Voluntary Association and Non-Aggression
Here are two very well done articles which explain how the government apparatchiks in political and media organizations are threatening everyone’s right to the freedom of speech and a free press.
Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm argue that the DNC’s lawsuit against WikiLeaks poses a serious threat to press freedom.
And Moon of Alabama has a documentary on the media’s war on truthful reporting and legitimate opinions.
Jacob Hornberger responds to the assertion that “illegal” immigrants are “invaders.”
James Bovard on 25 years after the U.S. government’s attack in Waco and murders of over 70 innocent people.
Thomas Knapp says that Donald Trump isn’t the first war criminal President, but he should be the last.
Zero Hedge has a lengthy article on long-time war reporter Robert Fisk who was at the Syrian “chemical attack” site, and who concludes, “they were not gassed.” This refers to the allegation that Syrian leader Assad attacked his own people with chemical weapons, which makes no sense. And thus Donald Trump’s recent bombing of Syria was unjustified. But the warmongers loved it.
Another long-time war reporter, Eric Margolis, comments on Assad and the false accusations by the West.
Thomas Paine says that society is a blessing, but government is evil.
Kevin Carson on the State’s own illegality (2010 article).
Jack Burns discusses the thousands of people in Amerika in jail for over a year, pre-trial.
Carl Watner discusses voluntaryism and secessionism (2000 article).
Laurence Vance has 8 stubborn facts on the drug war, asks whether drug testing violates libertarian principles, and says that Republicans talk the talk about limited government but don’t walk the walk. (i.e. they’re FOS.)
Dale Steinreich details the 100 years of U.S. medical fascism (2010 article). (8 more years of U.S. medical fascism since then, and counting.)
Jacob Hornberger says that the animus toward Russia is nothing new.
Michael Boldin says that Trump’s Syria airstrikes are unconstitutional.
Ray McGovern on the criminal referral of Comey, Clinton, et al.
Albert Jay Nock comments on the criminality of the State.
Joshua Green on the myth of cyberterrorism (2001 article).
Daniel Mitchell discusses the looming fiscal nightmare of extravagant unfunded pensions for state and local bureaucrats.
According to this article from NBC news, the Trump legal team had been “discussing a possible interview with Mueller’s team and had begun to hash out the final sticking points, including the timing, scope and length, according to people familiar with the discussions. One person familiar with the strategy said the president’s lawyers had sought over the weekend to expand his legal team to include individuals who would prepare him for an interview.”
But the chances of that interview decreased quite a bit because of Mueller’s referral to the FBI to raid Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s office and seize 10 boxes of documents and emails, and who knows what.
Many people advising Trump to not have that interview have included some of his lawyers John Dowd, who is now out, and Jay Sekulow, as well as Chris Christie, and Newt Gingrich.
Also retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has stated in the following interview that an innocent person can be indicted for perjury even if he’s telling the truth, if another witness has told prosecutors something different and the prosecutors believe the other witness. Former D.C. U.S. attorney Joe diGenova calls such an interview a “perjury trap.”
http://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=5764219308001&w=466&h=263Watch the latest video at foxnews.com
We do know that Mueller’s prosecutorial team pressured former national security advisor Mike Flynn to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, even though the FBI interrogators believed that he had not lied in his interview. It is possible that Flynn also considered the guilty plea because he knew that prosecutors were investigating his son as well.
But, given that Mueller prosecutors didn’t even believe that Flynn intentionally lied to FBI but were charging him anyway, it clearly was a case of entrapment. And they will do the same with Trump if given the chance. The problem with Trump is that he has made so many statements covering all sides of every issue, anything he says in an interview with Mueller’s gang could be interpreted as a “lie” whether he intended to mislead or not.
So now the corrupt and dishonest Rudy Giuliani has been added to the Trump legal team. One reason to totally distrust Giuliani is that he said, regarding his joining the Trump legal team, “I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this [Mueller investigation] for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller.” (Hmm, high regard for this? That sure tells us something.)
According to the Washington Post, “Dowd stepped down in March amid clashes over strategy and whether Trump should sit for a voluntary interview with Mueller. The legal team has often been beset by infighting.”
That is, the lawyers who know how easy it is for government investigators to entrap someone are saying that Trump should not talk, and the ones who are a part of the “swamp” and who really want Trump out are saying that Trump should talk to Mueller.
Some people, such as liberal Hillary-supporting blogger Bill Palmer, think that Rudy may be the one who is going to flip on Donald Trump. Palmer says that Mueller “cut a plea deal with Giuliani’s former client, Turkish criminal Reza Zarrab. Since that time the question has been whether Giuliani has secretly cut a plea deal against Donald Trump. Believe it or not, the FBI’s sudden raid against Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen provides strong evidence that Giuliani has indeed flipped on Trump….”
Palmer continues: “Unless you think Giuliani was fully exonerated in the Trump-Russia scandal by Robert Mueller prior to January, which seems incredibly unlikely that early on in the overall investigation, the other explanation would be that Giuliani cut a plea deal prior to January. Back in February, Palmer Report pointed out that Giuliani sounded very wary of what the FBI can do a criminal target, suggesting he’d already been through the ringer by then.” (Link via Target Liberty)
So, Giuliani says, “My advice on Mueller has been this: He should be allowed to do his job. He’s entitled to do his job.”
And given that the deep state, the swamp, doesn’t want someone in there who has expressed any anti-swamp sentiment, I think we know what that means.
UPDATE on May 3, 2018: Giuliani gets on TV and already betrays Trump’s confidence by merely talking! He’s contradicting things Trump has stated, and making Trump out to be a liar (which he probably is). Just the fact that Giuliani went on TV is enough. As Trump’s lawyer, his talks should be with Trump, not on TV. So this is further proof, as far as I’m concerned.
Jacob Hornberger says, Abolish the FBI, America’s KGB. Could someone be blackmailing Donald Trump? The Russians? The FBI?
Don’t forget COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program that involved illegal surveillance of the American people, just like the KGB did to the Russian people. In fact, President Truman even compared the FBI to the Gestapo, the national police force of the Nazi regime, writing “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I. is tending in that direction.”
For an excellent example of the use of secret dirt and blackmail on the part of the FBI, just recall what these people did to Martin Luther King (who they now conveniently extol as a great American). They illegally spied on him because they were convinced that he was part of a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over America and the world. In the process of doing that, they learned that King had apparently engaged in extra-marital relations. They then used that illegally acquired dirt to blackmail King into hopefully committing suicide. It was all done under the supervision and with the full support of none other than the FBI director himself, J. Edgar Hoover.
And James Bovard writes about Trump and the right to #resist.
History is replete with tyrannical governments that deserved to be destroyed by their victims. At what point can we say that a government has placed itself in a state of war with the citizenry? By what standard or measure can people know when they have a right to forcibly resist illegitimate power? In Bosnia, in Rwanda, or in other areas where mass murders have recently occurred, the citizen obviously may use as much deadly force as necessary to prevent himself and his family from being slaughtered by rampaging government forces or by murderous private mobs acting with government sanction. And in the United States, blacks clearly had a right to peacefully resist segregationist laws in the 1950s and 1960s and had a right to violently resist attacks on them by sheriffs and private citizens.
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But there is a paradox in the anti-Trump “resistance.” Many of the liberals who are most vehemently opposed to Trump also support government confiscation of private firearms. Perhaps they believe that as long as they still have their Twitter hashtags, their rights will be safe from government oppression.
…
Another paradox of the Trump opposition is that many of them seem most angry about the president’s policies that reduce federal power. Many Trump opponents are not opposed to dictators per se; they simply want different dictates. Trump was widely denounced because his Justice Department refuses to compel every public school in the nation to make special bathroom and locker-room accommodations for self-proclaimed transgender kids. But the Constitution did not grant the federal government jurisdiction over “gender identity.”
The 2016 election consisted of some former First Lady who became a Senator and then Secretary of State who was going to go on to “break the glass ceiling,” and probably could have won the election had she actually campaigned in the swing states and not insulted half the voters as “deplorables.”
Besides Hillary’s using the Clinton Foundation to allegedly rake in millions from the Saudis in exchange for billions in weapons contracts for the Saudis and the Foundation’s other quid pro quos, there was Hillary’s email scandal that most others would not get away with, there were classified emails that she was allegedly criminally reckless with. And the controversy that most people don’t know about, that Clinton Foundation-connected James Comey had already written a letter of exoneration prior to interviewing Hillary or other witnesses.
Actually the corrupt FBI flunky Peter Strzok did the interview of Mrs. Clinton and he then went on to work on the Mueller investigation until Strzok’s texts with FBI counsel Lisa Page were exposed in their biased anti-Trump hatred. But they were demoted, not fired. And their friend the fired former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe is also in deep doo-doo. McCabe did a go-fund-me thing obviously to cover the legal bills for the representation he’s going to need at his trial, if there is one. Maybe they can do a joint trial with McCabe, Comey, Strzok, Page and the rest of the corrupt hacks in Washington.
So much of the corruption has been exposed now, I just can’t see how the Mueller investigation and Mueller’s going after Trump’s associates and lawyers will prevent the real criminals of the FBI and DOJ from getting away with their crimes. And that includes attorney general Jeff Sessions, in my view, the corrupt former prosecutor. Sessions does not seem to really be a Trump supporter, and it is clear to me given his fascist policies that his loyalty is to the State, first and foremost.
Several bureaucrats of the national security state, within FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSA, made up the “Russian collusion” and “Russia hacking the election” stories that were really fake news. The DNC emails were released to WikiLeaks by an insider, and not actually hacked, but the media, begun by the Washington Pest, repeated the “collusions” and “hacked the election” story ad nauseam.
The Mueller investigation came up with nothing against Trump so they went after Trump associates Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn and other associates. And now they are harassing Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen to try to find any possible evidence of any technical violations of non-crimes or whatever they can find and make up. I’m sure “insider trading” will come up, as with Martha Stewart based on criminally corrupt government prosecutors’ socialist envy and hatred of capitalism and their hatred of private sector entrepreneurs, and as the feds also did in their persecution of Joseph Nacchio of Qwest in Nacchio’s refusal to act as an NSA stasi against his innocent customers. Government sucks.
Judge Kimba Wood, the “Love Judge,” is the judge who ordered Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen to reveal the names of other clients, whether or not they were involved with Donald Trump. During the 1980s, she presided over the Michael Milken trial, in which Milken was railroaded by the New York U.S. attorney thug Rudy Giuliani. Prior to being an evil judge, Wood’s field of expertise was anti-capitalism known as “antitrust” law. These government apparatchiks hate the market, the free market and voluntary exchange in which bureaucrats don’t get to stick their fat noses into the people’s private business. (“MYOB” used to mean something, for crissakes.)
So the FBI and Mueller prosecutors will have access to many private documents and emails for no good reason, except for political reasons, anything to get Donald Trump. (Perhaps the real reason they hate The Donald is because he has been a businessman his whole life. Well, a crony-capitalist businessman, but, whatever. Just like their persecution of Martha Stewart and the other innocent people in business.)
And regarding Sean Hannity, he has been a propagandist for the national security state for years now. Should I care that much about him?
Perhaps it’s time to investigate all the comrades on the Soviet-like Mueller team, including especially Mueller himself. Is there an NSA agent who has released info to WikiLeaks on the Mueller team members? That would be a lot of fun.
I’ve been saying that impeaching Trump would a bad thing because at least his presence in Washington is exposing the corruption in the national security state, including FBI and DOJ, and he has also been exposing the media’s real bias, corruption and idiocy, and eliciting their hysteria in their hatred for Trump. And impeaching Trump would also give us a President Mike Pence, a loathsome warvangelical neocon phony-baloney.
But, given that Trump is so bad on just about everything now, including his taking in the bloodthirsty warmongering neocons John Bolton et al. and going along with the tear-down-the-Middle-East agenda of the neocons and Bible-thumping Israel First crowd, I really don’t care any more. And we knew that Donald Trump has sympathized with the Establishment for decades, with his contributing financially mainly to Establishment statists mainly Democrats. I looked through his past political contributions and he never donated to anti-Establishment politicians such as Ron Paul or Rand Paul. So a lot of people were bamboozled by Trump’s “Drain the Swamp” demagoguery and they still take him seriously. Heh.
But, if the Rethugs in Congress want to avoid a 2018 election bloodbath, post-2018 Democrat majority in both houses, and impeachment and conviction of Trump for nothing, the Senate and House committees better get going in their investigations and bringing indictments against James Comey and other FBI corrputocrats, and ordering Mueller to start investigating Hillary Clinton and her Foundation.
We have a whole generation (or two generations now) of cultural Marxists with their race-obsessed political correctness censorship, generations now of ignorant, brainwashed young people who have no idea why there is freedom of speech, due process and presumption of innocence, why the government must treat everyone equally under the law, and why civilians have a right to defend themselves against aggression, what the Declaration of Independence is, or any real knowledge of the vast history of empirical evidence which proves how much better off they are in a free society of free exchange than they would be under socialism or communism.
All that crap is connected to these stasi-Soviet-Nazi kangaroo investigations and witch hunts in Washington. The thugs in Washington are anti-capitalists, anti-freedom, anti-market government apparatchiks, and the younger generations are right there with them in their brainwashed hatred of freedom. And we had better watch out!
So, for now we shouldn’t let the national security state, i.e. “deep state,” continue to criminally frame innocent people who have attempted to “drain the swamp” in any way whatsoever (or even mentioned the idea).
The Daily Bell with an article on DHS wanting to create a vast “media monitoring” apparatus to keep real-time surveillance on all world-wide media, including (and especially) social media. (Centralized stasi much?)
Breitbart with an article on Facebook labeling all Breitbart articles as “intentionally misleading.”
Robert Higgs says that statism’s first casualty is the truthful use of language.
Zero Hedge with an article that Russia has “irrefutable evidence” that U.K. staged the alleged Syrian chemical attack.
The Intercept with an article on Donald Trump’s DoJ legal justification for bombing Syria that Congress is not allowed to see.
Jacob Hornberger writes about U.S. government dropping hypocrisy bombs on Syria.
James Bovard says that college students aren’t starving — the real college problem is obesity.
Becky Akers objects to Hillary’s degrading married white women.
Henry Hazlitt wrote in 1949 about 4,000 years of price control.
Richard Ebeling discusses some of the reasons for anti-Capitalism: ignorance, arrogance, and envy.
Justin Raimondo asks, Why write about foreign policy? and writes about Trump bombing his base.
Gareth Porter writes about what Ken Burns left out of the Vietnam story.
And Bill Sardi suggests that Stephen Hawking may have been a polio victim or vaccine victim.
Special Bureaucrat Robert Mueller has gotten the FBI to raid the New York office of Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, seizing many, many documents and records. Some people are speculating that Mueller has caused this new extension of the “Russia Collusion” investigation to bait Trump into firing Mueller, so the anti-Trump forces can use that as an excuse to charge Trump with “obstruction.” This makes me now wonder whether the deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein’s urging Trump to fire then-FBI director James Comey might itself have been Rosenstein’s own attempt to bait Trump into an “obstruction” charge. Rosenstein was the DOJ official who signed off on the questionable FISA surveillance of Carter Page.
This whole Trump-Russia investigation by Mueller is a banana-republic, kangaroo investigation. There was no crime that was ever being investigated. Instead, it was an investigation (more accurately a “witch hunt”) in search of a crime. The Mueller team and FBI entrapped Mike Flynn into a “lying to the FBI” charge, and indicted some other people for things not really having anything to do with Donald Trump. But they did indict some politically-uninvolved Russians in a marketing scheme.
But, it appears that Donald Trump will not be interviewed by Mueller after many months that Trump said he would talk to him. Had Trump done that, it is obvious that Mueller and his team would have probably entrapped Trump in the same way as previous entrapment victims, and that would be their way to impeachment. But obviously, now that there won’t be that opportunity for Mueller, and his investigation of “Trump-Russia collusions” are coming up with nothing, that means Mueller has to do desperate things like getting the FBI to raid Trump’s lawyer’s office.
In all the materials the FBI stole from the lawyer’s office, I am sure they will find something to use as evidence against Trump in some minor technical violation, as well as perhaps other clients whose information is also contained in the seized material. This is a fishing-expedition-based-on-politics on steroids. Anything that comes of this, any indictments, should be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, and if cases are rubber-stamped, then there is no more “attorney-client privilege.” (Just like with ObamaCare, no more doctor-patient confidentiality, etc.)
But now the DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz has released his initial report that former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe lied to investigators on several occasions in the ongoing Mueller investigation. The inspector general will release further reports on FBI shenanigans associated with the 2016 election and the Trump-Russia probe.
Andrew McCabe was closely involved in the changes made to the language of a statement by James Comey on whether to charge Hillary Clinton with any crimes involving her email scandal. The investigators changed the words “gross negligence” (which is a legal term in which they would have to have indicted Clinton), to the words “extremely careless,” which removes criminal responsibility. This was allegedly done intentionally to save Hillary from being a jailbird.
So while the Mueller Russia investigation has been a farce and a political witch hunt toward the goal of taking down Trump as President, the real scandal and the real criminality is pervasive involving the apparatchiks of the FBI and DOJ. But the corrupt attorney general, Jeff Sessions says there will not be a second special counsel to investigate all the corruption.
These conservatives discuss the corruption of FBI investigators and the call for a second special counsel.
Now, I stand by what I wrote in my previous post, that these guys wouldn’t be discussing this on conservative news shows had it been the Bush DOJ and FBI attempting to interfere with the Obama election. That is because these conservatives are partisan Republicans and more important they have been constant defenders of the national security state, the DOJ, FBI including J. Edgar Hoover, and all the rest. But, at least they are discussing these issues now.
Meanwhile, the bamboozled public really believes this Mueller investigation is legitimate. Most people really believe the “Russia-Russia-Russia” propaganda, just as they believe the current warmongering propaganda to get public approval of Trump ordering the bombing of Syria.
Here are some subsequent comments I have since my recent post regarding the “nationalists on the right.” I will clarify some things here. First, I referred to them as the “national socialists on the right,” because I was referring to the people generally referred to as being on “the right” (as opposed to “the left”), the ones who are foaming supporters of Donald Trump’s “economic nationalism” policies, such as several talk radio personalities I listen to. I was not referring to “neo-Nazis,” and I wanted to make that perfectly clear.
This “economic nationalism” of Trump and Steve Bannon really is just another phrase meaning “national socialism.” Yes, Trump and his follower ditto-heads are “socialists,” whether they will admit to that label or not. And I know that “national socialism” is a left policy, not right, but I was referring to those people generally referred to as being on the right.
Now, in my post I suggested that these people such as Limbaugh, Hannity, Kuhner, et al. on the radio, if they were around during the 1930s they would have supported FDR in his sending the Jewish refugees back to Germany, which is exactly what FDR did. And I believe that these people around today would have done that because they currently would send refugees back to war-torn Syria and other places over there, and they would gladly send back the escapees from Central America back to the drug lords and sex traffickers. I listen to these ignoramuses every day, so I am quite familiar with their views, their hypocrisy, and their anti-immigration, anti-foreigner propaganda.
And as I mentioned in my other post, if those so-called conservatives were around during the American Revolution they would have sided with the British rulers and helped the British soldiers to find and arrest “disloyal colonists,” those dissidents and “radicals” who criticized the Regime.
Like the Nazi German informant who turned in members of the White Rose, these “nationalists” around today would have acted as informants and reported on “unpatriotic” neighbors during the American Revolution. And I believe those things based on the authoritarian “patriotic” rhetoric by these so-called conservative “nationalists” in their criticism and outrage over people who won’t stand for the National Anthem or recite the Pledge of Obedience a.k.a. Pledge of Allegiance, or who are “disrespectful of the flag.” In their authoritarian nationalism they view a flag as “sacred,” based on the brainwashing they received throughout 12-16 years of government-controlled schooling and growing up in this authoritarian society.
These are people who are gullible and easily bamboozled by U.S. government propaganda and believe what the bureaucrats in Washington say about the “terrorists,” about why 9/11 happened and that we must “fight them over there to protect us over here,” and that we mustn’t allow anyone to question the national security apparatus’s legitimacy and sincerity in the “war on terror,” and not allow anyone to question the “war on terror” itself.
In the case of Sean Hannity in particular, I think he’s dishonest and hypocritical. For instance, I think that his constant coverage of the Mueller witch hunt against Donald Trump has been great, with daily interviews of Sarah Carter and others investigating the corrupt Mueller/FBI/DOJ apparatchiks in their fishing expedition to try to take down Donald Trump. However, I thoroughly believe that Hannity would NOT be doing ANY of this stuff if this were during the end of the Bush administration and the Bush DOJ/FBI were attempting to create a fake news story in an attempted framing of the Obama or Hillary campaign of “colluding with Russians to steal the election,” and so on. Hannity would have been right with the witch hunt on that side, because he is really just a partisan propagandist, in my opinion.
In a different area of discussion, during an interview regarding the Florida school shooting, Hannity interrupted a talk radio personality Gina Louden when she brought up the relationship between these mass shootings and pharmaceutical drugs such as antidepressants. (Hmm, it’s not because Hannity’s show or Fox News is sponsored by the big drug companies, is it? We never or rarely hear about the connection between psychiatric drugs and these mass killing incidents because the pharmaceutical companies are some of the TV news outlets’ biggest advertisers.) And just in the past few days, maybe it was yesterday during Hannity’s 2nd radio hour, I heard Hannity cut off a guest when the guest brought up something controversial, I can’t remember specifically now, it might have been regarding the Syria chemical attack as a possible false flag. The Hannity neocons don’t want listeners to know about false flags especially promoted by the CIA.
And by the way, Hannity is buying the “Syria’s Assad gassed his own people” story, hook, line and sinker. So are most of these nationalistic so-called conservative talk radio personalities. And I’m getting sick of Sebastian Gorka on all these talk shows. As these guys tend to believe what the neocon wing of bureaucracy and its media flunkies tell them, Gorka also believes the narrative that Assad was responsible for the recent chemical attack on civilians, that, like five years ago, was likely a false flag attack to justify further Western military aggressions in the Middle East.
(The alleged chemical attack just one year ago in Syria was apparently unintended following Syria’s bombing of Islamic rebels’ weapons cache. But most people don’t know that — based on propaganda, they believe that Assad intentionally gas-attacked civilians.)
And Gorky promotes more war while at the same time denying that the Trump administration is a neocon Bush III despite its taking in the failed John Bolton to do even more damage than Bush and Obama have done. Karen Kwiatkowski says that Doug Feith, a major architect of the disastrous Bush Iraq War, might now join Trump as well. Doh!
And as I also mentioned recently, many of these conservatives and talk radio personalities bring up the “right to keep and bear arms” when the gun-grabbers resurface after a mass shooting. But at the end of the day, when President Trump declares some kind of martial law that will include suspicion-less searches of non-suspects’ persons and homes and cars, and unconstitutional confiscation of firearms, in my view the Limbaughs and Hannitys of the political and talk radio punditry will side with the rulers. (And frankly, I believe they will do that whether the Bureaucrat-in-Chief is Trump, Hillary Rotten Clinton, Joe Biden, or whatever.) Because they believe the gubmint! They are “patriots.”
In December I had mentioned Tom Ashbrook, formerly of “On Point” on NPR, who was yet another alleged groper/octopus/abuser/manipulator at the radio station where he worked, and from which he did his biased 2-hour daily NPR program.
According to WBUR, who eventually fired Ashbrook, “Tirades directed at young women in the studio. Name calling and belittling critiques of show ideas during meetings. ‘Creepy’ sex talk, hugs and back or neck rubs after a dressing down. That’s the pattern of alleged abuse described by 11 mostly young women and men who filed a multi-page document outlining their complaints…”
Well, Ashbrook has an op-ed column in the Boston Globe in which he begs for forgiveness and hopes for redemption.
Ashbrook writes: “My firing came in the heat of the #MeToo movement, which I support, believe in, and applaud. I never imagined being a target. I should have been more self-aware of my own behavior and sensitive to the people around me.”
How could you never imagine “being a target” or being accused of all those things? Are jerks really that clueless? I guess so. (That’s because they’re jerks.)
But I really liked the comments following the article, so I will quote from some of them:
“Too soon to consider. Go back to your cave, Tom.”
“Scram, Tom.”
“I like that he had to drop in a plug for his ratings in the middle of his apology.”
“I am all for second chances, but why did it take losing your job for you to realize that you were being a jerk? If you had never lost your job, would you still be a jerk?”
“No. You’re history buddy. The days of forgiveness are over.”
“He did not provide ‘a welcoming atmosphere’ for the 23 current and former WBUR employees who’ve alleged verbal abuse, intimidation and/or unwanted touching by Ashbrook. For the sake of their staff, WBUR should keep him out of their building (and so should all other radio stations). If people still crave his radio show then he should host a podcast by himself in his basement, where he can’t harass anybody.”
“He’s just sorry that his co-workers reported his behavior. He’s not “sorry” for treating them badly. Go away Tom!”
“While I always enjoyed On Point, this comes across as whiny and undignified.”
“Wow. These anonymous comments. How abusive. How bullying. I am among the thousands of listeners nationwide who miss you on the air. You are without a doubt far more talented than the revolving door of substitutes they’ve trotted through at WBUR. Any station would be smart to snap you up.”
“How is it abusive to suggest that Tom Ashbrook does not fully get why he was fired? His comments come down to this. ‘I may have offended some but I had big ratings.’ This take may be enough to get a job somewhere else,but not here.”
To be fair, there were some more forgiving comments. But why put them in here? I enjoy seeing a biased “journalist” getting the boot.
So frankly, I couldn’t care less about this. I listened to “On Point” a little bit from time to time, but not at all in the past year or two. Talk about biased. It is NPR, after all. When discussing a political issue, for his conservative guest he would have someone who was just not as far to the left as the communists far-leftists on the panel. I wrote about his discussion on capitalism here. Clueless clucks. So, as far as I’m concerned, good riddance to him, and please, Terry Ew-Gross, the entire team at “The Takeaway,” and especially “Morning Edition” as well!
Losing his patience with Donald Trump, Justin Raimondo writes, “A child could see through the fake ‘chemical attack’ supposedly launched by Bashar al-Assad just as his troops defeated the jihadists and Trump said he wanted out of Syria. But our President can’t, which raises the question: is he as stupid or stupider than George W. Bush? Or is he crazy?”
And he continues, “We are expected to believe that the Assad regime committed a horrific atrocity against mostly women and children at the very moment when Syrian forces have decisively defeated the Islamist rebels and Trump declared he wanted US troops out of Syria. Days before this fake attack, the Russian Defense Ministry warned that a false flag provocation was in the making.”
People need to ask, exactly how would Assad benefit from chemical-bombing Syrian civilians? And who would benefit from that?
And Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams discuss the recent chemical attack in Syria:
So we have the socialists on the left, the ones who want to disarm law-abiding civilians and make them defenseless but keep the government armed to the teeth, and who want to empower the government to impose many regulations to control nearly every aspect of human existence, and tax and steal the earnings of others.
And then there are the national socialists on the right who support interventionist foreign policy, immigration controls, the socialist drug war, and their own precious welfare state in Socialist Security and Medicare. And like the left, the authoritarian nationalists also want the government to restrict the economic liberty of others.
Some people are such nationalists that in their irrational hysteria they worry about “illegal” immigration, “trade deficits,” and other imaginary problems. They praise and applaud Donald Trump’s socialist and central planning policies of the police state and militarism on the border, and his anti-capitalist economic restrictions.
These authoritarian nationalists are in fact anti-capitalists just like Trump. Their indoctrinated collectivism prevents them from accepting the morality of laissez-faire capitalism, the real free market.
Authoritarian nationalists such as Donald Trump and talk radio ditto-heads Limbaugh and Hannity, et al., support policies of deporting “illegal” immigrants back to the drug lords and sex-traffickers. I noted recently that they are so anti-foreigner and obsessed with following arbitrary bureaucratic rules imposed by government planners that, were they around during the 1930s they would have been right there with FDR sending the Jews back to Germany for “not following the rules.”
And were they around during the American Revolution, the authoritarian nationalists would have sided with the British rulers and soldiers in the Colonies. These “loyalists” would have reported on the “radicals” who were fighting to separate from the British King. The authoritarian nationalists of today would have ratted on those who were “unpatriotic” and “disloyal” to the Regime, and turned them in to the “authorities.”
And why do I believe this? Because whenever there is an issue in the news in which someone is being “unpatriotic,” the authoritarian nationalists get extremely upset. For example, Colin Kaepernick, the football player who didn’t want to stand for the National Anthem. (Or, “Colin Crappernick,” as radio ignoramus Jeff Kuhner calls him.)
A LOT of people in America were furious with Colin Kaepernick and his fellow moonbats for not standing for the National Anthem, or not saluting the flag or reciting the Pledge of Obedience to the government (a.k.a. “Pledge of Allegiance”). Kaepernick’s reasons for not “showing patriotism” were misguided, whereas more rational reasons for someone refusing to “show patriotism” might include opposing U.S. foreign policy or the Mueller witch hunt.
And when protesters are in the news for burning the American flag, ooooh, do those authoritarian nationalists get upset. They are religious in their nationalism. They view the flag as a “sacred” symbol. Burning the flag is like setting fire to America, or to an actual person to these worshipers of the American State.
So besides the collectivism and authoritarianism in the nationalists’ rigid anti-immigration and anti-trade views, there is this mysticism of America worship with these people. They are clearly mystical, such as with Michael Medved’s book, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic. Medved and a lot of people who agree with him see the founding of America as a “miracle,” and “divinely inspired.” To some people, merely questioning the Medved myths is an act of blasphemy, just as they see someone “disrespecting the flag” as being an act of “desecration.”
But how was it a “miracle” or “divinely inspired” when the new nation was formed in which all the inhabitants of the territory must comply with the rule of the new government in Washington, whether they liked it or not? What if the whole agreement was a fraud from the beginning?
Was it divinely inspired when Honest Abe Lincoln caused the murders of thousands and thousands of innocent civilians and burned whole cities to the ground? How about when the people of America allowed Washington, D.C. to impose the income tax-theft of their earnings, and a corrupting progressive central banking Federal Reserve (regardless of the warnings of the Founders)?
And President Harry Truman’s immoral and unnecessary mass-murders of tens of thousands of innocents in Japan, as well as Germany. That’s a miracle? The authoritarian nationalists defend all that. They rationalize the crimes of the State. And was it divinely inspired that President FDR sent the Jews back to Germany?
But this America thing was started based on individualism and private property, not collectivism and socialism. If someone lives outside of the territory and he sees an opportunity inside the territory he has an “unalienable right” to “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” to go to where that opportunity exists. As long as he doesn’t trespass on private property. And no, the so-called “public property” is not privately owned, and it isn’t collectively owned either. I asked many questions about those assertions but haven’t gotten any answers, though.
In their collectivism many people seem to view the whole of America and American citizens as one big family, and the “illegal” immigrants are “breaking into our home,” for example. They sound like a well-known Marxist schlep, in her “It takes a village” stuff. Yech.
Besides the immigrant exercising one’s freedom to find a better life for oneself and one’s family as long as they are peaceful, the inhabitants of this territory or “citizens” also exercise their freedom as businesspeople, landlords, private organizations and other residents to employ, rent to, sell to or otherwise associate with these new people, or take in the refugees rather than see them sent back to the drug lords and sex traffickers as the talk radio personalities prefer.
Unfortunately, collectivists want to lock out the new immigrants, regardless of those specific individual immigrants who are not suspected of any crime of aggression, theft or fraud. Unfortunately today’s nationalists see an innocent immigrant entering the territory as still being an “aggressor” and a “criminal,” because of “not following the rules” by getting a bureaucrat’s permission.
In a free society no one is required to get a bureaucrat’s permission to do anything! Alas, the authoritarians are indoctrinated over a life of government schooling and authoritarian culture and obediently believe in the authority of the government bureaucrat.
The national socialists on the right are all about rigid adherence to arbitrary rules, not morally-based rules. Arbitrary rules include “foreigners can’t enter the territory without a government bureaucrat’s permission.” Why? Because the government in Washington and the collective majority of people say so, with disregard for private property rights and the sanctity of the voluntary contracts of others.
The collectivists are acting in a covetous manner in their having government bureaucrats and their enforcers lock out foreigners from exercising their right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
In contrast, morally based rules include: Don’t steal, don’t defraud, don’t use aggression against others. So I really don’t take today’s nationalists like those talk radio personalities seriously when they say how much they love the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, because for them it’s “freedom for me but not for thee,” such as “freedom for me but not for foreigners.”
The authoritarian nationalists are also short-sighted in their “solutions” to society’s problems, and that is why they favor socialism rather than free markets and private property. For instance, they support the socialist drug war police state as well as locking out foreigners fleeing the drug lords and sex traffickers.
Prohibition causes the black market which engenders the violence we are seeing. And why don’t the collectivist authoritarian nationalists emphasize the right of the people to keep and bear arms? Sure, they do only when school shootings occur and the gun control crowd comes out of the woodwork. But why not advocate that people be armed to protect themselves from the actual violent criminals who might come into the territory?
And the hysterical socialists on the right are now crying for a government wall on the border, and that’s why they elected Donald Trump. Very short-sighted. Just ask the people of the former East Germany how they liked their government wall. They didn’t. After the Amerikan government wall is built, future administrations will use it in the same way that the East German rulers did. We know that the leftists among the U.S. rulers have a Fugitive Slave Act mentality in their going after expats to steal their wealth. With a wall (and all the bureaucratic restrictions on travel as well), the future rulers can just lock the people in. And the neanderthals among those employed by TSA and DHS will happily enforce that.
So the national authoritarian socialists on the right are very similar to their counter-parts on the left, in their rejection of the liberty envisioned by America’s founders.
They also reject the Golden Rule, as discussed by Ron Paul at a debate in South Carolina, in which opponents in the audience booed Dr. Paul’s view of applying the Golden Rule to U.S. foreign policy. If we don’t want foreign regimes invading and bombing our cities and towns and murdering our people, then we obviously shouldn’t allow our government to invade and bomb and murder foreigners over there. Right?
This “citizenship” thing, by the way, is referring to the relationship between the individual and the ruling government. It is a political relationship, not an economic or social one. It is one of serfdom, not of freedom. “Citizenship” is very important to the authoritarian nationalists, in their own relationship with the ruling bureaucrats in Washington. And this is why they are not big on economic freedom, such as in trade, another example.
I am sure that the Trump-supporting nationalists will support the government when or if it begins to impose a “National Service” program again, i.e. the “draft,” whether it’s into the military or in the government’s proposed conscription for tech workers or those with other skills.
Because we owe society, i.e. the government, for our freedom. That is the nationalists’ mantra. We owe gratitude, as William F. Buckley, Jr. would put it, for our wise and high and mighty rulers in Washington. No, not quite what the American founders had in mind.
According to the New York Times,
Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
The letter, which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash between Silicon Valley and the federal government that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes.
(Read the text of the letter.)
“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” says the letter, addressed to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive. It asks that Google pull out of Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program, and announce a policy that it will not “ever build warfare technology.”
Yasha Levine writes, “It’s great that Google employees are protesting their company’s Pentagon AI drone research, but that’s hardly the only work Google does for militaries and law enforcement. What about Google’s work with predictive policing contractors? What about the NSA?” and links to this blog about Google’s history of helping the warmongers in Washington.
John Vibes of the Free Thought Project writes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VP Milo Medin are members of the “Defense (sic) Innovation Advisory Board” for the Pentacon, and other members also include the evil “Internet-infiltrator” guy Cass Sunstein, and Jeff Bezos. So not just Google but Amazon too? We already knew that Amazon was helping the CIA in its evil misdeeds.
The Military-Tech-CIA-Complex is alive and well. So while it’s good that Google employees are protesting, they will do what their superiors tell them to do, and that is helping military and CIA to continue provoking foreigners retaliation to justify further ballooning CIA and military budgets (as we have just seen recently with Trump’s budget).
Jacob Hornberger responds to Donald Trump’s call for militarizing the border,
And James Bovard says, After the FBI’s Pulse nightclub failure, why should we trust James Comey anymore?
Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation and Richard Ebeling of the Citadel discuss the question of who decides how best to education children. They discuss the idea of privatization and leaving education to the free market.
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