Two Items

Here is an interesting article on suicides of U.S. military soldiers and veterans by Alyssa Rohricht. Mentioned are the long deployments and the never-ending wars started by the chickenhawks. But the writer doesn’t mention the prescription drugs that the military “doctors” are feeding these military personnel, supposedly to treat depression and nightmares etc.

Why are people not seeing how these damn drugs are causing depression and suicidal thoughts? The troops are mixing different antidepressant and anti-psychotic drugs into “cocktails,” so no wonder their difficulties become worse. This is just like the bizarre nature of why people in the media do not seem to be asking what prescription drugs the recent mass shooters have been on. We still haven’t heard about Adam Lanza’s prescription drugs, yet family friends and associates have stated in interviews that he was on medication. Why does it never occur to so many people that it is that damn medication that is a huge contributor to Lanza’s violence? It certainly isn’t the video games, because plenty of kids look at those things hours every day, and they don’t go shooting people! (The Powers That Be and their media flunkies and propagandists are more interested in disarming people and making them defenseless and vulnerable to the criminals, private and public, it seems to me.)

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Infowars has this story on a S.W.A.T. drill training exercise in Albany, New York, taking place at a vacant apartment building. But the “officials” didn’t bother to let the residents in the neighboring apartment buildings know in advance that this was going to take place.

First, something like this shouldn’t take place at all. We need more freedom in America, and not be a more Nazi Germany-military state society. If the idiots in charge would repeal all laws against victimless activities, they wouldn’t need all this unnecessary, criminal police stuff. It’s all completely reactionary, irrational and really the statists have turned America into a more primitive culture than the advanced one that it had been in the past.

And secondly, the real reason these government criminals and terrorists did not inform the residents of the S.W.A.T. drill taking place in their neighborhood beforehand is that many of these neanderthals get a thrill (up their legs, and other areas) in scaring the you-know-what out of people. Today’s Amerikan culture is now run by sickos, psychopaths and terrorists. Alas.

Some Misc. Items

In my article that’s on today at LewRockwell.com, The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq, I included links to certain books by a few people mentioned in the article. But, I neglected to include a reference to James Bovard’s books, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, and his newest one, his memoir Public Policy Hooligan. Bovard has also written other noteworthy books, including Attention Deficit Democracy, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Here is James Bovard’s blog.

Also regarding my article, and my bringing up the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign to sell the 1991 Gulf War to the American people, an emailer asked what PR firms might the U.S. government have hired to sell war on Iran. My answer is that, since the 1990s, the feds haven’t had to hire any PR firms to sell wars, as the stenographers and zombies of the mainstream media have acted as de facto PR firms for free.

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The Obama “food taster” issue: Now, it’s one thing to need a food taster, someone to test the food that’s served to you before you eat it, which is totally paranoid in this case. And we can expect a dictator and tyrant such as Obama to be as paranoid as he apparently is. But it’s another thing to see that all the other people at that luncheon are eating the same exact food, and as Sen. Susan Collins noted, none of them had “keeled over,” so, he must be, like, really paranoid.

Related: The federal government has been arming up and stocking up on hundreds of millions of rounds of ammo, and weaponry, for the DHS and other domestic agencies. That’s domestic, not military. At the same time, they are drooling to totally disarm the civilian population. But there are those in the media who are saying that, if you point out those two things, and that it gives the appearance that the feds are preparing for something, they call you “paranoid” and “conspiracy theorists.” I think that we know who is really “paranoid,” don’t we.

The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq

March 23, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com. (Link to article)

Several commentators have been observing the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, but really the U.S. government’s war on Iraq began over 22 years ago.

In January 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush started the war on Iraq, and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, which were continued by President Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. By 2001, hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths were wrought by the U.S. government and the UN, and there was widespread anti-American anger felt by many in the Middle East.

Here is a brief review of what led up to the elder President Bush’s 1991 war on Iraq:

In 1990, Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were engaged in disputes with Kuwait. Iraq believed that Kuwait was siphoning Iraq’s oil via horizontal drilling, and Iraq also believed that Kuwait’s own oil production was above OPEC quotas which allegedly effected in lower oil profits for Iraq.

Saddam Hussein had been the U.S. government’s favorite during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam had started with his invasion of Iran. The U.S. government’s arming and providing tactical battle planning to Iraq, despite U.S. officials knowing that Iraq was using chemical weapons during that conflict, were well documented.

When Saddam considered invading Kuwait, he met with then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and asked her what kind of response the U.S. would have to such an invasion.

In their discussion, according to the New York Times, Glaspie stated, “…we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. (Sec. of State) James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (More here.)

Apparently, Saddam Hussein took those words as a green light to invade Kuwait.

However, George Bush the elder then did a bait-and-switch, and began preparing for his war on Iraq. But the biggest task for Bush was to convince the American people that the war on behalf of Kuwait, an extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian monarchy, was not for oil but for “liberating” Kuwait from Saddam.

To sell this war to the American people, the government of Kuwait hired as many as 20 PR and lobbying firms. One PR firm in particular, Hill and Knowlton, was apparently the “mastermind” of the PR campaign, according to PR industry experts John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You provides the details of the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign, as excerpted by PR Watch.

Both Bush presidents were skilled salesmen in their demonizing those who would be on the receiving end of their own wars of aggression. Philip Knightley, author of the book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, in an October 2001 article described the repeated stratagem of warmongers’ use of propaganda to demonize the enemy to rationalize a new war for the warmongers’ own people to support it.

The most effective PR ploy was the congressional testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl who stated, emotionally, that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of hospital incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die.” The girl later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. And not only was that fact suppressed until after Bush’s war began, but the information she gave was false, and the girl had been coached by an executive of Hill and Knowlton. (Video)

Murray Rothbard gives quite a few further details regarding the whole 1990-91 Bush-Iraq-Kuwait wheeling-and-dealing here and here.

During the elder President Bush’s 1991 Gulf War, one of the most egregious acts that the U.S. military committed against the Iraqis was to intentionally destroy civilian water and sewage treatment centers and electrical facilities.

According to researcher James Bovard, U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden published an article in Airpower Journal, titled, “The Enemy as a System,” in which Warden told of the U.S. military’s intentional targeting of the civilian infrastructure as a means to undermine Iraqi “civilian morale.” Bovard also cites a June 23, 1991 Washington Post analysis, which quoted a Pentagon official as stating, “People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”

By the mid-1990s, diseases such as cholera, measles, and typhoid had led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, with many more deaths by the year 2000. This campaign of cruelty was advanced further by the U.S. government and the UN through sanctions and no-fly zones, which prevented medical treatments and the means of repairing damaged infrastructure from being imported into Iraq. Clearly, such a controversial campaign of bombing civilian water and sewage treatment centers must have been approved beforehand by then-President George H.W. Bush and his Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney.

Justifiably, there was widespread anger amongst the inhabitants of the Middle East by 2001. In fact, one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists was the Gulf War’s subsequent sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population.

Besides the sanctions throughout the 1990s as continued by President Bill Clinton, Clinton himself inflicted more bombing of Iraq.

Some people have now been comparing George Bush Jr.’s 2003 revival of the long war on Iraq with the extended war in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, especially combined with the younger Bush’s war of aggression in Afghanistan and Obama’s continuation of those wars and starting new ones.

The younger George Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq was really a continuation of what his father had started in 1991. Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, asserts that Bush Jr. was planning to invade Iraq as early as 1999 to take advantage of the “political capital” his father had built up earlier in Iraq.

(Can you imagine a President Jeb Bush in 2016? But I digress.)

In the elder President George Bush’s January 16, 1991 speech from the Oval Office, when he claimed that his 1991 war “will not be another Vietnam” (approx. 6:45), he also spoke of the “New World Order” (7:30).

The neoconservatives and progressive interventionists have been implementing their plans for global hegemony for decades, and using the force of the U.S. government to do it. But there is a frightening love of government that connects these interventionists, far outweighing any actual love for freedom and peace they could possibly have.

And now, after all these 22 years of Bush war quagmires and trillions of dollars in debt, and with warnings regarding the warmongers’ plans for Iran (which was part of the neocons’ plans all along), can the American people ever wake up to the truth about all this?

Now, the elder George Bush was elected President in 1988. But given how entrenched the Establishment’s interventionist policies were by that time, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered whether Bush or Democrat Michael Dukakis was elected in 1988. Given the myth of the “progressive peacenik,” a hypothetical Dukakis administration of 1989-1993 would most probably have been similar to the current one of Barack Obama. And with similar militarist reactions to Iraq as Bush in the name of furthering the obsession for hegemony that statists of both left and right have (and to keep the military-industrial-complex happy, too).

However, during the 1988 presidential campaign, had the media given Libertarian Party nominee Ron Paul the same free advertising they gave both Bush and Dukakis, the American people would have seen the clear alternative from the Bush-Dukakis statist quo.

And how would a President Ron Paul have handled the collapse of the Soviet Union? Given that any threats or perceived threats from overseas had vanished overnight, Ron Paul would have closed all the overseas U.S. military bases that existed then, including all the European and Asian bases and other foreign U.S. governmental apparatus. He would have brought all U.S. troops home, and many of them would have gone into the private sector to become productive workers, business owners and employers.

A President Paul would have shrunk the federal government by eliminating many useless departments, bureaus and programs, which Ronald Reagan promised to do but didn’t. And Paul would have abolished the fascist income tax. The economic boom of the 1990s would have been magnified by many times, for sure.

And a President Ron Paul would have educated the American people on the actual ideas of liberty. He would have informed the people of what a real free market is – something that the Heritage Foundation, Glenn Beck, and, ugh, Willard Romney wouldn’t know if they fell over it.

There also wouldn’t have been a U.S. government invasion of Iraq in 1991, bombing of civilian infrastructure, sanctions and no-fly zones, and provocations of foreigners becoming determined to retaliate. There may not (or probably not) have been a 9/11, and the police state in America that was already growing by the early 1990s would have been put to a stop. (And the younger George W. Bush probably wouldn’t have even been elected governor of Texas, let alone President of the U.S.) And there wouldn’t have been any U.S.-initiated wars in Afghanistan and other countries as well.

But, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is just not realistic, and what happened, happened. The misery, destruction, collapse of the American economy in addition to all these wars – it happened, thanks to neocons and progressive interventionists.

The central planners in charge must have very serious clinically pathological delusions of grandeur and a hunger for power and control in their attempts to “remake the Middle East in America’s image” or “make the world safe for democracy” (but not freedom and peace), while coveting those foreign territories’ natural resources and slaughtering innocents.

So, call me old-fashioned, but it takes a really sick, criminal mind to intentionally destroy the water and sewage treatments of an entire civilian population, and forcibly withhold their medical treatments and repairs. And it takes a very demented person to view entire populations and cultures in other parts of the world as sub-human and whose lives are not worthy of any “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and peace.

As I have stated in the past, America’s culture has declined over the past century. The greater power we have allowed governments to usurp, the further “third world” America has become.

The Bush wars of the past 22 years have not been helpful to human progress, that’s for sure.

Rand Paul Is Concerned About Border Security

Here are some steps that Rand Paul can take if he is concerned about border security:

1. End the drug war. Recognize that each individual has a right of self-ownership and a right to put into one’s own body and ingest whatever the hell one wants. However, the individual must take full responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions and decisions.

2. End the “war on terror.” Stop invading and occupying other countries’ territories and murdering their people. Stop provoking foreigners into retaliation and driving them to using desperate methods of retaliation, such as terrorism. The U.S. government needs to stop terrorizing the American people as well, close down DHS, TSA, and end treasonous un-American policies against Americans such as warrantless searches and seizures, invasive Orwellian surveillance, NDAA indefinite detention and assassination provisions.

3. Restore the right of all human beings to migrate. Just enforce property and contract rights. The concept of “illegal immigration” is very collectivistic and abandons the ideas of individual liberty, voluntary contracts, the right to travel and freedom of movement and free markets.

4. Restore Americans’ 2nd Amendment-protected rights to self-protection, and private property rights. Duh.

Dumb Central Planners Run Amok

Glenn Greenwald has this post today on the FBI’s anticipatory prosecution of Muslims to criminalize speech. He states that the U.S. government is increasingly going after “non-Muslims.” That is because the criminal and buffoonish central planners more and more see those who criticize them as a “threat.” They will call their critics a “threat to national security,” but really they are threats to these central planners’ non-productive trough-feeding, and to their powerful, unaccountable socialist fiefdoms. Now that Obomber has been in charge for over four years and four more to come, they are beginning to go after “constitutionalists,” tea partiers, “tenthers,” advocates of decentralization, advocates of liberty, as well as anti-war and pro-civil liberties people in general.

Pornography, Perverts, and the Police State

At spiked magazine online, Frank Furedi has this very interesting article, Porn: No Longer a Dirty Little Secret, in which he discusses quite a few aspects of pornography. Now, I don’t usually discuss these kinds of issues. But Wendy McElroy discussed the issue of pornography quite a bit in her Daily Bell interview just out yesterday. So I will discuss this issue today.

In his article, Furedi writes, “Pornography has become a culturally, even socially validated fetish, and this resonates with today’s wider tendency to devalue the private sphere. In recent decades, the ethos of transparency has trumped that of privacy.”

This, in my own opinion, is coinciding with the increase in collectivization of society, and the decline of respect for the individual and the rights thereof.

And Furedi writes, “Contemporary society is increasingly suspicious of private life and intimacy. Everything conducted behind closed doors is viewed as a prelude to abuse or domestic violence. The longing for intimacy is depicted as a dangerous desire to lose oneself in someone else. Love is often described as too risky. This stigmatisation of private relationships runs alongside a ceaseless attempt to push sex out into the public domain.”

That is my conclusion exactly. And this stigmatization of private relations goes with the contempt that our Rulers have for the idea of privacy, the dignity of the individual to have one’s own private life actually be private and of private couples, groups, associations to have their own private matters kept private. So, in my view, the sexualization of society is coinciding with the collectivization of society. And all this, of course, goes with our growing police state in which the individual no longer has rights, no longer has liberty, and no longer has privacy.

One article that was published in the past year that describes the perverted sexualizing of society and the Rulers’ authoritarian intrusions into people’s most intimate existence was by Naomi Wolf, How the U.S. Uses Sexual Humiliation as a Political Tool to Control the Masses. In that article, Wolf discusses the U.S. Supreme Imbeciles’ ruling which allowed police to strip-search any arrestee while in jail, regardless of what minor “offenses” for which one was arrested. Like the sicko TSA airport groping and molesting, these policies are just further ways for the Rulers and their minions to act out their sick fantasies of control over innocent human beings, being legally permitted to stick their dirty perverted fingers and what have you into innocent human beings’ anuses, vaginas, and so forth. (Generally, the ones who are attracted to these kinds of jobs are the ones who get off on those very crimes committed against other human beings.)

I really believe that the voyeurism aspects of our sick police state, the TSA’s cancer-radiation-emitting scanner machines along with the jail strip-searching, is a natural outcome of the steady increase in the public acceptance of porn and “open sexuality” as an “okay” everyday occurrence. What we have in modern times is a dysfunctionalizing of pornography whose use, in my opinion, is perhaps much more “normal” when kept private. (Call me an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy stick-in-the-mud, whatever.)

Back to Furedi, who writes about the decline of the integrity of private relationships and sexuality, and regarding voyeaurism and the trend toward revealing one’s feelings and desires to mass audiences,

This constant demand for revelation empties intimacy of meaning. When the very private thoughts that were once only disclosed to an intimate are communicated to a mass audience, then human relationships corrode. Sex also changes dramatically when it becomes a public spectacle. It is only in the private sphere that it is possible to make love; in public, sex becomes just physical coupling. Paradoxically, the more sex is transformed into a public spectacle, the more it becomes unsexed. Sexual desire, a very human attribute, is transformed into a need for physical release. From this perspective, the principal virtue of pornography is that it allows physical release to be experienced outside of a human relationship.

And I see this more generally in the police state and the surveillance state: the collectivist authoritarian Rulers treat the people as inanimate objects with which the Rulers and their “workers” satisfy their own selfish desires for intrusive voyeurism and sexual humiliation of others.

While Furedi agrees with me in rejecting any kind of censorship (and Wendy McElroy had stated in the aforementioned interview, as being a “free speech absolutist”), he brings up how the pro-censorship crowd wants to inflict their censoring “for the children.” (It’s always “for the children.”) But it’s really the culture that has decayed to the point at which sexuality in no longer private.

The American Dream Blog has these articles worth reading, 21 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Have Become Training Centers for Sexual Deviancy, and 25 Signs American Women Are Being Destroyed by the Sexual Revolution and Our Promiscuous Culture. And, regarding the police state, Why Are Police in America Treating Women Like Dogs?

But I wonder if some of the same kinds of people who want to impose censorship — such as on the Internet — “for the children,” are the ones who are pushing sex onto the kids. And are the censorship pushers part of the same crowd who are aligned with the Child Protective Services Nazis? Please, don’t get me started on the CPS Nazis now. And their involvement with the adoption and foster care rackets (See here most recently, and here, here, here and here, for examples.), and child sex trafficking racket. In Georgia, the late state Sen. Nancy Schaefer was exposing the corrupt CPS and their involvement in child sex trafficking, and she died an unexpected, suspicious death.

I see a close connection between the police state and the purposeful dysfunctionalizing of sexuality and pushing of sex onto kids, whether it be through pornography or more direct actions.

Some Videos for a Sunday Afternoon

This video is from 2007, and is a good explanation of why the U.S. government’s foreign policy is in the mess it’s in now:

In this one, Gen. Wesley Clark tells of plans by the neocons to start wars against several countries for the sake of government central planning and socialist covetousness:

Here is a January 28, 2002 CBS News report on the ailing Osama bin Laden, who, despite his serious kidney disease, must have had really good doctors and treatment for the next ten years:

Now, on to economics/monetary policy. Here is Peter Schiff talking to a young hotshot news-reader who doesn’t seem to understand the consequences of increasing debts:

And if you didn’t understand some of that, here are the Federal Reserve and quantitative easing explained:

Finally, economic historian Tom Woods tries to explain his book on Nullification to a representative of mainstream media:

The Rule of Law Applies to Everyone

March 13, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

This is really a follow-up from my previous article on the government-media complex’s continuing war propaganda. To clarify, my bringing up Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was not a defense of him but a defense of due process and the rule of law.

I happen to believe that all people must act under the rule of law with no exceptions, including government bureaucrats.

And in my previous article, I referred to ‘war’ as an artificial concept. There’s really no such thing as war – only criminal aggression, which is what ‘war’ is. You are either behaving aggressively in society, or you are peaceful and respectful of the lives and property of others. There’s no middle ground there.

However, there are those who believe that “9/11 changed everything,” and that “we’re at war with al Qaeda.” They believe those things because they had been bamboozled by government bureaucrats and their apparatchiks who already had questionable plans in place for wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq – and for a police state for America well before 9/11.

And our rulers say we are “at war with al-Qaeda,” even though our own government has been supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, supported its rise in Libya, and in fact supported Osama bin Laden early on (similar to the Israeli government’s own dippy central planners helping to create Hamas).

Do people know these things?

So I personally find the corrupt buffoons of the U.S. government terrifying. We are not “at war with al-Qaeda”; the U.S. government has been at war against the American people.

But some people want to suggest that my wanting to tell the truth about our government’s shenanigans, or my defending the right of all people to due process, or suggest that a Bradley Manning exposing government crimes, could possibly be “aiding and abetting” the enemy, or being an “enemy combatant.”

So given our dangerous government’s absurdly broad and ambiguous definition of “enemy combatant,” you can see why I find these U.S. officials terrifying.

And it isn’t just the President’s unconstitutional power to kill an innocent human being sans due process, it’s also the NDAA’s indefinite detention of Americans without due process, the FISA or otherwise searches and seizures without due process, all these thoroughly un-American police state policies now.

For instance, U.S. government agents had paid villagers in Pakistan to drop spy transmitter chips in areas that would lead to innocents being captured for torture or innocents being murdered by drones. And many of the Guantanamo detainees who were taken by U.S. forces from abroad had been found to be totally innocent, having been turned in by local villagers being paid by U.S. government officials, or in which no evidence against them existed or whose capture had been a result of informants giving false confessions (which is the real purpose of torture, by the way).

Can you imagine combining those imbecilic central planner-type policies with the more recent “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign? Can you imagine being the victim of some Nazi-brownshirt neighbor falsely turning you in for no good reason, and government agents treating you like a “terrorist”?

Now, occasionally I hear Mark Levin on the radio. Sometimes he can go on and on and on about how great the Constitution and Bill of Rights are, and criticizing the Obama socialist agenda with point after point on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, etc., and lately he has even been criticizing the Establishment Republicans in Congress. Good so far.

But then, he starts talking about U.S. government foreign policy, and pulls a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on us – totally turning against the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law, and spewing the ignorance and moral relativism of the neo-conned chickenhawks who have been starting the wars and occupations that have caused terrorist blowback against America.

Sadly, the neocons have unwittingly turned Thomas Jefferson’s America into a Stalin-like America. The neocons brought their deranged collectivist and globalist vision to America, and the conservatives and “constitutionalists” such as Levin bought it, hook, line and sinker.

One issue that Mark Levin was discussing late last week (on 3/8/13) was the decision of the Obama Administration to bring a terrorism suspect into a civilian court for trial, rather than bring him to Guantanamo or some other torture regime. Of course, the cognitively dissonant Levin was against the idea of a civilian trial.

Levin and other neocons actually believe that we’re really at war, as our central planning rulers have been telling us since 9/11, and that “war is different.”

“War is an exception, and therefore the Bill of Rights needs to be suspended,” seems to be what the zombie neocons have been saying.

Well, Levin – supposedly a big fan of the “Founding Fathers” – doesn’t seem to understand that the Bill of Rights includes inalienable rights that all human beings have, pre-existing any government. And these rights, such as the right to due process, the right to require your accuser to present evidence against you in a court of law, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, the right to be secure in your person, papers, property and effects, apply to all human beings, everywhere.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t say “These rights only apply to Americans, or to people who happen to be within the borders of the United States.”

So, if some government bureaucrat, the President, a military general or soldier, or one’s next-door neighbors want to accuse someone of something, then one has a natural, inherent right to require the accuser to present evidence against the accused or otherwise they must leave him alone. That’s the American way. (It might not be the Nazi Germany way, but it is the American way.)

And it doesn’t matter what crimes others or the government accuses someone of, terrorism, murder, rape, doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter who is being accused, foreigner or American, “over there” or “over here.”

But due to the widespread cognitive dissonance of today’s Americans (and generations afflicted with government-controlled schooling), one type of crime is now different from all others. Terrorism is different. Because of terrorism, we must remove what used to be seen as inalienable rights from all people domestic or foreign, and we must blindly and obediently trust the judgment of politicians and militarists.

This kind of trust in politicians is quite misplaced, to say the least, as Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger observed just recently.

The fact is, a crime of aggression is a crime of aggression, whether a suicide bomber blows up a marketplace, whether a drugged-up psychopath shoots innocents at a school, or whether a government ruler takes an organized military overseas and invades a country that was of no threat to his people, and occupies those foreign lands by force and destroys those entire societies. Those are all crimes of aggression.

You see, in 1991 when the U.S. government initiated a criminal act of military aggression against Iraq, intentionally destroyed Iraq’s civilian water and sewage treatments and electrical centers, imposed sanctions and no-fly zones and prevented materials from being imported to repair the damage and prevented medical supplies from being imported, and the rates of cancer and cholera and other illnesses amongst the Iraqi civilian population skyrocketed as a result during the 1990s, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, those acts are all crimes, regardless of the propaganda government bureaucrats disseminated.

During the 1990s, Ron Paul actually warned us several times that, if the U.S. government continued with those aggressions against people on foreign lands, there could very well be a terrorist attack within the U.S.

But there are a lot of people now in America who actually think it’s absurd to bring up the actions of our own government which preceded 9/11. They think it’s absurd for someone to suggest we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. government foreign policy. “How dare you suggest that our government shouldn’t “do unto others what we would not want others to do unto us”!

That denial of human rights in others, the same inalienable rights that one claims for oneself, is incredibly selfish and shows how self-centered and anti-social the philosophy of “Exceptionalism” really is.

So the American Exceptionalists believe in  our government’s right to invade and occupy other countries, but that the people in those countries do not have the same kind of right to self-defense that we Americans have, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

For example, while many of the conservatives, the “moral values” crowd and self-proclaimed “patriotic Americans” now fear the Left and the feds’ gun control agenda because “patriots” believe in the 2^nd Amendment, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, they nevertheless supported U.S. troops confiscating arms from innocent civilians in Iraq, making Iraqis totally defenseless.

Meanwhile, the obsessive bureaucrats and their flunkies fail to see the big picture – they fail to understand the causes and effects regarding terrorism.

And so Bradley Manning has been referred to by ignoramuses as a “traitor,” because he released so-called classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks. As I mentioned in my previous article, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers.

But the real traitors here are our central planners who have been intentionally starting wars and provoking foreigners to justify the always-expanding, tax-eating central planning and military bureaucracy.

The treasonous central planners had a duty to “protect the peace,” to keep Americans safe and secure from foreign aggression. But what they have been doing – starting wars and provoking foreigners – has made Americans less safe and less secure.

The central planners are derelicts of duty who have not been “promoting the general welfare” or well-being of America and instead have diminished it.

But the Exceptionalists still don’t see it that way. The zombies continue to stare at their iPhones and their TVs, and let the propagandists hypnotize them.

And then we have a well-meaning filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, but the real rulers still seem to be the ignorant Sens. Graham and McCain, and the dangerous Obama and John Brennan, to our detriment.

The War Propaganda Continues

March 9, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

Some people believe that Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster to delay the vote to confirm the barbaric John Brennan as CIA Director was effective. However, there are skeptics, and I am one of them. We still seem to be ruled by government officials who are clueless about how to maintain a civilized society and are clueless about human rights.

And Americans seem to depend on a mainstream media for information but are getting government propaganda instead.

For instance, during a PBS discussion about Sen. Paul’s filibuster and the drone program controversy, New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane incorrectly asserted that U.S. officials “have in one case, in September of 2011, killed one American overseas. And that was Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined the al-Qaida branch in Yemen and was actively plotting terrorism against the United States.”

Now, either Shane really believes what he is saying – in which case he is not a very good reporter – or he knows these items of information are not true and is merely “parroting the party line,” as the old saying goes.

First, U.S. government drones bombed and murdered at least three Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was not even accused of any crimes or of terrorism.

And secondly, Shane also stated – falsely – that Anwar al-Awlaki was “actively plotting terrorism against the United States.” The Obama Administration never presented any evidence against al-Awlaki. And, as analysts have demonstrated, any evidence against al-Awlaki that may have existed was weak and its use in an actual trial probably couldn’t have convicted him.

This case was very similar to the Osama bin Laden case, in which neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations had any evidence to prove bin Laden’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. As George W. Bush stated regarding the Taliban’s requiring the Bush Administration to present evidence against bin Laden, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

Obama’s technique was similar, in that his refusal to present evidence against al-Awlaki was based on secrecy, an important part of totalitarian regimes. But “We know he’s guilty, and we don’t have to prove it to you” is basically what the Obama Regime implied in its refusal to disclose its alleged evidence.

The main problem that the U.S. government had with Anwar al-Awlaki, however, was with his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy which he included in his religious sermons, speech entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in this very important article on this subject, the First Amendment protects the advocating of violence as a means of defending oneself against violent and tyrannical governments. Greenwald pointed to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, its reversal of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which separated the difference between forms of speech which “‘advocate or teach the duty, necessity, or propriety’ of violence ‘as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform’” and forms of speech which are an “incitement to imminent lawless action.”

You see, from the point of view of the millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and other foreigners who have been the victims of the U.S. government’s wanton socialist violence and destruction not just since 9/11 but especially since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991, they actually view the U.S. government as a tyrannical foreign invader and occupier (which it has been).

But especially since 9/11 many in the mainstream news media have been obediently and subserviently repeating what government bureaucrats and their spokesflunkies have been dictating to them, rather than actually engaging in real investigating or research. They certainly do not seem to have been questioning the assertions of government officials, that’s for sure.

And we also have some of the most ignorant and short-sighted congressmen and senators in Washington as well. In response to Sen. Paul’s example of Vietnam and the possibility of drone murdering Jane Fonda in her cavorting with the North Vietnamese in Hanoi, rather than arresting her and charging and trying her for treason, Sen. John McCain replied, “To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous.” Yet, that is exactly what Obama did to Anwar al-Awlaki and why he did it.

Sadly, most of the American people do not know these important facts, as the mainstream news media seem to have been merely copying and pasting the latest White House press releases, and passing them off as “news,” especially since 9/11.

In fact, part of our problem, and which is why some true patriots are concerned for Americans’ future as a free society and not just another banana republic dictatorship, is that we have actual powerful U.S. senators who do not understand the uniquely American ideas of due process and presumption of innocence.

In my article, Senators Who Love the Government But Hate America, I referred to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s outburst, “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer.” And my reply was: Who will determine whether or not one has “betrayed” one’s country?

Graham and others seem to want the President or military generals to make such a determination. But those who actually know their history know how empowering the President to be judge, jury and executioner ends up. (Not good.)

However, it seems to me that these rulers are more concerned with whether someone has betrayed the government, not the country.

In betrayal of certain bureaucrats’ policies, not in betrayal of their fellow people. Graham even suggested that political speech could be curtailed during times of “war.”

And as more information has come out about Army Private Bradley Manning’s release of overly-classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, and why he would do that, we have seen that Manning’s motivations were out of a duty not to government bureaucrats but out of a duty to the American people. (We cannot say the same about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however.)

Manning saw that crimes were being committed against foreign people, and in America’s name, and he believed that the American people had a right to know about them.

So there are now many examples of government censorship of political speech since 9/11. But these senators who want to label someone as an “enemy combatant” merely for questioning or criticizing short-sighted, counter-productive and dangerous government policies, such as the “war on terror” itself and its legitimacy, are really acting to protect the government and its minions.

And thanks to the propagandists, the Orwellian story of 9/11 suggests that these conflicts all began on 9/11. To this day, the propagandists still refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. government’s disastrous foreign interventions, and especially its 1991 first war of aggression on Iraq and subsequent sanctions were major provocations against the people of that region of the world. But, true to their diehard socialist agenda, the rulers went ahead after 9/11 to increase the interventions, wars, and crimes of renditions, indefinite detentions of innocents, tortures and murders of foreigners.

But all this war stuff is a crock, as I mentioned here. War is really an artificial concept used by collectivists, statists, racists and power-grabbers to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it. This is the whole point of American Exceptionalism, by the way.

Perhaps some of the people will finally see the illegitimacy of these wars when the Washington regime begins to target the American people more directly (after disarming them and making them totally defenseless, of course), which is where we seem to be heading, as I noted in my 2010 article, Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon.

And, as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger pointed out recently, the early Americans and Revolutionaries also warned us over 200 years ago against an armed federal government run amok.

I think our government has run amok.

How the State Has Ravaged Our Inalienable Rights

March 6, 2013

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com (Link to Article)

It is unfortunate that the American people have allowed their country to degrade so deeply into a vast state of decadence and turmoil, coinciding with their century-long growth of government intrusions and criminality.

As Albert Jay Nock, Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner have all observed, the State is itself an inherently criminal organization. The early Americans recognized that all human beings have inalienable rights, but their maintaining a centralized State ran contrary to their adherence to the principles of liberty.

Sadly, the implementation of compulsory government has effected in the virtual cancellation of what were our inalienable rights.

Now, there are some people, some theorists, who do not believe that human beings have “natural rights,” or inherent, inalienable rights, but I believe that we do.

The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That is, each individual has a natural, inalienable right to self-ownership, to make use of one’s own life, person, labor, contracts and property as one sees fit, as long as one does not interfere with any other individual’s same right. (For those who think there’s a difference between inalienable and unalienable, please see this.)

But the problem is that statists, communitarians, collectivists, political conservatives and progressives, and even some libertarians, don’t believe that rights are inalienable. Whether they would ever state it directly or not, they believe that the community in which one lives has collective ownership rights over each individual and one’s life, labor and property, and that the community has the right to make use of each individual as the community sees fit.

That’s really it, this conflict between the power of the group versus the inalienable, natural rights of the individual. And it really is an “either-or” situation. There is no “the individual has some inalienable rights to one’s life and liberty, but it’s up to the others to decide” kind of stuff. Because once you share in ownership of your life, your labor, your contracts and your property with the rest of the group, you have really forfeited any rights of self-ownership and liberty, mainly because the rest of the community outnumbers you.

So, those natural rights which are inalienable are absolute rights. You as an individual have an absolute, exclusive right to own your life, person, honestly-acquired property, and have an absolute right to be free from aggression being initiated against you by others or the threat of such aggression.

Not that I’m a big fan of the U.S. Constitution, but its Fourth Amendment does state that the people have a right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” But it also goes on by stating that such a right is “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That word “unreasonable” gives the State and its agents the power to subjectively decide what is or is not unreasonable.

So given that the State’s very existence is based not on the voluntarily-agreed upon consent by all those over whom the State rules, but by compulsory fiat rule without alternative choices or self-governance allowed, therefore entrusting the State’s agents with deciding the reasonableness of intrusions inherently makes the people less secure. Ultimately, the scheme of the State’s monopolizing of various functions becomes a criminal enterprise, as I observed recently.

For example, when the State orders the people to participate in and fund the State’s own government-run schemes, such as Social Security, Medicare and the new Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, then those are also illegitimate compulsory schemes.

The reason those State-imposed schemes are illegitimate is because each individual in society has an inherent, inalienable right to self-ownership, a right to control one’s own personal matters, and a right to establish contracts with others, without any third-party intrusions.

Therefore, government bureaucrats who order an individual to participate in any government-run scheme – or to purchase any product or service privately, for that matter – are criminally violating that individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and one’s pursuit of happiness, as well as the individual’s right to be secure in one’s person, property and effects.

And government bureaucrats who demand that an individual report on one’s private matters, such as employment or employee details, pay schedules, one’s income or private assets – information which most people would not voluntarily provide to one’s neighbors, because it’s none of their damn business – then such bureaucrats are criminally trespassing into the private lives of individuals.

Regarding the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”) specifically, the relationship and association between the doctor and patient is a private relationship, and it’s none of the government’s business. Some people consider the doctor and patient as provider and consumer, but Ayn Rand called them traders.

The contract between the two traders and the terms of the contract are between them. Such a contract does not include anyone else, unless the doctor and patient both agree to have some third-party involvement. And the contract between an individual and an insurer is also no one else’s business.

So for third parties to forcibly intrude themselves into these private contracts and associations really is an act of aggression.

However, the freedom of choice and free enterprise of the original America as the early Americans envisioned is one that not only discourages but forbids those acts of aggression, including or especially committed by the State. Those acts of aggression are crimes, literally.

Compulsory Social Security, Medicare, Affordable Care Act et al. all imply that the government bureaucrats – the Rulers – own your life and have a right to order you into some scheme that your own commonsense noggin tells you is not good for you and that limits your freedom.

And when any third party intruder steps in between you and others with whom you have established voluntary contracts, or orders you to participate in some scheme, that third party is automatically seizing ownership of your life and labor, and in a criminal way, in my opinion.

And that is exactly what Supreme Court Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts has rubber-stamped in his Orwellian approving of the Obama health insurance mandate, and cynically and almost facetiously calling it a “tax.”

America has now become a State-controlled prison in which petty non-productive bureaucrats have ownership rights of the rest of the population, unfortunately.

Also, these healthcare and retirement policies which require reporting one’s private matters to government bureaucrats are intrusions no different from police searches of one’s home.

And like these government healthcare and retirement intrusions, laws regarding regulation of property or businesses are also before-the-fact, presumption-of-guilt laws and policies.

In fact, the Dodd-Frank law is presumption-of-guilt writ large. (Or presumption-of-guilt on stilts, as Walter Block might say.)

The business or property owner must report private information to Mr. Bureaucrat that is none of his business, especially without any reason for Mr. Bureaucrat to suspect someone of anything. This violates the individual’s right to be secure and one’s right to presumption of innocence, and becomes an act of aggression or coercion on Bureaucrat’s part. Here, Mr. Bureaucrat is the criminal, not the business or property owner.

A more recent example of the government’s criminally eviscerating one’s right to be secure was the Supreme Bureaucrats’ dismissing a lawsuit by Amnesty International against the feds’ Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA warrantless eavesdropping policy.

The illegal and unconstitutional policy was supported by the five Republican appointees, including the aforementioned turncoat Roberts.

As Glenn Greenwald noted, this is a policy that is held in secret, and therefore there are no checks on these government powers.

The Bush and Obama administrations have maintained that the secrecy is necessary to thwart terrorism. (Then why does their FBI intentionally create terrorists? But I digress.)

But in reality, such illegally intrusive kinds of powers have been used by governments throughout history – including the U.S. government – against their own people, mainly to suppress political dissent and silence critics and victims of government tyrants.

But don’t these Republican Supreme defenders of government intrusions know their history? Apparently not.

So, the Supremes seemed to wave their hands as if to shoo away an annoying pest, in their further strengthening the power of the State’s rulers and their minions to use such criminal intrusions as a means to crush dissent.

Besides the government FISA snooping, drones are also being employed to engage in domestic spying and tracking of people, and the Rulers now want to track innocent, law-abiding gun owners.

Most people who understand history know that the real reason for government bureaucrats to track gun owners is to inevitably confiscate the guns from the civilian population. Given that Leviathan is now totally out of control, that is what the Rulers will do. And the government bureaucrats will use the reporting requirements of the Affordable Care Act to aid and abet their suppression of dissent, and in their crimes against the people. How can I say that? We’re talking about government bureaucrats, that’s how I can say that. The American Revolutionaries really did understand the true nature of the State, as did Rothbard, Nock and Spooner. Alas, most modern Americans do not.

But, as discussed above, each individual has an inalienable right to one’s life and liberty, and the right to be secure in one’s person, home and effects, and the right to protect oneself from intruders, regardless who the intruders are or what their occupation is or whom they work for. Just as the people have the inalienable right to be free of government-controlled healthcare or retirement schemes being shoved down their throats, so too do the people have the right to resist tyranny.

Is there any hope for us at this late stage of the game?

Government Whistleblower Bradley Manning, and the Press

Army Private Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to illegally passing overly-classified documents and videos on to WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald noted here, none of the released information had compromised in any way the security of Americans, or the safety of U.S. troops stationed overseas. In addition to his guilty pleas, he also pleaded not guilty to charges that he was aiding and abetting the enemy.

As told in this article, the military intentionally over-classifies documents, or classifies documents which shouldn’t be classified, as a means to discourage, intimidate, and/or punish prospective government whistleblowers. In other words, the military and various U.S. diplomatic agents know that much of what they do is illicit, dishonest or criminal, and they just don’t want the American people to know what they are doing. It has nothing to do with preventing foreigners or ‘enemies” from knowing what our military is up to — it is only to prevent the government hooligans’ own fellow Americans from knowing the truth.

Here are three very informative articles by Glenn Greenwald, from 2010 and 2011, on how Manning was betrayed by an informant, and also of Wired‘s own involvement in the scheme of withholding important information whose disclosure could have changed the initial witch hunt against Manning and the general opinion of Americans (and the way the military handled Manning’s initial year-long-plus imprisonment without charges, solitary confinement, and torture), had people had a clearer picture of what Manning’s motivations were:

http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/

http://www.salon.com/2010/12/27/wired_5/

http://www.salon.com/2011/07/14/wired_7/

So Bradley Manning is a government whistleblower, and in his hour-long statement to the court, he restated exactly what his intentions were, as he told the un-American informant who turned him in. Manning was guided by a moral conscience, something which our “leaders” lack, and by a sense of duty not particularly to his military superiors, but a sense of duty to the American people. We cannot say the same for George W. Bush or Barack Obama, however. Manning knew that crimes were being committed, especially crimes against innocent foreigners, and he saw a lot of incompetence and corruption as well, and he knew that those actions were against America’s own interests.

If it weren’t for independent journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and others, we really wouldn’t know anything about what our criminal government is up to.

But times have changed, though, and today’s journalists are generally much more entrenched with the State, much more loyal to the bureaucrats and apparatchiks of the U.S. government than they are to the truth, and to the true purpose of a free Press.

For example, in the early 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg was a government whistleblower when he gave so-called top secret documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times, the Washington Post and several other newspapers. Ellsberg was motivated by disillusionment with the Vietnam War, and his emotional reaction to the impending imprisonment of a draft resister. The Pentagon Papers revealed how President Lyndon Johnson and military leaders were lying to the American people about the war, and that many in charge actually believed that the war probably could not be won, but they continued with it anyway. Besides the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were killed, the Vietnam War also caused the deaths of over 58,000 Americans.

So, to many people, Daniel Ellsberg is a hero of the truth with a moral conscience. But because of how the mainstream Press these days act as government stenographers and bureaucrat suck-ups, most amongst the American people do not know that Bradley Manning is another Ellsberg, and NOT what government warmongers have been misleading people to believe.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, the Washington Post apparently also had the same chat logs that Wired had, but only selectively quoted from them while withholding key parts as well. Greenwald wrote of his correspondence with a Post reporter about that, and how in the reply the Post‘s Director of Communications sounded “like a CIA spokesperson trained by Dick Cheney.”

In another example of the news media’s subservience to the government, Greenwald had written about the New York Times‘s obedience to the Obama Administration’s request in withholding information about a CIA operative who was accused of killing two Pakistanis, because the Obama Administration wanted the CIA operative to have “diplomatic immunity.”

And, more recently, Greenwald also wrote about the communications between a New York Times national security correspondent and the CIA in “clearing” a column by Times columnist Maureen Dowd on the Obama Administration’s feeding Hollywood producers information on the Bin Laden raid to enhance Obama’s reelection chances.

Van Cliburn Has Died

Concert pianist Van Cliburn has died at age 78. He was best known for winning first prize in the very first Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia, in 1958. That was during the Cold War. The Russians were probably reluctant to award first prize to an American, but Cliburn could not possibly have been outmatched. Had he not been awarded the first prize, the whole thing would have been a joke, and the Russians would have been a further laughing stock than they already were.

But I find it revealing that neither the New York Times obituary nor the Associated Press obituary mentioned that Cliburn was a deeply religious Christian Baptist, who prayed before each concert. A search on the Internet finds maybe just one outlet, the Associated Baptist Press, that mentions Cliburn’s deep faith. Even his Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention it. That was a very important aspect of who Van Cliburn was as an individual, and an obituary should mention it.

So, are those left-leaning, pro-State Press organs intentionally trying to confirm what many conservatives constantly have been accusing them of, namely attempting to throw Christianity into the dustbin of history? I’m just asking, not particularly accusing, mind you.

And for me personally, I am not Christian, I’m Jewish. But I do happen to identify more as a cultural and social conservative. I happen to be somewhat “anti-authoritarian” (as if you couldn’t tell by now), that’s why I “hate the State,” and I’m also not thrilled with the authoritarianism we hear in those Christian-based religions, either.

That said, I still believe in telling the whole story. As Larry Glick would always say, “The Story Behind the Story,” and so forth. You would think that reporters for the NYT would include all the important facts of who Van Cliburn was. They sure didn’t leave out the fact that he was homosexual, that’s for sure (“not that there’s anything wrong with that,” etc. etc.) — those aspects of life and society are really important to the elitists, the “alternative lifestyle” pushers on the left, the cultural debauchers of the mainstream media and so forth.

But long ago, during school I would listen to my parents’ RCA Victor LP records of Van Cliburn’s 1958 recordings of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3. The Tchaikovsky recording sold a million copies in its first year.

Cliburn was going to appear in Hartford in March of 1972, and I was going to see that concert, but I had some kind of illness and couldn’t go. Oh, well. So, I had never seen Cliburn in person. (But during the 1980s, I did see Horacio Gutierrez several times.)

I don’t have Cliburn’s aforementioned two famous recordings, but I see that the original vinyl LP of the Tchaikovsky and the original vinyl LP of the Rachmaninoff are available, used, according to Amazon.com. But there are CDs available of re-releases of both the Rachmaninoff and the Tchaikovsky performances, available at Amazon.

One thing that one of the obituaries mentioned was that Van Cliburn was a “night owl,” and practiced through the night, like into 4 or 5 AM. He got up at 1 or 2 PM. Now, in my opinion, that’s not healthy. But there are some people who have to do that because of their jobs, but, apparently Cliburn didn’t have to do that. Whatever.