Regarding the recent U.S. Supreme Court case on the church that wanted public funding to help build its playground, Jacob Hornberger has this excellent post on that, Supreme Court Upholds the Right of Churches to Steal. He makes great points especially for those who are of the clergy, some points on important moral questions to consider.
Bureaucratic Nincompoops And Their Obsession for Control
Wendy McElroy posted links to these two articles on her blog, Oregon wants to regulate flexible work schedules out of existence, and in Chicago a Proposed “Fair Workweek” would mandate predictable schedules, stable paychecks. Local imbeciles in state and local governments who have never run a business now want to even more interfere in the marketplace and in employment. Who do they think they are, federal imbeciles?
As George McGovern wrote, “A politician’s dream is a businessman’s nightmare.” (George McWho?)
And it’s the same thing now in the health care debate, in which the Republicons are channeling their inner Mao in their craving for control as they just can’t bring themselves to actually repeal the ObamaCare monstrosity. But finally, now we hear Donald Trump tweeting, as I have been saying, just repeal the damn thing now and worry about “replacing” later.
No, don’t replace it. Repeal all the other regulations, tax-thefts and intrusions that government has been forcing on the American people that have driven the costs of health care way up.
But no, everyone is obsessed with his other tweets that insulted Mika Brzezinski’s facelift(s). Did ObamaCare pay for her facelift(s)? Anyway, I’m glad he does that, because I need a good laugh from time to time. And Charles Krauthammer and other high-and-mighties who think Trump’s insults are undignified or “unpresidential” are the same ones who think that Trump “finally became President” when he unnecessarily and criminally bombed Syria (criminal? Aiding and abetting ISIS?)
“Sanctuary Cities”
Regarding the “sanctuary cities” aspect of the immigration issue (which I commented on in my previous two posts, here and here), I oppose any government direction or action to bring immigrants or refugees into an area or any government provision of “illegal immigrant” sanctuaries, just as much as I oppose any government restrictions of the freedom of movement and travel of innocent people.
However, if private organizations, charities, churches, businesses, families or individuals want to organize an effort to bring immigrants or refugees in and provide “sanctuary” for them, they should have the freedom to do so, as long as they take responsibility for any consequences of such actions, and as long as they aren’t harboring actual criminals (and by “criminal” I mean anyone who has violated the person or property of another, not someone who is merely traveling to seek a better life for oneself and one’s family and hasn’t harmed anyone).
And that is what I have to say about that. Sanctuary much.
Further Reasons for Why the Trump Travel Ban Is Unconstitutional
Regarding my previous post on the Trump-dictated ban on people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. and my asserting that such a ban was unconstitutional, I wasn’t particularly specific on how exactly such a ban is unconstitutional.
I think that the most important reason why federal government travel bans — or any controls on the movements of millions of people — are unconstitutional is that, as Judge Andrew Napolitano pointed out, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t delegate power over immigration to the federal government. The Constitution just doesn’t authorize the federal government to have a central-planning bureaucracy which attempts to control the movements of millions of people. If you want to look at the specific discussions on that, you can click on law professor Ilya Somin’s essay (and he has also written on those arguments here and here). Prof. Somin also writes for the “Volokh Conspiracy” blog at WaPo.
But the extremely flawed, inconsistent and self-contradictory Constitution is also in part contradictory to the Declaration of Independence. In my previous post I referred to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. There have been occasions that U.S. Supreme Court Justices have cited the Declaration of Independence in their decisions, including stating that “it is always safe to read the letter of the constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence,” and so on.
And in my referencing the Bill of Rights in my previous post, I didn’t mention where specifically it notes a “right to migrate,”or a “right to travel or freedom of movement.” I think we can assume that when the Declaration of Independence asserts the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” included in that right to “liberty” is the right to travel and freedom of movement (as long as one doesn’t violate the liberty, person or property of another).
But where do we see such rights in the Bill of Rights? We don’t. The Bill of Rights can’t possibly enumerate all the rights that human beings have. That is why the writers of the Constitution included the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” And remember, when the Founders referred to “rights,” most of them had a belief that people had “natural” or negative rights, rights which preexisted the formation of government. They didn’t believe in “positive” rights i.e. entitlements, such as a “right to education,” or a “right to health care,” or otherwise a right (or entitlement) to have something provided to one by others.
Throughout the years, I have seen utter contempt from both the left and the conservatives for the Ninth Amendment. The collectivist majoritarian-moralist anti-private property judge Robert Bork, who thankfully was voted down by the U.S. Senate for Supreme Court, arrogantly called the Ninth Amendment an “inkblot.” His contempt for private property included statements such as, if the majority of a community were anguished by a private behavior within someone’s home (albeit voluntary and consenting), then the majority of the community had a legitimate right or power to legislate against such behavior (within someone’s own private property), and have the armed government police enforce that legislation.
But the Ninth Amendment really is the part of the Bill of Rights that most protects the right of self-ownership of the individual, in my view. Many people believe that if a “right” is not listed in the Bill of Rights, then therefore it is not a right. Nope. And as I wrote in my previous post, the rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights are rights that are not given to us by government, by rights that we have inherently that government may not violate. Those rights are unalienable rights that ALL human beings have, and which apply to all people, not just American citizens. A lot of people don’t like that idea, because they view the importance of “citizenship” like a membership in a private, exclusive club. They are collectivists who believe in a common, community ownership of the entire territory as though it is a large parcel of private property not to be trespassed by outsiders.
And as far as private property rights are concerned, if I were a business owner and I received an application for employment from someone, part of my private property rights is the right to invite that applicant onto my property and into my business and if I think he’s the best one for the job I will have him stay there and employ him, from wherever he comes from. When the immigration restrictionists want to interfere with those private property rights, they are saying that they don’t believe in private property rights, as well as freedom of contract and freedom of association. You have to either believe that the property owner has full absolute sovereignty and authority over his own property or, if you believe that the owner must get a bureaucrat’s approval of whom to invite on one’s own property, then you are acknowledging your belief that the ultimate owner of the property is not the official owner as written on paper, but the government. There’s no grey area there, it’s either-or.
And as far as self-ownership is concerned, if you believe that a traveler must get a bureaucrat’s approval to travel, or where one may travel or not, then you can’t claim to believe in the idea of self-ownership, but that the ultimate owner of the people is the government. And I believe that the Ninth Amendment protects both private property rights and the rights of the individual to self-ownership.
U.S. Government’s Immoral and Unconstitutional Travel Ban
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments next term regarding Donald Trump’s immoral travel ban, his order to ban those wanting to travel to the U.S. from several countries that all happen to be Muslim majority countries. Another reaffirmation by nine robed bureaucrats that America is not about individualism, unalienable rights and private property, but about collectivism and the supremacy of central planning.
The Declaration of Independence is perfectly clear in its support of “unalienable rights,” especially the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which are rights that all people have inherently, rights which preexist the formation of any government. That is why they are called “unalienable.” If you believe in the concept of unalienable rights, then you would believe that people have a right to live, a right to own and control their own lives, and a right to liberty which I believe is the right to live free of the aggression, intrusion and violation of one’s person or property by others.
There are some people who believe that those rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence are rights that U.S. citizens have based on their citizenship, or based on their membership to a particular political union. I’ve heard many of those people, mainly conservatives or “constitutional conservatives,” on talk radio talking about “unalienable rights” in one breath and then in the next breath saying that “only citizens” have those rights. Sadly, they don’t seem to see foreigners as having the same unalienable human rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as American citizens have. (Then they would have to admit that they really don’t believe in “unalienable” rights, and that they believe that only government-granted citizenship gives people their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. More cognitive dissonance.)
And I even heard “liberal” law professor Alan Dershowitz interviewed on the Mike Gallagher radio show, in which Dershowitz stated that foreigners don’t have constitutional rights, or the U.S. Constitution doesn’t apply to foreigners.
Well, the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, enumerates only some of the specific rights that people — all people — have, that can be under the category of the “rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.” The Bill of Rights is not a list of rights that government is granting people. No, rather it is a recognition of some of the unalienable rights that all people have, rights which preexist the government, and it is a set of rules that government must follow and that the government must not violate those rights of the people.
For instance, the Bill of Rights refers to the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, houses and effects. If you agree with the concept of unalienable rights, you would have to acknowledge that ALL human beings have a right to be secure, a right that their persons not be molested, aggressed against by others including bureaucrats and their enforcers. And ALL human beings would then have a right that their personal effects, their personal property not be molested or violated by others.
As part of our rights to life and liberty, we all have a right to due process. Those who are accused of some violation against others have a right to require the accuser to bring evidence against the accused and prove it, openly, and the accused has a right to bring witnesses or evidence on his behalf as well. Many in America do not believe in that. They believe that government bureaucrats including Presidents can or should have the power to accuse individuals with no basis to back up their accusation, and tie the accused up, torture him, imprison him, or execute him, without trial, without due process. Those people, including former “Speaker” Newt Gingrich, do not believe in unalienable rights.
The Bill of Rights is not perfect. Some of the wording really sucks, such as the 2nd and 5th Amendments. The 2nd Amendment should just recognize the right of the people to keep and bear arms, period. No reason for that other stuff. (The writers don’t define “militia,” or “regulated.” Not good.) The 5th Amendment says that government may not take your property for public use without just compensation, implying that “government may take your property in the absence of a voluntary contract, as long as the compensation is just.” So the 5th Amendment empowers the government to steal people’s property.
Anyway, people think like collectivists now, and it’s sickening. For instance, when government bureaucrats impose a ban on others traveling to wherever, others coming from specific areas in other parts of the world, that certainly is a policy of collectivism.
In other words, in the context of unalienable rights to life and liberty, if you don’t suspect someone of having violated the person or property of another, you morally don’t have the right or authority to interfere with that presumably innocent individual’s life, his liberty, his freedom of movement, freedom of association, his right to travel and right to seek a better life for himself and his family.
Leave innocent people alone. Presumption of innocence is a very important concept in a civilized society.
And we see in these terrible, inhuman policies America’s worship of central planning. Banning whole groups of people just because they happen to come from some certain area? According to the New York Times, “those challenging the travel ban said the court’s opinion would protect the vast majority of people seeking to enter the United States to visit a relative, accept a job, attend a university or deliver a speech. The court said the ban could not be imposed on anyone who had ‘a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States’.”
So, you really expect government bureaucrats — central planners — to determine who is coming to “visit a relative, accept a job, attend a university or deliver a speech”? No, if someone isn’t suspected of some kind of violation of the person or property of another, it’s no one else’s business what his purpose of travel is.
I know, collectivists who don’t believe in unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness don’t agree with me on that one.
Now, if you’re concerned that someone might try to come here to commit “jihad,” or some act of violence against innocents, and given that most such people have expressed U.S. foreign policy as a motivation for their retaliation, then tell our government to stop invading, occupying and bombing those other countries that it has been doing for decades and decades, since well before 9/11/2001, and stop murdering the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians that our government and military have been doing for decades and decades. Ya think? You see, people don’t like it when foreign regimes like the one in Washington invade and bomb their countries, and so they retaliate. (Duh.) And worse, our government has been committing these criminal acts of violence against people of an extremely primitive, repressive culture over there in the Middle East and Asia. So poking already-barbaric hornets’ nests will be counter-productive, no? And that is why some people really believe that all this stuff, the U.S. invasions overseas for decades against the Muslim countries, has been because the planners knew that the Islamic-centered jihadi retaliation would be the kind of response to our government’s invasion that the invaders would get. George H.W. Bush was a CIA guy, after all. Prior to his 1991 war in Iraq that he started for no good reason, CIA-man Bush had to have meticulous knowledge of those cultures and given how primitive they were to see how easily manipulable they would be. And we can go back to the CIA’s installation of the Shah and their support of SAVAK in Iran from the 1950s to 1979. Yes, this crap goes way back.
So, in my view, it is immoral to interfere with or violate the lives of innocent people who are not suspected of anything, and the U.S. Constitution which includes the Bill of Rights does or should protect ALL human beings, regardless of where they’re from, or what country they are a “citizen” of.
The Real Putin?
I haven’t seen the Oliver Stone interviews of Vladimir Putin, but Justin Raimondo highlights some interesting revelations from the first interview, and Raimondo states that he will write more on this as a series. Raimondo notes that in the interview Putin conveys that he is not in favor of “restoring the old Soviet Union” as he has been accused by propagandists of wanting to do. Putin actually is a proponent of private property, and the problem he had with Gorbachev’s reforms was — and this in some way is also articulated by ex-Soviet bureaucrat turned dissident Yuri Maltsev — the people who were most resistant of privatization were the cronies who were really resistant of letting go of their government controls and fiefdoms (sounds like the typical bureaucrats and hacks here in good ol’ USA). For instance, Raimondo quotes Putin:
Do you know who was not happy with the new laws [which opened up the bidding process for state-owned industries]? Those who were not true businessmen. Those who earned their millions or billions not thanks to their entrepreneurial talents, but thanks to their ability to force good relationships with the government – those people were not happy.
Gosh, how I wish so-called “free-market capitalists” here in the U.S. and “conservative” Republicans had such an understanding of those things. Oh, well.
Raimondo seems to conclude that Putin is actually pro-America, certainly more pro-America than the propagandists of the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, and the two major political parties Republicrat and Demopublican. But that is not the image we apparently have of Putin coming from the aforementioned propagandists.
It could be that those American propagandists on both left and right are not as much pro-America as they are pro-government.
From this interview of Putin it seems apparent that perhaps Putin really does have an understanding of (and appreciation for) free markets and private ownership of the means of production, far more than the typical “conservative” dimwit political hack I hear everyday on with Sean Hannity and Mike Gallagher. These days, it really seems that the morons in Washington would prefer full communism than a society of free exchange and private property rights, as we can see form the ongoing debate over “health care” (whatever that means any more).
Raimondo also gets into the topic of who attempted to assassinate Putin, supposedly five times. Obviously, in my view, it’s the CIA, because if there is anyone who already has an idea of Putin’s pro-America, pro-free market and private property sentiments (that prior to this interview most of us had never heard before), it would be the CIA. From all their spying, they must know everything about Putin! Like most other government bureaucrats, they probably also favor communism rather than a free society, because a free society (free of government intrusions, etc.) takes power away from them!
One thing I disagree with Putin on in that interview is his speaking favorably of then-President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 invasion of Iraq. That was a big mistake, a criminal act, a war crime, and along with sanctions it was a large contributor to the motivations that led to 9/11.
Conservatives Need to Stop Supporting Immoral Government Policies
Here is my latest article on Activist Post, Conservatives Need to Stop Supporting Immoral Government Policies:
June 26, 2017
A few years ago, Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrote about the intellectual incoherence of conservatism, but he was only touching the surface, as far as I’m concerned. Now, I’m conservative in the social and cultural area, but I do have a sense of consistency when it comes to morality and recognizing the immorality and evil of government. Most conservatives do not seem to have that consistency, it seems to me.
Conservatives are constantly railing the “left,” the irrationality and nonsense on college campuses, and some government programs. And usually when Democrats like Obama are in charge, conservatives criticize the government. But when Republicans like Donald Trump or George W. Bush are in charge, conservatives love government.
Oh, the conservatives on talk radio are so excited about Karen Handel winning her election to Congress from Georgia. Well, the truth is that nothing she does or says will change anything in any significant way. That is because she supports the system of central planning and government confiscation of private wealth, just like most conservatives.
For example, Wikipedia notes that Handel supported Tom Price’s bill to replicate ObamaCare with some nips and tucks, and she supports the “American Health Care Act,” i.e. RepubliCare. She does not support free markets in health care. She doesn’t recognize that central planning in medical care is what has doomed medical care in America, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Conservatives have to stop it with their continued limp-wristedness when it comes to saying they support “free markets,” private property rights and free association, but then promote taxation (involuntary transactions, which are immoral, equal to a robber ordering you to fork over your money), and centrally-planned governmental intrusions into people’s private lives.
As long as we continue to have a system that relies on involuntary payments or confiscations of private wealth or income of the workers and producers of society, we will continue to have bureaucrats and their minions and corporate cronies living high off the hog at the expense of the people’s labor, all based on theft and plunder.
So get rid of the theft, restore private property rights, and you will no longer be complaining about all the abuses of ObamaCare, RepubliCare, government grants for medical “research,” IRS targeting Christians and conservatives, FBI targeting anti-war protesters, the parasite warmongers, CIA funding of ISIS, NSA spying on innocents, you name it, it will ALL be gone when the government’s power to steal, rob, loot, burglarize and embezzle the people’s wealth and income is removed.
Only allow government “work” or programs to be voluntarily funded by the people. Programs, including in the “security” area, that are lacking voluntary funding will be eliminated.
Only a fool would voluntarily pay his hard-earned money to fund FBI keeping dossiers on innocent people or FBI infiltrating mosques to motivate young Muslims to commit jihad. And only a fool would voluntarily pay for TSA molesting you or cancer-scanning you at the gate, or pay for ATF agents gun-running to Mexican drug lords, or pay to fund ANY form of health care central planning that only creates chaos, no?
I thought theft was immoral, conservatives. Why do conservatives continue to rationalize and support theft? They also rationalize murder. And no, by and large they are not “pro-life,” and they support the targeting and murder of innocent human beings. I don’t know how many times the notion of “war” is brought up to rationalize the intentional bombing and murder of innocents, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo and Dresden during World War II, or Vietnam or Iraq. “Well, the little Japanese child who was murdered in Hiroshima is in part responsible for his rulers bombing Pearl Harbor — and in order to save the life of a U.S. soldier, it is acceptable to murder a little child who never harmed anyone.” You know, rationalizations such as that disgusting bunch of stuff.
And now we have the Nudnik-in-Chief who wants to make it more acceptable to murder more innocents with the drone strikes that he has been immorally authorizing since January 20th, according to Activist Post. And according to AFP, U.S. government-led air strikes are killing more civilians per month than they were previously. Retired Army JAG Major Todd Pierce discusses Douglas Valentine’s new book The CIA as Organized Crime. I don’t know how much longer those who claim to believe in “moral values” can continue to support a military/security system that’s based on central planning and involuntary tax-thefts. It’s disgusting.
And they love their new attorney general, Jeff Sessions and his vicious wars on immigration and drugs. The conservatives love Soviet-like central planning when it comes to the immigration issue. (They’ll deny that, of course.) For instance, they love “e-Verify.” Businessmen have to get the gubmint’s permission to employ a worker. And workers have to get the bureaucrat’s permission to get employment.
So really, in America the U.S. government is the ultimate owner of the businesses, not the businessmen. Sadly, there is this collectivistic obsession with government borders. Nationalists want the government to control the lives of the people — all the people, foreigners and citizens alike, it seems to me. (They’ll deny that, of course.)
But in a system of private property and free-market capitalism, whoever actually started or built a business with his own capital and investment, or with the voluntary investment of others, is the actual owner of that business, not the government. And workers from anywhere may find work with willing and consenting employers, without the permission of central-planning bureaucrats. Sadly, conservatives tend to be with the central-planning socialists on this immigration issue. (Talk about cognitive dissonance!)
And attorney general Sessions may very well be stepping up enforcement of federal drug laws even in states in which the voters approved legalizing marijuana. And I thought that conservatives supported “states’ rights.” I guess not, when it comes to marijuana or other drugs.
Now, if you prefer the communist way of thinking, then the government owns your life including your body. You must get the government’s permission on what you may or may not put into your body. In communism, the government owns the means of production. Not just industry, capital and property, but the “means of production” also includes the people, and that includes their bodies with which to perform the labor that the government also owns.
However, if you own your own body, then you are the ultimate decider on what you will put into your own body. But you must then accept the consequences of your own decisions and actions. That’s another thing with conservatives, they don’t believe in personal responsibility. They believe that people must get the government’s permission on what chemicals they may or may not ingest.
And Sessions says that pot is “dangerous.” But so is alcohol. How many people are dying on the roads and highways because of drunk drivers? How many people are slowly killing themselves with alcohol-related liver disease and cancer and dementia? (“No, no, I gotta have my booze! Don’t touch mah booooze!!” they cry.) So the gubmint ended Prohibition in 1933, but they then transferred that prohibition (and its subsequent black market and the underground’s associated criminal gangsters) from alcohol over to “drugs.” And how’s that working out? (Psst. Not good.)
There is a moral case for drug freedom, as Laurence Vance pointed out.
And regular cigarettes are also dangerous. They result in many deaths. And junk food, and too much sugar or salt in the diet, and so on. So, I thought that conservatives were against the “nanny state.” But when it comes to “drugs,” they love the nanny state. The police state, that is.
And then there’s the death penalty, “well we have to balance possibly prosecuting and State-killing an innocent person with a possible murderer killing more innocent people.” Like, “two wrongs make a right” or something. (And the conservatives make fun of the left’s irrationality!) As Paul Craig Roberts pointed out this week, Republicans are just as much for persecuting and prosecuting innocents as Democrats.
Activist Post | Creative Commons 2017
U.S. Out of Korea (China, Japan, Persian Gulf, Middle East, etc.)
A 22-year-old American college student named Otto Warmbier went over to North Korea, and supposedly was caught stealing a propaganda poster and sentenced to prison. At some later point he was returned to the U.S. in a coma, and has now died.
I heard warmonger Mark Davis on the radio saying that because of the North Korean regime’s murder of an American, therefore the U.S. military must bomb a North Korean military installation. That’s a typical response of the typical American neocon. (Davis was filling in Tuesday for another neocon, Hugh Hewitt.)
No, the right thing to do would be to remove all U.S. troops and military bases from South Korea. Their presence there is a provocation to North Korea. Unfortunately the True Believers in American Exceptionalism don’t see our government’s occupations of foreign lands as provocations. They have some sort of entitlement mentality, in which because the U.S. rules the world, thus our government is entitled to place its apparatus anywhere in the world it wants.
But the cognitive dissonance comes in when the True Believers oppose foreign military presence near the U.S. What would happen if Russia, Iran, China, or North Korea had military ships going along the U.S. coasts? Wouldn’t that seem like a “provocation”? Or their placing military bases in Cuba or Mexico?
When a Russian spy ship was less than 30 miles off the U.S. east coast last March, the new U.S. President Trump stated: “The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles offshore right out of the water.” Of course he didn’t do that, because, according to the article, Russia has had ships off the U.S. coast for the past several years and even at 17 miles they are still within international waters.
But I don’t think that the True Believers see any comparison to The Donald (and his fellow American Exceptionalists) expressing a perception that Russia is “provoking” and Trump’s wanting to shoot at them, to North Korea perceiving U.S. troops and bases in South Korea as “provocations.”
To show how arrogant and narcissistic the True Believers in American Exceptionalism are, when U.S. military are trespassing, loitering or just plain fiddlin’ and diddlin’ off the coast of Iran, and the Iranians made “provocative maneuvers around a U.S. destroyer” and other U.S. ships, one of the U.S. ships fired warning shots! “How dare you interfere with our provocations off your coast, Iran!” How DARE they, as Al Gore would say.
Reuters: U.S. warship challenges China’s claims in South China Sea, Fox News: Chinese warships spotted off Alaska coast reportedly passed through US waters. In my view, they’re all nuts, these governments and their invasive, trespassing bureaucrats.
You see, when those who are a part of an “enemy,” or non-ally, are getting too close, that might seem invasive, or an act of provocation. So the North Koreans remember all the U.S. military bombings and thousands and thousands of tons of napalm dropped and all the civilian North Korean deaths caused by the U.S. military during the 1950s, and so the North Koreans have felt threatened by the stationing of U.S. troops and bases in South Korea.
So get the U.S. military out of South Korea, because they are invasive and don’t belong there, just as they don’t belong in Japan or the Middle East and other parts of the world that are not U.S. territories.
It might also be a good idea for tourists such as Otto Warmbier to not take unnecessary risks such as traveling to other countries whose regimes are dangerous or tyrannical, like that of North Korea, and who are constantly threatened by belligerent U.S. bureaucrats.
Recent Articles on CIA Insanity, Criminality and Hooliganism
History.com has this article by Brianna Nofil on how a CIA obsession with “brain warfare” led to appalling human experiments.
Charles Burris has this article on LewRockwell.com, including a video by Melissa Dykes, on CIA’s “MK-ULTRA” mind control program, and the CIA’s illegal domestic intrusions and surveillance.
Activist Post with an article by Rachel Blevins on the CIA running a covert drug smuggling airline.
And Jon Rappoport with an article on Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, noting the CIA connection to Amazon.
More Interesting Articles and Issues
The Daily Caller has this long list of attacks by thugs and marauders on conservatives and Trump supporters. (Meanwhile, late last year Daily Caller had this list of “hate crimes” or harassment by Trump supporters that turned out to be false accusations or hoaxes. And don’t forget all the Jewish Community Center bomb threats that it turned out they were allegedly perpetrated by a 19-year-old American-Israeli hacker located in Israel. But people tend to believe the media’s hysterical fake news.)
A judge has convicted a young lady of involuntary manslaughter because she encouraged, by texts and phone calls, her then-teenaged boyfriend to commit suicide (he did). So the judge, appointed by former Gov. Deval Patrick (shock!), believed that words can be responsible for killing someone. This is another legal decision against freedom of speech, and another example of our society’s further relieving people of responsibility for their own actions. The boy committed suicide by his own free will. Just because someone tells you to do something that doesn’t mean you do it. Regardless of what she said to him, he nevertheless chose to kill himself. (See Walter Block on “incitement.”) The ACLU is right to oppose this decision, as do most lawyers who have commented on this case. The young lady should not have waived her right to a jury trial, because there would have been at least several jurors with common sense who would not have voted her guilty, unlike the idiot judge. (Have I mentioned that the judge was appointed by another idiot, Deval Patrick?)
Justin Raimondo says that Mexico is the real threat, not Russia. He says legalizing drugs won’t solve the problem, but legalizing all drugs will effect in the cartels and drug lords no longer having any “business,” which thrives on the prohibition of drugs. Yes, organized crime gangsters continued after the alcohol Prohibition ended many years ago, but I don’t think you can compare the two situations. The drug war also consists of U.S. government agencies’ complicity in the trafficking and smuggling. The whole drug prohibition thing is a racket.
Don Boudreaux says that economists are not therapists.
Jack Burns reports on another unbelievable school-related police drill that was conducted without saying it was a drill. (Who would do these things?)
Dave Bohon writes about Ontario’s new law to take children away from parents who oppose “gender expression.” (That’s disgusting, and criminal. Like everyone else, parents have a right to freedom of thought and conscience. People shouldn’t be punished for believing the truth about gender confused persons.)
Phillip Nelson discusses the Israeli military’s attack on the USS Liberty.
Washington’s Blog asks, Will the mainstream media ever report on false flags? (Me asks: What about real ones, like the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty?)
Ron Paul asks, Why are the U.S. government and its military attacking the Syrians who are fighting ISIS?
Gareth Porter says that the long war in Afghanistan, that George W. Bush started for no good reason, has been self-serving for the officers and bureaucrats.
Tony Cartalucci writes that Tehran was always the U.S. government’s and thus the Islamic State’s final destination.
Ray McGovern discusses hiding the ugly business of torture.
Aaron Nelson on the U.S. military’s own secret brand of fake news.
Bionic Mosquito criticizes “libertarians” who support a universal basic income.
Chris Calton has this article on natural law libertarianism.
Darius Shahtahmasebi discusses where the U.S. ranks on the list of most peaceful nations in the world.
Catherine Frompovich writes about mandatory vaccinations.
Bill Sardi on starving cancer cells out of existence.
And Kalee Brown on mainstream media and Big Pharma’s false health claims.
It Turns Out, Now Democrats Are Rethuglicans
A deranged lunatic on the fringe left has come out of the woodwork to shoot at and wound (and almost kill) some Republicans practicing baseball in an area outside Washington, D.C. The 66-year-old shooter was killed, thank God. His Facebook or other media indicated that he was a Bernie Sanders supporter and an Occupy Wall Street activist.
Some hysterical people on talk radio have been saying that “we’re in a civil war,” meaning cultural like between “left and right.” No, we’re not in a civil war. While there’s a lot of rhetoric on Twitter and elsewhere coming from the left from people suggesting that violence is necessary against those with whom they disagree, I still say that such rhetoric is not “influencing” people to be emboldened to then go out and shoot people. The Republican baseball practice shooter was acting on his own free will and would have done so regardless of all the “violent rhetoric” out there. (I wonder what psychiatric drugs he had been taking? Xanax? Zoloft? But I digress.)
These particular incidents have all been isolated incidents. There were this shooting, the Rethuglican candidate for Congress who beat up a news reporter and then won the election anyway, various anti-Trump activists beating up on people wearing a Trump hat, or whatever. This is not happening every day, or every week, or month. It’s not an “epidemic of violence.” And we’re not in a “civil war.” Chill.
However, the real epidemic of violence is our government and military and CIA bombing and murdering innocents on a daily basis overseas. For instance, civilian murders by U.S.-led airstrikes in Raqqa, Syria are “staggering,” according to the Guardian. And a study now shows that the U.S. government will only admit to civilian deaths in one out of five of its drone strikes. For at least 15 years, Americans have seen how their “awesome” military have been committing the most acts of violence against foreigners, mainly murdering civilians. So of course some Americans might be “influenced” by the news on a daily basis. One possible solution, as Jacob Hornberger points out, the U.S. government ending its own killing spree in the Middle East should have a positive impact on America.
Unfortunately, this Republican baseball practice shooting is reviving the gun control argument. Now, if you’re against gun control but aren’t exactly sure what to say to your pro-gun-grabbing co-workers or friends, here are some suggestions. Point out that criminals, or those who are intent on shooting, assaulting or murdering people, don’t care if there are laws against assaulting and murdering people. So obviously, they will not care if there are laws regarding gun possession or usage. They will not obey ANY laws.
Also, if just one of those Congressmen or Senators or staff members had a firearm then that armed civilian could have taken out the shooter early on. Many times, waiting for government police adds to death tolls or in this case, numbers injured. And places designated as “Gun-Free Zones” are telling would-be shooter-murderers that the place is open season for anyone who wants to go there and kill people, because no one is armed and so they can’t shoot back. If just one teacher or staff member at the Sandy Hook School were armed, that individual could have saved 20 kids from their deaths.
Besides all that stuff, retired law professor Butler Shaffer has this terrific article on law, Sharia law, and government law. He is right on, in my view.
Now to conclude this post, there is a new bill being introduced in the U.S. Senate by those who have no understanding of “law,” who are showing just what greedy thugs, parasites, terrorists, tyrants and all-around bad guys these neanderthals in Washington really are. If anyone is doing the reckless shooting of innocents, it is these psychopaths shooting at their own fellow citizens by siccing the enforcers-of-tyranny on them with legislative bazookas.
According to Robert Wenzel, a bill being sponsored by Sen. Charles Grassley, Dianne Feinstein, John Cornyn and Sheldon Whitehouse, “The Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” will expand civil asset forfeiture powers. They will steal everything you have if they suspect that you have not filled out the required forms. (To protect us from those Ay-rab towelheads, naturally.)
Excuse me, retarded senators, but rather than stealing more money from innocent people for no good reason (which is really all government does these days), if you want to stop terrorist financing, then why don’t you in the U.S. government stop financing terrorists. Duh. And getting rid of the Federal Reserve System will get rid of that counterfeiting and “money-laundering” scourge in America. (Ya think?)
No, I Am Not “Anti-Military” When They Really Are Defending Us
In yesterday’s post, I included some remarks about the U.S. military. Please stop complaining. I am not “anti-military” if they are actually defending the U.S. from actual foreign aggression. But what the U.S. military have been doing for decades is not “defending” the U.S., as Laurence Vance pointed out recently, but invading other countries, occupying territories that are not U.S. territories, and bombing, shooting, wounding, maiming and murdering innocents. So, they are really invaders, not defenders.
I do not support invaders. I do not support intruders or invaders of any kind. Those who initiate aggressions against others. It was wrong for our government and military to start wars of aggression against foreign countries that were of no threat to us, especially the Bush war on Iraq in 1991 that started much of what’s going on now.
So U.S. military soldiers have no business being over there in those foreign countries that are not U.S. territories.
I do not support invaders who break into your home, steal your stuff, rape your daughters or kill your family. Of course, that goes for regular thug invaders or those invaders who might be from an invading foreign government and its military. Likewise, I do not support invaders from my own country who go over to other countries to invade, steal, rape, assault, kill and wreak havoc, and destroy whole countries as our military has done to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as our military having created ISIS.
The moral relativists I mentioned in my post yesterday believe (or are brainwashed to believe) that it would be evil if or when foreigners invaded America, but because America is an “exceptional” nation, when our government and its military invade foreigners, that’s okay.
So, everybody “support the troops.” Nope. Not when they are invaders. And there are those authoritarian sheeple who say you have to show “loyalty” to the government and its “troops,” but no, we Americans are not obligated to be loyal to the troops, the military, the President or any other government bureaucrat. Especially those who act criminally against innocents.
It’s actually the other way around. The government and its bureaucrats and soldiers must show loyalty to us, the people who employ them. That is why they swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution which includes the Bill of Rights.
Invading foreign territories and murdering innocents and poking hornets’ nests and starting fights with foreigners does not “defend” us, it makes us less safe and less secure. Don’t support invaders.
Can Today’s Conservatives Overcome Their Worship of the National Security State and the Military?
We are increasingly seeing whistleblowers, investigators and commentators telling it like it really is, as far as the “deep state” or the national security state is concerned. Even the Rush Limbaughs on conservative talk radio have been willing to point out the lies, incompetence of the bureaucrats.
The talk radio crowd are this close to actually questioning the legitimacy of the national security state and the so-called “intelligence” community, which is turning out to be not so intelligent, and extremely corrupt, quite frankly. Their counterparts in the Pentacon and military are not exactly the cream of the crop as well.
For example, law professor Jonathan Turley presented this extensive, scathing case against former FBI director James Comey in an opinion piece in The Hill. Turley emphasized the memo Comey wrote after a private meeting with Donald Trump in February, the memo that Comey had another law professor leak to the New York Times. That was the memo in which Comey accused Donald Trump of asking him to end the investigation of former national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Turley wrote:
… FBI agents routinely write such memos in investigations. They are called 302s to memorialize field interviews or fact acquisitions. They are treated as FBI information.
The Justice Department routinely claims such memos as privileged and covered by the deliberative process privilege and other privileges. Indeed, if this information were sought under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) it would likely have been denied. Among other things, the Justice Department and FBI routinely claim privilege “inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.”
…
Besides being subject to nondisclosure agreements, Comey falls under federal laws governing the disclosure of classified and unclassified information. Assuming that the memos were not classified (though it seems odd that it would not be classified even on the confidential level), there is 18 U.S.C. § 641, which makes it a crime to steal, sell, or convey “any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof.”
There are also ethical and departmental rules against the use of material to damage a former represented person or individual or firm related to prior representation. The FBI website warns employees that “dissemination of FBI information is made strictly in accordance with provisions of the Privacy Act; Title 5, United States Code, Section 552a; FBI policy and procedures regarding discretionary release of information in accordance with the Privacy Act; and other applicable federal orders and directives.”
One such regulation is § 2635.703, on the use of nonpublic information, which states, “An employee shall not engage in a financial transaction using nonpublic information, nor allow the improper use of nonpublic information to further his own private interest or that of another, whether through advice or recommendation, or by knowing unauthorized disclosure.” While this provision covers current employees and would not likely to be applied to Comey on these facts, FBI forms and rules barring such use of FBI information extend to former employees…
The standard FBI employment agreement bars the unauthorized disclosure of information “contained in the files, electronic or paper, of the FBI” that impact the bureau and specifically pledges that “I will not reveal, by any means, any information or material from or related to FBI files or any other information acquired by virtue of my official employment to any unauthorized recipient without prior official written authorization by the FBI.”
So who knows what was going through James Comey’s head when he felt compelled to have his law professor friend leak the memo. He’s clearly incompetent. And now we have Trump appointing Comey’s former FBI colleague and friend Robert Mueller to be the new “special counsel,” sometimes known as “independent counsel.”
Absent the independence, of course, because Mueller will not be objective if this is a “Trump vs. Comey”-based investigation.
Actually, the FBI should really just be abolished. They are useless, along with the CIA, NSA, etc. I wish the conservative talk radio crowd could ever understand that.
The FBI is the government bureaucracy that kept Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen under surveillance, but apparently weren’t able to prevent his shooting 49 innocent people. Meanwhile, they are good at spying on, infiltrating and cracking down on groups like Occupy Wall Street, telling teachers to rat on “anti-government” students, cracking down on dissenters and journalists who cover the FBI’s corruption and ineptness, and so on.
And this is the same bureaucracy that creates its own “homegrown terrorists” to thwart their plots (See The FBI again thwarts its own terror plot, 9/29/2011 by Glenn Greenwald, FBI: Bureau of Frame-ups, bullying, and intimidation, 10/23/10 by William Grigg, Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI entrapment questioned, 11/16/11 by Paul Harris, The Informants, 2011 by Trevor Aaronson who also wrote a book about the FBI’s manufactured war on terrorism, and The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: “There is no real hunt. It’s fixed.” 3/20/2012 by Paul Harris.).
Comey and other national security heads or former heads have testified that even though they have no evidence, they still believe that Russians or the Russian government interfered with the recent election. Why do they still believe this? I find it hard to believe that they believe that, given that they know about the kinds of cyber tools that CIA and others have to intrude into computers or networks and leave the “fingerprints” of others, such as Russian fingerprints, as former CIA agent Ray McGovern wrote just recently:
However carefully Megyn Kelly and her NBC colleagues peruse The New York Times, they might well not know WikiLeaks’ disclosure on March 31 of original CIA documents showing that the agency had created a program allowing it to break into computers and servers and make it look like others did it by leaving telltale signs (like Cyrillic markings, for example).
The capabilities shown in what WikiLeaks calls the “Vault 7” trove of CIA documents required the creation of hundreds of millions of lines of source code. At $25 per line of code, that amounts to about $2.5 billion for each 100 million code lines. But the Deep State has that kind of money and would probably consider the expenditure a good return on investment for “proving” the Russians hacked into Democratic Party emails.
In other words, it is altogether possible that the hacking attributed to Russia was actually one of several “active measures” undertaken by a cabal consisting of the CIA, FBI, NSA and Clapper – the same agencies responsible for the lame, evidence-free report of Jan. 6, that Clapper and Brennan acknowledged last month was not the consensus view of the 17 intelligence agencies.
This article on Zero Hedge explains the CIA’s cyber tool more thoroughly.
You see, the American people will believe what the government and its sycophantic media stenographers tell them, that “Russians hacked the election” because the government and the media tell us that repeatedly. The American people by and large will assume that the CIA, FBI, NSA, Pentacon, etc. are “good” and “honest.” Would some spooks in or ass0ciated with the CIA or NSA hack or leak emails from the DNC to embarrass a candidate they don’t want to win an election? And to cover their tracks use software they have available to leave “Russian fingerprints” such as spoofed IP addresses, etc.?
The truth is, government bureaucrats are involved in criminality and corrupt shenanigans far more than those in the private sector, such as when the 9/11 Commission deliberately omitted testimony regarding FBI prior knowledge of 9/11, and the Pentacon’s deleted files related to the Osama bin Laden so-called raid.
Meanwhile, the conservatives, nationalists, and exceptionalists of the talk radio crowd are constantly obsessed with “Muslims” who “want to kill us,” because “they hate us for our freedoms,” etc, like a brainwashed mantra. I’ve already mentioned recently that the main problem is not Muslims and Islamic extremists, but it is our hegemonic, interventionist and incompetent bureaucrats in the military/security area who have been invading, occupying, destroying other countries, and bombing and murdering foreigners especially in the Middle East for decades.
But I think a problem regarding the conservatives’ cognitive dissonance is their inability to either recognize or acknowledge the inherently evil and immoral nature of centralized government, especially its “protection” services, which are communistic in nature. They also seem to have this thing with worshiping the national security state and all those agencies of the FedGov and especially the military. They can’t overcome that. Some people blindly love and worship all things military, regardless of the murderous criminality.
Besides the CIA drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere that are mainly killing innocent civilians, the military has also been acting murderously and immorally, such as when a U.S. military convoy recently was bombed and troops then responded by just shooting indiscriminately and murdering some more innocent people.
But what the hell are U.S. government and military personnel doing in Afghanistan? They don’t belong there! And they don’t belong in Iraq, Yemen, and all those other damn places!
And regarding the kinds of people the military-worshipers worship, I wrote in a 2010 article,
the character of many who join the military … groups such as the “Thrill Kill” unit in Afghanistan, in which a young soldier had testified that members of his unit had committed acts of murder for the “thrill” of it. Incidents of sexual assault against female soldiers have been on the increase, and we have an increase in crimes by and mental illness of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that President George W. Bush started, the military has been stretched and had by 2006 lowered its standards, including accepting recruits with criminal backgrounds.
Today’s conservatives especially some of them on talk radio constantly preach about morality vs. evil and the “right to life,” yet they support the U.S. government’s aggressions, invasions and occupations, bombings and murders of whole populations of innocents.
(See Jacob Hornberger’s recent posts, Why should CIA murderers be protected by secrecy? and Assassination is murder, even when the CIA does it.)
It isn’t just the conservatives, but perhaps most Americans are brainwashed by government-controlled schooling to worship the State and its hired guns. Most people seem to defend the U.S. government targeting and killing innocents abroad, but cry foul! when foreigners kill our people. And that is why I have referred to those conservatives and talk radio preachers as moral relativists.
For some reason, the moral relativists on both the left and right see “war” as being different. War excuses criminality. War excuses murder, in their minds. They have the “We’re at War!” mentality, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2011.
But, as Thomas Knapp put in in a recent article,
Of course, we’re frequently and piously informed that innocent civilians killed by US or US-allied forces are accidental “collateral damage” or even “human shields.” The US Department of Defense always thoroughly investigates such killings and always ends up absolving US troops of responsibility. It’s only a crime to kill noncombatants if “the enemy” can be blamed for the killing, and – mirabile dictu! – that always turns out to be the case.
But in reality, when you pull a trigger and send a round of any kind downrange, you are responsible for where it lands and who it kills. Until and unless US forces accept that military responsibility, it’s our civic responsibility to treat them as the war criminals they are.
No More Involuntarily Funding of ISIS and the National Security State
My previous post was one of those I calls it like I sees it kind of posts. A lot of people dismiss such calling the bureaucrats and their enforcers what they are because a lot of people have been bamboozled by a lifetime of propaganda from the mainstream news media who tend to be lazy and unchallenging and tend to merely repeat word for word what government bureaucrats tell them without question.
And many of those in the mainstream media also have poor knowledge or understanding of history, economics, philosophy, or don’t even have good reading and comprehension skills, especially lately thanks to the government schools. So despite their “communications” degrees from the journalism schools they don’t even know that they should always be skeptical of what government bureaucrats tell them without evidence and without the journalists themselves doing some investigative research for corroboration of statements or assertions.
And most Americans, unfortunately, seem to take what they see on CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News, HBO, Comedy Central, or read in the New York Times or the Boston Globe, as unquestionable fact. Nope. Much of it is propaganda to further an Official Narrative or to further the editors’ own social agenda, or to please their corporate sponsors.
And since 9/11, the propaganda mainly has been the war-promoting kind, and the “liberal” mainstream media have been playing right along.
What led to 9/11 was George H.W. Bush and the U.S. government’s first war on Iraq and its sanctions, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians throughout the 1990s, continued bombing and sanctions by Bill Clinton, and the U.S. government’s continued occupations with military bases throughout the Middle East. Bush’s war that he started in 1991 was heavily propagandized to get the American people to support it. After 9/11, I’ll bet you didn’t hear much about those antecedent events from the mainstream media outlets. Anyone who did bring up those things were called crackpots or tin-foil hat wearers.
The government told us that we were here minding our own business (which we were, but our government was not!) and Islamic terrorists came over and attacked us, and so we must start a war against them. Don’t question that Official Narrative! and so on.
But the truth is, there never really has been a “war.” And I don’t believe that 9/11 would have happened had elder Bush not started that war on Iraq in 1991, imposed sanctions and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. And this “war” stuff is a propagandistic device by collectivist statists to rationalize their cravings to commit criminal acts of violence (or have their obedient militaries do their dirty work for them).
Most people still don’t believe that the first war on Iraq by the elder Bush in 1991 was a criminal act of violence, that included bombing Iraq’s civilian infrastructure that forced the Iraqis to have to use untreated water, and that was intentional by the U.S. military. Only a sick, deranged, sadistic psychopath would target innocent civilians to cause them to have diseases such as cholera and typhoid as well as as cause the increase of infant mortality.
After 9/11, the younger George Bush started two wars of aggression, including the second one on Iraq, to finish the job that his father started (for no good reason). And he didn’t even “finish the job”! Younger Bush caused even further havoc and chaos and not only turned Iraq from a secular state into a theocratic sharia-law tyranny, but caused the conditions that have engendered what is now known as “Islamic State,” or ISIS.
So, in reference to my previous post, I see a comparison between the U.S. government and what has been referred to as “ISIS,” which refers to Islamic State and is really just another criminal gang of thugs, marauders and murderers. In my view, the leaders of these Islamic terrorist groups are themselves not as religiously fanatical as many people think they are. They are power-grabbers and psychopaths who just like to enslave others, hurt and torture others, and murder innocents and get away with it with impunity. However, the followers of these groups are the easily emotionally manipulated ones who are brainwashed with the religious ideology, in this case Islam, and who really believe in the Islamic-based authoritarian rules and “sharia” this or that.
The ruling bureaucrats of the “Western” nations especially U.S. and U.K. have been the “acceptable” power-grabbers, while their “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” minions and duped soldiers have been carrying out the radicalizing and provoking of the aforementioned, as I referred to in my previous post.
U.S. government forces have had absolutely no business being in those foreign countries for these past many decades. There have been many innocent human beings who have been slaughtered by the violence started by the two Bush presidents and continued by Clinton, Obama, and Trump. In addition to the innocents who had been slaughtered by the agents of the U.S. government in the Vietnam War, in Korea, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tokyo and Dresden, and other places.
Every time I hear the moral relativists on conservative talk radio make references to the official rationalizations for these wars and the slaughters of innocents, I really cringe.
We could stop the Islamic fanaticism and terrorist attacks we have today if we didn’t allow our governments to fund them and provide them with weapons and intentionally radicalize them. The answer is the same answer for all the other problems government creates: end the involuntary confiscatory taxation that funds all this and that funds the weapons manufacturers, remove all U.S. foreign military bases from those other countries, as well as abolishing the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and dismantling the entire national security state. (Who in his right mind would voluntarily contribute to fund all that crap?) And such dismantling and decentralizing will coincide with the domestic welfare state that also needs to be abolished, because without involuntary confiscatory taxation you could not have a welfare state. (Who in his right mind would voluntarily contribute to fund a government-run social welfare scheme?)
Time to Give the Central Planners in Washington and the U.K. a Dishonorable Discharge
That title is similar to a title for an article I wrote some years ago. The central planners who rule over us are power-hungry control freaks. But many of them now are so over-zealous in their hunger for power and control that their crimes of murder, theft and corruption are more and more visible. We’re talking about real psychopaths (or sociopaths, if you prefer), in my view.
There are many articles now on the Internet that are still not covered by the mainstream media. So I am glad that people like Justin Raimondo link to some very important items on their Twitter. For example, this article by Mark Curtis suggests that one of the London attackers was part of a British covert op in Libya, “trained by U.K. and U.S. ‘liaison’ officers.” That’s typical.
The U.S. and U.K. “national security” central planners train militants (or those who are not militants but become militants by way of CIA/MI6 psy-ops and training) to commit jihad. Central planners do the stupidest things, in my view. And they also have been assisting these jihadists in their revolving door from Libya to the U.K. to Syria, back to U.K., etc. Really stupid, those government central planners.
In the U.K., I think that MI6 is their equivalent to the CIA, while MI5 is their FBI. And GCHQ is the U.K. version of NSA.
In this article, Curtis states that the Manchester bombing was blowback from “overt and covert actions of British governments.” And Nafeez Ahmed in this article says that the “terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.”
“Closely monitored by MI5 for decades”? That just shows how sincere those central planning bureaucrats are in protecting the people from terrorists! Just who in his right mind would go into mosques to intentionally motivate young Muslim males to commit jihad, as the FBI have been doing? Who in his right mind would give armaments to the Saudis knowing that they are sponsoring and providing for jihadists worldwide? It’s nuts, all this stuff.
And talk about dogs chasing their tails. I think a lot of this is just a game, perhaps not entirely to those who actually do a lot of the work in those agencies (the True Believers who don’t connect the dots and don’t know they are being used by the higher-ups) but it’s a game (and a very profitable one) to those higher-ups who are in charge of the agencies, who KNOW that the terrorism is blowback and is being provoked and stoked by these government bureaucrats who thrive on the existence of the monsters they create to then destroy.
I think that Donald Trump had a sense of this in the years leading up to his election, and that’s why he articulated some criticism of the central planners themselves, the war-starters Bush I and Bush II and the bunglers under whose control 9/11 was allowed to happen. But Trump also has this fascination with generals and their ilk, unfortunately, and he chose generals to be part of his administration. Unlike most of the rest of us, the generals are trained in the military to suppress their moral consciences. They are also trained in psy-ops, psychological operations on what are intended to be their enemy targets. But the generals seem to have given Trump a good dose of the psy-ops (even though he is not their enemy, or is he?) and seem to have brainwashed “conditioned” him to accept the warmongering, totalitarian-mindedness of the central planners, and they got Trump to become one of them.
Now, a lot of people have been referring to the “deep state,” which is really just another way of referring to the national security state. The national security state became more of a “deep” or hidden state after they killed JFK, who wanted to scatter the CIA out into the winds, and so on. But it was becoming a little less deep when the Pentagon Papers came out, and when the Church Committee hearings were going on. And then the Iran-Contra fiasco occurred during the 1980s. But after each instance I think the national security state re-strengthened itself. There was a lot of prestige in being a part of the FBI-CIA-NSA-Military, right? Many Americans worship those things, and still do. But I think that CIA-man George H.W. Bush was able to restore the “deepness” and hidden aspect of the national security state by starting his new aggressions and sanctions in Iraq in 1990-91. This led to 9/11 and all the planned post-9/11 “national security” totalitarian measures to be sealed in place.
But in these more recent years, whistleblowers with a moral conscience have been “leaking” inside information, as they should be, which reveal the crimes and corruption of government bureaucrats, particularly “national security” related bureaucrats. Throughout the Obama administration and now with Trump the U.S. government is cracking down on whistleblowers, mainly because the criminal cockroaches in these government bureaucracies don’t like their crimes, or their embarrassing idiocy, exposed.
Government bureaucrats hide behind secrecy laws, marking just about everything “classified” or “top secret,” while they are imposing more and more invasive spying measures against their own people. It’s a sick society now. The central planners in Washington are more and more Soviet-like. Is this why they want Universal Health Care, Single-Payer (or whatever you want to call it)? After all, it’s what Democrats and Republicans want, it’s what Donald Trump wants. And why do you think totalitarian-minded central planners want government-run health care? Perhaps that would give them even more personal information of the people to have in their dossiers, if you know what I mean. NSA and other whistleblowers have stated that bureaucrats are blackmailing people, members of Congress, and judges. Imagine what they can do with everybody’s private medical information. Very Soviet Union.
And as I wrote in this 2011 article, sexual assault in the U.S. military was a serious problem, and included male against male as well as against female. In 2017, sexual assault is still a problem in the U.S. military. It’s bad enough when our government sends its military overseas to invade other countries, destroy people’s homes and businesses and schools and churches and mosques, murders innocent people and rapes their women. Obviously those are criminals doing all those things. So I suppose it makes sense that thugs and marauders who would do those things against foreigners would also do those things against their own people, rape or assault their own fellow comrades.
In my 2011 article, I wrote:
According to the Newsweek article, among U.S. military soldiers, “male-on-male assault…is motivated not by homosexuality, but power, intimidation, and domination. Assault victims, both male and female, are typically young and low-ranking; they are targeted for their vulnerability.” Verbal and physical attacks now reported include those in which the assailants are throughout the chain of command, by soldiers against their fellow soldiers, as well as by superior officers. In one incident, for example, “a group of men tackled (a soldier), shoved a soda bottle into his rectum, and threw him backward off an elevated platform onto the hood of a car. When he reported the incident…his platoon sergeant told him, ‘You’re the problem. You’re the reason this is happening,’ and refused to take action. ‘You just feel trapped’…”
In another incident, according to the Newsweek article, a soldier “was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, ‘It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them.’”
Now, if you are a commanding officer in the military and you were confronted by a soldier with such a complaint against other soldiers and you replied in the aforementioned manner, then shame on you. That kind of response by a military officer, supposedly in charge of a unit whose purpose is to “protect and defend” their fellow Americans, is a cowardly protection more of criminals than of fellow citizens…
…
But in America, in which violence now seems to be so part of the culture and within the military ranks, it’s just barbaric, and sick, and there’s no excuse for it. Should we be surprised to hear of military “Kill Teams,” etc., in which soldiers have been shooting and mutilating innocent civilians abroad and being celebrated by their fellow soldiers? Just how pervasive is this sick behavior within the ranks of this institution that we think will defend us when we’re attacked? There was one soldier within the notorious “Kill Team” unit who was shocked at the indifference amongst the unit toward the lives of their victims, and noted, “I talked to someone and they told me this stuff happens all the time…everyone just wants to kill people at any cost….” And, he wrote that, “The Army really let me down when I thought I would come out here to do good maybe make some change in this country I find out that its all a lie (sic)….”
And it really is a lie. I can see why 22 U.S. military veterans commit suicide every day on average, while the numbers of active-duty military committing suicide are also well above the national average. George H.W. Bush started his war in Iraq and imposed sanctions based on lies. And his son did the same thing after 9/11. It is unfortunate that there is so much military worship in America, by the bamboozled majority who are American Exceptionalism’s True Believers. And they worship the entire national security state apparatus, including the U.S. military, the CIA, the FBI, NSA, and so on. But will they continue to do such worshiping if there is to be economic collapse and civil unrest, or martial law in America? I hope not.
The True Believers in “American Exceptionalism” and the central planning that naturally goes with it may want to rethink such an ideology. Because the goons and loony-tunes in Washington are turning America into the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as well, and I think the only way to stop it is to have a “Brexit” for America, a total decentralization and dismantling of the central planning apparatus in Washington that has been gradually destroying America for over 200 years.
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