Herr Obama’s Weekly Radio Address: Exploiting More Victims of Tragedy

I don’t know what’s more unsettling, frightening or disgusting, Obama’s exploiting the grief of Sandy Hook parents, or the gullibility and naivete of the American people in their obediently and unthinkingly supporting our Rulers’ drooling craving for Total State Control.

This morning a grieving mother of a murdered Sandy Hook School child took the microphone for Obama’s weekly radio address. To me, this is disgusting, as is what various state and federal pols and power grabbers are doing to compromise the right to security and self-protection of each and every human being.

Regarding Obama’s radio stand-in today — and I am sure this is going to seem extremely harsh — there is no amount of “gun control” or other legislation that will bring back this lady’s murdered child. This reminds me of MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who are constantly supporting or sponsoring one item of legislation after another, one police-state tactic after another, drunk-driving roadblocks a.k.a. “sobriety checkpoints” and so forth, stopping and harassing innocent people for no good reason, as though these fascist policies will bring back their children who were killed by drunk drivers.

Why does the Sandy Hook parent who is being exploited by Herr Obama today want to disarm totally innocent people who had nothing to do with her child’s death? Why does this lady want to make totally innocent, peaceful law-abiding people defenseless because someone else murdered her child? Doesn’t she know that when she helps to disarm people and make them defenseless (like the government-mandated “gun-free zone” at her deceased child’s school), she is making it easier for criminals — people who do not obey laws against murder, rape, assault or obey gun restrictions — to commit their crimes against innocents with no resistance whatsoever?

Sadly, when it comes to crises and tragedies, too many of our contemporary folks respond solely with emotion and not rational thought, unlike the people of the Enlightenment era and the Revolutionary Americans who actually had the patience and common sense to think things through.

But this issue doesn’t just involve the right of each and every human being to self-defense against private criminals, but against government criminals as well.

Throughout history, governments have been responsible for more “gun violence” and murders of and crimes against innocent human beings than private criminals, and it isn’t even close. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of innocent human beings whose lives have been and continue to be criminally abused, wrecked or snuffed out by government criminals.

As Judge Napolitano wrote here, the people of the civilian population have a right to be armed to protect themselves from the government’s soldiers, “law enforcers,” and other armed agents who act criminally against the people. Most people who aren’t mainstream media-hypnotized zombies and who see the Internet and blogs and YouTube every day are quite aware of the out of control police, S.W.A.T. teams and federal agents all across America. Unfortunately, a vast proportion of the population are State-worshiping sheeple, and as jurors they would vote to convict an individual who “resisted arrest” or attempted to defend oneself against a uniformed and badged agent of the State acting criminally against the innocent individual. This is as thoroughly un-American as the dumbed-down, subservient zombies can get, in my opinion.

Despite the increasing number of atrocities committed by government agents on a daily basis in America, many people remain in denial, and do not believe America could descend into the kind of tyranny experienced in Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, North Korea, and many other parts of the world, even though that is what has been happening right before our very eyes. We have a President who claims the power to indefinitely detain or kill any innocent human being he wants without suspicion and without being required to show evidence against the accused. The federally-funded militarized local police departments are enforcing extremely stupid drug laws and other nonsense ordinances just to meet their arrest quotas and for “revenue enhancement.” And the federal government’s DHS and other agencies are stocking up on hundreds of millions of rounds of ammo because the sleazy, corrupt criminals in Washington know that trouble is ahead, and many of these people locally and federally are so sadistically power hungry they can’t wait for it to happen.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes wrote this Pledge of Resistance against government criminals disarming innocent civilians. It is these very courageous people like Stewart Rhodes who will protect the people from the criminals, both private and public.

I feel very sad for the grieving parents of murdered children and sorry for their loss, but it is a shame that they let politician low-lifes exploit them for the sake of further expanded State power and control and further enslavement of the people.

Margaret Thatcher and “Misapplied Death Etiquette”

Glenn Greenwald has this post on the “Don’t Speak Ill of the Recently Departed,” regarding the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher this morning at age 87.

This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure’s death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. “Respecting the grief” of Thatcher family’s members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person’s life and political acts. I made this argument at length last year when Christopher Hitchens died and a speak-no-ill rule about him was instantly imposed (a rule he, more than anyone, viciously violated), and I won’t repeat that argument today; those interested can read my reasoning here.

Greenwald brings up the “week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence” for Ronald Reagan when he died in 2004, but also mentions how these tributes seem to be reserved for those well-known political figures of the West. In contrast, Greenwald notes, many commentators did not waste time to get in their two cents worth of trashing the trashy Hugo Chavez when he died.

And I know exactly what he is talking about. Back in 1994, it was another week-long barf-fest when war criminal and central bankster Richard Nixon died. On the TV they had commentary by various people then doing political commentary, news and talk shows (during the days in which I was still watching TV, that is), and there were the alleged known “liberals,” really talking about Nixon as though he were some sort of saint.

But what if a President or foreign leader is a war criminal? Should we praise, for example, George H.W. Bush when he dies? He started a totally unnecessary war against Iraq in 1991, as I wrote here.

Some people actually don’t believe that the war the elder Bush started was a criminal act, even though it was a war of aggression, which, as defined during the Nuremberg tribunal, is a war crime. You don’t start wars.

The senior Bush’s military under his command intentionally destroyed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers, which not only led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, but widespread anti-American sentiment, which was very much to do with the motivations for the 9/11 attacks. And then there were the younger Bush’s wars overseas for no good reason, and the police state those two gave us. Had the elder Bush not started the war against Iraq in 1991 and begun a whole new phase of expanded U.S. government military bases and other governmental apparatus in those areas of the world, we wouldn’t have had a 9/11, these damn wars, the deaths of millions in those countries, and the domestic police state and U.S. government near-bankruptcy we have now.

And, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the article linked above, Margaret Thatcher was also vital in getting that 1991 war on Iraq going, and for no good reason.

Sorry, but that is not worthy of “praise.” No R.I.P., no respect is deserved for war criminals.

Now, for those who disagree with me, and believe that we should give either of the Bush Presidents some kind of “praise” or “respect” when one or both die, then you do not believe in morality, and would have to be suggesting that just because someone holds some high office, that therefore he should be excused for criminal behavior (or because he was a Republican).

The “Mommie Dearest” Neocons

Do you remember Mommie Dearest? That was a memoir written by Christiana Crawford, daughter of the control freak actress Joan Crawford. The book was made into a film by the same name, starring Faye Dunaway as the dreaded Joan. Well, we sadly have some self-proclaimed “Mommy Dearests” amongst the neocon pundit crowd: Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin.

Hannity and Malkin chatted about the Rutgers basketball coach who was recently fired over his verbal and physical abuse of players. Hannity and Malkin defended the coach’s abuse. Hannity stated that we need more “discipline” in society, and should stop being such “wimps.”

Get this — Both Hannity and Malkin claimed that they had received that kind of physical abuse as kids — Hannity with a “belt” and Malkin with “more than a belt,” and they “turned out okay.” Further, Malkin admitted to being “much better at administering spankings now than receiving them.”

(Click the link to Mediaite to see the actual video clip.)

First of all, some might argue that, no, they did NOT “turn out okay”! They both became very devoted followers of centralized government in Washington, acting as blindly obedient media propagandists for the Bush Regime’s criminal actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush-Cheney police state that goes totally against what the early Americans stood for, including and especially due process and the right of the people to their security.

The two child abuse supporters have also defended the Bush-Cheney torture-Gitmo regime, in which totally innocent human beings were abducted by CIA or U.S. military personnel, or turned in by CIA-paid informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have been defending a torture regime in which the true purposes of torture are to extract false confessions and to satisfy the sadist lust of the torturers. (If you didn’t know those particular facts about this charade of a “war on terror,” see this article and the links I provided.)

These damn conservatives talking about “leftists,” when they themselves are not really that different! Both sides, Left and neocon, support authoritarian government controls, coercion and force. Certainly not peace, liberty, private property, Christian moral values, the rule of law, and the rights of individuals.

Hannity asked, regarding the issue of toughness and discipline versus being “wimps” in the military, if we then have to fire the military’s drill sergeants because they get “in the face” of cadets. I wonder what Hannity would say about all the sexual assaults in the military now. Are they deserved? And it’s not just assaults against female military personnel but male against male sexual assaults, as I noted here.

And what about all the murders of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan committed by U.S. soldiers? I’m sure that Hannity and Malkin do not believe that those murderer soldiers should be held accountable — because “there’s a war going on” — regardless of the victims being innocent civilians. (However, being of the self-centered nationalist-exceptionalist crowd, they probably would think otherwise if foreign government soldiers came over here to the U.S. and murdered American innocent civilians.)

And, being authoritarian government-worshiping nationalists, are these two among the neocons who have called Army Private Bradley Manning a “traitor” for releasing overly-classified documents to WikiLeaks? As I wrote in the article linked above, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers. The real traitors are the central planners who use U.S. government apparatus and personnel to intentionally provoke foreigners as an excuse to expand the size and power of the centralized federal government, for the sake of non-productive bureaucrat tax-eaters and their military-security-industrial complex minions.

But I don’t think that someone “turned out okay” if one would condone the cover-ups of the military crimes and bureaucratic bumblings that Manning and WikiLeaks revealed. Siding with the criminals of the government is really taking the side of the abuser. That’s not “okay.”

And what about the police state that we have now, and the government police neanderthals and their brutality against innocent civilians here in America? Do Hannity and Malkin approve of them, too? Just look through any one of William Grigg’s articles, or material by Radley Balko, the Cop Block blog, and especially this post by attorney Rick Horowitz on the police of today. As I indicated in my article, No More Police Socialism, the reason that we have neanderthals drawn to the apparatus of the socialist government police monopoly is that it provides the bullies, brutes and primitives with an excuse and a means to assault, beat and abuse innocents and get away with it with impunity.

So, if Hannity and Malkin approve of letting police continue to get away with their tyrannical and Nazi-like abusive treatment of others, then no, they did not “turn out okay.”

And also, I wonder if these supposedly “pro-2nd Amendment” conservatives who presumably believe in the individual’s God-given right of self-defense against aggression, believe that the individual’s right to self-defense also applies to when one’s assailants are wearing official uniforms and badges of the government. Many authoritarians, alas, do not believe in such a right of an individual to that much self-defense. But yes, we do have that right, as Judge Andrew Napolitano observed here, and as I wrote here.

And, as Larken Rose wrote in this article,

People don’t mind when you point out the tyranny that has happened in other countries, but most have a hard time viewing their OWN “country,” their OWN “government,” and their OWN “law enforcers,” in any sort of objective way. Having been trained to feel a blind loyalty to the ruling class of the particular piece of dirt they live on (a.k.a. “patriotism”), and having been trained to believe that obedience is a virtue, the idea of forcibly resisting “law enforcement” is simply unthinkable to many. Literally, they can’t even THINK about it. And humanity has suffered horribly because of it. It is a testament to the effectiveness of authoritarian indoctrination that literally billions of people throughout history have begged and screamed and cried in the face of authoritarian injustice and oppression, but only a tiny fraction have ever lifted a finger to actually try to STOP it.

But back to being abused as kids. I can see how Ms. Malkin brags about her “spankings” of her own little children, which goes with her defense of government agents abusing and torturing totally innocent human beings. In the case of a child, I don’t think that physically striking a child can ever be a just action — or are you saying that the child was such a threat to you physically that you had to use physical force to protect yourself? I don’t think so.

In other words, children who are not a physical threat have a right to not be physically struck. Even “misbehaving” children do not deserve to be physically struck by someone who is bigger, stronger and more powerful than they. I am referring to striking a more vulnerable human being who can’t fight back. Only cowards and primitives do that.

And I’m not talking about the more sophisticated parents who administer non-violent punishments such as withholding toys or games or “grounding” the child for a period of time. Those techniques of discipline are used by more civilized parents, not the violent ones like the Hannitys and the Malkins of the world. I don’t think that the fascists and authoritarians who love and identify with power figures understand the difference.

Regarding the support of these “Mommie Dearest” neocons of the aforementioned foreign policy of aggression and belligerence committed by the U.S. government, psychological theorist Alice Miller, author of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence,  has written about such blind obedience to one’s government’s criminality and aggressions. In her article on ignorance and how we produce evil, Miller writes,

Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence, possibly on a gigantic scale. Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. …

… Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will. As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. Instead he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears.

Miller cites Hitler, Stalin and Mao. I would add the Bushes in their bloodthirsty aggression against Iraq since 1991 as I noted in this recent article, and the 1 to 2 million innocent Iraqis slaughtered in the past 22 years by the Bush wars that neocons supported. I would also add Barack Obama, the current Dictator-in Chief, who wants to have the power to murder presumably innocent human beings without bringing evidence against the accused, apprehend, abduct and incarcerate innocent human beings (mostly protesters, critics of Obama and other government imbeciles) without charge and the power to detain them indefinitely, and Obama’s insatiable craving to confiscate all the guns and ammunition away from the people amongst the civilian population so that he can implement his dream of full socialist government control over and enslavement of the workers and producers of society, and without any possible resistance whatsoever.

In their obedient and blind support of the Bush-Cheney regime and its pre-planned “war on terror” following 9/11, and acting as some of the Regime’s most loyal media propagandists, Malkin and Hannity unwittingly supported the most unlawful, unconstitutional and immoral policies that would then be later used by Obama and others of his ilk against the people.

In my opinion, Hannity and Malkin are severely disturbed individuals, obviously self-admitted products of an abusive upbringing, and no they did NOT turn out “okay.” Even Malkin openly admitted that she herself hits (a.k.a. “spanks”) her kids, and she seems very proud of it, and I’m sure her kids will grow up to support the same kind of socialist authoritarianism and fascist police state that she herself supports.

Interview of Dr. Peter Breggin

Lew Rockwell interviews Dr. Peter Breggin on the psychiatric drugs that doctors are feeding people like candy, and the harm they are causing people, especially children as well as the false labeling of “ADD,” ADHD,” “PhD,” etc. of normal kids who act like normal kids and how the “doctors” are ruining the kids lives. Dr. Breggin talks about the possible relationship between some psychiatric drugs (such as SSRIs) and the mass shootings in recent years at about 21:00 in the interview, for those who are interested in that. Just recently, it finally came out that Aurora alleged shooter James Holmes was taking Zoloft, the same drug that one of the Columbine shooters was taking. (And I am sure that Adam Lanza was on some medication as well, but the “authorities” are thus far covering up that information. The greedy dirtbags of Big Pharma really have a lot of influence these days.)

Doh! A Faux Tea Party Rally Today to “Save the Mass GOP” Here in the PR of Taxachusetts

(Updated, with some corrections made.)

Some Republican political hacks and neocon talk radio personalities will be having a faux “Tea Party” rally in Braintree, Massachusetts, today on “How to Save the Massachusetts GOP.” Okay, stop laughing, now. Howie Carr and Jeff Kuhner have been talking about this on their shows on WRKO, and the event will be hosted by WCRN talk host Michael Graham.

And I say “faux” Tea Party because Michael Graham and Howie Carr always support these Big Government Republicans such as Scott Brown, Paul Ryan and Willard Romney, and they scoff at actual spending-cutters such as Ron Paul. (“Too extreme”) In fact, just today, Laurence Vance has another article showing what big spenders the Republicans are in Washington. (Here is Vance’s review of Jim DeMint’s book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse. And just scroll down Vance’s article archives here and especially here for more on the hypocrite socialist Republicans.)

And apparently, Sen. Rand Paul will “attend” the rally today (by phone). As EPJ has noted, Rand Paul doesn’t really want to cut taxes and spending, he just wants to rearrange the deck chairs on sinking America (enough to get his own self elected President in 2016).

Also at the rally today will be Deval Patrick’s 2010 Republican opponent Charlie Baker. He is as socialist as these socialist Big Government Republicans can be. If I remember correctly, during his 2010 campaign Baker expressed continued support for the RomneyCare health reform in Massachusetts. Baker apparently had some role in the forming of Romney’s plan for governmental intrusions into people’s private medical matters. According to this article, Baker’s earlier Massachusetts state Medicaid savings plan became a foundation for what was to become the atrocious RomneyCare plan.

Also, during Baker’s time as CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health, his salary went from about $500,000 to 1.7 million, but their premiums went up by 150% at the same time. Then Baker went to a state agency to get a $150 million bailout for Harvard Pilgrim that had been under his stewardship. (See this, this, and this.)

I’m sure that Charlie Half-Baker will probably run for governor again in 2014 to remind us what Republicans are all about. (Not much different from Democrats.)

As the most recent GOP goobernatorial nominee, Baker is the Massachusetts GOP’s “standard bearer.” Just as pathetic as the national GOP’s standard bearer Willard Romney.

So, how to “save the Massachusetts GOP”?

Sadly, these rally faux Tea Partiers, Graham, Carr et al., have been in a coma, and didn’t know that the Mass GOP died many years ago, thanks to socialists and buffoons with an (R) after their name continuing to expand the state regime, and pretending that they actually support “lower taxes,,” “cutting spending and waste,” and fooling the actual conservative Tea Party voters in the state — all nine of them — to support these clowns. I am talking about Romney, Swift, Weld, and other Big Government Republican governors, as well as their cohorts in the State House.

Currently, there are four (4) Republicans in the Massachusetts state senate out of 40 senators. This state is a joke, and it is only getting progressively worse, as things continue to do so throughout this banana republic USSA. In 2008, the roll-over-and-play-dead sheeple in Massachusetts voted by 70-30% against the elimination of the state income tax. According to Wikipedia, Carla Howell’s Committee for Small Government raised as of November 1, 2008, $385,000, and as of October 15 of that year the ballot question’s opponents, the “Coalition for Our Communities,” raised $5 million. That is how important it is for the hacks to keep themselves on that ongoing gravy train. (Hmmm. I am going to go vote against eliminating the state income tax. Sounds good to me!”)

And now, Deval Patrick wants to raise taxes even more, to pay for more “shovel-ready” boondoggles, more bridges to nowhere (or more empty commuter rail lines to nowhere, whatever), and for more hacks to fill more no-show jobs in more useless state agencies. It never ends, this stuff. (Mass. Citizens for Limited Taxation has info here). And in her latest column, CLT executive director Barbara Anderson writes,

… (CLT’s Chip Faulkner) also pointed out that Massachusetts is not suffering from a shortage of taxes. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, our state and local tax burden is still fourth-highest in the country, 31 percent above the national average.

Yesterday, the Tax Foundation released its annual Tax Freedom Day report. On April 13, 2013, taxpayers in the United States, as a whole, stop working for their federal, state and local government and begin to work for themselves. In Massachusetts, the date is April 25 — the fourth-latest in the nation.

Yet, we don’t adequately maintain our roads and bridges or run the MBTA with transparency or efficiency. We don’t keep track of welfare recipients’ electronic benefits cards. The state inspector general has told us that the commonwealth can’t prove the eligibility of roughly 33 percent of children receiving welfare benefits, doesn’t know if any of them are in school, if they are even in the state, or in fact if they exist at all.

In other words, the more the Rulers steal from the people, the more they spend on themselves and their corporate cronies, the more they increase budgets and deficits, the more outright plunder, waste, and fraud there will be.

Besides the deluded faux Tea Party neocon talk radio personalities and the state’s GOP political hacks, however, today’s rally will also include a non-politician who ran for office once, the 2010 Republican nominee for state auditor, Mary Connaughton. She had more credentials for the position of auditor than anyone ever could, and she was actually not a hack and didn’t sound like any kind of Romney-Weld-Baker socialist. Even the Boston Globe endorsed her! But she lost the race to a total nincompoop pol, Suzanne Bump, a real hack’s hack.

And that’s life here in Taxachusetts, where the Republican party hacks rearrange the deck chairs, playing little games with the Democrats, and creating new Big Government schemes such as the dreaded RomneyCare, but won’t eliminate programs, offices, departments. agencies whose sole purpose is to act as daytime baby-sitting services for non-productive goof-offs.

The Same-Sex Marriage Issue Again: The Supreme Court Is Not So Supreme

April 1, 2013

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

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on two same-sex marriage cases: California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which changed the state constitution to eliminate the state-recognized ‘right’ (i.e. state-granted privilege) of same-sex couples to marry; and regarding the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as only between one man and one woman, and which restricted federal benefits and inter-state marriage recognition to only opposite-sex marriages.

The arguments and Justices’ questions in these cases showed that the laws that legislators (and voters) make are more and more confusing, intrusive and nonsensical, in my view.

In these arguments, the Supremes expressed doubts as to the high court even having jurisdiction, as well as whether the cases had legal standing for review.

In arguments involving the California case this week, the Justices seemed to express doubts as to whether they even wanted to bear the burden of deciding the equality of homosexual couples.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley commented, “Indeed, they looked like so many elderly drivers in Florida driving slowly on the highway with their turn signal on, looking desperately for an off-ramp.”

Sadly, our society, state legislatures and Congress are filled with many slow drivers with their turn signals forever on and never turning. Turley is correct in observing that the clueless court clucks seem disoriented, as these cases shouldn’t be too difficult to decide, in my view.

Perhaps the overpaid highly-paid Justices have more important things on their minds, such as what temperature at which to set their bubble baths later on, and so forth.

However, in the past Turley has suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court should be expanded to perhaps 19 Justices.

Hmmm. Will that really solve the conflicts which arise in our society? (No, I think that perhaps 49 or 149 Justices might be better. Or even 535, if you get my drift.)

So just recently, Nullification author Thomas Woods has been taking some jabs at how some people in America view the U.S. Supreme Court as the Ultimate Decider:

If the peoples of the states created the federal government and its subdivisions as their agent, how do they permanently lose the ability to stop their own creation from destroying them? Since when does the agent tell the principals what its powers are?

To say that the Supreme Court must decide constitutionality in the last resort is to beg all the relevant questions. To say that the Supreme Court has itself decided that it must be this arbiter is to take question-begging to quite an extreme. How can the Supreme Court, part of an agent of the states, have the absolutely final say, even above the sovereign entities that created it? As Madison explained in 1800, the courts have their role, but the parties to the Constitution naturally have to have some kind of defense mechanism in the last resort.

But what ever happened to freedom in America? Has that ever existed here? Why is it that a population of supposedly free people must seek the guidance of government-appointed bureaucrats to decide whether or not certain relationships or contracts are officially recognized by the State? Or approved by some government bureaucrat? And who the hell are the State and its bureaucrats to give their recognition or approval of private relationships and contracts?

Actually, marriage was essentially a private matter until around the 18^th Century.

As LRC columnist Ryan McMaken wrote, the State got into the marriage business because the statists couldn’t bear the thought of contracts being transferred without the State’s intrusions and thefts. And it also has to do with control. The bureaucrats of the State love control.

So besides whether these same-sex marriage cases have legal standing before the high court, some of the Justices had expressed concern as to whether these issues should really be left to the states to decide.

But when the high court refers to “the states,” they really mean the states’ governments, the state legislatures and state courts should decide the outcomes of these cases. Really, we’re talking about politicians, bureaucrats, and government-appointed state court judges.

Sorry. But our liberty and the rights of the individual should not be dependent upon the whims of politically-appointed bureaucrats on courts, or even elected representatives in legislatures. Then, you are not talking about rights or liberty, you are talking about state-granted privileges.

And the Supremes often decide cases on the bases of the conflicts between the rights of the individual and “compelling State interest.” Or “balancing the rights of society as a collective against the rights of the individual.” Again, in this case we are then not talking about “rights,” but state-granted privileges.

But society or the collective does not have “rights,” only individuals have rights, and they are inherent rights which pre-exist any governments. There is no compromise that can be made here. If there is a compromise, then the individual really doesn’t have rights.

And when there is compromise of the individual’s rights, there is no liberty.

But, alas, America has degenerated from a liberty-loving population following the Revolution to one in which the political process is used for some people to impose their will and way of life onto others.

So it’s always something, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say. Either the voters of California do not believe in the rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or the U.S. Congress wants to define how certain private relationships and contracts must be by law.

And as more amongst the population are increasingly confused about liberty and rights, so are these “Supreme” Justices in Washington.

Now, were I a Supreme Court Justice (and obviously I am not, nor will I ever be, nor would I ever want to be, nor do I think that such a body of Ultimate Deciders has any real legitimacy or moral standing in a free and just society, but I digress…), I would say that it doesn’t matter whether the California Proposition 8 case has legal standing – of course not. And if I had to adhere to the extremely flawed and unjust U.S. Constitution, I would say that the First Amendment protects the individual’s right of freedom of association, and the Ninth Amendment – something which the late Judge Robert Bork compared to an “inkblot” – protects the rights of the individual not enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

I would then give examples of rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, including the right to establish voluntary contracts with others, contracts the terms of which are really the matters of those parties involved, and not the business of any third parties, be they one’s neighbors, the majority of voters of Commie California, Moral Majority hacks activists, state legislators, or court judges. And those contracts include in matters both personal and economic. (Why in the alleged 21^st Century are we even debating these issues?!)

And, regarding the Defense of Marriage Act case, of course that’s “unconstitutional,” because no where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to define or interfere with the personal relationships and contracts of the people of the United States.

I know, I know, there are those out there who desperately search the U.S. Constitution in its every detail, hoping to find some word or phrase they can use to justify their own selfish impositions of their way of life onto others, but whatever.

If  homosexuals want to be married and have a legally-binding contract, then that is their right as human beings. The Defense of Marriage Act and the California voter-approved law violate those fundamental human rights.

So, it comes down to this: We really have to decide as an evolved, civilized society who owns the life of the individual.

There is collective ownership of the individual, or there is self-ownership.

There cannot be anything in between. No “shared” ownership of the individual’s life between the individual and the society in which one lives. That’s nutso.

And you really can’t have liberty without the society’s recognition of the individual’s right to self-ownership. In fact, the entire rule of law and the idea of civilized society is based on this, in my view, and self-ownership’s pal, the non-aggression principle. At least, that’s how I see it.

The anti-same-sex marriage advocates are really saying that they as a majority of society (and as enforced by the almighty State) own the life of each individual, as well as other people’s private contracts. Otherwise, even if they disagree with the kinds of private, voluntary contracts which other individuals want to have, the majority of meddlers and intruders are really obligated to buzz off, or “MYOB!” (which is a phrase we no longer hear in the People’s Republic of Amerika now).

And to complicate matters, many of these cases are to do with government benefits, such as in the case of death of spouses, divorces, etc.

But there should be no such thing as “government benefits,” which are redistributed from other members of society whose earnings and wealth are seized from them involuntarily, through coercion or threats of violence. Once again, how can the society call itself “civilized” while simultaneously implementing such dishonest and immoral schemes?

And people are worried about the children whose parents are homosexuals. But what about the many, many children for generations and centuries, raised by heterosexual parents, who were beaten, humiliated and brutalized as part of their upbringing? Such cases are still widespread in our society. Things haven’t changed much there. What about them? (And no, I’m not saying that the heterosexuality of those abusive parents had anything to do with their abuse!)

And I can’t believe the ignorance I am hearing on talk radio. People are actually concerned that, “if we allow gays to marry, then more and more people will be gay and marry one another, there will be no more heterosexuals to reproduce the human race!”

Well, the many surveys which have been done on the percentage of homosexuals in society have ranged from 1 to 20%, so it probably has always been around 10% or so.

Despite the Left’s encouraging homosexuality in the government school curriculum and pop culture for decades, I don’t think that that or the legalization of same-sex marriage in some states has changed that general percentage, or ever will.

But it is sad that so-called conservatives and traditionalists feel this compulsion to immorally use the armed power of the State as a means of social engineering (what are they, leftists?) to force their way of life onto others. A healthy society – which ours isn’t, not by a long shot – really values procreation without State-enforced social engineering and legal compulsion to do it.

So to conclude, it really is a mistake to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court for answers to any issue, certainly not the same-sex marriage issue.

I really thought that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo eminent domain ruling was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the Court’s legitimacy as Ultimate Decider was concerned.

Then, last year the Supremes decided in favor of the ObamaCare mandate, with Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts declaring that the mandate was a “tax,” even though its proponents weren’t even arguing that it was a tax.

The Court’s self-delegitimizing was at that point a matter of settled law, in my book.

Two Items

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

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

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

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

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

Some Misc. Items

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

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

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

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

The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq

March 23, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rand Paul Is Concerned About Border Security

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

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

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

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

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

Dumb Central Planners Run Amok

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

Pornography, Perverts, and the Police State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Videos for a Sunday Afternoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rule of Law Applies to Everyone

March 13, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do people know these things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War Propaganda Continues

March 9, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think our government has run amok.