostly overindulged, pampered, underparented, overeducated and spoiled children -- are on the verge of a rude awakening.  They are on the verge of waking the sleeping giant, which is to say most of the law-abiding, hard-working and family-focused people of this country. 

There have been several reports recently of clashes in the streets; not between Antifa and the Proud Boys, police or other demonstrators, but between Antifa and regular people in their own neighborhoods.  We’ve seen Antifa, emboldened by the almost nonexistent response by the neutered Democrat politicians who run their cities and states, attempt to export their nonsense out to the suburbs and other non-urban locales... and the response has been glorious!

In the big Left Coast cities, citizens have almost no ability to arm themselves to protect their families or property, but once you wander out past the city limits, you find those still in possession of their 2nd Amendment rights (and their testicles) who are ready, willing, and able to stand up to the lawlessness and say very loudly and clearly, “Not here.”

In several instances, Antifa has been very promptly and swiftly (and sometimes violently) ejected from towns or neighborhoods who knew what their intentions were and collectively decided to take a stand.  Those stories are wonderful to hear, because to me it means that regular people -- you know, those crazy people who have jobs, families, responsibilities, maybe faith in God and a love of their country -- are starting to tire of the violence and overall nonsense.  They’re tired of being called racists simply for existing with white skin. They’re tired of seeing the legal double-standard that arrests the gym or hair salon owner for trying to earn a living during COVID-19 but allows and even endorses the nightly riots of hundreds or even thousands of "wokees."

In the last few days, there were at least two serious shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin which appear to have been by people defending themselves or their businesses from the BLM mob.  Multiple businesses were seen with armed men on the roofs defending what likely took them a lot of hard work and dedication to build (Yes, President Obama, they built that.)  Kenosha is not Portland, and they are not going to stand by and watch as their city is laid to waste by what amounts to a group of petulant children having a tantrum.

The violence is only going to intensify leading up to Election Day, and I believe there will even be great violence at the polls themselves. We’ve already seen in years past the New Black Panthers standing outside polling places with nightsticks and their trademark Angry Glare going completely unchecked by law enforcement.  We know that Antifa and BLM do not care about nor fear the law and are more than willing and able to bring the violence.

So the question is, How much more patience will law-abiding, peaceful Americans have before the laws of physics come into play, and the rioters’ force is met by an equal and opposite force?  (Although I don’t really think it will be equal... I think it will be massive, swift and brutal... but it will be opposite, for sure).  It’s pretty easy to see that patience is wearing thin.

I believe the Sleeping Giant is yawning, stretching, and turning on the coffee pot right now, and will be fully awake before too long.  I say, beware, Antifa and BLM... you may not like what the morning has in store for you.

From World War to Civil War?

From World War to Civil War?

Seventy-five years after the formal surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri, it is a little difficult to get one's arms around how much has changed since then.  In the 75 years from V-J Day to today, America has changed, from united as we have ever been to disunited as we have ever been.

In 1945, enemy cities were firebombed; in 2020, American cities are firebombed.  In 1945, food was strictly rationed; in 2020, food is plentiful, but local authorities mandate conditions under which restaurants can operate.  In 1945, the nation mourned when President Roosevelt died; in 2020, a large chunk of the American nation wants to see President Trump dead.

In 1945, the mindset of Americans was essentially stoic: our troops made two major amphibious assaults (at Iwo Jima and Okinawa), and likely a third, on the Japanese mainland before 1946.  They and American civilians stoically performed their respective duties, the latter almost 100 per cent unified behind the war effort and its sacrifices in blood and treasure.  They understood the existential threat to the American way of life.

After 75 years of increasing material plenty and comfort, many Americans have become risk-averse to the extreme.  Students the age of those who landed on Okinawa need safe spaces on campus.  The COVID-19 epidemic recedes, but many local authorities are guided by risk aversion, and many constituents accept their mandates out of fear.  School systems face labor unrest because teachers fear possible health dangers.  As one has said: "I didn't sign up to be a martyr!"

Other Americans, after six months of government-enforced lockdown and three months of government-tolerated burning and looting of business districts, have had enough.

The stoicism of the wartime years has not completely disappeared; it exists yet in "Flyover Country," far from national media centers.  Otherwise, the mindset is essentially hedonism: everybody has "stuff" and wants more.

Today's American people are badly divided to the extent that many believe that a civil war is near, if not here already: a second civil war (a third, if one counts the war between Whigs and Tories in 1775–1783) due to conflicting ideologies and value systems.

How has this breaking apart occurred?  As a lifelong observer of the process, I'll attempt an explanation.

As a kid in postwar America, I participated in the migration from cities to suburbia.  I saw it undertaken primarily by young families, people who had lived through fifteen years of privation, 1930–1945: first the Great Depression, then another Great War.

The demand for suburban housing was stimulated by the desire to start new families in new places and by easy V.A. home mortgages.  On the supply side, an army of home-builders was recruited from veterans of military construction units.  Our neighborhood showed the result: row upon row of housing, all built rapidly and from the same design.  Also, the defense industrial base that had made jeeps, tanks, and planes was converted to passenger car production.  People had the opportunity to move to the suburbs; they took it.

These postwar neighborhoods were peopled, mostly, by two-parent families.  The dads were war veterans: our little league coach had a bad limp, the scars on his leg from wounds suffered in Italy.  One neighbor, recently deceased, had been a submariner.  Another, still alive at over 100, was a medic with the First Army from D-Day to V-E Day.  The mothers were all homemakers; everyone was working hard to turn his home into a dream house.

We kids played Americans and Nazis rather than cowboys and Indians.  We hadn't the foggiest idea what a Nazi was; we only knew that that they were bad guys.  Even one of the Jewish kids was tagged as a Nazi.  No offense was taken because, again, none of us knew what it meant.  We gave no thought to ethnicity, except that two families, refugees from the Third Reich, were called "the Germans."

We had "stuff," but not much of it.  Air-conditioning was unknown.  "Eating out" meant putting dogs and burgers on the charcoal grill in the backyard.  The family had one car and one TV.  Our small black-and-white RCA set took forever to come on, and it needed repair every week.  Always the cyclotron or some such broke down and needed a replacement.  The hordes of TV repairmen were themselves among the hordes of people who had manufactured, operated, or maintained vast numbers of radios, radars, and sonar systems; their widespread availability after 1945 was a beneficial, unintended consequence of the need to teach theoretical and practical electronics to wartime military personnel.

Kids, when not playing Americans and Nazis, or pickup baseball, worked around the house and yard.  When old enough, we got jobs for pocket money to pay for our own "stuff": bats and gloves; transistor radios (when they came in); and, eventually, cars.  We knew that if you wanted something, you worked for it.  Many of us worked after school in the local supermarket; we stocked the shelves and cleaned up after closing at six.

That world existed until maybe twenty years after the War.  But something had been happening to change it.  I think I saw it in one neighborhood mother who, remembering 1930–1945, said, "I don't want my kids to do without."  Another mom struggled to find ways to keep her kids "entertained" during summer vacations.  Obligation was giving way to entitlement.

As kids grew older, mothers entered or re-entered the job market.  We became a nation of two-car families.  Before long, everybody accumulated a lot of the aforementioned "stuff."   Gradually, hedonism replaced wartime and postwar stoicism. 

As the kids went to college, quiet postwar America gave way to two social movements: one for Civil Rights, the other against the Vietnam War.  I witnessed neither firsthand but followed both through The New York Times, then a credible news source.

I was at the far side of the Pacific Ocean when "peaceful demonstrators" attacked armed men, the personnel of the Ohio Army National Guard, at Kent State University.  A few months later, I came home and began graduate school.  The place was a hotbed of leftism, but the inclination to violence had disappeared.

Looking back on what has happened in the 50 years after that, it seems that after Kent State, the fomenters of the "antiwar" violence made a tactical retreat — replacing confrontation with infiltration (of institutions) — while keeping to their strategic goal of imposing on America their own ideas of a radical paradise.

Meanwhile, consumer goods — many imported from Communist China — have provided Americans with all the "stuff" they could ever want, many of it goods and services that had not even been imagined in 1945.  School kids have their cars, but few have worked after school for them; also, they don't work their off posteriors in school, once the parental criterion for permission to buy the car in the first place.

All of that unearned plenty contributes to complacency.  And boredom.  It results in a life without principle, but that can no more be sustained than a vacuum in nature.

Having been conditioned to reject religion and patriotism, the grandkids of the kids who called each other "Nazis" (national socialists), whose fathers had fought the real Nazis, are now calling themselves socialists, even communists.  They don't seem to know what socialism is, or they simply don't care to learn about it.  But they're willing to fight in the streets to bring it about. 

The Worst Impeachment in History

The Worst Impeachment in History

An epigram likely composed by the lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe says laws, like sausages, “cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”  That observation certainly applies to the motives and methods that led to what author Fred Lucas concludes was “the worst impeachment in American history.”  In this case, however, the rhetorical saw should be revised to cover the production of really rotten sausages.

That summary judgment shouldn’t cause one to assume that Lucas’s Abuse of Power. Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump is a one-sided blast against Democrats.  Indeed, for Trump supporters, the author’s focus on historical, legal, and testimonial details may seem frustratingly nonpartisan.  Nevertheless, it is instructive to know the legal and procedural differences that distinguish Trump’s impeachment from the proceedings brought against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton.  President Nixon, of course, wasn’t formally impeached, but the congressional proceedings that would have led to his impeachment and removal from office did set a standard that was largely followed during Clinton’s impeachment but abandoned by Speaker Pelosi’s party.

Lucas’s analysis doesn’t begin with the “impeachment investigations” headlined incongruously by Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.  Instead, it starts (after an historical preface) with dreams of impeachment conceived even before Trump’s inauguration and first presented as a resolution to the House of Representatives  in 2017 by the bomb-throwing Texas Democrat, Al Green.  Several chapters are then devoted to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s attempts to stave off what she feared would be a politically damaging focus on impeachment prior to the 2018 elections.  

After those elections, the radical shift of her party’s base, exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s crushing primary victory over an established New York congressman, meant that now Speaker Pelosi, as well as many establishment Democrats, might be forced to walk the impeachment plank or risk losing their positions of power to challengers of the Ocasio-Cortez stripe.  The pressure on Pelosi to impeach President Trump from this Squad-inspired base only increased after Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation came up empty but set a novel legal standard by declaring the President had “not been exonerated” of an obstruction of justice charge.  

Thus, after having previously set a “compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” standard for impeachment, Pelosi ultimately opted (despite fearing she might lose her House majority in 2020) for an impeachment that was, in Lucas’s words, “uncompelling and underwhelming and extremely partisan.”  The principal action identified as an impeachable offense was a phone call between President Trump and the new Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky.  In that exchange, which covered several items, the President encouraged Zelensky to check on possible corruption involving a company (Burisma) that was being investigated when then Vice-President Joe Biden demanded the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired as a precondition for receiving American aid. 

 Linked here is the actual non-verbatim transcript of that presidential call which Lucas analyzes in detail but doesn’t present in its entirety in one place.  And what follows is the transcribed Presidential statement that became the basis of weeks of impeachment furor in Congress:  “The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General (Barr) would be great.  Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.”  

Rather than dismissing Democrat allegations of Presidential corruption out of hand, Lucas meticulously examines the evidence and testimony given in the Schiff and Nadler investigations to support the claim that Trump engaged in an “abuse of power” by asking Zelensky to investigate a situation that even Obama’s advisors had identified as an apparent conflict of interest for Biden.  All the major witnesses are identified in great detail and given a more-than-fair hearing -- at least as fair as the not-always-positive evaluations of the few witnesses allowed to defend the President.

A witness never heard during the impeachment proceedings, Hunter Biden, does have his financial dealings, both in China and Ukraine, scrutinized by Lucas.  Concerning Vice-President Biden’s ethical lecture to Ukraine about the allegedly corrupt prosecutor (Shokin) who must be fired, the New York Times provided this assessment in late 2015: “Sadly, the credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices.”  The Gray Lady had a much different opinion of Biden’s intervention, of course, when Trump’s removal from office was at issue in 2019.  Lucas adds to the picture of possible corruption Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, as well as another dubious actor, Devon Archer, who partnered with Heinz and Hunter at Rosemont Capital during the Obama-Biden Administration.  The rather clear pattern of influence peddling that Biden and Kerry established vis-à-vis their relatives would have been an unwelcome addition to an impeachment case largely predicated on the thinnest of quid pro quo grounds.  

In brief, Lucas provides a complete impeachment scorecard that tracks witnesses, testimony, rules of engagement, and perceived hits and misses during both the investigations and the impeachment trial itself, a proceeding that scrupulously avoided revealing the identity of President Trump’s primary “abuse of power” accuser -- the “Whistleblower.” Perhaps the nadir of the supposedly solemn impeachment proceedings was reached when Schiff cited an unconfirmed news report that the White House had threatened to put the heads of GOP senators “on a pike” if they voted against the President – a vicious lie that alienated two Republican senators, Collins and Murkowski, whom Democrats hoped to sway to their side.  In the end, only Mitt Romney voted with all the Democrats, and only on the “abuse of power” charge.

“Abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress,” Lucas notes frequently, are noncriminal accusations so broad that any prior President could be brought up on the same charges by a hostile House of Representatives.  With respect to the latter charge Law Professor Jonathan Turley observed, “Basing impeachment on this obstruction theory would itself be an abuse of power -- by Congress. It would be an extremely dangerous precedent to set for future presidents and Congresses in making an appeal to the Judiciary into [a] ‘high crime and misdemeanor.’”

The one major element I felt was missing from Lucas’s evenhanded and thorough account of the impeachment investigations and Senate trial was any concerted effort to view those events in light of the (in my view) criminal activity initiated by the Obama Administration to spy on and destroy Trump’s presidential campaign and later to undermine his presidency.  Compared to this unprecedented and as yet unpunished contempt for representative government itself, all the accusations brought against President Trump by Schiff, Pelosi, and company don’t amount to a hill of beans -- or to a string of bad sausages.  

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle   

Since 9/11, the Government’s Answer to Every Problem Has Been More Government

Since 9/11, the Government’s Answer to Every Problem Has Been More Government

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”—Anonymous

Have you noticed that the government’s answer to every problem is more government—at taxpayer expense—and less individual liberty?

The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic.

Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn.

Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

To the police state, this COVID-19 pandemic has been a huge boon, like winning the biggest jackpot in the lottery. Certainly, it will prove to be a windfall for those who profit from government expenditures and expansions.

Given the rate at which the government has been devising new ways to spend our money and establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems, this current crisis will most likely end up ushering in the largest expansion of government power since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This is how the emergency state operates, after all.

From 9/11 to COVID-19, “we the people” have acted the part of the helpless, gullible victims desperately in need of the government to save us from whatever danger threatens. In turn, the government has been all too accommodating and eager while also expanding its power and authority in the so-called name of national security.

As chief correspondent Dan Balz asks for The Washington Post, “Government is everywhere now. Where does it go next?”

When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control.

This expansion of government power is also increasing our federal debt in unprecedented leaps and bounds. Yet the government isn’t just borrowing outrageous amounts of money to keep the country afloat. It’s also borrowing indecent sums to pay for programs it can’t afford.

The government’s primary response to this COVID-19 pandemic—flooding the market with borrowed money in the amount of trillions of dollars for stimulus payments, unemployment insurance expansions, and loans to prop up small businesses and to keep big companies afloat—has pushed the country even deeper in debt.

By “the country,” I really mean the taxpayers. And by “the taxpayers,” it’s really future generations who will be shackled to debt loads they may never be able to pay back.

This is how you impoverish the future.

Democrats and Republicans alike have done this.

Without fail, every president within the last 50 years has expanded the nation’s debt. When President Trump took office on January 20, 2017, the national debt—the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back—was a whopping $19.9 trillion. Despite Trump’s pledge to drain the swamp and eliminate the debt, the federal debt is now approaching $27 trillion and is on track to surpass $78 trillion by 2028.

For many years now, economists have warned that economic collapse would be inevitable if the national debt ever surpassed the size of the U.S. economy. The government passed that point in June 2020 and has yet to put the brakes on its spending.

In fact, the Federal Reserve just keeps printing more money in order to prop up the economy and float the debt.

At some point, something’s got to give.

As it now stands, the U.S. is among the most indebted countries in the world.

Almost a third of the $27 trillion national debt is owed to foreign entities such as Japan and China.

Most of the debt, however, is owed to the public.

How is this even possible? Essentially, it’s a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

First, the government requires taxpayers to pay a portion of their salaries to the Social Security Trust Fund. The government then turns around and borrows from Social Security to cover its spending needs. Then the government raises taxes or prints more money in order to pay out whatever is needed to the retirees.

It’s a form of convoluted economics that only makes sense to government bureaucrats looking to make a profit off the backs of the taxpayers.

According to the U.S. Debt Clock, each taxpayer’s share of the national debt is $214,000 and growing.

That’s almost five times more than the median income for what Americans earn in a year. That’s also almost five times more than the average American has in savings, across savings accounts, checking accounts, money market accounts, call deposit accounts, and prepaid cards. Almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement.

Just the interest that must be paid on the national debt every year is $338 billion and growing. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the fastest growing item in the budget over the next decade will be interest on the debt.

As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported in 2019, before COVID spending pushed the country over the fiscal cliff, “Interest payments will rise from $325 billion last year to $928 billion by 2029, a nearly threefold increase. If tax cuts and spending increases are extended, interest will exceed $1 trillion and set a new record as a share of the economy. The federal government will spend more on interest than on Medicaid or children by 2020. By 2024, interest will match defense spending.”

Bottom line: The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who will have to pay for it.

As financial analyst Kristin Tate explains, “When the government has its debt bill come due, all of us will be on the hook.”

Despite the tax burden “we the people” are made to bear, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

All the while the government continues to do whatever it wants—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

This brings me to a curious point: what the future will look like ten years from now, when the federal debt is expected to surpass $78 trillion, an unsustainable level of debt that will result in unprecedented economic hardship for anyone that does not belong to the wealthy elite.

Interestingly enough, that timeline coincides with the government’s vision of the future as depicted in a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

According to the video, the government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power, and is grooming its armed forces (including its heavily armed federal agents) accordingly to solve future domestic political and social problems.

The training video, titled “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” is only five minutes long, but it provides a chilling glimpse of what the government expects the world to look like in 2030, a world bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Far from draining the politically corrupt swamps of Washington DC of lobbyists and special interest groups, however, the Trump Administration has further mired us in a sweltering bog of corruption and self-serving tactics.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting during a war?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

Funny how closely fact tracks fiction these days.

Just recently, in fact, I re-watched Escape from L.A., John Carpenter’s 1996 post-apocalyptic action film that imagines a future (2013, in fact) in which the United States has elected a president for life who runs the country according to his own theocratic moral law. Anyone who runs afoul of the president’s moral laws is stripped of their citizenship and either electrocuted or deported to the island of Los Angeles, a penal colony where lawlessness reigns supreme.

As the film’s opening narrator recounts:

In the late 20th century, hostile forces inside the United States grow strong. The city of Los Angeles is ravaged by crime and immorality. To protect and defend its citizens, the United States Police Force is formed. A presidential candidate predicts a millennium earthquake will destroy L.A. in divine retribution. The earthquake measuring 9.6 on the Richter scale hits at 12:59 P.M. August 23rd in the year 2000. After the devastation, the Constitution is amended, and the newly elected president accepts a lifetime term of office. The country's capital is moved from Washington, D.C., to the president's hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. Los Angeles Island is declared no longer part of the United States and becomes the deportation point for all people found undesirable or unfit to live in the new, moral America. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped among the shorelines, making any escape from L.A. impossible. From the southeastern hills of Orange County to the northwestern shore of Malibu, the great wall excludes L.A. from the mainland. The president's first act as permanent Commander in Chief is Directive 17: once an American loses his or her citizenship, they are deported to this island of the damned, and they never come back.

Carpenter is a brilliant filmmaker whose dystopian visions of the future are eerily prescient, but this film is particularly unnerving: environmental disasters; engineered viruses used like weapons to control the masses; riots and looting that leave the populace longing for law and order; religion used like a weapon; martial law; surveillance that keeps every citizen under the government’s watchful eye; and a growing awareness that the only path to freedom left for humanity is to shut down the government and start over again.

We’re almost there now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, unless we make some effort to reject the sorry excuse for representative government that we have been saddled with, the future that awaits us—whether it’s the future envisioned by the Pentagon in its training video or the future imagined by Carpenter—will be a living nightmare from which there is no escape.

Rules for Radicals Everyone must leave something behind

Rules for Radicals Everyone must leave something behind

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.


It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”


As we travel through this life we have been so graciously  Given “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”


If we have not yet come to the understanding of our indoctrination yet as a people or as individuals of humanity  let us do that today and come to and understanding of the truth of our slavery, it matters not what color race or creed we hail from we have grown comfortable in the ways of the governed.


And have failed to become the unique and beautiful beings we were born to be 

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED : is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

“If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”





I say this in a sense of feeling I to have lost my way to whom I was born to be .




It is true that Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).


In our indoctrination as Americans we must come to see thew truth in that false idealism of whom we are as citizens of our world as free citizens of it, The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.


It is said that governments of this world are destroying the planet and our own lives in a sense this is true but no one alone can mislead or destroy a country or our world unless we are all accomplices in the destruction of it it not a matter of good and bad but of truths .

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are.


“It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral;”


MANY MAY SAY I AM A LAIR “To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”


Understand the world we live in the governments that rule the people of all faiths colors and creeds in this world “In America Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.”

The Establishment AKA the Governments of this world rule by the consent of the governed indoctrinated to conform to the ways of the establishment of the times “Our main problem is a lack of understanding of what it means to be human and that we are not separate from nature.”


In learning to become the change I wish to see in our world I have had to ask myself these questions knowing all to well what I have been taught by the educational systems of my time “What is the meaning of life?" "What is consciousness and the mind?” "Why am I here?" “What is my relationship to God and the universe?" These questions have been asked for centuries, but they are irrelevant to achieving social progress. These are unanswerable questions because they don’t have referents in the real world. The posing of such ambiguous questions doesn’t express concern for fellow human beings, or a desire to elevate their condition. Such musings are gibberish in terms of practicality, and as impotent as wailing over an injured person instead of seeking medical attention for them.”


“Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith....Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.”


The truth is “People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others.”

“The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society. Our way of life is symbolized to the world by the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.”


“One may reasonably ask: Why do people cling to the values and practices of the past, when they so obviously no longer work? Long-standing thought patterns are hard to overcome because they often appear to serve the interests of the individual, and old ways of thinking are simpler and easier to handle. In a two-valued way of thinking, as in good and bad, right and wrong, love and hate, cause and effect, very little logical analysis is involved.”


A part of our indoctrination is based in are faith “Most churches make people feel guilty about natural human inclinations, making them feel dependent on the church for forgiveness. Religion focuses on unresolved human problems of insecurity, shame, fear, and wish fulfillment, and offers hope for a better life in the next world. Science offers people the tools of reason and knowledge to help build self-reliance and free people from mythology and simple wish fulfillment.”


“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.”“The only limitations on the future of the humankind are those we impose upon ourselves”“Unfortunately, we tend to support basic values and traditions that reflect the past, without questioning their appropriateness to the present or the future”

“We can build rockets to explore outer space and enhance the quality of life on Earth, or we can use them to destroy other nations.”“Either we learn to live together in full cooperation or we will cause our own extinction.”“Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in wars around the world  killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom?”


“They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership—in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to “the system” itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society’s innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life.”


“In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.”


Many speak of Revolution or revolt I tell you this “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so future-less in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.”“Mankind has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.”


As I have grown older and had the opportunity to speak out to lead and write of those experiences it is in my opinion “What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted—a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are—a chance to strive for some sort of order.”


“A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.”


Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself. 

To find this true change we seek people must come to see We are not here concerned with people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.”

Non-violence is the key to changing our world “What is the alternative to working “inside” the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about “Burn the system down!” Yippie yells of “Do it!” or “Do your thing.” What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of “murdering fascist pigs” when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide? “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!” Is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns.”

To the man of action the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available. Reviewing and selecting available means is done on a straight utilitarian basis—will it work? Moral questions may enter when one chooses among equally effective alternate means. But if one lacks the luxury of a choice and is possessed of only one means, then the ethical question will never arise; automatically the lone means becomes endowed with a moral spirit. Its defense lies in the cry, “What else could I do?” Inversely, the secure position in which one possesses the choice of a number of effective and powerful means is always accompanied by that ethical concern and serenity of conscience so admirably described by Mark Twain as “The calm confidence of a Christian holding four Aces.”

“Whenever the word power is mentioned, somebody sooner or later will refer to the classical statement of Lord Acton and cite it as follows: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In fact the correct quotation is: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We can’t even read Acton’s statement accurately, our minds are so confused by our conditioning.”

We live in a demented world today “The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”


“In which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.”


We must all leave something behind stand and be counted decide no longer to be governed but to be free

for there is no Apprenticeship for freedom you are free or you are not ,“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom


—Lucifer.

I am Joseph F Barber / I am an American Patriot...part of the Grassroots Movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. A Freelance Syndicated Writer, Editor, Author, Activist, Blogger, Tradesmen,Veteran, PTSD Survivor, Gas and Diesel Mechanic.




“A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as I climb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finally reach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the "real" top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably.

Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, "Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?" Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. "Because it's there." Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known. Paradocically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heights of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.”