The First 100 Days of President Donald Trump (Doh!)

So how is Donald Trump doing after 100 days as President? Well, like most politicians, Trump wants to spend other people’s money like a drunken sailor. He loves government entitlements, won’t touch Social Security, wants to expand Medicare or Medicaid, ultimately wants Universal Health Care, still wants to build a Berlin Wall on the border and impose more central planning controls on immigrants, he gives executive orders including ordering U.S. employers to only hire Americans, wants to expand military spending, and is now imposing what are supposedly big tax cuts and will increase the deficit and the national debt even more to cover the tax cuts because he won’t cut any spending or eliminate any programs.

In contrast, Ron Paul had a great response to Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” proposal in 2012, with Herman Cain suggesting a 9% flat tax on individuals, 9% flat tax on businesses, and 9% consumption tax, with Ron Paul suggesting “0-0-0!” to that.

Back to the present, Former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman severely criticizes Trump’s tax proposal, with Stockman saying he would make dramatic cuts, eliminate whole programs including ObamaCare and send a lot of “Washington” back to the states. In contrast, Trump is a central planner on steroids, loves Big Government and wants to expand the size and power of the federal government, like it’s a toy for him to play with.

Trump pushed the Ryan Plan to “replace” ObamaCare a few weeks ago, which didn’t even make it to a vote. But now, the sell-outs in Congress are pushing a new socialist Keep-ObamaCare-In-Place plan. But they’re moving some things around, and supposedly unshackling medical patients and insurers in some ways. Nevertheless, the new changes will still cause further chaos, just like ObamaCare, because the new plan is still a central-planning bureaucracy, and that is what central-planning bureaucracies do. But, it will make a lot of lawyers even more rich. And that’s always good, right?

Speaking of the sell-outs in Congress, Hugh Hewitt on the radio refers contemptuously to the House Freedom Caucus as the “Area 51 Caucus,” because Hewitt believes in socialism and, like most “conservatives,” can’t let go of it. He thinks they’re nutcases. In fact, just a few days ago, I think it was Thursday, Hewitt was interviewing the Chairman of the FCC (an agency which shouldn’t even exist!), and Hewitt brought up his problem with Mexican radio stations interfering with his ability to get California or Texas radio stations in clearly, I can’t remember which state now. But he wants the FCC to do something about that. Yes, run to the armed power of government and its Communications Commissars to restrict others to benefit yourself. The real, free-market solution to that problem is under the control of the radio-listening consumer: get a better radio, or tune in to your desired stations via the Internet. Duh. But I digress.

Anyway, I hope the House Freedom Caucus sticks to their guns on these issues of freedom, free markets and contract rights, as they did with the previous Ryan Plan, or else we might have to refer to them as the “House Freedom Carcass.”

And I think it’s somewhat too soon to know if Trump’s pick of Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Supreme Court is a good one. However, Gorsuch has already voted to rubber-stamp the death penalty. Oh, well. So much for that guy. I think many conservatives support the government death penalty because they don’t know about the innocents who have been put to death by the State (so much for “moral values”), the corrupt prosecutors with their prosecution quotas, and so on.

On other domestic issues, Herr Trump has expanded the police state, especially with his gestapo-like escalation of the drug war, his crackdown on immigrants, and his ultra-authoritarian attorney general and ignorant CIA director, all of whom possess an utter lack of understanding of “unalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness,” due process, freedom of speech, and the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

And what in international relations has Donald Trump been up to in the first 100 days? He bombed Syria, getting its leader Assad’s airbase (which was up in operation again within 24 hours after the bombing), even though there was no evidence (there still isn’t) to back up Trump’s claim that Assad attacked civilians with chemical weapons. Such Trump actions could be seen as helping ISIS because Assad had supposedly been winning against ISIS in Syria.

And Trump ordered a “Mother of All Bombs” dropped on Afghanistan, supposedly getting over 90 ISIS militants. However, word is that the bomb didn’t get any militants. Oh, well.

But, since Trump’s inauguration he has been killing innocent civilians in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere with his drone strikes that he has authorized since Day One. (See news stories: U.S. airstrike kills family of eight, U.S. drone strike kills three civilians and four “suspects,”  from antiwar.com, and Trump has killed beautiful babies in four countries by Chris Ernesto.)

I heard Michael Medved this week interview Prof. Allan Lichtman on Lichtman’s book, The Case for Impeachment (of Donald Trump). I didn’t hear the entire interview or read the book, but I wonder if Lichtman mentioned the war crimes case against Trump (and Obama, Bush, Clinton, and especially the elder Bush). I doubt it, but that would be the true, legitimate case to impeach Trump. (A lot of people believe in the idea that “collateral damage” is acceptable and not “murder,” because they have been long-conditioned to rationalize such inhumanity and criminality.)

On the North Korea issue going on right now, I agree with Sheldon Richman. Instead of stepping up aggressions in that region, Trump should invite Kim Jung-Un to the White House and negotiate something with him. After all, isn’t Trump the expert on the “art of the deal”? And I agree with Jacob Hornberger, U.S. troops getting out of South Korea will solve a lot of problems and prevent further risks.

So my conclusion is that Donald Trump is enthusiastically taking Bush and Obama’s further ruination of America onward. Not a good first 100 days, in my view.

The Confusion (Or Cognitive Dissonance) of “Left” and “Right”

Regarding “left vs. right,” I have viewed leftism as part of collectivism. In my view, the nationalists who want central planning controls over immigration, for instance, as well as over trade, labor and employment, are leftists. The actual “right” consists of those such as myself who favor individualism, private property and contract rights, free markets and freedom of association. The collectivists do not get those concepts. They do not get the ideas of self-ownership and “unalienable rights.”

The election in France between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron is an interesting comparison to 2016 Trump vs. Clinton. We have an anti-immigration nationalist Le Pen and a “centrist” pro-immigration Macron. In some ways that election is similar to the U.S. election between the anti-immigration, nationalist (and alleged anti-interventionist) Donald Trump and pro-immigration warmonger Hillary Clinton. But in France the genders seem to be reversed.

In the immigration issue, I hear these nationalists, liberal and conservative, saying things like “immigrants are stealing Americans’ jobs.” How absurd. Americans don’t own the jobs that could be “stolen” from them. But it is the business owners who “own” the jobs they provide to people. The jobs are certainly not owned by the community, and certainly not by the government.

But also, what are you saying, that Americans, based on their nationality or their citizenship, are entitled to jobs? Are you saying that employers must be required to hire only Americans (yes, Trump has been saying that), and not foreigners?

So it’s a kind of affirmative action for Americans, whether an American is as qualified for a particular job as a foreign applicant or not. So collectivist conservatives who are anti-immigration are for government-imposed protectionist entitlements, a hire-Americans-only affirmative action program. They would never admit to that, however.

Regarding foreign policy, in the media and politics warmongers are commonly associated with being “right-wingers,” while peaceniks are “left-wingers.” But all that is a myth, as Tom Woods pointed out.

Was Lyndon Johnson, who was an exploitative Medicare/Medicaid “Great Society” socialist but getting into Vietnam and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of young Americans and a million or more civilians overseas, a “right-winger”? Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were warmongers, but they were socialists, thus leftists, not rightists. I see warmongering as part of collectivism and socialism. Economically, George W. Bush imposed the largest redistribution-of-wealth scheme on Americans, worse than Johnson’s Great Society, Bush’s Medicare Part D prescription drug program.

So, socialists destroy, while capitalists create and build. And no, Donald Trump is not totally a “builder,” being of the anti-capitalistic mentality as we’ve seen in his penchant for socialism.

Governments’ bureaucrats and militaries bomb and destroy other communities, towns and cities, homes and businesses, and murder innocents. (See Death by Government.) But do businessmen and capitalists bomb and destroy, murder and maim innocents? I know, the crony capitalists such as those at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, the “Merchants of Death,” are involved with all that. But if their workers were to go over to foreign lands without the “authority” of government and intentionally drop bombs and kill innocents (as government militaries do), they’d probably get in trouble, no?

And the politicians in France do not seem very much different than those in the U.S., in their economic ignorance, their nationalism vs. individualism, and their warmongering. For instance, despite his earlier calls for diplomacy, Emmanuel Macron is nevertheless a warmonger. After the chemical attack on civilians in Syria that was without evidence blamed on Syria’s Assad, Macron stated that “international intervention is needed … My preference is that there should be an intervention under the auspices of the United Nations. A military intervention.”

I guess Donald Trump took his advice. During the 2016 U.S. campaign, Trump was the non-interventionist (but now warmonger), while Hillary Clinton has been the warmonger since her days as Secretary of State (and before). But Hillary is known as a “leftist.”

Meanwhile, the “right-winger” Marine Le Pen disapproved of Trump’s subsequent bombing of the Syrian airbase (that Trump ordered despite the non-existence of evidence linking Assad to the chemical attack).

Like Donald Trump, Macron loves the national security state, and doesn’t understand due process. For instance, Macron stated that government authorities “must have access to (encrypted) content exchanged between terrorists on social media and instant messaging.” Obviously, he’s referring to people the government or police are accusing of terrorism, but, like in the U.S., officials and media commonly refer to suspects as “terrorists,” not “alleged terrorists.” Like in the U.S., presumption of innocence and due process escape the minds of professional government bureaucrats.

And as I have written repeatedly here, what bureaucrats really have in mind is going after those who criticize their regime, the dissenters. And like the leftist college snowflakes, Donald Trump also doesn’t appreciate freedom of speech.

The label of Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump as “far-right,” because they are closed-border, anti-free trade-protectionist nationalists, is a misnomer. Marine Le Pen wants out of NATO, and criticized The Donald’s change of heart with NATO, and on his renewal of U.S. government’s “policing the world.” I don’t see wanting to get out of NATO as “far-right,” just commonsensical.

But at the same time, Emmanuel Macron says he favors more of a “business-friendly” environment (traditionally a pro-business “right-winger”) while maintaining the entitlements of the “social safety net” (typically a redistribution-of-wealth “leftist”), just like Donald Trump. i.e. cognitive dissonance when it comes to economic issues.

On social issues, is Donald Trump a “right-winger”? He supports gay marriage, affirmative action and is fine with transgender bathroom-intrusions. When it comes to private property rights, he loves eminent domain, which is government theft of private property, and in fact thinks that eminent domain is a “wonderful thing.” Collectivists and socialists tend to not appreciate private property rights (or private property, period).

And Trump has for many years, including throughout the 2016 campaign, advocated universal health care, single payer, public option, or nationalized health care or whatever you want to call it. So, he’s a “leftist.”

But what about building a big Berlin Wall on the Mexican border, isn’t that a “right-winger”? And imposing governmental restrictions and controls on immigrants, on laborers and on businessmen who must get the government’s permission for whom to hire or not to hire? That’s a “right-winger”? Nope. Leftists and socialists build government walls and impose intrusions into private property and contracts, including employment contracts.

So I just wanted to reiterate that real free-market capitalists include a businessman who has the sole authority to determine who works for him, without having to get a bureaucrat’s permission, regardless of where the worker comes from. The employer knows best which workers are most qualified and who would best serve the customers or clients, those dreaded consumers for which leftists and control freaks have had a lot of contempt throughout the ages. It is those on the real “right” who favor private property and contract rights and who support genuine free-market capitalism.

Government Traitors and Criminals, and Their News Media Toadies

CBS News reporter Jeff Pegues began this CBS News article this way:

WASHINGTON — CBS News has learned that a manhunt is underway for a traitor inside the Central Intelligence Agency.

A “traitor”? By “traitor,” do you mean someone who has shown disloyalty to the CIA from within the CIA? Or do you mean someone in the CIA who has been acting against Americans, such as by implementing some sort of hack or malware on the people’s computers or phones? We’re talking about American citizens as well as foreigners here. And then Pegues wrote:

The CIA and FBI are conducting a joint investigation into one of the worst security breaches in CIA history, which exposed thousands of top-secret documents that described CIA tools used to penetrate smartphones, smart televisions and computer systems.

And that includes the phones, televisions and computers of Americans, innocent Americans who are not suspects. So in other words, this CBS reporter Jeff Pegues already begins the article by referring to the whistleblower(s) as “traitors,” those who released the information of CIA sabotage and criminal encryption-intrusions, not the CIA criminals themselves as “traitors” who are targeting innocents.

Unfortunately, many people are authoritarians, and have a long-instilled loyalty to the government. They can be nationalists, conservatives, liberals and progressives.

And, being obedient authoritarians, they do not seem to distinguish between a “whistleblower” (someone who exposes and reveals immoral corruption or criminality within an organization, particularly government), and a “traitor,” someone who swears an oath to protect the liberty of the people yet betrays the people by acting criminally against them.

And this is just one individual example of how most of the news media are embedded with the government, how many in the media are obedient minions to government power-grabbers and usurpers, and who are conditioned to assume that government (including the CIA) is good and noble, and if they are committing criminal intrusions into innocent non-suspects’ devices and compromising innocent people’s security, that’s okay, because they’re the government.

With that CIA “security breach,” which was really a release of documents which detailed crimes committed by CIA, WikiLeaks also revealed that CIA has a program enabling them to hack computers, etc., and, to hide evidence of their guilt, leave the “fingerprints” of innocent others and so the guilty ones themselves could not be traced. Now that’s a criminal, not a “security agent,” in my view.

And it was already reported in 2013 that the NSA and FBI along with the CIA have all been intercepting shipments of new computers for the purpose of  installing malware and listening mechanisms to spy on and wreak havoc in the lives of others. Some of the stuff that had been revealed by Edward Snowden is extremely unbelievable.

Wendy McElroy gives more details on the latest CIA criminal intrusions, as well as providing some tips on how you can protect your devices from the government criminals.

But just how extensively did CBS News report on the Snowden revelations at the time, besides giving them a 30-second mention? Did the news organization report on how U.S. and British government spies target and infiltrate Xbox Live and other games to recruit “informants” and otherwise manipulate people through the Internet, as revealed by Edward Snowden? (I’m sure those al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists spend a lot of time sitting around playing those stupid games. Or maybe they do, who knows?)

And has CBS News reported on GCHQ, the British equivalent of NSA, with a scheme of covertly infiltrating the Internet to “manipulate, deceive, and destroy reputations,” also revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden? According to an honest, real journalist, Glenn Greenwald,

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

Greenwald shows one of the tactics against an individual as labeled, “Discredit a Target“:

*Set up a honey-trap

*Change their photos on social networking sites

*Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims

*Email/text their colleagues, neighbors, friends, etc.

And “Discredit a company“:

*Leak confidential information to companies / the press via blogs etc

*Post negative information on appropriate forums

*Stop deals / ruin business relationships

Hmm. Sounds like Darrin Stephens’s mother-in-law. (Don’t these people have anything better to do?)

This is called “information ops (influence or disruption)” as Greenwald quoted directly from the GCHQ documents. I guess that’s sort of like the incompetent, self-interested, war-losing, war-mongering generals who use psy-ops on U.S. senators to manipulate their emotions and decisions, and their votes in the senate.

Greenwald makes it clear that these slimy tactics are NOT for “national security” purposes:

Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.

The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes

As I have been saying for years now, this “national security” agenda, phony and incompetent “war on terror” pretense is a cover for the damn U.S. government (and other state and local “law enforcement” and bureaucratic rackets) to crack down on political dissent, on criticism of government power-grabs and buffoonery.

It isn’t just the IRS targeting Tea Party conservatives or the FBI targeting anti-war activists. It’s the government in the broad sense persecuting those whose views go against TPTB (or the “deep state,” or the “Establishment,” or the “mentally ill” political class, or whatever you want to call those criminals).

And it isn’t just the college snowflakes and their “adult” cohorts who want to shut people up who dissent from the majority consensus of ignorance and claptrap. The DHS wants people to shut up and do what they’re told and not complain, the TSA continues to molest and rape innocents while 95% of prohibited items still get through at the airports, and Obama has given us essentially a “Ministry of Truth” to censor and stifle non-authority-approved opinion and expression.

Sadly, many in the news media are so indoctrinated with government-worship and obedience they just can’t see that their constant propagandizing on behalf of the government’s power grabs is going against their own Press freedoms.

They need to be de-programmed, that’s for sure.

An Older Post on Education

One of my older posts has been getting a lot of views, for some reason. So it seems interesting enough and I will repost that now.

Education Should Be Individual-Centered, Not Authoritarian

April 28, 2011

It seems that the high costs of higher education and the societal costs of socialized lower education are really taking America down, right along with the disasters that central planning in security, money and retirement have wrought. One problem is the authoritarian, top-down approach to education that has pervaded our society and culture, and the suppression of expressions, interests, and the will of society’s youths that goes with it.

This article by Stephan Kinsella, Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism, today on LewRockwell.com, is very informative on the approach in education of Maria Montessori, an approach based on the child’s individuality, and being a rejection of top-down, authority-driven educational ideologies.

Although this quote by Montessori is referring to the discouragement of placing a child in a crib, I like the quote, addressing the encouragement of independence:

When the child is given freedom to move about in a world of objects, he is naturally inclined to perform the task necessary for his development entirely on his own. Let us say it straight out – the child wants to do everything all by himself. But the adult does not understand this, and a blind struggle begins. The child likes neither to play idly, nor to waste time doing useless things, nor to flit about aimlessly, as most people believe. He seeks some very precise goal, and he seeks it with an instinctive directness of purpose. This instinct that impels him to do things by himself makes it incumbent upon us to prepare an environment that truly allows him to develop. When he has freed himself of the oppressive adults who act for him, the child also achieves his second goal, working positively toward his own independence. [Education and Peace, 55]

If one takes an honest look at the government schools, one will see how they have dumbed down generations of people, especially in the U.S., and how the government curriculum of authoritarian pedagogical instructions has caused mostly not just an unquestioning obedience to the State, but an intolerance of diversity, such as in the name of political correctness. Diverse ideas are not discussed, and in fact are not tolerated. This is not just a government-school phenomenon in America, but a cultural phenomenon whose effects have pervaded in the private schools as well.

Some of the problem in our culture is to do with the increasing influence of the television. When generations of Americans sit in front of that thing and passively and vegetatively stare at it for hours every day, then you should expect Americans’ average intelligence, as well as their motivation and creativity, to decline.

In the schools, instead of learning history, math and English, the kids are learning about “man-made global warming,” and how to put a condom on a cucumber. Of course, the kids are also learning how to text. All they want to do now is text their friends, and play with their Facebook page. This is what the centralization and bureaucratization of everything in society has caused, intellectual laziness and a destroyed motivation in many people, now.

But regarding the pedagogical authoritarianism and discouragement of alternative ideas in the classroom, Gary North writes online (Garynorth.com, Feb. 10, 2010) on “How a College Student Can Safely Create Pain for a Professor Who Is Misusing His Bully Pulpit,” for college students, but perhaps it can apply to high school students as well.

College now is a total fraud and a sham. While government (and private) schools are an indoctrination center for State-worship authoritarianism, so are colleges. However, college is worse, because of the institutionalized fraud of promising a post-high school “education” to be used as the path toward a “career.”

College is no longer a worthy investment for parents to make for their kids. It is a place for extended adolescence that discourages personal responsibility and independence, and it wastes parents money and puts students into long-term debt.

Unless your child has a desire to enter an extremely concentrated specialty such as medicine, I would advise that the high school graduate work full time, and take college courses perhaps toward a BA on a part-time basis, such as with an online university. Also, it is important that teenagers have part-time jobs during high school. They need to learn the “work ethic.” Teens also need to get experience seeing how businesses are run. Learning through observation is very important. I think that people get better educated through actual experience than through formal classroom teachings.

Another thing for parents to consider is encouraging and promoting the child’s natural interests, that the child or teenager expresses, as noted in the aforementioned Kinsella article. For example, if a high school student is fascinated with jewelry and other similar expressions of artwork, he or she can get a part-time job with a jeweler, and study techniques in jewelry crafts, and so on, and then such a part-time job can perhaps eventually turn into full time. Or, if the kid loves gardening and plants, he or she can get a part-time job with a florist or landscaping business, which can eventually turn into full time. That could then include the young adult’s taking courses in botany and getting a degree in Botany, perhaps in an online university.

There are also high school AP courses online.

I believe in maintaining traditions generally, but not when such traditions become self-destructive and wasteful of time and money. Americans need to reconsider traditional education methods, and Americans need to reconsider this tradition of sending kids off to college for four years. These ways of life are not helping people in the long run, and not helping the country.

Remembering Will Grigg (1963-2017)

A courageous and fearless defender and promoter of liberty has died. William Norman Grigg was an investigative reporter, researcher, writer and extremely eloquent and articulate speaker who was a powerful voice for the libertarian cause. He was only 54.

I must say, this news is really a shock, given how young he was.

Dan Sanchez has a moving tribute to Will Grigg. He writes:

Will’s main beat was stories about individual victims of the state: particularly Americans who have been unjustly imprisoned or wrongfully assaulted by government officers. His research for each article was exhaustive. From his home in Idaho, he traveled all around the northwest to get the story in person. He would get to know each subject personally, and seek face-to-face interviews with their powerful persecutors. His tireless work has saved several innocent lives from being slowly drained away in prison. He wrote so many pieces about Christopher Tapp, a man who has spent two decades in prison for a murder he did not commit, that the Libertarian Institute, where he was managing editor, will publish a whole book collecting them.

Each essay he wrote was a masterpiece of erudition and eloquence, precision and passion. He did not hurl invective. He simply described each official injustice exactly, stripped of all euphemism, as one would a crime committed by any “mundane” outside of the “punitive priesthood” and devoid of “blue privilege,” to use three of his many incisive coinages. He would illuminate the matter by drawing fascinating parallels from his expansive knowledge of history, literature, and popular culture: especially science fiction, which he loved. And he would slice to pieces the officious justifications of official victimizers with his razor-sharp reason. He was, bar none, the best writer in the liberty movement.

Some of the commenters to that post argue over libertarians’ advocacy of free markets in health care, implying that a government health care system could have saved Will. Of course, we don’t know the whole story on his untimely death, but I do recall Will mentioning in an article or two his unwillingness to accept government financial aid, despite his lack of wealth to handle his (and his wife’s) health issues and the caring for their six kids. I wish that Will was more flexible in that area.

Now, I am not being critical here, but, as a libertarian who truly believes that taxation is theft and that public treasuries funded by government theft are immoral, I nevertheless do not believe that one is acting immorally by receiving government aid, or that it is redistributed “stolen loot.” It is not that simple.

If I may digress for a moment, the U.S. treasury supposedly has trillions. But what is a “trillion”? Try counting to a trillion, or keeping a budget of a $trillion! The truth is, “trillion” doesn’t exist, in my view, especially when we’re talking about government-run money, i.e. counterfeit money. It is not real money, and this whole thing is a government-controlled charade, in which the government-money controllers live well while most of the rest of us don’t. So I don’t believe that, in the absence of outright fraud on the part of the recipient, that one would be receiving “stolen goods.” Only in the most theoretical sense, maybe. Although I do see a difference between Mr. Smith who receives Medicare payments but is not harming others (not even indirectly), and Raytheon receiving payments from the government in exchange for equipment that is then used by the government to murder innocent people which is mainly what the U.S. government has been doing, for decades.

Walter Block, a.k.a. “Mr. Libertarian,” has addressed this issue several times. In this article, Walter Block writes:

My take on this is that it is a positive virtue to relieve the government of its ill-gotten gains. Suppose Z steals an apple from Y and then X comes along and takes this fruit away from Z. Did X do anything wrong? Did he act incompatibly with the NAP? Is X no longer a libertarian? Of course not. Very much to the contrary, X did something entirely compatible with our philosophy. Certainly, all libertarian theories of private property rights, of punishment, would agree that of all people in the world, Z is the absolutely least deserving of this foodstuff. Now, it might be nice, it might be virtuous, for X to return the apple to Y…

…

It should not at all be an “ideal … not take a penny from the State,” at least not for the libertarian. No, no, no, a thousand times no, it is a virtue to take money away from this illicit organization, and way more than a penny too.

8. But wait! If you cooperate with the government in this manner, can you not be properly accused of “aiding and abetting” an evil institution? Well, yes, sort of. If you take money from the state, you are indeed giving it your imprimatur, or “sanction” as the Randians would say. And, indeed, you are helping the government in the ex ante sense, in that both parties always and ever, and necessarily so, benefit from any voluntary exchange, and, here, you are both agreeing: you to accept the funds, they to give them to you.

However, you are not promoting statism any more by taking their money than by carrying around their cash, patronizing their libraries or streets, etc. And, too, while you are of course benefitting them in the ex ante sense, you are certainly not doing so in the ex post sense. That is, they are giving you the money in the hope that by doing so, they can better promote statism than by the use of it in any other way. But you, by your actual actions, will not be doing any such thing.

And, again, I am not criticizing Will Grigg’s judgment, or his uncompromising moral or Christian beliefs. But could Will’s situation have been different had he been willing to accept some kind of government benefits, such as Medicare? As I noted above, as long as you don’t commit some kind of fraud as a way to receive the government funds, I don’t see that as parasitism if you are truly in need.

But back to Will Grigg.

I would like to say that my thinking was influenced by Will’s writing, but the truth is that he mirrored what I had already thought about the important issues of the day. Will recognized the Sovietization and stasification of Amerika, especially with the government police tyranny and the SJW crusades we are witnessing today.

Will had an innate sense of the criminality of the State, of the State’s parasitism and injustice. There is no worse a criminal racket than the State.

And Will wrote extensively on the abuses of the State’s corrupt “Child Protective Services,” the “Child Snatchers,” including their aiders and abetters such as stasi neighbors who make anonymous calls to government police because a child is allowed to play outside unsupervised, and so on. (I’ll never understand the conservatives who are with Will on his opposition to CPS intruders, yet such conservatives nevertheless worship government police, or anyone in uniformed authority, quite frankly.)

Will’s criticism of the government police was always justified, in his specific examples and descriptions. In this interview with Lew Rockwell, Will describes the hysterical panic of the L.A. government police in fear of one of their own, Christopher Dorner, who ended up receiving the “Waco” treatment by the gubmint.

But Will was objective. His recognition of the “good cops” was consistent with his sense of honesty, and he many times called out those among government enforcers who persecuted the good cops and who covered up for and even promoted the bad cops.

As I noted here, Will wrote about the slave-like relationship between us “mundanes” and the bureaucracy’s enforcement masters:

… all citizens are incipient slaves, subject to detention, abduction, and other abuse at the whim of uniformed slave-keepers.

A slave is somebody who cannot say “no” – as in, “No, I can’t talk to you right now because I’m on the clock and there are paying customers ahead of you.” This is because the slave doesn’t exercise self-ownership in any sense in the presence of a slave-keeper.

A slave-keeper is somebody who claims the legal right to take ownership of another person at his discretion, and use physical violence to compel submission.

. . .

The conceit that defines law enforcement is that all claims to self-ownership evaporate in the presence of a police officer.

Will also observed:

From its inception, American “law enforcement” has been in the business of harassing harmless people, demanding that they present their “papers,” and violently abducting them if they cannot give a proper “accounting” of themselves to those who presumed to own them. Victims of 18th century slave patrols might be mystified by the accoutrements of contemporary police, astounded by the technology they can employ in the service of official coercion, and horrified by their capacity for unprovoked violence, often of the lethal variety.

Will understood the State’s enslavement of the masses’ labor and theft of their wealth. Not just the bureaucrats and their enforcers as the perpetrators but also some of our fellow civilians who routinely make criminal use of the State’s power and control.

A thorough opponent of today’s “Social Justice Warriors” (SJW), Will Grigg always succeeded in pointing out the real motives of SJWs, their thirst to impose governmental powers over others of whose private lives the SJWs disapprove, and the SJWs’ use of the State as a means of exacting tributes from those whose thoughts and consciences don’t jibe with the SJWs. (See Will’s posts, “Of Wedding Cakes and Puritanical Collectivism,” and “Ending Property Rights: What ‘Add the Words’ Really Means,” for instance.)

Regarding his personal life, I remember some of his essays in which he gave personal accounts of his awful medical ordeals. Here is his very detailed description of his medical and hospital ordeal from August 2009, which was the first year that I became familiar with Will and his writing. (That essay brought back memories of my own experiences in the medical area.) In that 2009 essay, Will showed that he can still display quite a wit and have a sense of humor despite his medical difficulties.

Given all of this, I was stunned and troubled to discover during my routine morning ablutions that I had, ah, deposited something the color of borscht. (My apologies to anyone who has enjoyed that Slavic delicacy or any other porridge made from that noble and misunderstood tuber, the beet.)

…

Regardless of what else was to come, this much was certain: Sometime, in the near future, an endoscopic camera was going to take a long, scenic tour of my intestines sort of like the voyage of the Starship Enterprise through V’Ger, I suppose, although I doubt that V’Ger felt degraded and violated by the experience.

As I was admitted to the ER, I looked at William and we carried out a ritual that became familiar during my years on the speaking circuit.

“William, while I’m away….” I began.

“I know I’m Daddy ex officio,” replied my Firstborn with the same quiet confidence displayed by Mr. Spock as he assumed command in Captain Kirk’s absence.

Now, I don’t know if the cause of Will’s death was related to those particular medical issues described at that time. It’s possible. And while I didn’t know him personally, I recall emailing him once or twice. As some of you already know, I’m not particularly good with email. And I will certainly miss him and his articles and his staunch defense of human freedom.

Will left a wife and 6 kids. Here is the link to donate to the Grigg family fund at Gofundme.com, and the Donate link to his Paypal account is located on his blog, “Pro Libertate.”

If you were not familiar with Will Grigg, you can check out his blog. And here are his LewRockwell.Com articles and blog posts, his posts at the Free Thought Project, and articles at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Interview with Jeff Deist of the Mises Institute, on the police state:

Interview with Jeff Tucker of Liberty.me, on the government police:

CIA Honcho Pompeo Calls WikiLeaks a “Hostile Intelligence Service”

(Updated, with two slight changes.)

Yes, “they’ve gotten to him.” Donald Trump, that is. The simpleton is even more of a flip-flopper than Willard M. Romney was. And Trump’s warmongering, bombing Syria with no evidence against Assad of using chemical weapons and in doing such bombing Trump is aiding and abetting ISIS that Assad was fighting against. And now dropping the “mother of all bombs” on alleged ISIS “caves and tunnels” in Afghanistan. So obviously, all those nutjob generals surrounding Trump have used their psy-ops on the sponge-brain President to convince him to support globalist U.S. government bullying and murder overseas and support the treasonous domestic spying-on-innocents at home. Not good.

And now, CIA director and former congresscritter Mike Pompeo criticizes Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, an organization previously praised by Trump, calling WikiLeaks a “non-State hostile intelligence service.” Seriously? And this crap coming from the director of a government “hostile intelligence service,” a.k.a. CIA.?

So Pompous Pompeo is threatening to disrupt WikiLeaks (and other whistleblowers and transparency-related organizations) in their use of “free speech values” in order to protect the criminality of the national security state bureaucracies, despite even Pompeo’s own previous praise of WikiLeaks in its exposing the Obama Administration’s corruption.

But without “free speech values,” whistleblowers and Freedom of Information Acts, we would not know about the Pentagon Papers. We would not know in 1971 that the military bureaucrats believed as early as 1967 that the war in Vietnam could not be won, and that Presidents Johnson and Nixon nevertheless continued to send tens of thousands of young Americans off to their deaths for no good reason. So thank God for Daniel Ellsberg.

Without “free speech values,” whistleblowers and freedom of Information Acts, we would not know that the real reason for post-9/11 torture was to concoct a false connection between Iraq and 9/11. We would not have seen the Iraq War logs. We would not see the Afghanistan War logs. So thank God for Bradley Manning, in my view.

And without “free speech values,” whistleblowers and freedom of Information Acts, we would not know about the Saudi regime’s support of the 9/11 terrorists. And we would not know about the Clinton Foundation’s collusions with the Saudis as well.

Now, I know that some people don’t like the reference to “sheeple” (because it sounds “derogatory”), but if you are an authoritarian sheeple, then you probably defend CIA, NSA, FBI, etc., regardless of the crimes their agents commit against innocents at home and abroad. On talk radio, I think Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved are the worst of the worst when it comes to blind worship of the national security state. But many Americans are waking up to the truth about these agencies, these entrenched and sanctified bureaucracies and their intrusions, their criminality and their corruption. Thankfully WikiLeaks has provided a way for whistleblowers to leak information, because otherwise, what, the mainstream media will expose the corruption? We can rely on NBC, CBS, ABC, New York Times, et al.?

But this Mike Pompeo person calls WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service,” while that is exactly what his CIA is and has been for decades. For instance, in Operation Ajax the CIA in 1953 staged a coup in which the Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh was brought down and replaced by a U.S. government puppet, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The CIA supported the Shah’s totalitarian police state known as SAVAK for 25 years, and this dictatorship is what led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution that included taking Americans hostage in Iran and an imposition of an Isalmic-based regime which has been in place ever since.

So really the tensions that exist now with Iran, and the paranoia of and hatred toward Iran on the part of policy makers in U.S. government would not be happening, in my view, were it not for the CIA’s criminal aggressions in Iran. The CIA and Shah of Iran’s totalitarianism are what led to the rise of Islamic extremism and that revolution. You see what government interventionism causes? So these U.S. government bureaucracies are like the dog chasing its tail, creating new problems and then in an attempt to solve the problems they cause they then create additional problems. Unfortunately, this is what neocons, interventionists, globalists, “American Exceptionalists,” support in their blind obedience to CIA and other bureaucrats.

And I wonder if Mike Pompeo even knows about Operation Northwoods and Operation Mongoose, schemes proposed by the CIA and military Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage various false flags such as hijacking or attacking a civilian airliner and attacking a U.S. ship in Cuban waters, as well as causing terror among the Miami area Cuban community and blaming it all on Cuba’s Castro. The false flag schemes of Operation Northwoods were proposed to President John F. Kennedy in 1962 which he rejected. But he did sign on to Operation Mongoose, which went forward. Here is an ABC News article about Northwoods. And that was all nearly 40 years before 9/11.

Some of the proposals are really unbelievable. But here are some pages from the archived documents from this source, from the National Security Archive at The George Washington University:

Many True Believers believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who assassinated John F. Kennedy. But there was definitely a motive for the CIA and fellow national security state goons to assassinate Kennedy with his promoting peace rather than war that they prefer to promote. See Charles Burris and Jacob Hornberger (and especially this from Hornberger) on that issue. View Kennedy’s 1963 Peace Speech at American University, just months before he was murdered.

Now that President Donald Trump has authorized the “Mother of All Bombs” to be dropped on ISIS “caves and tunnels” in Afghanistan, I wonder if Trump will maybe want to bomb all the Afghan opium poppy fields from which the CIA are (allegedly) pushing their heroin in America. But, while I would oppose any such bombing, nevertheless I am not holding my breath. Trump will order to be bombed what the military and CIA want to be bombed.

Sorry. We know who the real “hostile intelligence service” is, and it’s not WikiLeaks.

Ron Paul: Get U.S. Out of Syria, “We Don’t Have Any Business Being There”

“Gucifer 2.0” Claims a Murdered DNC Insider Leaked DNC Emails

In December I asked, Was Putin or Russia really behind the hacks? although NSA whistleblower William Binney and CIA analyst Ray McGovern made the case that the DNC emails were merely leaked by someone who already had access but not “hacked.”

But in my aforementioned post I wrote:

Glenn Greenwald on the absence of evidence to support CIA/Washington Post‘s assertion that Russia hacked U.S. elections to benefit Trump. However, both Julian Assange (who ought to know about his sources of hacked documents!) and Oliver Stone have stated otherwise. Stone believes that the DNC hacks were an inside job. Justin Raimondo wrote about that and quoted Assange, “…’If we’re talking about the DNC, there’s lots of consultants, lots of programmers’ with means, motive, and opportunity.” (Such as a disgruntled Bernie supporter, etc.) “Circumstantial evidence” supporting the “inside job” theory include the suspicious deaths of DNC-involved young people, Seth Rich, Joe Montano, and Shawn Lucas at the time of the July, 2016 Democrat National Convention. (Only three? And those names have been added to the “Clinton death list,” by the way.)

The Gateway Pundit now has an article which states that Gucifer 2.0 claims that Seth Rich, the patriotic DNC “Voter Expansion Data Director,” was the leaker of the emails that embarrassed former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary campaign director John Podesta.

However, a subsequent article on Zero Hedge states that such claims of Seth Rich’s alleged leaking have not been substantiated. But given that besides Rich and other DNC workers who have access, so do the NSA have access into the DNC emails. No “hacking” necessary. The NSA has access into everything on the Internet. What would be an NSA/CIA/FBI/otherwise national security state goon’s motive for leaking the emails? A hatred of Hillary perhaps? And an attempt to derail her Presidential campaign by embarrassing Hillary’s DNC stooges? That last theory makes the most sense to me. And how to explain the 3 mysterious deaths of DNC people last year? Hmmmm.

Trump’s Aggressions in Syria Will Have Long-Term Consequences

Here is my latest article on Activist Post, Trump’s Aggressions in Syria Will Have Long-Term Consequences

April 8, 2017

As I have noted in response to the latest U.S. government aggressions in the Middle East, Donald Trump’s short-sighted military actions in Syria are not based on rational thought but on emotionalism, his feeling terrible about the children and other innocent victims of the chemical attack in Syria this week. But this is purely selective emotionalism, given that he doesn’t seem so concerned about all the innocent victims of his own drone bombings that he has been authorizing since he was sworn in as President.

Trump is also not concerned for the probable long-term results of his warmongering now. History indicates that the situation will only get worse from here, as we have seen with Iraq.

And there are other examples of Trump’s selective emotionalism and concern for Syrians. For example, where is Trump’s concern for the innocent victims of the head-choppers and thousand-lashers in Saudi Arabia? Should he bomb the Royal Saudi King’s palace? What about the starving victims of Venezuela’s Maduro? Should Trump bomb Caracas? (But since when is U.S. foreign policy ever consistent?)

As with his terrible economic advisors who have been advising Trump to support ObamaCare Lite and trillion-dollar infrastructure squandering, Trump’s national security and “defense” advisors are just as bad, and worse. Matthew McCaffrey at the Mises Institute explains how Trump’s “economic worldview could only ever have led to militarism and conflict.” So the new warmongering should be of no surprise.

Although while he has suggested some hints of non-interventionist thought during the campaign, now we can see the kind of influence that his entourage of military generals can have on his “thinking.”

According to Reuters, a “U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,” said that “[Syria’s Bashar] Assad has repeatedly shown that he is willing to use whatever chemical weapons he has retained or reconstituted to attack and terrorize his own people,” even though those who have made that assertion have not presented any evidence of it.

In a statement rationalizing his military strikes on Syria, Trump said, “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the life of innocent men, women and children,” as a matter of proven fact. Yet, there has been no evidence provided by anyone. And the government groupies of the mainstream media do not seem to be asking why Assad would intentionally gas his own people? What did he have to gain from that? What proof has there been that Assad is the true culprit?

Although, there have been claims of evidence made mainly by the Islamist anti-Assad rebels as pointed out by Justin Raimondo, who lists some of the hoaxes committed by those “rebels.” So really, there is no reliable evidence against Assad on this recent chemical weapons attack.

And what about the Trump drones terrorizing innocents in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere? According to the U.K. Guardian, the Tuaiman family in Yemen is typical of people in those areas who now experience the terror of Trump’s escalation of drones from once a week to every day, especially given Trump’s campaign threat to kill “terrorists” (in a total absence of due process), as well as their families. Trump’s bombs in Syria and Iraq have already resulted in a huge increase in numbers of civilians murdered.

And speaking of chemical warfare, I guess Trump has not learned from, or perhaps doesn’t even know about all the terrible things that the U.S. military did to the people of Iraq over these past 15 years, actually 26 years now, since 1991. As Eric Margolis referred to, the U.S. military used white phosphorus in its invasions and bombings in Iraq, especially Fallujah.

The people of Iraq have suffered not only from the U.S. military’s use of chemical weapons but from depleted uranium and other contaminants which have polluted the Iraqis’ water supply since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos wrote for The American Conservative of “babies born with two heads, one eye in the middle of the face, missing limbs, too many limbs, brain damage, cardiac defects, abnormally large heads, eyeless, missing genitalia, riddled with tumors,” and a doubled rate of childhood leukemia.

The bombing during the 1991 first war on Iraq also negatively affected U.S. soldiers, many of whom complain of health problems now as well.

In the current bombing of Syria that Donald Trump has initiated, the U.S. military claims that their Tomahawk missiles, profitably produced by Raytheon, have pinpoint precision, so that they will not harm civilians.

That precision bombing technology is what we witnessed from the proud warmongers of the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq in 1991:

But, James Bovard noted in this article how during that first 1991 war the U.S. military went on to intentionally bomb Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers. Those illicit actions were followed by the U.S. government’s sanctions to prevent the Iraqis from rebuilding that infrastructure. That was for the stated purpose of disabling the society as a whole as well as subverting “civilian morale,” as the Air Force Col. John Warden put it, who was quoted in that Bovard article.

The destruction of Iraqi water treatment centers and the sanctions during the 1990s led to high rates of cholera, typhoid and infant mortality, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands by the mid-1990s, from the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq that then-President George H.W. Bush claimed would not be “another Vietnam.”

Activist Post | Creative Commons 2016

The Hypocrisy of U.S. Presidents, Including Donald Trump

Donald Trump responds emotionally to the attack this week in Syria that resulted in 70 deaths and more than 500 injuries, supposedly caused by chemical weapons as well as the airstrike. Trump stated that the attack was an “affront to humanity,” and he said, “I will tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me – big impact,” and that, “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal – people were shocked to hear what gas it was. That crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line, many, many lines.”

Now, regarding his own war crimes in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, does Trump actually know that the drone bombings and raids that he has been authorizing since becoming President have been slaughtering many innocent civilians including children? Many more drone strikes per day than Obama’s drone strikes. If he does know, then his above statements express utter hypocrisy on his part.

Glenn Greenwald wrote on January 30th:

The New York Times yesterday reported that military officials had been planning and debating the raid for months under the Obama administration, but Obama officials decided to leave the choice to Trump. The new president personally authorized the attack last week. They claim that the “main target” of the raid “was computer materials inside the house that could contain clues about future terrorist plots.” The paper cited a Yemeni official saying that “at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed in the raid,” and that the attack also “severely damaged a school, a health facility and a mosque.”

As my colleague Matthew Cole reported in great detail just weeks ago, Navy SEAL Team 6, for all its public glory, has a long history of “‘revenge ops,’ unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.” And Trump notoriously vowed during the campaign to target not only terrorists but also their families. All of that demands aggressive, independent inquiries into this operation.

If Trump is aware of his own slaughter then perhaps we could accuse him of hypocrisy in his condemnation of Bashar Assad, no? However, Trump’s not the brightest bulb ever, as we very well know. So it’s possible that he actually doesn’t know that the drone strikes and raids he has been authorizing since January 20th have been killing innocent people, including children. (By the way, besides bombing a mosque in Syria last month that killed 46, will Trump’s military and CIA still target weddings, funerals, hospitals, and rescuers? Honestly, those al-Qaeda and ISIS militants really should come up with better times and places to get married, given how on top of things our military and CIA are these days. But I digress.)

Or perhaps Trump does know, but, as with how the U.S. military are trained, perhaps Trump is also being trained to suppress whatever moral conscience he might have had prior to being President.

So now that Trump has discarded his “anti-war” campaign rhetoric and seems much more heavily influenced by the warmongering psychopath generals surrounding him, will he “bomb the sh*t out of them” (Syria), as he promised during the campaign to do to ISIS?

And then he can add many, many more innocent civilians to the list of those he will have slaughtered.

More slaughter, more retaliation blowback, more terrorist attacks against the West. Not good.

And it’s really all about “Regime Change.” And that would explain those suggestions that the Syria attack could have been a “false flag,” and not really Assad perpetrating it. If you’re very skeptical of the idea of false flag events, then read through this thorough history of false flags by Washington’s Blog. That this recent chemical attack in Syria might have been a false flag for the purpose of stepping up the U.S. and NATO’s aggressions and conquests in the Middle East is not so far-fetched.

More Revelations of Politically Motivated Illegal Surveillance of Trump Campaign

If you rely on the government-propaganda outlets such as CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times, CNN, etc. for factual news and information, then you probably haven’t heard about the recent revelations this week which show that Donald Trump and associates really were surveilled.

Security writer Eli Lake reported for Bloomberg on former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice who sought the “unmasking” of names of people associated with Donald Trump’s campaign from “incidental” intelligence data. However, Mike Cernovich asserts that Lake and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman were actually holding on to that information and not reporting on it because such information reflects poorly on Obama.

So it’s another example of how our mainstream “journalists” are really not journalists, but propagandists (and control freaks).

And now we are hearing, not from the corrupt mainstream media but from Daily Caller, that the situation is much more involved, and serious. Daily Caller reports:

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

…

Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.

…

Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told TheDCNF that many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.

“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.’”

“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”

“Serious stuff.” (YA THINK?!)

Frankly, the corruption of our “public servants,” those government bureaucrats and their little minions in Washington and the little Goebbels in the mainstream media, is extraordinary. But seeing all that exposed now, seeing all the leaking and whistleblowing by people who have at least some sort of conscience, and especially seeing the dishonesty of the mainstream media exposed, is very refreshing.

My View: Judge Neil Gorsuch Will Probably Be Better Than Most SCOTUS Justices Thus Far

I haven’t been paying that much attention to the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, or his testimony and the grilling he received. But I think I’ve read and heard enough to believe that he’d probably be better than most other Justices.

Besides Sen. Chuckles Schumer, who wants to try to block the Gorsuch appointment, there are other left-wing hystericals out there. They’re nutsos, it seems to me.

For instance, in her latest Boston Globe op-ed, Harvard law professor and retired judge Nancy Gertner says that “Judge Gorsuch is more dangerous than he appears.”

And the people on the left view him as dangerous because his decisions have been in line with property rights and show an opposition toward “positive rights,” which are privileges or entitlements that are called “rights” by those who reject private property and freedom of association. By “rights,” the hystericals want to use the armed powers of government to force their social agendas onto others, quite frankly.

Judge Nancy Gertner brings up the “frozen trucker case,” in which a trucker was fired for not following his employer’s instructions. Gorsuch sided with the employer. All the factors involved, such as the trucker’s being stuck out in an area and in extremely cold weather, are irrelevant, in my view.

The first point I would make is that private employers have a right to hire and fire whomever they want, and for whatever reason. They own the business, not the truckers and not the government. It has to do with private property rights.

The second point is to do with Gertner’s references to the “Administrative Law Judge from the Department of Labor,” and the “Administrative Review Board.” But the U.S. Constitution does not even authorize the federal government to have a Department of Labor and its respective unconstitutional judges in the first place.

Judge Gertner writes:

He does not believe in deference to administrative agencies. He hinted darkly that the “administrative state” poses a grave threat to democracy. And he even rejects the usual standards for legislative interpretation, which calls for interpreting language in the light of Congress’ purposes. It is a mistake, he says, to “assume a statute pursues its putative purposes to their absolute and seemingly logical ends,” singling out health and safety statutes for special ire.

Go, Gorsuch, go!

Gertner then lets out her own leftist nonsense biases, such as in her writing, “He ruled against an autistic child, who claimed a violation of the statutory right to a ‘free appropriate public education.’ In doing so, he rejected the expertise of school officials and substituted his own crabbed view.”

Well, there actually is no “right to a free appropriate public education.” It may be a “statutory” right but that’s really a government-granted entitlement, not a right. No one has a right to demand that society provides one with education, or “free education,” because society consists of individuals, it consists of your neighbors. You don’t have a right to demand that your neighbor provide you with or contribute financially to the provision of an education, involuntarily. The ones with actual “rights” are the neighbors who have a right to live their lives and not have something demanded from them involuntarily.

The Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights,” among them the “rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Unalienable means that we have those rights inherently as human beings. The right to liberty means that one is free from aggression against oneself by others. The use of coercion or threats in making demands of others involuntarily is under the category of aggression.

Leftists support the use of aggression and coercion to carry out their demands on others. When they say that all people have a “right” to an education, they mean that society, which consists of individuals, is obligated to provide and fund the education of others. And that is the system we have now. (And why do you think so many people are as dumb and ignorant as they are now? Why do the government schools not actually educate the kids but engage in indoctrination, mainly of leftist views? Would our society be different if education were all voluntarily organized and not by way of coercion and force, and theft for its funding?)

There are not enough “rights” for those on the left to promote, in which they may forcibly make demands on others. For instance, those on the left believe that people have a “right to health care,” i.e. a right to forcibly demand that doctors or hospitals treat you, involuntarily. And there are other “rights,” really entitlements, such as the “right” of a lesbian couple to force a Christian baker to have to do extra labor to serve them, involuntarily. Many on the left now just don’t believe that interactions, associations, contracts, should all be voluntary, i.e. peaceful. They do not believe in peace. They do not believe in freedom, in my view.

In her conclusion regarding Judge Neil Gorsuch’s decisions, Judge Nancy Gertner writes, “If this approach were accepted by other justices it could gut major health and safety and anti-discrimination legislation.”

Hooray!

I am not a big fan of the U.S. Supreme Court and I don’t view their existence as “important,” only as dangerous, because having to be slaves of their bad decisions goes against our freedom and our security. Yet another reason for full decentralization. However, Judge Gorsuch shows that maybe some Supreme Court rulings may not be as bad in the future as they have been up to now. (But there are always the Tenth Amendment and civil disobedience, if need be.)

It Seems That Cognitive Dissonance in Government and Media Never Ends

I heard a radio talk show host with the usual hysteria on the “Islamic threat,” and she was saying that we better step up the “war on terror” and the bombing overseas that’s mainly murdering innocent civilians. And this is a “moral values” conservative. So, a lot of people have been bamboozled by the 15 years of post-9/11 propaganda that continues to this day.

No, the problem is that the U.S. government and military’s invasions, occupations, bombings, murders of innocents (and knowingly) and destruction of those foreigners’ homes and cities, especially since 1991 (as I mention frequently, and I won’t shut up about it), have been provoking them like poking hornets’ nests. So if you are serious about wanting to end the “Islamic threat” and make us actually safer and more secure (and not less safe and less secure), then our government will end the invasions, occupations, bombings, murders of innocents and destruction of those foreigners’ homes and cities. Close all the U.S. military bases throughout the Middle East and Asia, Africa, etc., and bring all the troops back to the U.S. They don’t belong over there. They are invaders. They are as much invaders of those territories as any foreign government’s soldiers would be considered here on U.S. territory. (Jacob Hornberger explained that just recently here.) But sadly a lot of war supporters just don’t understand that.

And if you’re worried about refugees or otherwise unwanted possibly threatening people coming into the U.S., then, as I wrote above, stop bombing them and creating more terrorists. End the U.S. military and CIA’s supplying ISIS with weapons and financing, end all foreign aid, especially to those Middle Eastern governments who are sponsoring terrorism, indoctrination of Islamic extremism and authoritarianism and “jihad” with U.S. tax-handouts.

And stop all other foreign aid as well with U.S. tax-theft-handouts, especially to European countries. Stop the U.S. government from subsidizing those European governments’ taking in refugees who if they’re legitimate should be cared for by private and voluntary agencies and groups, not governments. (Same for the U.S.. by the way.)

There are many conservatives and others who have been paying attention and now understand how this obsession that the mainstream news media have with Russia, that was really promulgated by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, has been “fake news,” promoted by the political activists in the news media as well as their comrades of the Democrat party.

So now that you can see just how propaganda is being pushed by activists as well as by those in government and media who may benefit financially and whose careers in government or media may be enhanced by pushing such propaganda, perhaps then you can have a better understanding of how the post-9/11 propaganda helped the bureaucrats, the warmongers, the military-security-industrial complex to feather their own nests. (And better to see just how thoroughly immoral and criminal it was for the U.S. government to start further wars, against Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.)

And propaganda not just from the Judith Millers of the world but MOST of the mainstream media who were either complicit or just clueless of what the U.S. government and military had done to Iraq previous to 9/11 and how the primitive Islamic reactionaries (such as Osama bin Laden) didn’t like the invasive U.S. military bases occupying those foreign lands since the 1970s. It was propaganda that hoodwinked the American people to support George H.W. Bush’s criminal 1991 war of aggression against Iraq as well.

In fact, I heard on CBS Evening “News” with Scott Pelley yesterday (that I sometimes hear on WBZ radio simulcast), there was mention of FBI investigating Trump associates for allegedly planting “fake news” to spread propaganda. And I thought, you gotta be kidding me. Does Scott Pelley really believe that stuff? If so, he is extremely ignorant. But I think that it’s possible he might be knowingly participating in this Washington Post-instigated “fake news” agenda, which itself is fake news. And to avoid any possible “libel” lawsuits, I wrote, “I think” and “might be” etc. I didn’t make any outright assertion or accusation against Pelley, or his fellow moonbat media morons such as Todd Chuck or, regarding the “Russia-gate” stuff, various news outlets and talk radio hosts especially Hugh Hewitt who seems to be engaging in intentional propaganda against Russia, in my view. I don’t think that Hewitt is that dumb, but just another dishonest neocon-chickenhawk.

Even the Salem Radio newscasters, like CBS and other networks, at the top of the hour are reporting on “Russia hacking” or “Russian collusions” with the Trump campaign as fact, despite the top “intelligence” agency chiefs or former chiefs testifying there is no evidence of that fake news.

Read Justin Raimondo’s column on the “Cyber-Gulf of Tonkin.” He details how there was no “Russian hacking” of the 2016 election. And read Zero Hedge’s report on the latest WikiLeaks release of Vault 7, “Marble,” documents which “detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages.  The tool was in use as recently as 2016.” (That goes with CIA’s ability to hack computers and leave the “fingerprints” of others such as Russians.)

So, we know from the past 25 years that invading, bombing and killing foreigners causes the blowback of retaliation. But the people nevertheless remain ignorant of the blowback and continue to gullibly believe what bureaucrats and their little minions and media groupies tell them, and support more wars, more domestic police state government criminality such as facial recognition false accusations committed by self-absorbed FBI bureaucrats, government messaging encryption invasions, due process-free civil asset forfeiture thefts and drug war cash seizures.

Why do these idiots want to start another war, and with Russia, for crying out loud?

Some Misc. Items

Here are some more items to check out:

More and more parents in China are rejecting the government’s indoctrination of kids in the schools, and those parents are turning to homeschooling. But now, the Chinese government is cracking down on homeschoolers. The rulers are afraid that future Chinese workers and citizens might actually think for themselves, might actually explore intellectually more and invent new stuff that will be useful to the rest of the world. The Chinese rulers will have none of that. Better to be repressive and live under the total control of ignorant buffoons otherwise known as bureaucrats. (I have a feeling that the educrats and teachers unions here in the U.S. are becoming more the same way.)

Jim Davies on America’s owner.

The UN “Human Rights” Committee is censuring Italy for its high number pf physicians who won’t perform abortions. (Don’t you have it backwards, UN? They’re nuts. Is it time to get out of the UN and kick them out of the U.S.? Yup.)

Colin Flaherty on the white SJWs who become victims of black perpetrators.

Thomas DiLorenzo asks, Is Donald Trump a Jacksonian? and Dom Armentano on Trump’s economics: Danger ahead.

Activist Post with an article on Trump’s nominee for FDA commissioner, who is too much in bed with Big Pharma, in my view. (How about a nominee who will promise to eliminate the corrupt and dangerous FDA?)

Connecticut, “The Constitution State,” might begin the process of government’s war on the people with weaponized drones. (Make that the “unconstitutional” state.)

Bill Sardi discusses nutrition rather than vaccines.

And Wendy McElroy asks, Would Bitcoin function in a societal collapse? (I am not a Bitcoin person. If its purpose is to provide anonymity and security, I don’t think it provides either, given how much control the government and all its spy apparatus have over the Internet.)