Cultural Relativism And Ethical Obscurity

If you wonder, why the world is so confused and incoherent, look no further then the concept that All Truth Is Local. “Cultural Relativism is the view that moral or ethical systems, which vary from culture to culture, are all equally valid and no one system is really “better” than any other. This is based on the idea that there is no ultimate standard of good or evil, so every judgment about right and wrong is a product of society. Therefore, any opinion on morality or ethics is subject to the cultural perspective of each person. Ultimately, this means that no moral or ethical system can be considered the “best,” or “worst,” and no particular moral or ethical position can actually be considered “right” or “wrong.”

This viewpoint is patently absurd on face value. Yet much of humanity uses “words like “pluralism,” “tolerance,” and “acceptance” in a loose way in which modern society defines these ideas has made it possible for almost anything to be justified on the grounds of “relativism.”

The article by Gene Howington, Ethical Relativism: A Good Idea or a Path to Anarchy? – cites a compelling example of an indisputable immorality performed that resulted in the deaths of innocents.

“One of the strongest arguments against ethical relativism comes from the assertion that universal ethical and/or moral standards can exist even if some practices and beliefs vary among cultures. In other words, it is possible to acknowledge cultural differences and still find that some of these practices and beliefs are wrong. Consider that although the Aztec had a society that was in some ways more advanced that their contemporary European counterparts, that their practice of human sacrifice is simply wrong.”

Most people seldom analyze their personal behavior in light of such extreme historic atrocities. However, many live a life of individual relativism. The OBJECTIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND MORAL VIEWS site poses the danger of accepting a situation ethics and the risk of adopting the dead end captivity of iconoclasm.

“Individual relativism is close to, but should not be confused with, moral nihilism. An individual relativist takes standards seriously perhaps even by going so far as establishing a strict, or burdensome moral code for himself or herself. Under this position, we view the code as binding only for that one person. A nihilist, on the other hand, believes that morality is an illusion. Nothing is really binding, even a code one establishes for oneself. Nihilism about any subject is difficult to overcome, if overcoming it means giving a nihilist reasons adequate to change his or her belief, because the nihilist can continually reject the basis for our reasoning. We may claim that an objective moral code is needed for proper social function, to avoid harm, to do good, to preserve integrity. The nihilist keeps telling us that all of this is an illusion or that each involves an imposed standard.”

Is there really a difference between a personally devised ethical system, which inescapably descends into an abstruseness of conflict and indiscriminate conduct, and the nihilistic delusion that no moral behavior is attainable? Admittedly, each act of moral conscience is individual, but when society promotes a cultural relativism mystique, in order to establish an egalitarian moral neutral acceptance, the glue that binds civilization together breaks apart.

The conventional basis that philosophers acknowledge as foundational for any culture that accepts a deity, is natural law. The University of Tennessee provides an impressive summary of moral thought, in MORAL PHILOSOPHY THROUGH THE AGES.

The traditional underpinnings that apply Aristotle’s precepts, to Christian teachings are found in Aquinas Natural Law Theory. Aquinas’s account of natural law appears in his “Treatise on Law,” a section of his several thousand page Summa Theologica (1a2ae q. 90-144).

“In short, for Aquinas, all moral laws are ultimately grounded in God’s unchanging eternal law, and we discover general rules of natural law through intuition. Legal experts then deduce more specific rules of human law from these, and in scriptural divine laws we find examples of both general and specific rules. Since we don’t have access to the complete list of eternal law, from our limited human perspectives morality begins with a search for the general rules of natural law. But where do we begin looking for the general rules of natural law? Aquinas says that we must look to human nature as a guide:

… [each human being] has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law. [Summa Theologica, 1a2ae 90:2]

According to Aquinas, when God created us he gave us natural instincts that reflect the general moral principles of natural law. There are two distinct levels of morally-relevant instincts. First, God implanted in us an instinctive intuition that we should pursue our proper human end. Second, God implanted in us a series of instincts that define our proper end as living, reproducing, and rational creatures.”

Now the relevance of submitting yourself unto the authority of divine design is rare in an age of godless cultural relativism. Without a willful acceptance of inspired purpose and rules for prescribed conduct, the barbarism of immoral nihilism is inevitable. Politically, the rages of wicked government repression become institutionalized, and a much greater cruelty, than most cleric domination abuses. One need not be a defender of any particular faith to accept the fundamental inherent autonomy of your being within the world. Your plight is often proportional to your circumstance, but your morality or lack thereof; is directly tied to the nature of your created soul.

The ontogeny of every individual is a product of social environment, mortal will and providential inspiration. Most of temporal society is geared to combating political disputes or fostering phony promises. Personages cope according to their singular talents and determination to compete. Many reject, from this equation, the role and influence of the muses consorting with your own mythology. Notwithstanding, the very mention of obedience to Almighty God and the submission to His natural law, bears the risk of being burned at the stake of the cultural relativist.

Thinking About Obscurity suggests: “Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe.” Alas, this seems to be the current condition of embracing natural law in an age of cultural relativism. Asking for divine inspiration that seeks eternal reason or using your natural instincts to discover everlasting principles, is hidden from the nihilist and their relativist cousins. Their condescending attacks against religion stems from their own inadequacies, while they spend their energy on convincing themselves of the illusion that a world without God is safe for their own form of Nahuatl liturgy sacrifices.

Dr. Edward Younkins provides a strong defense of Western Civilization in his essay, “Why the World is the Way It Is: Cultural Relativism and It’s Descendents”. By including, “Multiculturalism, racism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, political correctness, and social engineering are among cultural relativism’s “intellectual” descendents”, into this mistaken value system, the stage is set for his valid conclusion.

“In reality, the superiority of Western culture can be objectively demonstrated when cultures are appraised based on the only befitting standard for judging a society or culture—the extent to which its core values are life affirming or antilife. Prolife culture recognizes and honors man’s nature as a rational being who needs to discern and produce the circumstances that his survival and flourishing require. Such a culture would promote reason, man’s natural rights, productivity, science, and technology. Western culture, the prime example of this type of culture, exhibits levels of freedom, opportunity, health, wealth, productivity, innovation, satisfaction, comfort, and life expectancy unprecedented in history.

Western civilization represents man at his best. It embodies the values that make life as a man possible—freedom, reason, individualism, and man’s natural rights; capitalism, self-reliance, and self-responsibility based on free will and achievement; the need for limited, republican representative government and the rule of law; language, art, and literature depicting man as efficacious in the world; and science and technology, the rules of logic, and the idea of causality in a universe governed by natural laws intelligible to man. These values, the values of Western civilization, are values for all men cutting across ethnicity, geography, and gender.”

That so many pseudo intellectuals not only reject this timeless assessment and actually rebel against the natural order of society, demonstrates why the world is such a mess. Diversity of ethnical relativism cries out for a methodical demise. The cultural suicide of civilization is really a crisis in valid moral values.

There is little safety left on a planet that surrenders it individual responsibility to the collective and forgoes any duty to fulfill ones natural purpose. The progressive slough that society proceeds upon only demeans the whole. Abandoning the quest for universal ethics denies our instinctive intuition. In order to fulfill our nature as a rational creature, humanity must believe that rightful moral principles are ubiquitously applicable.

Bond Bubble Expectations

Bonds are loans that have the expectation of payback with interest. Government bonds are viewed as the safest financial instrument since the primary fiscal obligation of the state is to honor the terms of their own notes. However, in the fevered climate of currency wars among central banksters, the security factor of capital repayment is rapidly coming into question. As interest rates rise, the economic value of the bond diminishes. This inverted normal relationship is the essential dynamic of lending money with the purchase of Treasury Bonds. So what is all the talk about a bond bubble and likelihood that it will destroy your underwriting capital?

Bloomberg Businessweek warns in the article, The Rising Bubble in Bond-Bubble Chatter.

“An asset price bubble is when the expectation that the price can only go higher forms the only rationale for purchase,” remarked BlackRock’s (BLK) bond honcho Jeffrey Rosenberg Thursday at the CFA Society of Los Angeles’s Economic & Investments Forecast Dinner, at which the “wherefore bond bubble” discussion dominated. “But the main motivation of investors for buying fixed income is the opposite of typical bubbles—the fear of losing money rather than the greed of potential profit has fueled the historic shift of assets into fixed income.”

Just how safe is your money when you are holding T-Bonds? The U.S. Treasury wants you to believe that no other form of currency has the protection of first guarantee of the full faith and credit of your own government. Well, the mere questioning of this mythical assurance breeds deep distrust and instability of confidence into the entire fiscal system.

Morningstar offers an assessment in The Bond Bubble Threat, which on the surface is very sensible.

“To understand the implications of where we are, consider the history of the benchmark 10-year Treasury note. From 1900 to 2012, the average interest rate (yield) was 4.99% (often quoted as 5%). On Jan. 30, 2013, the yield was 1.99%, well below the long-term average. The prime interest rate, which the Fed has a role in setting, is 3.25%. It is the break-even rate for banks pricing loans.

When the performance of an asset class runs substantially above or below a long-term average, the odds increase that at some point performance will move back toward the long-term average. It may take a while for the interest rate on 10-year Treasury paper to re-approach 5%, but at some point, it will. As interest rates creep up, we see a shift away from fixed debt instruments to variable rate paper, stocks and various inflation hedges.”

Regretfully, when was the last time that economic fundamentals applied to the money debasement manipulations of the Federal Reserve? No doubt, a day of reckoning will come if market principles are allowed to work out their natural balance. However, the moneychangers design a fantasyland of monetary assessment that distort and prop up the price of the “Reserved Currency”.

John Plender writes in the Financial Times, Central bank hot air pumps up bond bubble, presents an analytical evaluation of worth in the current bond values.

“In the fixed interest sector something irrational is undoubtedly going on, but it is less a matter of exuberance than desperation in the pursuit of yield. In higher yielding parts of the market prices are out of touch with default risk.

Despite the oft-heard central bankers’ refrain that bubbles are impossible to identify until after they have been pricked, historical comparisons leave little doubt that this is a bubble – one, moreover, to which central banks have contributed their fair share of hot air. It is rare indeed for investors to pay a multiple of more than 50 times for the income stream on a 10-year Treasury bond.”

Nevertheless, this inflated bubble just keeps expanding from the unlimited flow of repurchases by the Federal Reserve of Treasury debt. What else is left to do, when the global financial markets are reluctant to buy into the next round of T-Bill offerings? Indefinite aggressive QE is here to stay as long as the need to roll over the debt exists. This view is shared in the latest report, Treasury Bond Bubble Will Not Pop, Fed Will Simply Increase QE. Guru Jim Sinclair offers the conventional-politicized viewpoint that the printing press will just keep running.

“Essentially Sinclair is stating that interest rates will continue to manipulated at an artificially low level by uneconomic buying of T-bonds by the Federal reserve governor typing on a keyboard, and that the pace of QE will keep pace with the pace of the US budget deficit/ funding gap, until which point the US dollar faces a collapse in the confidence of the currency itself.”

Of course, the operative circumstance is when will the collapse of the Dollar currency come? The interest rates charged to purchase T-Bonds will rise, when the Fed decides that the underreported rate of inflation can no longer be concealed from institutional transactions. When the Street panics over, the artificially low levels on Treasury Bonds rates, and refuse further purchases, the international exchange rate of the Dollar will plummet.

The global rush to devalue currencies is in full force and over time will affect the options that the Fed has in their toolbox. This chicken and egg dilemma will test the legal tender equation to its core. While the government can coerce the acceptance of a failing currency to be used as money, the same cannot be inferred about the purchasing power of T-Bonds.

The linkage between the underlying capital used to purchase the government note and the final return received for holding the bond until maturity has a profound disconnect. Selling your T-Bonds is a wise practice even if an imminent bubble is not ready to blow.

The harm to the financial markets from another precipitated house of cards should scare everyone. Expectations have a funny way of influencing financial results more often than sound evaluations. The prospect of a default by the Treasury is embedded, even under synthetically low interest rates. Just how long will this anticipation hold true?

Justice Department Memo Justifies Targeted Killing of American Citizens

The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize

The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike in Yemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.

Since then, senior Obama officials including Attorney General Eric Holder and John Brennan, Obama’s top terrorism adviser and his current nominee to lead the CIA, have explicitly argued that the president is and should be vested with this power. Meanwhile, a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.

[Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force - MEMO ]

When the New York Times back in April, 2010 first confirmed the existence of Obama’s hit list, it made clear just what an extremist power this is, noting: “It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.” The NYT quoted a Bush intelligence official as saying “he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president”. When the existence of Obama’s hit list was first reported several months earlier by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, she wrote that the “list includes three Americans”.

What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch – with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.

In fact, The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power. During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ’secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”

But when it comes to Obama’s assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.

Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper” prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.

This new memo is entitled: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force”. It claims its conclusion is “reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a US citizen”. Yet it is every bit as chilling as the Bush OLC torture memos in how its clinical, legalistic tone completely sanitizes the radical and dangerous power it purports to authorize.

I’ve written many times at length about why the Obama assassination program is such an extreme and radical threat – see here for one of the most comprehensive discussions, with documentation of how completely all of this violates Obama and Holder’s statements before obtaining power – and won’t repeat those arguments here. Instead, there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:

1. Equating government accusations with guilt

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears US government defenders referring to “terrorists” when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. This entire memo is grounded in this deceit.

Time and again, it emphasizes that the authorized assassinations are carried out “against a senior operational leader of al-Qaida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” Undoubtedly fearing that this document would one day be public, Obama lawyers made certain to incorporate this deceit into the title itself: “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a US Citizen Who is a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida or An Associated Force.”

This ensures that huge numbers of citizens – those who spend little time thinking about such things and/or authoritarians who assume all government claims are true – will instinctively justify what is being done here on the ground that we must kill the Terrorists or joining al-Qaida means you should be killed. That’s the “reasoning” process that has driven the War on Terror since it commenced: if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such – with indefinite imprisonment or death.

But of course, when this memo refers to “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida”, what it actually means is this: someone whom the President – in total secrecy and with no due process – has accused of being that. Indeed, the memo itself makes this clear, as it baldly states that presidential assassinations are justified when “an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US”.

This is the crucial point: the memo isn’t justifying the due-process-free execution of senior al-Qaida leaders who pose an imminent threat to the US. It is justifying the due-process-free execution of people secretly accused by the president and his underlings, with no due process, of being that. The distinction between (a) government accusations and (b) proof of guilt is central to every free society, by definition, yet this memo – and those who defend Obama’s assassination power – willfully ignore it.

Those who justify all of this by arguing that Obama can and should kill al-Qaida leaders who are trying to kill Americans are engaged in supreme question-begging. Without any due process, transparency or oversight, there is no way to know who is a “senior al-Qaida leader” and who is posing an “imminent threat” to Americans. All that can be known is who Obama, in total secrecy, accuses of this.

(Indeed, membership in al-Qaida is not even required to be assassinated, as one can be a member of a group deemed to be an “associated force” of al-Qaida, whatever that might mean: a formulation so broad and ill-defined that, as Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller argues, it means the memo “authorizes the use of lethal force against individuals whose targeting is, without more, prohibited by international law”.)

The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations. This memo – and the entire theory justifying Obama’s kill list – centrally relies on this authoritarian conflation of government accusations and valid proof of guilt.

They are not the same and never have been. Political leaders who decree guilt in secret and with no oversight inevitably succumb to error and/or abuse of power. Such unchecked accusatory decrees are inherently untrustworthy (indeed, Yemen experts have vehemently contested the claim that Awlaki himself was a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat to the US). That’s why due process is guaranteed in the Constitution and why judicial review of government accusations has been a staple of western justice since the Magna Carta: because leaders can’t be trusted to decree guilt and punish citizens without evidence and an adversarial process. That is the age-old basic right on which this memo, and the Obama presidency, is waging war.

2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor

The most vital fact to note about this memorandum is that it is not purporting to impose requirements on the president’s power to assassinate US citizens. When it concludes that the president has the authority to assassinate “a Senior Operational Leader of al-Qaida” who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the US” where capture is “infeasible”, it is not concluding that assassinations are permissible only in those circumstances.

To the contrary, the memo expressly makes clear that presidential assassinations may be permitted even when none of those circumstances prevail: “This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful.” Instead, as the last line of the memo states: “it concludes only that the stated conditions would be sufficient to make lawful a lethal operation” – not that such conditions are necessary to find these assassinations legal. The memo explicitly leaves open the possibility that presidential assassinations of US citizens may be permissible even when the target is not a senior al-Qaida leader posing an imminent threat and/or when capture is feasible.

Critically, the rationale of the memo – that the US is engaged in a global war against al-Qaida and “associated forces” – can be easily used to justify presidential assassinations of US citizens in circumstances far beyond the ones described in this memo. If you believe the president has the power to execute US citizens based on the accusation that the citizen has joined al-Qaida, what possible limiting principle can you cite as to why that shouldn’t apply to a low-level al-Qaida member, including ones found in places where capture may be feasible (including US soil)? The purported limitations on this power set forth in this memo, aside from being incredibly vague, can be easily discarded once the central theory of presidential power is embraced.

3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield

The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the “battlefield” is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited “battlefield”. That theory is both radical and dangerous because a president’s powers are basically omnipotent on a “battlefield”. There, state power is shielded from law, from courts, from constitutional guarantees, from all forms of accountability: anyone on a battlefield can be killed or imprisoned without charges. Thus, to posit the world as a battlefield is, by definition, to create an imperial, omnipotent presidency. That is the radical theory that unleashed all the rest of the controversial and lawless Bush/Cheney policies.

This “world-is-a-battlefield” theory was once highly controversial among Democrats. John Kerry famously denounced it when running for president, arguing instead that the effort against terrorism is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world”.

But this global-war theory is exactly what lies at heart of the Obama approach to Terrorism generally and this memo specifically. It is impossible to defend Obama’s assassination powers without embracing it (which is why key Obama officials have consistently done so). That’s because these assassinations are taking place in countries far from any war zone, such as Yemen and Somalia. You can’t defend the application of “war powers” in these countries without embracing the once-very-controversial Bush/Cheney view that the whole is now a “battlefield” and the president’s war powers thus exist without geographic limits.

This new memo makes clear that this Bush/Cheney worldview is at the heart of the Obama presidency. The president, it claims, “retains authority to use force against al-Qaida and associated forces outside the area of active hostilities”. In other words: there are, subject to the entirely optional “feasibility of capture” element, no geographic limits to the president’s authority to kill anyone he wants. This power applies not only to war zones, but everywhere in the world that he claims a member of al-Qaida is found. This memo embraces and institutionalizes the core Bush/Cheney theory that justified the entire panoply of policies Democrats back then pretended to find so objectionable.

4. Expanding the concept of “imminence” beyond recognition

The memo claims that the president’s assassination power applies to a senior al-Qaida member who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States”. That is designed to convince citizens to accept this power by leading them to believe it’s similar to common and familiar domestic uses of lethal force on US soil: if, for instance, an armed criminal is in the process of robbing a bank or is about to shoot hostages, then the “imminence” of the threat he poses justifies the use of lethal force against him by the police.

But this rhetorical tactic is totally misleading. The memo is authorizing assassinations against citizens in circumstances far beyond this understanding of “imminence”. Indeed, the memo expressly states that it is inventing “a broader concept of imminence” than is typically used in domestic law. Specifically, the president’s assassination power “does not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future”. The US routinely assassinates its targets not when they are engaged in or plotting attacks but when they are at home, with family members, riding in a car, at work, at funerals, rescuing other drone victims, etc.

Many of the early objections to this new memo have focused on this warped and incredibly broad definition of “imminence”. The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer told Isikoff that the memo “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning”. Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller called Jaffer’s objection “an understatement”, noting that the memo’s understanding of “imminence” is “wildly overbroad” under international law.

Crucially, Heller points out what I noted above: once you accept the memo’s reasoning – that the US is engaged in a global war, that the world is a battlefield, and the president has the power to assassinate any member of al-Qaida or associated forces – then there is no way coherent way to limit this power to places where capture is infeasible or to persons posing an “imminent” threat. The legal framework adopted by the memo means the president can kill anyone he claims is a member of al-Qaida regardless of where they are found or what they are doing.

The only reason to add these limitations of “imminence” and “feasibility of capture” is, as Heller said, purely political: to make the theories more politically palatable. But the definitions for these terms are so vague and broad that they provide no real limits on the president’s assassination power. As the ACLU’s Jaffer says: “This is a chilling document” because “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen” and the purported limits “are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”

5. Converting Obama underlings into objective courts

This memo is not a judicial opinion. It was not written by anyone independent of the president. To the contrary, it was written by life-long partisan lackeys: lawyers whose careerist interests depend upon staying in the good graces of Obama and the Democrats, almost certainly Marty Lederman and David Barron. Treating this document as though it confers any authority on Obama is like treating the statements of one’s lawyer as a judicial finding or jury verdict.

Indeed, recall the primary excuse used to shield Bush officials from prosecution for their crimes of torture and illegal eavesdropping: namely, they got Bush-appointed lawyers in the DOJ to say that their conduct was legal, and therefore, it should be treated as such. This tactic – getting partisan lawyers and underlings of the president to say that the president’s conduct is legal – was appropriately treated with scorn when invoked by Bush officials to justify their radical programs. As Digby wroteabout Bush officials who pointed to the OLC memos it got its lawyers to issue about torture and eavesdropping, such a practice amounts to:

“validating the idea that obscure Justice Department officials can be granted the authority to essentially immunize officials at all levels of the government, from the president down to the lowest field officer, by issuing a secret memo. This is a very important new development in western jurisprudence and one that surely requires more study and consideration. If Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had known about this, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.”

Life-long Democratic Party lawyers are not going to oppose the terrorism policies of the president who appointed them. A president can always find underlings and political appointees to endorse whatever he wants to do. That’s all this memo is: the by-product of obsequious lawyers telling their Party’s leader that he is (of course) free to do exactly that which he wants to do, in exactly the same way that Bush got John Yoo to tell him that torture was not torture, and that even it if were, it was legal.

That’s why courts, not the president’s partisan lawyers, should be making these determinations. But when the ACLU tried to obtain a judicial determination as to whether Obama is actually authorized to assassinate US citizens, the Obama DOJ went to extreme lengths to block the court from ruling on that question. They didn’t want independent judges to determine the law. They wanted their own lawyers to do so.

That’s all this memo is: Obama-loyal appointees telling their leader that he has the authority to do what he wants. But in the warped world of US politics, this – secret memos from partisan lackeys – has replaced judicial review as the means to determine the legality of the president’s conduct.

6. Making a mockery of “due process”

The core freedom most under attack by the War on Terror is the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. It provides that “no person shall be . . . deprived of life . . . without due process of law”. Like putting people in cages for life on island prisons with no trial, claiming that the president has the right to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield without any charges or trial is the supreme evisceration of this right.

The memo pays lip service to the right it is destroying: “Under the traditional due process balancing analysis . . . . we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person’s interest in his life.” But it nonetheless argues that a “balancing test” is necessary to determine the extent of the process that is due before the president can deprive someone of their life, and further argues that, as the New York Times put it when this theory was first unveiled: “while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Stephen Colbert perfectly mocked this theory when Eric Holder first unveiled it to defend the president’s assassination program. At the time, Holder actually said: “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Colbert interpreted that claim as follows:

“Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”

It is fitting indeed that the memo expressly embraces two core Bush/Cheney theories to justify this view of what “due process” requires. First, it cites the Bush DOJ’s core view, as enunciated by John Yoo, that courts have no role to play in what the president does in the War on Terror because judicial review constitutes “judicial encroachment” on the “judgments by the President and his national security advisers as to when and how to use force”. And then it cites the Bush DOJ’s mostly successful arguments in the 2004 Hamdi case that the president has the authority even to imprison US citizens without trial provided that he accuses them of being a terrorist.

The reason this is so fitting is because, as I’ve detailed many times, it was these same early Bush/Cheney theories that made me want to begin writing about politics, all driven by my perception that the US government was becoming extremist and dangerous. During the early Bush years, the very idea that the US government asserted the power to imprison US citizens without charges and due process (or to eavesdrop on them) was so radical that, at the time, I could hardly believe they were being asserted out in the open.

Yet here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight. If you believe the president has the power to order US citizens executed far from any battlefield with no charges or trial, then it’s truly hard to conceive of any asserted power you would find objectionable.

DOJ white paper

Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Q… by Mike Riggs

Source: Glenn Greenwald | Guardian.co.uk

The U.S. Economy Is Now Dangerously Detached From Reality

Recently I was asked to give a presentation on the current state of the global economy to a local group of concerned citizens here in Northwest Montana.  I was happy to oblige but when composing my bullet points I realized that, in truth, there were no legitimate economic numbers to examine anymore.  You see, financial analysts have traditionally used multiple indicators of employment, profit, savings, credit, supply, and demand in their efforts to divine the often obscured facts of our financial system.  The problem is, nearly every index we used in the past, every measure of capital flow and industry, is absolutely useless today.

We now live in an entirely fabricated fiscal environment.  Every aspect of it is filtered, muddled, molded, and manipulated before our eyes ever get to study the stats.  The metaphor may be overused, but our economic system has become an absolute “matrix”.  All that we see and hear has been homogenized and all truth has been sterilized away.  There is nothing to investigate anymore.  It is like awaking in the middle of a vast and hallucinatory live action theater production, complete with performers, props, and sound effects, all designed to confuse us and do us harm.  In the end, trying to make sense of the illusion is a waste of time.  All we can do is look for the exits…

There is some tangible reality out there, but it is difficult to find, and there are few if any mainstream numbers to verify.  One has to remember always that the fundamental world of money and trade revolves around real people and real circumstances.  No matter how corrupt our economic system is, as long as there are human beings, there will always be supply and demand that cannot be hidden.  We have to look past the “official numbers” and look at the roots of trade.  Where has demand fallen?  Where has supply diminished?  Where are the tangible goods and needs and how have they changed?

Let’s first start with the mainstream version of our system, looking at each aspect of the economy that no longer represents the truth of our situation…

Employment, Savings, And Debt 

Much of this information is old news to those of us in the Liberty Movement, who tracked the progress of the global collapse long before the general public even knew of its existence.  However, it is useful to take a step back and look at the basic picture every once in a while.

According to numbers issued by the Department of Labor, weekly unemployment reports have dropped to a five year low, and the overall employment rate is holding at 7.9%.  This would seem to be a vast improvement over the dreadful bloodletting in the system only a few years ago.  Has the private Federal Reserve and the Obama Administration really done it?  Have they turned back the tide on the greatest fiscal crisis the U.S. has seen since the Depression?

No.  They haven’t.

They have only changed how the data is disseminated to the public. In order to understand how the employment statistics con is being engineered, it is important to understand the difference between “Adjusted” and “Unadjusted” numbers.

Labor Department data is “seasonally adjusted”, using a series of statistical assumptions including something called “Trend Cycle Analysis”.  Trend Cycle Analysis is, basically, a sham, but a sham put together in a very complex and confusing manner.  If you ask a mainstream economist what it is, you’ll likely get a three hour long dissertation filled with financial babble and very little concrete explanation.  So let me break it down as simply as I can…

Imagine that you are going to estimate how much profit you plan to make in a particular month, but you don’t just consider your current pay rate and pop it into a calculator; you also throw in the possibility of a few pay raises, an inheritance from a grandma who might kick the bucket, and, your exaggerated expectations of the entire year’s profit on top of that.  You may also take into account future bad weather, a mugging, a nuclear war….whatever.  All hypothetical situations not based in reality.  Basically, you decide that a particular trend in your income is inevitable, then, mold your statistical analysis around that assumption.

When your real profit numbers come in (the unadjusted numbers) and they do not meet your expectations, you simply change them according to what you believe SHOULD have happened.  If you insist that your profits are going to go up for the year, and they go down for a couple months instead, you change the variables you use to calculate the statistical average so that the results match your expectations, assuming that it will all balance out in the end.

Now, this sounds utterly insane for the common person out there trying to make a living.  If you ran your household this way, without accepting the cold hard unadjusted numbers in front of you, you’d find yourself broke and on the street in no time.  Unfortunately this is EXACTLY how our government handles most financial data; by coming to a final conclusion before hand, and then forcing the numbers to fit that conclusion.

This is why in February of 2013, “adjusted” first week unemployment rate was reported at 366,000 – a 5000 person drop from the week before.  A seeming improvement in the trend.  But, unadjusted numbers came in at 386,176 – a 16,000 person spike from the week before.  When one examines real unemployment numbers, he finds that the divergence between the adjusted and unadjusted statistics is growing larger with each passing quarter.  That is to say, the contradiction is becoming so blatant between the hard numbers and the Labor Department’s fantasy numbers that one must question whether or not the government is lying to us outright about the state of the economy (hint – they are lying).

These same methods are used by the government to calculate progress in the housing market, disposable income, etc.

The claim of “recovery” in the jobs market simply doesn’t jive with other indicators, like 2012 Christmas retail, which had the worst showing since the crash in 2008 (and these are still mainstream numbers!):

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/12/26/us-holiday-retail-sales-growth-weakest-since-2008/ 

Average household savings continue to scrape the bottom of the barrel, indicating that the public is not spending or withholding cash.  They are simply broke:

And the overall GDP of the U.S. contracted in the fourth quarter of 2012 for the first time in three years (again, according to official numbers, meaning the reality is much worse):

http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/30/news/economy/gdp-report/index.html

The downturn in consumption and industry also seems to be supported by the Baltic Dry Index, a measure of global shipping and rates.  The BDI has fallen to near historic lows THREE TIMES in the past year, which to my knowledge, has never happened before.  In the past, the BDI has been a strong prophetic indicator of future market volatility.  Usually, around a year after a severe decline in the index, a dangerous economic event takes place.  The BDI made its first sharp drop to all time lows at the end of January 2012, exactly a year ago.

U.S. household debt was recently reported to have fallen to a 29 year low, but the ratio used by the Federal Reserve applies a statistic for disposable income that is derived from the Trend Cycle boondoggle method.  While markets cheer, the truth is, the only reason household debt obligations have fallen at all is because bank lending and credit issuance remains frozen.  Consumer debt falls when there is no money to borrow.  In fact, the Federal Reserve actually pays large banks NOT to lend to the public; an activity which was exposed by Dennis Kucinich in 2009 on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  An activity that continued through 2012:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/the-fed-should-stop-paying-banks-not-to-lend/

Keep in mind, one of the primary arguments the Federal Reserve used when promoting the bailout concept was that it would “free up credit markets” so that lending could pick up again and fuel a recovery, and yet, at the same time, they were paying banks to NOT lend.

Meanwhile, the supposed job recovery has produced an astonishing increase in welfare recipients in the U.S., including a record 46 million Americans on foodstamps (approximately 15% of our population):

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/report-15-americans-food-stamps-980690

If we are to apply any “trend” to our calculations on overall economic health, then we should include the extreme level of government handouts, and poverty levels which are now at all time highs.  The facts are undeniable; the number of people who have much less than they did in 2008 has grown.  How then could the U.S. be considered “in recovery”?

National Debt And The Fiat Lie

With the Dow Index hovering near highs of 14,000 our system truly looks to be on a rocket ship to pre-2008 money market bliss.  In a mere five years we have returned to equity spikes that stagger the mind and the wallet.  At least, that’s how it all appears…

What needs to be taken into account, though, is the amount of fiat money being created by the Federal Reserve, and how much of that printed pixie dust currency is fueling our magical flight to Neverland.  Since 2008, our official national debt has increased from $10 trillion to $16.4 trillion, and some estimate $17 trillion to $18 trillion by the end of 2013 (unless, of course, a collapse occurs).  Which means our national debt, which took decades to reach the $10 trillion mark, will have nearly doubled in only six years!

So, what has a doubling of our national debt in such a short span of time bought us?  Well, credit markets remain frozen, property markets remain stagnant, poverty is at historic levels, welfare recipients are at epic highs, and consumer activity and GDP is back at 2008 lows.  Where did all that printed money go?  Where was it spent?  To answer that question, we only need to find what area of the economy has seen the most positive (or fantastical) activity.  What sector is seeing a massive boost while the rest tumbles?

I suggest that a large portion of QE1 through QE3 has gone to prop up the stock market, and nothing else.  I suggest that American taxpayers are fronting the bill for the equities bonanza we see today.  I suggest that the Dow is being used as a Red Herring to distract the populous for as long as possible while real assets are being snapped up and hoarded by international banks and foreign entities.  I suggest that we are being leached dry and that the parasites are almost ready to move on…

When will it all end?  Perhaps sooner than many people think.  The decision by D.C. to delay talks on the so-called “Fiscal Cliff” until March may not be coincidence.  Extensive cuts in federal spending are absolutely necessary and cannot be dismissed forever, but, because the last vestiges of our system that still operate do so through government money, such cuts will cause immediate damage to the economy, including possible default and dollar devaluation.  Refusal to make cuts will result in credit downgrades, currency inflation, and a loss of the greenback’s world reserve status.  There is no “right” way out of this quandary.

When this collapse is initiated, it would certainly behoove all parties involved, including central banks, international banks, and criminal politicians, to have a scapegoat handy for the citizenry to direct their rage at.

Event Horizon Economics 

An “Event Horizon” in physics is a moment or singularity in spacetime at which a gravitational pull becomes so great that there is no way to escape it.  It is a point of no return.  I believe America’s economy has reached its own Event Horizon.  Our system is now entirely fiat driven, with very little or no true economy left.  Without constant injections from the Fed, and perpetually low interest rates, the country would implode tomorrow.  This is not recovery.  Actually, I’m not sure what to call it.

Today, independent economic analysts cannot look to the numbers to determine future trends.  Most are fake, and the rest are ugly, and I’m not sure much else can be said in their regard.  Instead, we must now look to events, rather than statistics, because our country has been maneuvered into a position of utmost frailty.  Like an avalanche shelf waiting for that perfectly timed disturbance to trigger its roaring collapse.  All that is needed is a macro-crisis, and it is no great feat for such a thing to be created in our tension filled global environment.

War in Syria and Iran leading to a tripling of energy prices.  Sanctions and strife with North Korea leading to Chinese economic retribution.  Conflict between China and Japan, again leading to Chinese economic warfare and perhaps real warfare.  An opportune “cyber attack” which could be used as an excuse for a market crash and even an internet shutdown.  A “political impasse” between Reps and Dems which leads to a default of U.S. credit.  Any one of these catastrophes could easily occur (with a little nudge from some well placed people) and feed a wider global tragedy.  The important thing to remember is that while this event will be blamed for the breakdown, it was international banks, the Federal Reserve, and elements of our own government that made the domino effect possible.  They put the pieces in place.  The act that knocks them over is secondary.

I have spent the past seven years writing about “potential” threats to our overall system, but these dangers were always just beyond our sight.  Just around the corner.  Today, it is as if the journey is over, and all those threats have materialized right before my eyes as real, and imminent.  I am watching that which I warned of come to fruition, and this is certainly not a pleasant thing.  What is valuable, though, is what we have all done in the Liberty Movement with the time that we had.  From when I began writing for the movement until now, I have seen an overwhelming increase in public awareness.  It may not be obvious to newer activists, but it is there all the same.  While we still face disparaging odds, and millions upon millions of oblivious bystanders, there is, amidst these darker moments, a steadfast community of free men and women forming.  I have full faith in the future.  Much more so than I ever did before.  Our economy may be detached from reality, but our endeavors as individuals will not be.  Our resolve will be the great game changer.  Not fiscal calamity.

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

County Sheriff: Power To Protect

The local FOX affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah, has reported that the Utah Sheriff’s Association has written a strongly worded letter to President Barack Obama regarding any potential federal laws that would restrict the citizens of the State of Utah from practicing their Second Amendment rights. The letter was signed by every sheriff in the State of Utah except one. The letter reads in part:

“With the number of mass shootings America has endured, it is easy to demonize firearms; it is also foolish and prejudiced. Firearms are nothing more than instruments, valuable and potentially dangerous, but instruments nonetheless. Malevolent souls, like the criminals who commit mass murders, will always exploit valuable instruments in the pursuit of evil. As professional peace officers, if we understand nothing else, we understand this: lawful violence must sometimes be employed to deter and stop criminal violence. Consequently, the citizenry must continue its ability to keep and bear arms, including arms that adequately protect them from all types of illegality.”

The letter also states: “We respect the Office of the President of the United States of America. But, make no mistake, as the duly-elected sheriffs of our respective counties, we will enforce the rights guaranteed to our citizens by the Constitution. No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights–in particular Amendment II–has given them. We, like you, swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation.”

In addition, Utah Representative Brian Greene, R-Pleasant Grove, has introduced legislation that asserts State power over federal power regarding gun control. Rep. Greene’s bill “would go so far as to allow local police the authority to arrest federal agents should they try to seize any firearms.”

The report added: “‘Acting upon those will be a third-degree felony in this state, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine,’ Greene said.”

See the report at:

Proposted Legislation Asserts State Power Over Gun Control

Tim Mueller, the sheriff of Linn County, Oregon, has also written the White House a similar letter. Mueller’s letter said in part, “Any federal regulation enacted by Congress or by executive order of the president offending the constitutional rights of my citizens shall not be enforced by me or by my deputies,” adding, “Nor will I permit the enforcement of any unconstitutional regulations or orders by federal officers within the borders of Linn County, OR.”

Read the report and Sheriff Mueller’s letter at:

Second Sheriff Refuses To Enforce Gun Confiscation

Several sheriffs in the State of Oregon have followed Sheriff Mueller’s example and issued similar statements: Sheriff Jim Hensley of Crook County, Sheriff Larry Blanton of Deschutes County, Sheriff Glenn Palmer of Grant County, Sheriff Craig Zanni of Coos County, and Sheriff John Hanlin of Douglas County.

In fact, sheriffs from all over America have begun taking similar stands. One of the first was Sheriff Denny Peyman of Jackson County, Kentucky. Also add Pine County, Minnesota, Sheriff Robin Cole. Sheriff Cole said, “I do not believe the federal government or any individual in the federal government has the right to dictate to the states, counties or municipalities any mandate, regulation or administrative rule that violates the United States Constitution or its various amendments.” The sheriff said that the right to bear arms is “fundamental to our individual freedoms and that firearms are part of life in our country.”

A news report on the story noted, “The Sheriff said he would refuse to enforce any federal mandate that violates constitutional rights, and that he would consider any new federal regulation on guns to be illegal.”

Also include Madison County, Alabama, Sheriff Blake Dorning; Smith County, Texas, Sheriff Larry Smith; and Martin County, Florida, Sheriff Bill Snyder to the list of sheriffs who are vowing to protect their citizens from the unconstitutional overreach of the federal government.

See the report at:

Many More Sheriffs Vow Not To Enforce Federal Gun Control Laws

This is exactly the kind of response that is needed! No law enforcement action of any kind (county, State, or federal) can take place without the approbation of the county sheriff. Constitutionally, he is the highest law enforcement officer of the county. This is why I have repeatedly said that ultimately our freedom will be won or lost at the State and local levels.

Big Government toadies love to quote the so-called “supremacy clause” in Article. VI. Paragraph. 2. of the US Constitution. It reads, “This Constitution and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme law of the land…” This clause, they say, gives carte blanche to federal lawmakers to usurp, negate, or expunge any local or State law–or even the Constitution itself. Such an interpretation is absolutely ludicrous!

Notice that those federal laws that are considered to be “the supreme law of the land” must be made “in Pursuance” of the existing Constitution. Nowhere is it written that federal laws that contradict the existing US Constitution are to be considered lawful. In fact, just the opposite is true. Laws, even federal laws, which contradict the Constitution, are deemed to be null and void.

In the Marbury v Madison Supreme Court decision (1803), the Constitution was firmly established as the “supreme law of the land”–not legislative acts which contradict the Constitution. In the landmark ruling, Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the majority, said, “So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.

“If then the courts are to regard the constitution; and the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature; the constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

“Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law.

“This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions. It would declare that an act, which, according to the principles and theory of our government, is entirely void; is yet, in practice, completely obligatory. It would declare, that if the legislature shall do what is expressly forbidden, such act, notwithstanding the express prohibition, is in reality effectual. It would be giving to the legislature a practical and real omnipotence, with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. It is prescribing limits, and declaring that those limits may be passed at pleasure.”

The decision concludes, “Why does a judge swear to discharge his duties agreeably to the constitution of the United States, if that constitution forms no rule for his government? if it is closed upon him, and cannot be inspected by him.

“If such be the real state of things, this is worse than solemn mockery. To prescribe, or to take this oath, becomes equally a crime.

“Thus, the particular phraseology of the constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.”

See the Marbury decision at:

MARBURY v. MADISON

How could this decision be any more clear? The US Congress has no authority to pass laws, and the President has no authority to execute laws which contradict the US Constitution, and any such laws that are passed should be considered null and void.

In addition to the Court, the founders also expected that the states would serve as a check and balance on potential encroachments upon the people’s liberties by the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

At this point, allow me to quote my constitutional attorney son, Timothy Baldwin:

“One of the constitutional tools by which socialist and nationalist ideologues have incorporated political principles of centralization and state annihilation is through the ‘Supremacy clause’ of the U.S. Constitution, which states, ‘This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.’ (USC, Article 6) To many people, this phrase has been construed to mean whatever laws and treaties those in the federal government pass, execute and uphold are binding on the people of the states and their respective governments. Admittedly, this concept has taken a stronghold in America and has been treated as the accepted principle of constitutional law for generations. Undoubtedly, every law student attending an ABA accredited law school is taught this as fact, just as I was when I attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. Not everyone agrees with this construction, however.

“Big-government and monarchist himself, Alexander Hamilton sheds light on the error of this position in 1787 when he addressed the concerns of those Americans who rejected the U.S. Constitution because of the fear that the expected effect of the ‘Supremacy clause’ would be to subvert the sovereignty of the States to govern themselves according to their constitutions. Hamilton attempts to calm their fears, saying, ‘It will not follow from this doctrine [of supremacy] that acts of the large society [i.e., the union] which are NOT PURSUANT to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land.’ (Federalist Paper 33) Perhaps everyone in America would concede this, but what is not agreed upon is what the States can and should do about those laws that are NOT PURSUANT to the constitutional powers of the federal government. Many place the burden of correcting that grievance on the U.S. Supreme Court, as if a body of nine judges appointed by the executive of the federal government are an adequate remedy for the machinations of that distorted philosophy broadly accepted by those in federal office. Contrarily, those who believe in the principles of a federalist system should recognize that each unit of the union (i.e., States) have the duty to do what Hamilton suggested in response to those laws contrary to the constitution: ‘These [laws] will be merely acts of usurpation, and WILL DESERVE TO BE TREATED AS SUCH.’ (FP 33, emphasis added) These laws should be treated as no law at all, and moreover, as attacks on liberty, and should be resisted on every level of the union, from federal to state to local governments, as well as individuals.”

See Tim’s website at:

LibertyDefenseLeague

Sheriffs Mueller, Peyman, Cole, et al. are dutifully fulfilling their oaths of office and are exemplary examples of what it means to be a constitutional sheriff.

I strongly urge readers to take a copy of Sheriff Mueller’s letter to the White House to your own county sheriff and ask him where he stands on protecting your Second Amendment liberties. And if your sheriff balks at his duty of standing firm for your liberties, vote him out of office as quickly as possible and replace him with a true constitutionalist sheriff. Remember, without the approbation and cooperation of your county sheriff, no federal police agency has any ability to implement Senator Dianne Feinstein’s semi-automatic rifle ban or high capacity magazine ban, should Congress pass such a ban.

Sheriffs are not elected to be paper pushers or attend Rotary Club meetings or a hundred other mundane tasks; primarily, sheriffs are elected to protect the liberties of the citizens in his or her county–even if that means defying unconstitutional laws handed down from Washington, D.C.

Kudos to the sheriffs of the State of Utah; kudos to Sheriff Mueller, Peyman, Cole et al. Come on folks! Find out NOW whether you have a real sheriff in your county or just a political opportunist who wears a badge. Your liberties hang in the balance.

The CIA

And The Genre of American Society…

“We are no more free citizens in modern nations; for there are no nations and no free citizens. We are just grey and febrile pawns, volatile and nervous ants and cyber-cockroaches – name it as you want – lodging in a big technological concentration camp named the American matrix. An individual will be by no mean himself, for the old Christian subject is dead. For our ruling elites, who always lament the Russian resilience and threaten strangulated Iran, there are no nations, no races, no spirituality and no soul: there is just a cyber-personality in search of an ergonomic perfection and a global network of electronic prisons and ecological surveillance. As foresaw Job, the current man is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks upon a snare” Nicolas Bonnal, Pravda.

Many Americans are adamant about obedience to the United States Constitution.  Our beloved country which is feeling the encumbrance of the elite power structure clamors for Constitutionalism and seeks redress in the courts.  When Christians support a document that forbids allegiance to The One True God and ignores His writing they invite His wrath.  The Constitution opens wide the door for pagan government by forbidding a Christian oath and making it legal for infidels to rule over the nation.

When I expressed doubts about the efficacy of the United States Constitution I was shunned by some of my readers.  Many thought I had become a disciple of Reverend Ted Weiland (He has done excellent work in analyzing the pernicious nature of the United States Constitution.)  or had forsaken R. J. Rushdoony.  Neither is true.  I began to question the Constitution when I learned who supported it, who wrote it, the secrecy and duplicity that was involved in the Philadelphia Convention and the tragic results of some of its content.

The wickedness of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is at least to some extent a result of the failure of the United States Constitution to set forth proper moral restraints. Diane Spignola writes: “The CIA’s activities, per the official government directive, included the following:  propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including industrial sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrilla and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist or now anti-nationalist elements in countries around the world.  Such operations should not include armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage, counter-espionage, and cover and deception for military operations.”   She claims that, ”At least six million people had perished by 1987 as a result of the CIA’s covert operations. Not only is the CIA not an intelligence agency, it distorts information and perpetuates misinformation and disinformation to justify its own goals. This wide-range deception has resulted in organized terrorism throughout the world. Using the CIA, our government routinely dismisses or ignores national and international laws under the guise of ‘national security.’”

Wall Street and the money interests had their hand in the formation of the CIA.   According to Kai Bird’s biography “The Chairman”, in1941 John J. McCloy asked Attorney General Robert Jackson for authorization to use wire taps to ferret out potential saboteurs.  Jackson was against unauthorized snooping on private citizens and turned him down.  McCloy actually envisioned an even more extensive organization that would operate secretly dispensing propaganda, collecting intelligence, and manipulating people and governments.  He said, “I am somewhat obsessed with the necessity of establishing a propaganda or information bureau for our defense….It is more essential than artillery”.

McCloy’s request for wire tap authorization was backed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.  An attempt to get congressional approval was defeated by a vote of 154 to 146.  At about the same time William J. Donovan who had first-hand experience with the British intelligence system and the ear of President Franklin D. Roosevelt was appointed Coordinator of Information (A name Bird attributes to McCloy.)  a new function described as a means of bringing together the variety of intelligence gathering functions of the FBI, Army, Navy, and U. S. Department of State.  The coordination effort met with considerable resistance but the organization provided a platform for another intelligence organization called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Both John J. McCloy and William Donovan were bright, industrious men from poor families; McCloy from Philadelphia and Donovan from Buffalo.  Both were Wall Street lawyers.  Both were studious and both were amoral.

Donovan played football in high school and was a star at Columbia University where he was known as “Wild Bill Donovan”.  His undergraduate and law degree were both from Columbia.  He was a war hero and a revered leader who rose to the rank of Lieutenant General.  President Roosevelt, a sports fan, admired Donovan’s athletic ability and his war record.  He gave Donovan wide authority in forming a new intelligence organization.   In 1914 Donovan married Ruth, a member of the wealthy Rumsey family.   He was seldom home and his dalliances became so common that his hosts often provided him with women.

President Bush, the younger, was not the first high ranking politician to refer to the Constitution as “just a piece of paper”, McCloy did it first.  When McCloy and Robert Lovett worked for War Secretary Henry Stimpson he referred to them as the “Imps of Satan”.  McCloy visited Adolph Hitler and for a time was an advisor to Benito Mussolini.  He graduated from Harvard Law School and launched his career from the powerful law firm of Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff.  Cravath’s partners included Otto H. Kuhn; Jacob Schiff’s son, Mortimer; Jerome J. Hanauer; Paul M. Warburg, married to Solomon Loeb’sdaughter, Nina; and Felix M. Warburg, married to Jacob Schiff’s daughter, Frieda.  Paul Cravath, the firm’s founder, was an Anglophile internationalist who became a director and vice-president of the newly formed Council on Foreign Relations.  Ultimately McCloy left the Cravath law firm and became a partner in Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.  The Milbank firm was associated with the Rockefellers who were friends since his days at Harvard Law.  Throughout his life McCloy maintained a close relationship with powerful Jewish bankers.

Allen Dulles was a third key figure in the CIA.  Dulles headed the organization from 1953 to 1961 and under his direction it began to conform to the image Donovan and McCloy envisioned.  Dulles began MK Ultra, a secret organization that makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein look like child’s play.  With extensive CIA financing it did experiments in torture and mind control that truly boggle the mind.  He also financed Operation Mockingbird that successfully influenced the content of 25 or more strategic news sources.

Dulles was a libertine who was famous for his extramarital affairs.  Under his leadership the governments of sovereign nations were disrupted with propaganda and economic sabotage.    Democratic elections were disrupted, leaders were assassinated, military coups were launched, governments were undermined, genocide, scorched earth, and torture were all part of a frenzy of illegal activity.

In 1975 the Church Committee succeeded In reigning in some of the CIA excesses but the power to gain control over country after country was too good to be relinquished and other secret organizations were formed that took them up.

The brutal, Satanic policies carried out by the CIA mark the tenor of the elite money powers who are slowly bringing the world under their control.  McCloy and Donovan were agents of those powers as is our President, our media, and many of our politicians.  The United States of America and the War on Terror is being used as a tool to bring the remaining independent nations under the reigning world financial straight jacket.  Our nation is being purposely destroyed in the process.

When comparing the conduct of our society with God’s legal requirements it is difficult to know where to start.  Dishonesty is the main ingredient of our everyday life.  Our personal conversations are inhibited by deception; our media distorts and edits the news; businesses regularly deceive customers with phony sales, exorbitant prices, and inferior merchandise; our political leaders lie to us, deceive us, and betray us.  Our preachers describe a god that doesn’t exist and fail to mention the One that does. Our schools teach a debilitating humanism while we live, breathe, and have our being in a sea of mendacity with little effort to correct it.

Justice has vanished.  It is a fearful experience to come before our courts.  Receiving justice is like playing the lottery.  Without the immutable anchor of God’s Law, justice is absent. Human law is always a product of diverse opinion and is enforced by power.  Our legal system is as badly deteriorated as our honesty.  God cannot be honored when crimes are against the State instead of against His Divine Majesty and justice is never served when restitution is forsaken.  An adversarial system that ignores God’s Law cannot produce a just result.   Adversity must be between behavior and His Law.

R. J. Rushdoony wrote: “All law is based upon morality, and morality is itself based upon religion. Therefore, when the religion of a people is weakened, so also is its morality undermined.  The result is a progressive collapse of law and order, and the breakdown of society.  Men, though, see law as a limitation on their liberty, and Christianity is held to be the most restrictive with its emphasis upon Biblical law as the foundation for morality and liberty.  Humanistic man wants total liberty, but he does not realize that total liberty leads only to total anarchy, and that leads to the death of law and liberty. Unless every man’s liberty is limited by law, no liberty is possible for anyone.”

This is where we are going.  We are slowly being brought under the control of the elite money powers and in the process our liberty is being lost in increments.

We need to take a personal inventory.  Following is a shocking excerpt from a book by Nick Turse about atrocities our soldiers too often committed during the Vietnam War:

“The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy.  ’Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him…’ medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman… ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic…’

“A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive…

“A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice…

“And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women…

“Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company… [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on…”

This is a weeping wound of sin in our nation, the sin of our soldiers, and the sin of our people.   We support the savagery and murder that is fostered by unnecessary war.  Soldiers are taught to be callus and cruel and the uncertainties of combat require they kill or be killed.   As long as we don’t see it and our finger is not on the trigger we are happy to support murder’s macho image.  Our women slither into abortion clinics and with impunity murder their helpless, unborn babies.  We sanction murder in the name of selfishness.  Our young men are urged to join the army and assist in the torture and mass murder that is part of modern warfare.

The United States Constitution allows men and women of disobedient character to be elected to leadership and not surprisingly these disobedient men and women disobey the law they have sworn to uphold.   We protest disobedience to our Constitution but make no protest against disobedience to God’s Commandments.  We go to church on Sunday; pray for our soldiers, profess the greatness of our nation, and wonder why we are losing our freedoms and why our leaders lie to us.

We have been deceived.  Mendacity has invaded every nook and cranny of our nation.  We live a lie in a sea of lies.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.  And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”  And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, “You surely shall not die!  For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  From the Word of God.

The State-owned Bank of North Dakota

Fiscal conservatives often are blind when it comes to alternatives to the “so called” commercial banking system. Many conventional Republicans are ignorant or simply carrying the water for the crony capitalist banking establishment. The fractional reserve banking monopoly that operates under the auspices of the privately owned Federal Reserve System, despises any trace of competition. The bondage from debt created money has doomed Main Street to the fate of contrite beggars in search of securing loans. Useful purposes for business financing are not sufficient reason for the qualifying for commercial credit.

Is there an alternative to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and centralized banking dominated by Wall Street investment banksters? Can state chartered commercial banks compete separate from the favoritism shown to the “Not Too Big To Fail” money centered banks? Well, Ellen Hodjson Brown JD, has popularized the subject of the state-owned bank and believes there is a better model for community banking.

“The secret of its success seems to be the state-owned Bank of North Dakota, which was established by the state legislature in 1919 specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. By law, the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, and the state guarantees its deposits. The bank’s stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. The bank operates as a bankers’ bank, partnering with private banks to loan money to farmers, real estate developers, schools and small businesses. It loans money to students (over 184,000 outstanding loans), and it purchases municipal bonds from public institutions.”

 

The informative video, Bank of North Dakota provides a comprehensive overview, well worth viewing.Such a departure from the normal coordinated federal regulation and Federal Reserve prescribes, gives pause to the plutocrats that despise any departure from the top down banking model that is based upon special treatment for the schemes of investment banking.

Bloomberg News points out the banking industry opposition to the state-own charter in the article, North Dakota’s State-Run Bank Adds Millions to Treasury, Spurs Imitators.

“The U.S. banking industry opposes the idea and is lobbying against it, saying a state-run bank would compete with commercial banks for business and politicize a state’s lending decisions.

“A state-owned bank? Why don’t we just re-label the state capitols the Kremlin?” Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a Washington-based trade group that represents more than 5,000 community banks, said in a telephone interview.

“It’s a socialistic idea,” Fine said. “If you get a state-owned bank that is allocating credit, it can slide very quickly into a situation where those in favor get credit and those not in favor don’t get credit.”

How ironic the false claim that a sparsely populated state like, North Dakota could be such a citadel of collectivist enterprise when the titans of cartel-controlled crony capitalism were the financiers of the Russian communist revolution. The new generation of algorithmic traders has no more interest in writing business commercial loans then the banker funded Lenin investment of mercy shown to the Czar.

Even more sardonic is the viewpoint that the only banking monopoly acceptable is the one designated by the barons of usury. The slogan – no small business loans, is their operative policy.

Mother Jones examines what Republicans might call an idiosyncratic bastion of socialism in their interview with Bank of North Dakota’s president; Eric Hardmeyer, How the Nation’s Only State-Owned Bank Became the Envy of Wall Street. Mr. Hardmeyer explains the operation of their system thusly.

“Our funding model, our deposit model is really what is unique as the engine that drives that bank. And that is we are the depository for all state tax collections and fees. And so we have a captive deposit base, we pay a competitive rate to the state treasurer. And I would bet that that would be one of the most difficult things to wrestle away from the private sector—those opportunities to bid on public funds. But that’s only one portion of it. We take those funds and then, really what separates us is that we plow those deposits back into the state of North Dakota in the form of loans. We invest back into the state in economic development type of activities. We grow our state through that mechanism.”

The significance of the North Dakota experiment is that the dominance and control of the State/Capital cabal can be broken. Sensible banking is based upon making loans for productive enterprises, not derivative speculation. The customer of any bank is a person. Financing business growth and development is the core purpose and function of a bank.

The populist underpinnings of the independent method of funding the Bank of North Dakota provide an alternative model for depository transactions. Prosperity for local economies is an integral objective for any community interest bank. Those who profess free market enterprise principles need to adopt practical partner relationships with proponents of state charted banks.

ABC News reports the inconceivable, State-Owned Banks: The Future of Banking?

“Bank of North Dakota officials said that at least 10 states have turned to them for guidance, including some states, like Michigan, hardest hit by the financial crisis. They include California, Florida and Illinois, where a bill to create a state bank already is under consideration by the state legislature.”

Success is the best substitute to the stagnation of Wall Street greed and corporatism. Credit unions and associations provide another option for the depositor to conduct business. Loans are a way of life to most wage earners. Applying with an institution committed to their customer is rare in the era of national banking conglomerates. Trust is the basis of banking and the record of the Bank of North Dakota, compared to Bank America, demonstrates a stark difference. Register your discontent with your money stop doing business with national money-centered banks.

Syria: A Jihadi Paradise

So Bashar al-Assad hath martially spoken – for the first time in seven months – predictably blaming the Syrian civil war on “terrorists” and “Western puppets”.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he of the former “zero problems with our neighbors” policy, commented that Assad only reads the reports of his secret services. C’mon, Ahmet; Bashar may be no Stephen Hawking, but he’s certainly getting his black holes right.

Assad, moreover, has a plan: a national dialogue leading to a national charter – to be submitted to a referendum – and then an enlarged government and a general amnesty. The problem is who is going to share all this bottled happiness because Assad totally dismisses the new Syria opposition coalition as well as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), describing them as foreign-recruited gangs taking orders from foreign powers to implement one supreme agenda: the partition of Syria.

Still, Assad’s got a plan. First stage: all foreign powers financing the “terrorists” – as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Gulf Cooperation Council compound – must stop doing so. That’s already a major no-no. Only in a second stage would the Syrian Army cease all its operations, but still reserve the right to respond to any – inevitable – “provocation”.

Assad’s plan does not mention what happens to Assad himself. The only thing the multiple strands of the opposition agree on is that “the dictator must go” before any negotiations take place. Yet he wants to be a candidate to his own succession in 2014.

As if this was not a humongous “detail” torpedoing the whole construct of current UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, there’s still the crucial nagging point of Brahimi insisting on including the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in a Syrian transitional government. Brahimi should know better. It’s as if the UN was praying for a Hail Mary pass – that is, Assad’s voluntary abdication.

This ain’t Tora Bora

If you want to know what’s really going in Syria, look no further than Hezbollah secretary-general Sheikh Nasrallah. He does tell it like it is.

Then there’s what Ammar al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s number 3 – as in their de facto foreign minister – told my Italian colleaguem Ugo Tramballi. The most probable post-Assad scenario, if there is one, will be “not a unitary state, but a series of emirates near the Turkish border, and somebody proclaiming an Islamic state”. Hezbollah’s intelligence – the best available on Syria – is adamant: “one third of the combatants in the opposition are religious extremists, and two-thirds of the weapons are under their control.” The bottom line – this is a Western proxy war, with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) acting as a “vanguard” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Asia Times Online readers have already known this for eons, as much as they know about the tectonic-plates-on-the-move fallacy of GCC autocracies promoting “democracy” in Syria. While the geologically blessed House of Saud has bribed every grain of sand in sight to be immunized against any whiff of Arab Spring, at least in Kuwait the winds of change are forcing the Al-Sabah family to accept a prime minister who is not an emir’s puppet. Yes, petromonarchs; sooner or later you’re all going down.

As for those who ignore Musawi, they do it at their own peril; blowback is and will remain inevitable, “like in Afghanistan”. Musawi adds, “Syria is not Tora Bora; it’s on the Mediterranean coast, close to Europe”. Syria in the 2010s is the 1980s Afghan remix – with exponential inbuilt blowback.

And for those who blindly follow the blind in repeating that Hezbollah is a “terrorist” organization, Hezbollah is closely cooperating with the UN – on the ground with over 10,000 blue helmets, under the command of Italian General Paolo Serra – to keep southern Lebanon free from Syrian civil war contamination.

The dictator has fallen – again

Not surprisingly, that motley crew branded as the “Syrian opposition” rejected Assad en bloc. For the Muslim Brotherhood – the self-styled power in waiting – he is a “war criminal” who should go on trial. For Georges Sabra, the vice-president of that American-Qatari concoction, the National Coalition, Assad’s words were a “declaration of war against the Syrian people”.

Predictably, the US State Department – not yet under John Kerry – said Assad was “detached from reality”. London said it was all hypocrisy and immediately launched yet another “secret” two-day conference this week at Wilton Park in West Sussex mingling coalition members with the usual gaggle of “experts”, academics, GCC officials and “multilateral agencies”. The spectacularly pathetic UK Foreign Secretary William Hague twitted – for the umpteenth time – that “Assad’s departure from power is inevitable”.

Facts on the ground though spell that Assad is not going anywhere anytime soon.

As for British claims that “the international community can provide support to a future transitional authority”, that doesn’t cut much slack among war-weary informed Syrians – who know this civil war has been funded, supplied and amply coordinated by the West, as in the NATO component of the NATOGCC compound.

They smell a – Western – rat in the obsessive characterization of everything in Syria as a sectarian war, as they see how loads of influent Sunnis have remained loyal to the government.

They smell a – Western – rat when they look back and see this whole thing started just as the US$10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline (crucially bypassing NATO member Turkey) had a chance to be implemented. This would represent a major economic boost to an independent Syria, an absolute no-no as far as Western interests are concerned.

The Obama 2.0 administration – and Israel – would be more than comfortable with the MB in power in Syria, following the Egyptianmodus operandi. The Brotherhood promotes the idea of a “civil state”; one just has to check the few “liberated areas” across Syria to detect rebel civility inbuilt in hardcore Sharia law and assorted beheadings.

Yet what the NATOGCC compound and Israel really want is a Yemeni model for Syria; a military dictatorship without the dictator. What they’re getting instead, for the foreseeable future, is Jihadi Paradise.

Off with their heads

Almost a year ago, al-Qaeda number one Ayman al-Zawahiri called on every Sunni hardcore faithful from Iraq and Jordan to Lebanon, Turkey and beyond to take a trip to Syria and merrily crush Assad.

So they’ve kept coming, including – just like in Afghanistan – Chechens and Uyghurs and Southeast Asians, joining everything from the FSA to Jabhat al-Nusra, the number one killing militia, now with over 5,000 jihadis.

A report published this week by the London-based counterterrorism outfit Quilliam Foundation confirms Al-Nusra’s role. The lead author of the report, Noman Benotman, happens to be a former Libyan jihadi very cosy with al-Zawahiri and the late “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden.

Al-Nusra is in fact the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the terrorist brand of late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also known as Islamic State of Iraq after Zarqawi was incinerated by a US missile in 2006. Even the State Department knows that AQI emir Abu Du’a runs both AQI and al-Nusra, whose own emir is Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani.

It’s AQI that facilitates the back-and-forth of Iraqi commanders – with plenty of fighting experience on the ground against the Americans – to sensitive areas in Syria, while the Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians at al-Nusra also work the phones to extract funding from Gulf sources. Al-Nusra wants – what else – an Islamic State not only in Syria but all over the Levant. Favorite tactic: car and truck suicide bombings as well as remote-controlled car bombs. For the moment, they keep a tense collaboration/competition regime with the FSA.

What happens next? The new Syrian National Coalition is a joke. Those GCC bastions of democracy are now totally spooked by the jihadi tsunami. Russia drew the red line and NATO won’t dare to bomb; Russians and Americans are now discussing details. And sooner or later Ankara will see the writing on the wall – and revert to a policy of at least minimizing trouble with the neighbors.
Assad saw The Big Picture – clearly, thus his “confident” speech. It’s now Assad against the jihadis. Unless, or until, the new CIA under Terminator John Brennan drones itself into the (shadow war) picture with a vengeance.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

Source: Asia Times Online

Revolution?

I have been writing this column for over a dozen years, and I can safely say the column I wrote last week, “My Line In The Sand Is Drawn Here,” produced more response than any column I have ever written–maybe more than any two or three columns combined. And what is even more noteworthy: unlike most columns, the responses to this column were at least 90% favorable.

In last week’s column I said, “Throughout the United States, there are tens of millions of fully-armed citizens who are more than capable of defending themselves and their communities against any enemy–whether that enemy is an internal or external one. In fact, many millions of these citizens have been trained in the US armed forces. Firearms–especially semi-automatic rifles–in the hands of millions of American citizens is truly the only thing that stands between freedom and tyranny for the people of the United States. That Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein want to disarm the American people should be considered an act of war against our liberties! In other words, ladies and gentlemen, this is a line in the sand that none of us can afford to ignore.”

I also wrote, “Make no mistake about it: to take away an American’s right to a semi-automatic rifle is to FULLY DISARM HIM. There is no Second Amendment; there is no right to keep and bear arms; there is no citizen militia; there is no liberty without the semi-automatic rifle!”

I concluded the column saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms. Period. End of story. It’s not just a saying with me: when my guns are outlawed, I will be an outlaw!

“My line in the sand is drawn here!

“Make no mistake about it: it is not just semi-automatic rifles that these gun grabbers are after. Ultimately, they want to take all of our guns. We either stop them now or there will be no stopping them at all.”

See the column at:

My Line In The Sand Is Drawn Here!

Among those who wrote to tell me that they had also drawn their personal line in the sand on this issue and that they would also absolutely refuse to register or surrender their firearms were people from virtually all walks of life: attorneys, realtors, bankers, teachers, physicians, civil servants, salesmen, truck drivers, tradesmen, pastors, law enforcement officers (including federal police officers), and military personnel–even special forces troops. Accordingly, I am absolutely convinced that these people are a microcosm of gun owners nationwide. I am also convinced that should Senator Dianne Feinstein’s bill banning semi-automatic rifles become law that there are literally tens of millions of Americans who simply will not comply.

Furthermore, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan recently told John McLaughlin that should the federal government attempt to confiscate the guns of the American people, “There would be a revolution in this country!”

See the report at:

‘There would be a revolution in this country!’, Mail Online

What most people fail to realize (because they are not taught it) is that the match that ignited America’s War for Independence was not excessive taxes, or the lack of representation, or trade restrictions, or the lack of trial by jury (as important as these issues were). The match that ignited America’s War for Independence was ATTEMPTED GUN CONFISCATION.

On April 19, 1775, British troops, some 800 strong, were dispatched to Concord, Massachusetts, to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock and to seize a cache of weapons known to be stored at Concord. When Dr. Joseph Warren sent Paul Revere to warn Pastor Jonas Clark (in whose home Adams and Hancock were staying) that the Crown’s troops were on their way to arrest the two men and seize the guns at Concord, he alerted his male congregants. About 60-70 men from the Church of Lexington stood armed on Lexington Green awaiting the Red Coats.

Upon spotting the citizen militia, a British officer demanded the men throw down their arms. They refused; and the British troops immediately opened fire. Eight of the Minutemen were instantly killed. The colonists returned fire in self-defense, and the shot was fired that was heard ’round the world. By the time the troops arrived at the Concord Bridge, just a few miles away, hundreds of colonists were waiting for them with muskets in hand, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Make no mistake about it: attempted gun confiscation ignited America’s War for Independence. And I am convinced that Pat Buchanan is absolutely right. If the federal government attempts to confiscate the guns of the American people, “There would be a revolution in this country!”

One more observation regarding The Battle of Lexington which opened America’s War for Independence: not only was attempted gun confiscation the match that ignited the war, it was the pastor of the Church of Lexington and members of his congregation who were the Minutemen of Lexington Green. That is another fact most historians conveniently leave out of the story.

If there is one element missing from today’s liberty fight, it is the lack of participation from America’s pastors. By and large they are MIA. How many pastors today are warning their congregations of the threat against their Second Amendment liberties? Every pastor in America, regardless of denomination, should have already started proclaiming “the spirit of resistance” (Thomas Jefferson) to their church congregations; they should already be extolling the Biblical mandate to resist tyranny; they should already be warning their congregations of Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein’s plan to disarm them.

Let me ask my church-going readers: has your pastor said one word from the pulpit regarding the impending gun ban now being drafted? Has your pastor explained the Biblical principles of lawful resistance? Has your pastor exhorted his church congregation to not surrender their firearms and to do everything in their power to demand that your senators and legislators hold the line for the Second Amendment? And my next question is if your pastor has not done any of this, why are you still attending that church?

Ladies and gentlemen, there would have been no United States of America had it not been for Rev. Jonas Clark and the other patriot-pastors of 1775 and 1776. There would have been no Lexington Green and Concord Bridge; there would have been no Bunker Hill; there would have been no Declaration of Independence; there would have been no British surrender at Yorktown. And I would dare say that if a significant percentage of pastors would stand up this Sunday and encourage their people to stand firm against this gun ban bill, the bill would never see the light of day.

The time is late, folks! We no longer have the luxury of straddling the fence or putting our heads in the sand. If your pastor refuses to take a public stand for YOUR liberties, and the liberties of YOUR CHILDREN, vote with your feet and walk out the door. Find yourself a pastor who will defend your liberties and the liberties of your children–liberties that other pastors and patriots purchased at the cost of their very blood.

I repeat what I’ve already said, “Whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms. Period. End of story. It’s not just a saying with me: when my guns are outlawed, I will be an outlaw!

“My line in the sand is drawn here!”

And so are the lines of millions of Americans.

In response to Pat Buchanan’s prediction of revolution should the federal government attempt to confiscate our guns, John McLaughlin replied, “Baloney!”

I’m sure that’s what King George III said when he was told that would happen if his troops attempted to confiscate the guns at Concord.

When Teachers Aren’t Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader

When I’ve written about our listing mis-education system, my focus has mainly been on rampant political correctness, on how students learn few of the right things partially because of emphasis on teaching the wrong things. Yet there’s another problem: in some cases the teachers couldn’t teach the right things even if they wanted to — they don’t know them.

Professor Walter Williams treated this in his latest syndicated column, “Dishonest Educators.” He introduces the topic by talking about the fairly recent cheating scandals in places such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, and other large cities (in areas that, not coincidentally, also have high rates of vote fraud and other criminality). These are shocking instances in which teachers would commit transgressions such as reading answers aloud in class during the National Assessment of Educational Progress test. How did they justify this? Well, Williams quotes one teacher who told a fellow “educator,” “I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell.”

But it seems the kids aren’t the only ones. Now we learn that some teachers in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi paid surrogates between $1,500 and $3,000 to take the Praxis exam for them, the passing of which is necessary for teacher certification in 40 states. And how challenging is this test that some would fork over a few grand to a ringer sit-in? Williams describes a couple of representative questions, writing:

Here’s a practice Praxis I math question: Which of the following is equal to a quarter-million — 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000, 1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the following sentence: “The club members agreed that each would contribute ten days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital.” The test taker is supposed to point out that “annually each year” is redundant.

Forget about the fact that adults would find such questions challenging; it’s a sad statement about our society that we’d set the bar for teacher certification so low in the first place. I had to think: how young was I when I didn’t know the answers to the above two questions? Ten? Nine? Maybe even eight? Idiocracy has arrived.

Professor Williams also touches on a third rail of American social commentary, mentioning that most of the teachers hiring the surrogates are likely black — and that most of the surrogates may very well be white. Now, before anyone thinks of “Summerizing” Williams (not as I have. Rather, this refers to application of the kind of politically correct social pressure that drove Larry Summers from Harvard), know that he is black himself. And his point in addressing race is that our leftist mis-educators’ tolerance of low-information black teachers puts the lie to their claim that they care about blacks. After all, as he writes in his closing line, “If they [the teachers] manage to get through the mockery of teacher certification, at what schools do you think they will teach?”

But never fear, Dr. Williams. I’m sure these molders of young minds are well versed in afro-centrism, critical-race theory, and the principles of white privilege.

Technology Servitude

Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high tech devices, while driving, while walking, while shopping, while in groups of friends, while in restaurants, while waiting in doctor offices and hospitals, while sitting in toilets – everywhere.  While connected electronically, they are inattentive to and disconnected in physical reality.

People have been steadily manipulated to become technology addicted.  Technology is the opiate of the masses.

This results in technology servitude.  I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money.  Most people do not use independent, critical thinking to question whether their quality of life is actually improved by the incessant use of technology products that are marketed more aggressively than just about anything else.

I for one have worked successfully to greatly limit my use of technological innovations, to keep myself as unconnected as possible and to maximize my privacy and independence.  I do not have a smart phone; I do not participate in social networking; I do not have any Apple product, nothing like an IPod, IPad and similar devices.  I have never used Twitter or anything similar, or sent a text message.  I do use the Internet judiciously on an old laptop. Email is good and more than enough for me.  I very rarely use an old cell phone.

So what have I gained?  Time, privacy and no obsession to constantly be in touch, connected, available, informed about others.  Call me old fashioned, but I feel a lot more in control of my life than most people that I see conspicuously using their many modern devices.  They have lost freedom and do not seem to care about that.  When I take my daily long walks I have no device turned on, no desire to communicate, nor to listen to music; I want to be in the moment, only sensing the world around me, unfiltered and uninterrupted by any technology.

I am not hooked by advancing technology, not tethered to constantly improved devices, not curious about the next generation of highly priced but really unnecessary products, not logged on and online all the time.  I have no apps or games.

Those who think interactions with people through technology devices are the real thing have lost their sanity. Technology limits and distorts human, social interactions.  Worse yet, people have lost ability and talent for actually conversing to people face to face, responding to nonverbal nuances, or through intimate writing with more than just a few words.

Consider these findings: “Researchers from the University of Glasgow found that half of the study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour. An AOL study revealed that 59 percent of PDA users check every single time an email arrives and 83 percent check email every day on vacation.”

A 2010 survey found that 61 percent of Americans (even higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology.  One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed.  Worse, 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. A little good news: the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” increased to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

The main goal of technology companies is to get you to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve your quality of life.  They have successfully created a cultural disease that has gone viral. Consumers willingly surrender their freedom, money and time in pursuit of what exactly?  To keep pace with their peers?  To appear modern and sophisticated?  To not miss out on the latest information?  To stay plugged in?  I do not get it.

I see people as trapped in a pathological relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them.  I call this technology servitude.  Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.”  Welcome to virtual living.  To break the grand digital delusion people must consider how lives long ago could be terrific without all the technology regalia pushed today.

What is a healthy use of technology devices?  That is the crucial question.  Who is really in charge of my life? That is what people need to ask themselves if they are to have any chance of breaking up delusions about their use of technology.  When they can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then they can regain control and personal freedom and become the master of technology.  Discover what there is to enjoy in life that is free of technology.  Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”  Time to discover that it does not work for technology.

As to globalization of technology servitude: Is this worldwide progress what is best for humanity?  Is downloaded global dehumanization being sucked up?  Time for global digital dieting.

My Line In The Sand Is Drawn Here!

If Barack Obama and his gaggle of gun grabbers have their way, the American citizenry will have all of their firearms taken away. If their current attempt to outlaw semi-automatic rifles is successful, does anyone think it will stop there? Don’t be naïve! The goal of people like Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, et al., has always been total gun confiscation. In fact, Senator Feinstein is actually on record as saying so.

According to Infowars.com, “Senator Dianne Feinstein’s ultimate plan has always been to have Mr. and Mrs. America turn in their guns to the government, period. Feinstein’s bill would criminalize millions of Americans and completely eviscerate second amendment rights.

“She tells us a gun ban is about saving the children and reducing crime, but her comments on 60 Minutes in 1995 reveal her true plan is to target law-abiding American gun owners.

“On Thursday, Feinstein will introduce her dream bill to disarm the American people. The legislation is open-ended and includes provisions to re-register firearms and submit the fingerprints of law-abiding Americans as if they’re sex offenders.

“Feinstein’s bill will also include a buy-back provision that will allow the government to confiscate all firearms. Both Feinstein and New York governor Andrew Cuomo have said that is their plan.

“It is a gun confiscation bill.

“The proposed bill is open declaration of war on the Second Amendment.

“It’s no coincidence that the communist Chinese, the biggest holders of U.S. debt, have demanded the American people be disarmed. History tells us that it is the instinct of all tyrants to disarm the slaves.”

The report plays a video in which Senator Feinstein said, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban, picking up [every gun]… Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in.”

See the report at:

http://www.infowars.com/video-dianne-feinstein-says-prepare-to-turn-in-your-guns/

Writing for the National Association for Gun Rights, Dudley Brown said, “After reading Senator Dianne Feinstein’s new so-called ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban, I can only describe it as the effective END of the Second Amendment in America.

“The definition of an ‘Assault Weapon’ in this bill is so broad you can drive a truck through it!
They’re targeting EVERYTHING–rifles, shotguns and even handguns.

“You see, the gun-grabbers are going for broke.

“Even owners of supposedly ‘grandfathered’ firearms will be treated like common criminals.

“If passed, Feinstein’s so-called ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban would:

“–Ban the sale, transfer, importation, and manufacturing of 120 specifically named rifles, shotguns and handguns;

“–Ban the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of ALL firearms with a detachable magazine and at least one ‘military characteristic’–which could mean just about anything that makes a gun ‘look scary.’

“–Bans the sale, transfer, importation, and manufacturing of magazines holding more than 10 rounds;

“–Force owners of ALL ‘grandfathered’ weapons to undergo an intrusive background check and unnecessary fingerprinting;

“–Force owners of ALL ‘grandfathered’ weapons to federally register their guns after obtaining permission slip from local law enforcement showing their guns are not in violation of state or local law. That’s right. If you own a $10 magazine that’s more than 10 rounds, you’ll have to register it with the BATFE in their National Firearms Registry.

“And you and I both know registration is only the first step toward outright confiscation. So don’t be fooled.”

See the report at:

http://tiny.cc/5urcqw

As I stated in this column last week, “The semi-automatic rifle is the vanguard of our liberty; it is the surest and most trustworthy means of our self-defense; and it is the primary companion of any man who would both protect and feed his family.

“Make no mistake about it: to take away an American’s right to a semi-automatic rifle is to FULLY DISARM HIM. There is no Second Amendment; there is no right to keep and bear arms; there is no citizen militia; there is no liberty without the semi-automatic rifle!”

In that column I also quoted Thomas Jefferson who rightly observed, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

See my column at:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/home/archives/5335

And it is Jefferson’s observation that the “strongest reason” that the American people must always retain the right to keep and bear arms is “to protect themselves against tyranny in government,” that is universally ignored in the modern gun-control debate.

Throughout the United States, there are tens of millions of fully-armed citizens who are more than capable of defending themselves and their communities against any enemy–whether that enemy is an internal or external one. In fact, many millions of these citizens have been trained in the US armed forces. Firearms–especially semi-automatic rifles–in the hands of millions of American citizens is truly the only thing that stands between freedom and tyranny for the people of the United States. That Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein want to disarm the American people should be considered an act of war against our liberties! In other words, ladies and gentlemen, this is a line in the sand that none of us can afford to ignore.

Here’s how we must fight:

1. We must literally inundate our US representatives and senators with the most vociferous protest.

We must make sure that every representative and senator in America is told that under no uncertain terms their reelection will be determined by how they vote on this issue. Obviously, people such as Senators Feinstein and Schumer come from liberal, anti-gun states–which is why they feel safe in proposing these draconian gun-control measures. However, the vast majority of US House members represent average God-fearing Americans to whom the right to keep and bear arms is sacrosanct. And make no mistake about it: the legislative battle will be won or lost in the US House of Representatives.

Here in Montana, however, our two US senators (both Democrats) proudly profess to be pro-Second Amendment. Montanans should be sending a strong message to both of these senators to hold the line for our right to keep and bear arms–including semi-automatic rifles. I cannot imagine that any civil magistrate from either major political party could hope to be reelected in the State of Montana who would support Senator Feinstein’s gun-grab bill. And I would hope and pray that there would be dozens of other states in which the Second Amendment is equally honored.

Folks, CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS NOW! If we expect to retain any semblance of freedom for our posterity, we must pick up the phones and barrage our representatives and senators with opposition to this gun-control bill. And we must do it NOW! Furthermore, we must let our elected officials know that under no uncertain terms there can be NO COMPROMISE, that only outright opposition to any new gun-control measures will be deemed acceptable. There are already far too many gun-control laws in this country. We cannot accept any more abridgements and restrictions to our right to keep and bear arms. NO MORE!

2. We must demand of our State governors and legislators that they resist any attempts of the federal government to outlaw our firearms.

Should the Republican-led House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., cave-in to the Obama gun-grab like they did on Obama’s tax increases, it will be up to the states to say NO! If there is a single issue for which individual, sovereign states would be willing to defy the federal government and protect the rights and liberties of their citizens, it will be this issue. If the states, and liberty-minded people of the states, do not stand as one on this issue, there is no issue for which they would stand. We either draw the line on this issue or our liberties are gone forever!

This means State legislatures should pass laws defying the federal gun ban and protecting the right of citizens to keep and bear arms within their states. Governors should be willing to utilize State law enforcement agencies to protect their citizens’ right to keep (and not register) their guns, and county sheriffs should stiffen their backs and refuse to allow any federal police agency from enforcing the gun ban. After all, the county sheriff is the highest law enforcement authority in his or her county, trumping even federal law enforcement officers.

3. Individual citizens like you and I must be willing to draw our personal line in the sand on this issue and refuse to comply with any law requiring us to register or surrender our firearms–including our semi-automatic rifles.

Ladies and gentlemen, whatever the consequences might be, and whatever anyone else does or doesn’t do, I am prepared to become an outlaw over this issue! I don’t know how to say it any plainer: I will not register my firearms, and I will not surrender my firearms. Period. End of story. It’s not just a saying with me: when my guns are outlawed, I will be an outlaw!

It is time RIGHT NOW for every American citizen to make up his or her mind on this issue.

There are many laws, which I personally find repugnant and even unconstitutional, to which I grudgingly submit. For example, while I very much understand, and even philosophically agree with, those who refuse to pay income taxes, I pay income taxes. Even though I believe the income tax to be unconstitutional, onerous, and maybe even nefarious, I have not drawn my line in the sand on that issue. I haven’t drawn a line in the sand on the requirement for all sorts of government licenses, i.e., marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, CCW permits, Social Security cards, etc., even though I personally believe that many requirements for licensure stretch the boundaries of legitimate government. And, again, even though I understand those who refuse to take them, I have a marriage license, a driver’s license, a CCW permit, and a Social Security card. There are many issues over which I am willing to be annoyed, but for the sake of perceived Christian testimony and/or perceived good citizenship, I reluctantly and grudgingly comply. But on the issue of taking away my right to keep and bear arms–including a semi-automatic rifle–I absolutely refuse to comply!

My line in the sand is drawn here!

Make no mistake about it: it is not just semi-automatic rifles that these gun grabbers are after. Ultimately, they want to take all of our guns. We either stop them now or there will be no stopping them at all.

It is no hyperbole to say that this attempt by people such as Barack Obama and Dianne Feinstein to make outlaws out of law-abiding citizens for simply exercising our right to keep and bear arms is the most important political battle of our lifetimes! I am not exaggerating when I say that the future of freedom and liberty for our children and for our country–not to mention the future of our own personal lives and freedom–hang in the balance.

Preppers, Patriots And Pirates

Now that the prospects of a second Obama administration are hitting home, the pace of a rapid deterioration are confronting all thinking Americans. The radical transformation that is centrally planned for the economy and authoritarianism administrated by the statists that are part of the most tyrannical regime in memory, is taking place before our eyes. Falling off the cliff is more like descending into the abyss of martial law contrived to eliminate the last remnants of independent citizens. Advocating for civil liberties is treated as a criminal act and the gun culture is looked upon as the preview of a terrorist cell.

Several decades ago, the label of being a survivalist painted a prepared person as odd if not deranged. Today the “prepper” is demeaned as an enemy of the state. The Obama dependency society demands that government is the dispenser of all wants and needs. The threat to the state from a prepared population has become a primary target of the New World Order minions.

So what is so perilous about the Prepper Nation? The overt resistance to arbitrary authority is a fear that any beholden bureaucrat abhors. Combating the grievous culture, which is the federal ruthless and tyrannical government, is a crucial concern of the beltway elitists. Thus, the prepared individual is a dangerous agonist that ignores, if not resists, the best-laid plans for a controlled society.

The American Dream presents a perceptive analysis and alert in Why Are Preppers Hated So Much?

“In fact, it has been estimated that there are now approximately 3 million preppers in the United States alone. So now the mainstream media has decided that mocking the movement is the best strategy, and lots of “critics” and “skeptics” out there have picked up on this trend. Instead of addressing the very real issues that have caused millions of Americans to prepare for the worst, those criticizing the prepper movement attempt to put the focus on individual personalities. They try to find the strangest nutjobs they possibly can and then hold them up as “typical preppers”. The goal is to portray preppers as tinfoil hat wearing freaks that need to be locked up in the loony bin for their own personal safety and for the good of society.”

The mainstream mass media is a state endorsed first account of history writing and propaganda machine. Entertainment is now defined as a process to marginalize any movement that seeks to deal with fundamental problems in a common sense response.

Daisy Luther writes in The Psy-Ops War on Preppers.

“The National Geographic program Doomsday Preppers also has had a lot to do with the demonization of preppers – it’s a full-court press propaganda attack against preppers. The program finds the most outrageous examples of preparedness possible and edits to make them look foolish. An article on the American Preppers Network explains the modus operandi:

The show severely skews Preppers in an effort that can be summed up as “making good television”. This is evident not only through viewing the show itself, but through the format they have built the show around.”

Again in decades past the “Patriotic Cause” was smeared for its emphasis upon advocating a constitutional law application to the ills of excessive government. The current “Liberty Movement” need not require being a card carrying Libertarian to advance the natural rights of individuals. Such protagonists risk the wrath of Obama mania in the era of dictatorial edicts. No more grievous offense can be registered against the establishment than to champion the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.

John Adams wrote in a letter to H. Niles, February 13, 1818.

“But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was affected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.”

Those changes in principles are a foremost hazard in an age of international globalism. Patriots originally defended the spirit of the American Revolution. The meaning of limited government was understood in the hearts and minds of the ordinary populace. Now despotic technocrats act with impunity and violate the most basic precepts of common law.

Anyone who articulates the fundamental separation of powers that curtails outright totalitarian collectivism is no longer heralded as patriotic, but is viewed as a menace to the ruling cabal. The uniqueness of defiance from the “shot heard ’round the world” is captured in the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, Concord Hymn.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Emerson appreciated individualism, self-reliance and intuition. Under the Obama dictatorship, patriots like Emerson, would be degraded into submission as treacherous antagonists to the sociopaths that wear a state tiara. The British Crown is not embodied in a King. The Crown is a system of financial and servitude dominance.

In order to understand the nature of this enslavement scheme, the piracy of individual independence is a crucial element necessary to maintain state supremacy.

When buccaneer Henry Morgan was the scourge of the Spanish Main, he was a successful privateer for the British Empire. His appointment to admiral and then to the title of Sir was a reward for his pillaging and plunder. His eventual fall from grace brought down the anger of the English lords. The mechanism used by the ruling class to establish and maintain their power was based upon looting and force.

While initiative demonstrated by pirates that seized ships of treasure was protected as long as the spoils were shared with the Crown, the practice of keeping individual booty risked a hanging offense. The state is always the master robber.

Piracy is the largest business on the planet. Governments routinely make up the rules as it serves the interests of those who wage war to hold onto their power. Legitimacy of any regime is suspect at best and most governments act as criminal syndicates.

The Prepper intuitively comprehends this reality. The need to discredit the preparer of survival subsistence becomes a priority to the thieves that run the social plantation. Preppers are threats because many are practicing patriots. The establishment breeds compliant fools that eagerly support state tyranny as the price of being a ward of the dependency and entitlement society.

The purging of the essence of the American Revolution in the hearts and minds of the population is a betrayal of the John Adams legacy. As the federal behemoth, governance continues to destroy any lawful authority; the pirates of subversion destroy any legality remaining.

The Butchered Law sums up the dilemma.

“When ‘Truth’ is abandoned, ‘Justice’ is denied. Civilization is created and maintained through an arbitration of disputes that respects the ‘Rights’ of ALL Individuals. The ‘Law’ is the guide to settle and judge adherence to criterion of conduct. But it is left to the realm of morals, ethics and values to establish those principles. ‘Equity’ suffers not a right without a remedy, is based upon moral standards of conduct and ethical codes. The ‘Law’ is NOT meant to make those mores, but to apply them. Judges are the umpires of the rules. Lawyers are the presenters of the evidence. And the Jury is the determiner of guilt.”

Those remaining Patriots need to practice the Bill of Rights. Preppers need to share their personal preparation planning with open-minded neighbors. Both must defend the inalienable right of self-defense, especially against the pirate bandits that are planning military force to coerce you to walk the plank.

The article Have Gun, Will Travel puts the piracy perspective into context.

“The State is an entity that results from the organization of society among varied interests, to rule the public. Your natural rights are never transferred to a non living creation of those who have achieved power over others. Citizens cannot negate their own rights, through a process of delegation and consent to any State. But what we have is a chronicle throughout all history of governments telling citizens that their rights are a result of government authority. If you accept this fraud, you can and mostly likely will, gladly accept the pronouncement of civic administration that restrict your ability to preserve your own existence.

Gun ownership is a sideshow to the real struggle. But guns represent a real threat to corrupt masters and their institutions. You already know the terminal consequences that happen to any population that surrenders the means to protect themselves. The record is clear – the society is at a greater risk to their own government, than domination from a foreign intruder.”

Feinstein’s Gun Control Bill Will Trigger The Next American Revolution

All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party – Mao Tse Tung

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military – William Burroughs

Revolution?  Yes, it all sounds rather “extreme”, but the cold hard reality of our era is not going to comfort us with diplomacies and niceties, so honestly, why should I have to sugar coat anything?  We live in extreme times and there is no longer room for prancing around the ultimate consequences of that which is taking place in America today.  This country is increasingly sliding towards the edge of internal conflict.  The Liberty Movement and true Constitutionalists see it, subsections of Republicans and Democrats see it, and most of all, the federal government sees it.  In fact, they may even be counting on it.

Over the past two years alone, multiple draconian policies have been enacted through executive order by the Obama Administration which build upon the civil liberty crushing actions of George W. Bush and press far beyond.  The Patriot Acts, the FISA domestic spy bill, the bailouts of corrupt international banks, attempts at CISPA and SOPA, actions like the NDAA authorizing the treatment of U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants” without rights to due process; all paint a picture so clear only a one-celled amoeba (or your average suburban yuppie) would not see it.  You and I, and everyone else for that matter, have been designated potential targets of the state.  Our rights have been made forfeit.

There is no ambiguous or muddled separation between the citizenry and the government anymore.  The separation is absolute.  It is undeniable.  It is vast.  It is only a matter of time and momentum, and eventually there will be unbridled oppression, dissent, and conflict.  All that is required is a trigger, and I believe that trigger has arrived…

Though made to appear “complex”, the gun control debate is actually an incredibly simple issue.  It all boils down to a couple of questions which gun grabbers rarely ask:  How does the 2nd Amendment affect the future?  That is to say, what was the original intent, and should we still value that intent as it applies to tomorrow?  And, what will really happen if it is forcibly removed?  Gun opponents act as though they are unaware of these questions, or maybe they don’t care.  However, it is vital to their safety and the safety of our culture in general that they do finally consider the bigger picture.

We’ve all heard the prefabricated gun control talking points before.  Some of them so old they predate us.  They are numerous and most of them incredibly thin.  The gist of the anti-gun position, though, could be boiled down to these three points…

Common Anti-Gun Arguments

1) The 2nd Amendment is “outdated” and no longer relevant in today’s modern society.

2) We do not want to stop you from “defending yourself”, or interfere with the American tradition of hunting, but people do not need “military assault weapons” for either. 

3) Your claimed freedom to own guns should not supersede my freedom to live without fear of guns.  We exist in a society, and our society requires us to give up certain freedoms so that it can function.

Again, in response to these arguments, I have to ask, what does the 2nd Amendment mean for the future?  What was its original intent?  Gun control advocates would like to ignore the fact that the Constitution specifically protects a broad application of gun ownership, but when they cannot deny the legality of it, they instead turn to more abstract and existential methods of attack.  They try to twist the original intent of the 2nd Amendment to further their goals.  To respond briefly to each of the above fallacies:

1) The right to self defense from ANY threat, whether it be an individual, or a criminal government, does not “outdate”.  It is a universal and eternal freedom.  It is a foundational pillar of natural law.  Even if the 2nd Amendment did not exist, I would still have the inborn right to arm and protect myself and those I love, and the best way to do that is to own firearms.  The men who drafted the Constitution were far more intelligent than any pithy gun grabber today, yet, these socialist errand boys seem to believe that they have “surpassed” the wisdom of the Founders.  The amount of ego required to fuel such an attitude boggles the mind…

Gun violence and violence in general will not end simply by banning firearms.  The very idea that any society can remove all weapons from their sight is naïve to begin with.  Criminals always find a way.  Murder, rape, and mayhem will continue until you confront the root problem, which is the human mind, and the human heart.  Only when these two things are balanced in all people will violence end.  Disarming good men and women has never made a society “safer”.  When the power of defense is removed from the people, someone, somewhere, will seek to abuse their weakness.  The most armed entity of the time invariably becomes the subjugator, and usually this is the government.  Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc, all contained disarmed populations.  The guns were gone, and still millions upon millions died.  Modern day Mexico is a perfect example of a disarmed population that is now living in terror because of criminal organizations (which, of course, still have guns).  Disarmament does NOT end gun violence, it only changes the dynamic of who uses that violence, and it makes innocent victims easier to attack.

2) Because the legal argument over the “interpretation” of the 2nd Amendment is essentially over, and the Supreme Court has ruled that gun rights do indeed apply to individuals, and not just collective bodies like the National Guard, gun grabbers are now reverting to the argument that we ARE allowed to defend ourselves with firearms, but the kinds of firearms we are able to use can still be limited.  The goal of this argument is to fool gun owners who only possess conventional firearms (hunting rifles) into believing that they will not be personally affected if they support a ban on military style weapons.  These wishy-washy hunting enthusiasts are often referred to as “Elmer Fudds” because of their gullibility.

All gun confiscation programs start by chipping away at the outer barriers of gun ownership.  Like termites slowly chewing away at the wooden skeleton of a home, anti-gun proponents start small and end by destroying the entire edifice.  Anyone who believes Feinstein’s legislation will begin and end with AR-15’s and AK-47’s is living in fantasy land.  That said, the 2nd Amendment was not established for hunting purposes.  Nowhere in the writings of the Founding Fathers do they mention “hunting” as their primary concern.  Instead, gun rights are protected in order to ensure that the citizenry remains dominant over any centralized government that turns to corruption.  We are supposed to police our own political leaders, and without military style arms, this becomes increasingly difficult.

Gun grabbers will argue that our government is not the enemy because it is derived through democratic elections.  They will say that we can change it anytime we like in the voting box.  I would point out that regardless of which party is placed in power through elections, nothing in terms of our direction as a country has been changed, and, that both parties support almost identical policies.  For instance, Obama has come out in favor of nearly identical policy initiatives to Bush, and I can almost guarantee that many Republicans will sign onto the gun control efforts of Democrats despite their supposed pro-gun rhetoric.  When the two party system becomes a one party system, voting becomes irrelevant.

Finally, they will admonish the idea of an armed citizenry keeping the government in check as a “fairy tale”.  They will claim that in the face of modern military might, constitutionalists would be crushed.  For what can an AK-47 do to an F-15?  Apparently, they have never heard of Afghanistan, which has used AK-47’s and 30 year old armaments to repel two technologically advanced armies; the Soviet Union and the U.S.  Of course, the Afghanis did not allow themselves to be disarmed…

3) Here is where we get into the nonsense of intellectual idiocy.  The only real skill which academics seem to have is jumbling piles of logical fallacies together to make a single argument that sounds “rational”, but, in fact, isn’t.  The third debate point is an extremely collectivist one, and collectivist arguments generally exploit the idea that individuals must sacrifice their personal freedoms in order for the group to function.

The truth is, the group does not matter.  The perceived collective concerns and fears of a mass of people are not relevant.  All that matters are the concerns of the singular man or woman, and whether or not those concerns are legitimate.  If a person “fears” guns and gun violence, then that is their private problem, not the problem of our entire society.  We as gun owners should not have to relinquish our rights because others are afraid of what MIGHT happen to them.  We should demand that they control THEIR fear, instead of being allowed to control OUR guns.  Just because a portion of our country shares this individual fear does not make that fear any more credible, or any more our problem.

Do They Know What They Are In For…?

Feinstein’s campaign for gun control is not hers alone; it has been the overall establishment’s work in progress for decades.  I covered the broad based arguments of gun control advocates above because I wanted to illustrate the tangibility of gun ownership.  I want to show you where we stand as constitutionalists, and I can say confidently that our moral and intellectual footing is strong.  To be clear, when defenders of a particular idea are right in their position, they are much more likely to fight and die for that position, and they are much more likely to win.

In the beginning I asked what the 2nd Amendment means for the future of this country.  Not only if it continues, but if it disappears.  If I was a gun control proponent, I would weigh the aftereffects of my actions carefully, because the penalties will likely be dire…

I have heard it argued that Americans are passive.  We didn’t rise up against the last Assault Weapons Ban. We didn’t rise up against the Patriot Act.  We didn’t rise up against TSA molestation.  We didn’t rise up against warrantless wiretapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens, or even the NDAA.  The people who make this point, though, are not looking at the larger issue.  It is one thing for our government to pass legislation; the wider application of that legislation on our streets and at our doorsteps is another matter.

Feinstein’s bill is unprecedented in the history of this country, and requires widespread enforcement in every town and hamlet in order to be effective.  The way in which it is designed makes a violent response from the public inevitable.  It reaches far beyond the Assault Weapons Ban of the 1990’s, calling for the creation of a massive database of almost all gun owners in the United States.  This database will require citizens to submit their EXISTING firearms to cataloging, and the owners to be filed and fingerprinted like criminals.

The bill will ban the outright sale, manufacture, and transfer of at least 120 models of firearms (which have not yet been named).  It will ban the manufacture and sale of most if not all semi-automatic rifles and the bill specifically targets handguns as well.  Large capacity mags and mag fed weapons will essentially disappear from gun stores.  Though, those guns designated as “hunting rifles” will be exempt (for now).

Feinstein has also openly agreed with NY Governor Andrew Cuomo that government buy back programs (forced selling of firearms at a reduced price) and even physical confiscations are on the table:

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/guns/new-york-governor-andrew-cuomo-says-gun-confiscation-could-be-option

http://washingtonexaminer.com/sen.-feinstein-suggests-national-buyback-of-guns/article/2516648

To put this bluntly, there are approximately 50 million gun owners (according to official estimates) in the United States.  If only 2% of those gun owners refuse to submit to the Feinstein Database, and the feds attempt confiscation, they will have a massive revolution on their hands.

Many Americans, including myself, will not be strolling into the local Fusion Center to register our weapons.  Why?  Because gun registration reeks of fascism!  Some might call this “cliche”, but let’s just examine the guidelines of the Nazi Gun Registration Program of 1938:

- Classified guns for “sporting purposes”

- All citizens who wished to purchase firearms had to register with the Nazi officials and have a background check.

- Presumed German citizens were hostile and thereby exempted Nazis from the gun control law (meaning officials could have guns, citizens could not).

- Gave Nazis unrestricted power to decide what kinds of firearms could, or could not be owned by private persons.

- The types of ammunition that were legal were subject to control by bureaucrats.

- Juveniles under 18 years could not buy firearms and ammunition. 

You see, we’ve witnessed the Feinstein gun bill before, many times through history.  We know how it ends, so, there is very little incentive for us to go along quietly.

The database itself is truly the crux of it all.  It basically begs to be defied.  When a government has become openly hostile to common people, destructive of their economy, and oppressive of their individual rights, it only follows that gun registration will lead to outright confiscation later down the road or imprisonment for the owner.  Many Americans are simply not going to fall into the same trap that past societies have fallen into.  The eventual refusal of millions of citizens to voluntarily register will lead to a definite federal response.

The Department Of Homeland Security has obviously taken this into account, at least partly, by stockpiling over 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in the span of a year, most of which are used in weapons distributed by the government for domestic enforcement.  Their projected scenario, I believe, involves limited resistance from people like myself; “gun nuts” and “liberty freaks” who are on the “fringe” of the populous.  At least, that’s what the headlines will say.  In the end, who will care if a few “conspiracy theorists” take a bullet in the quest to end gun violence, right?  But then again…

What I see in America is a much harder stance against gun confiscation than at any time in recent memory, and far less compromising than in the 1990’s.  Gun grabbers are, in my view, walking into a hornet’s nest.  Most average firearms enthusiast may be less aware of the deeper problems at hand, but they know when they are about to be raped, and will react in kind.  We in the Liberty Movement are often accused of “radicalizing” people against government authority, but I have to say, if that is the case, then the Feds are doing a much better job than we ever could.

Simultaneously, the UN (which most gun owners despise) is helping matters along by using the recent Sandy Hook shooting as a springboard for a reintroduction of their failed international Small Arms Treaty:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/un-arms-treaty-nra_n_2373417.html

“European and other U.N. delegates who support the arms trade treaty told Reuters on condition of anonymity they hoped Newtown would boost support for the convention in the United States, where gun control is an explosive political issue.”

“Newtown has opened the debate within the United States on weapons controls in ways that it has not been opened in the past,” Abramson said, adding that “the conversation within the U.S. will give the (Obama) administration more leeway.”

The UN has always claimed that their small arms treaty would NOT restrict private gun ownership in the U.S., and that it only deals with the international trade of illicit arms.  Yet, they try to use gun control actions in the face of Sandy Hook as a rationale for reopening negotiations?  They can’t have it both ways.  Either they are trying to tie the treaty to domestic gun ownership in the U.S, or they aren’t.  Will our government sign on to an international agreement to restrict private gun ownership on top of Feinstein’s gun grab bill?

To put this in the most basic terms: registration and restriction equals revolution.  Count on it.  It is not a matter of what we “want”, it is a matter of what is necessary.  Without a citizenry armed with weapons of military application, we lose our last deterrent to tyranny, and thus, we lose everything.  When backed into a corner, a victim has two options: he can lie down and die, or, he can fight regardless of the odds.  Sadly, this is where we are in America; fear, servitude, subservience, or civil war.

Let us hope our weapons are never needed –but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government — and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws – Edward Abbey

Source: Brandon Smith | Alt-Market

It’s Official: Mayor Bloomberg Needs Mental Help

Since removing constitutional rights is all the rage now, I have to ask: when does dislocation from reality become severe enough to justify involuntary commitment? A good study case is NYC’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently uttered a real gem on his weekly radio show. Writes Politicker.com:

“I don’t think there’s anybody that’s defended the Second Amendment as much as I have, Ray,” Mr. Bloomberg said to a caller who asked him why he was “so against” the constitutional passage. “I think you have a perfect right to buy weapons and keep them for protection or for sport. We have tried to make sure that you have it.”

Well, take that, Wayne LaPierre. You thought you were the point man on gun rights, but you’re actually outshone by Little Big Gulp, who has defended the Second Amendment more than “anybody.”

Of course, this will come as news to Slate, which recently penned a piece titled “Beating Guns the Bloomberg Way: The New York mayor, not Obama, knows how to defeat the NRA.” The site credits Little Big Gulp’s example with being the gold standard for the evisceration of the Second Amendment, writing that, in contrast to Barack Obama’s “moral approach” to playing puppeteer, LBG “has been the exemplar of the alternative, paternalistic model….” Hey, who’s ya’ daddy?

I’m not sure what weapons LBG claims to want us to have; maybe the squirt is talking about squirt guns, although he’s not fond of those if they look too realistic. Heck, this is a guy who finds even really large drinks too intimidating because he has to look up at the rim (joke credit to Dennis Miller).

I don’t like it when crazies get their hands on guns, but it’s even more frightening when crazies get their hands on gun laws. LBG’s assertion is right up there with fellows behind institution walls who insist they’re Napoleon or the Queen of England. Next he’ll be telling us he’s more pro-life than Mother Teresa, more of a Confederate than Robert E. Lee, and more Christian than the Pope.

It really should be made easier to remove officials from their positions when they show the main warning sign of severe mental instability.

That would be liberalism.

The Highly Intelligent Psychopath – Achieving Deviant Goals

Understanding how psychopaths manipulate their victims, and even work together to prey on others, is a subject, about which, the public needs to be informed. Additionally, Americans need to understand the gravest threat to our personal autonomy and freedom, are highly intelligent psychopaths. While less intelligent psychopaths also exact monetary costs, more intelligent ones destroy our institutions, using these for their own ends. These are the ones who work their way up the corporate ladder and into Congress, after all.

Psychopaths were estimated by neuroscientist Kent Kiehl to cost Americans 460 billion every year.

The series of stories you are about to read move from the personal to the corporate and political, following the acts of individual psychopaths.

This is a story using my own, real life, experiences, and those related to me by other victims. This series of articles will examine the strategies and so illustrate how psychopaths think.

These stories illustrate how psychopaths operate together and how and why others tolerate what is happening, in business and personally.

The first two psychopathic individuals discussed in this series are Craig Franklin and Morgan Barteaux Gell (AKA Pillsbury). In this article we focus on Franklin. I was once married to Franklin.

I gave birth to Morgan, whose biological father was, I recently learned, a psychopath, when I was 18. When Morgan, then Carolyn Anne Barteaux, was born I had already left him. There is strong evidence psychopathy, or tendencies to the condition, are inheritable.

This specific story chronicles sexual deviancy tolerated by a major defense contractor, now providing drone technology to our government. Most Americans are horrified by the off shore use of drones, and even more so, at the idea these will be used by law enforcement in America.

We ask ourselves, how could those who provide the technologies have failed to see the use of drones as a gross violation of human decency? The short answer is they knew, quite well. The longer answer is that profits trump all other considerations all too often. The corporate toleration for shocking behavior, herein illustrated, makes their production of drone technology entirely understandable.

Individuals whose standards for acceptable behavior change due to their association with psychopaths, are known as ‘situational’ psychopaths. The shift toward behavior which harms others in politics and business is now believed, by many, to be related to the number of highly psychopathic individuals  in these arenas.

This story begins with a document, already published to the Internet, written by my youngest daughter, Ayn Pillsbury which shows the strategy laid out by a psychopath intent on gaining sexual access to little girls who viewed him as a father.

Ayn’s Declaration, written for the court in Santa Barbara in 1999, outlines events which took place eleven years previously when she was around twelve, in the presence of her sister Dawn, her brothers, Arthur and Justin, and her step-brother, Scott. Morgan Barteaux (AKA Pillsbury),was not present, as was usual. She was, at the time, attempting to extract Eddy van Halen from his marriage.

The most relevant part of the Declaration is at the beginning, but reading it in its entirety adds further insights.

“The first episode of violence I recall was the year I was in eighth grade. That would have been in the autumn of 1988. Craig had taken us into the family room, just the kids. Mom wasn’t there. Craig wanted to talk to us about how incompetent Mom was. It was bad stuff about Mom. He was trying to win our loyalty. So then Mom came home and came into the room wanting to participate in the discussion. Craig was very angry and told her he was having a private discussion with the kids and that she wasn’t welcome.

Of course, being our mother, she believed the contrary. None of us objected to her being there. Then he became very loud and vituperative and became vocally and physically intimidating. He wrestled Mom to the ground and was on top of her holding her down and hitting her and so all of us kids were torn. We didn’t know what to do. We wanted to get him off of her, so I picked up a bar bell which was probably from 12 – 15 pounds and sort of tapped Craig with it on the back, not really wanting to hurt him but wanting him to realize that we didn’t approve of what he was doing. I don’t know how well it worked. Eventually he got off her.

There was some discussion for a while, Mom saying why she should be able to stay and Craig saying why she should leave. Then Craig again became very angry and punched Mom in the jaw, knocking her out cold. Of course she was standing so she fell over and I thought she might have struck her head on the hearth stones. So she hit the floor and we were all worried she was dead. She wasn’t responding. Craig left her there. We ran and got some water and someone felt her pulse. Then Scott and Edi (AKA Arthur) and Justin went to call the police. We stayed with Mom until she came around and the police came but Craig wasn’t arrested because Mom told them not to arrest him.

Mom did not hit Craig. Mom never hit Craig. Mom is the least violent person I know. Craig never scrupled to use physical intimidation to get what he wanted.”

I had asked Ayn to recall those times she remembered Craig battering me. In 1999 I did not understand really what Ayn’s declaration documented, if considered along with events taking place after 1999. Now, with more information from his multiple relationships, the answers are glaring.

Craig began to denigrate me to my children and others who knew us as soon as we were married. He constructed and spun stories to make me look incompetent, stupid, venal, and unworthy of the respect due to a mother. This was essential to his goal of gaining access to my daughters so he could live out his fantasies of violation and incest. Destroying the credibility of the victim is essential. This was present in each instance, my own and others.

For psychopaths the truth is irrelevant. The story which advances their goal is the story which is told.

Strategies such as these take forward planning, demonstrating one of the less understood aspects of intelligent psychopaths, the ability for strategic planning and patience, coupled with complete ruthlessness in the advancement of the goal.

Craig’s I. Q. is 180. Forward planning is as natural to him as breathing.

At the time, in 1988, I suffered a concussion and had no memories, for quite some time, of what had transpired. I did not, then remember Craig battering me or talking to the police. The children told me what had happened, but with no details. Now, officers responding to this kind of situation would have known not to listen to me. People with concussions are not capable of making informed decisions.

Additionally, I suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Craig should have been out of the home – not just because of what he did to me but because of what he was then just beginning to do to my children. I say, “my children,” because although he later went through a form of adopting them, naming them as his children in his will, this was, clearly, only a step in a process which was not about being a father, but rather living out his sexual fantasies. Eliminating my former husband, their father, from the equation, was part of his plan. Ron Foster, relinquishment of parental rights.

Ron relinquished his rights, June 21, 1989. Craig adopted the children June 26, 1989. The two events were clearly related. Craig would go into court and lie on this point ten years later, having conspired with his divorce attorney, Jacqueline Misho, to steal the records.

Denigrating one parent by another is known as Parental Alienation Syndrome. This technique is used to manipulate children and gain their trust. The same technique is used by sexual predators to alienate children from those who will protect them. Craig was not a parent in any terms we would accept because his goal was, in the first instance, sexually predatory.

Morgan also engaged in alienating my children from me, first for her own purposes, then to support Craig in his agenda. For the psychologically disordered, harm to others, is not a consideration.

While Legal Abuse Syndrome is now recognized as a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, abuse suffered at the hands of a psychopath is not seen as causing similar, and worse, symptoms. I have survived only because I began to study the symptoms and understand psychopathy, despite the emotional anguish suffered, which included the realization I had never had a relationship with either Craig or Morgan. No one has a relationship with a psychopath in any normal, human, sense.

I began to understand this when I retrospectively put together a time line, remembering what he had told me, and what he had done. Then, I understand his real motives. This year I did the same for Morgan.

The marriage I had entered into was a fraud used to gain access to my children, milk me for money, and use me in a variety of other ways. Craig’s intention was to accomplish his goal and leave me penniless. Keep this in mind, as the theme will reoccur.

The psychologically disordered use familiar human institutions as avenues for carrying out their predatory behavior routinely. Marriage, parenthood, all familial relations, make us vulnerable when psychopaths are involved. We need to understand this, our courts need to be take this into account.

Those who benefit by enabling these behaviors for their own profit must be taught this is a form of fraud which will not be tolerated.

In public officials, for instance judges, either engaging in this behavior, or allowing it to take place by others, for profit, should be grounds for removal and incur liabilities. It can also be handled as a violation under color of law.

Craig’s Corporate Partner

In this instance Dan O’Dowd, who with his wife, Amy owns 97% of Green Hills Software, Inc. had little real experience with business when he partnered with Glenn Hightower, his boss, and founded GHS in 1982. Craig, who he hired as Senior Vice President for Advanced Products Development in 1986, prevented him from having to return to Hightower for more funding and diluting his holding by actually selling Green Hills products before he even knew Dan. Craig read the code and judged them simply on their merits, recommending their purchase to companies with which he was doing business.

Craig also provided the edge expertise which made Dan’s success possible from the late 1980s until he, Dan, was able to orchestrate a forced buy-out of Hightower in 1998 – 1999. This link, and the links which follow, tell the story through the court documents generated from the resulting law suit.

[b.] “Glenn Hightowervs. Daniel O’Dowd, Case No. BS 053127

[d.] “Glenn Hightowervs. Daniel O’Dowd, Case No. BS 053127,

[e.]AMERICAN ARBITRATION ASSOCIATION No. 72Y 180 0960 98,

The opinion expressed by the court in [d.] was that Hightower was likely to prevail if there is proof of unlawful action by O’Dowd. While there had, in fact, been a conspiracy to make it impossible for Hightower to exercise his option to buy O’Dowd out Hightower was unable to prove this at the time.

The deal struck between Craig and Dan was for Dan to recharacterize the stock and for Craig to run the ‘Green Hills Personnel Strike.’ Promises of lavish benefits were made by Craig to other key personnel. Morgan’s 2001 Deposition touches on the conspiracy in which Craig was paid to organize the strike by an exchange of favors. One of these was O’Dowd’s having a fraudulent stock option agreement written.

But it is very possible the manipulation went on in several directions. Dan and Craig saw a lot of each other and while Craig and I were still married Craig would come home shaking with rage because Dan passed on to him remarks, Dan said, were from Glenn, which were far less than complementary toward Craig.

Dan’ s own personal goal was to be richer than Bill Gates. To accomplish this he had to be rid of his partners. Stories of Dan’s belief he was smarter and better at computers than Gates traveled to me both from Craig and others at the company. I have considered the possibility Dan, too is psychopathic, but lacking more substantial evidence than his willingness to destroy me, my children, and suborn the court system, I have no opinion in the matter.

However, this interesting note should be considered. In 2003, according to Anne Fisher, who was eating dinner with Craig when he showed her an envelope and told her what was inside. The envelope enclosed a deposition from a law suit settled in 2001 given by Morgan Pillsbury. It was addressed to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. It was Green Hills Software, stationary and postage was paid.

The deposition inside was uncertified, meaning Morgan had no chance to review and edit the document. Craig would have had to obtain it from the Green Hills attorney. Why would Dan Risk providing this to John Fund if there was no accrued benefit to himself?

Look at the graph below, from the GHS site, for how much Dan benefited, and when.

Craig joins GHS 1986  -  Government Contracts 2003

 

Although it should not have been mailed, or placed on Fund’s website, the deposition is, in fact, revealing. In the deposition Morgan states she has had a borderline personality disorder all of her life. But she had never been diagnosed as having one by a competent professional. She admits Craig came on to her sexually and recalls having conversations with him where he insisted on discussing his sexual attraction to her and to my other daughters.

Morgan relates Craig’s goal of finding a blond haired, blue-eyed twenty-something woman who will cater to his every whim, as well and Craig’s insistence Morgan, who he is also approaching sexually, find him other women as well.

John immediately put it up on his website, started for him by intimate friend, Gail Heriot. The two had been intimate for over a year at this time. Email documenting their meetings in various hotel rooms, dated 1/13/02 10:05 PM. John’s only comment on the deposition was Morgan’s admission she had a borderline personality disorder. But Craig’s other reported activities coincide exactly with the same pattern exhibited later with Anne Fisher. When the deposition was given, in 2001, Anne and Craig were still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship.

Craig would prove himself to be a serial abuser, with the same patterns recurring with multiple women.

At about the same time, 2003, Fund put up his website Dan was struck with a moment of patriotic fervor and started the Fallen Heroes Last Wish Foundation.   2010 2011 2012

From this time on government contracts became very much part of Dan’s business. This suggests to me John Fund, through his friends Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, arranged government contracts as another exchange of favors.

Craig was very serious about leaving me destitute. In a phone recording made in 1999, Craig discussed stock options with Morgan. It is clear as you read, no matter what, Craig and Green Hills do not intend me to get even the tiny amount of stock the court awarded to me in the decision rendered in “Divorce Judgment, August 16,1999.” It was planned in advance.

Craig had agreed to assist with Dan’s take over of Green Hills to benefit himself. One of these ‘benefits’ was to destroy me financially, part by having a new stock option agreement written by Ruth Fisher, an attorney in Los Angeles, in late 1997 or very early 1998. Craig told this to Morgan at the time and, when we were again talking, she relayed this to me.

By 2003 John had his reasons for helping Craig. By then Morgan had stabbed Craig in the back and the war between Morgan and Fund had involved Fund’s friends, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Psychopaths routinely stab each other in the back.

Morgan had started talking to me again in 1999 because she needed me to provide support Craig had withdrawn and help her get Fund to the altar.

Until recently I did not realize what had actually transpired. I also had no idea I was being double-teamed by two psychopaths, Craig and Morgan.

I began to understand this when I retrospectively put together a time line, remembering what they had told me, done, and then understanding their real motives.

Craig’s Fixation on Incest

Each of us is impacted by what happens in our own lives and from the reflected memories of those who raise us. Craig’s first sexual arousal came when he was sixteen, while wrestling with his younger sister, Priscilla, then twelve. He did not molest her. But thereafter his focus would be young girls with whom he had a familial relationship, who were virgins, and who he was betraying. A life-time pattern was set.

Craig’s parents were rigid, highly domineering, and cold. Craig’s father, a double vice-president of the University of Southern California, was also an attorney. His reputation at USC was built on fundraising, and I was told, over and over again, he had raised over 100 million for the university.

Dr. Franklin’s communications with his children came in the form of a news bulletin, announcing in gloating language, how much he had raised by persuading elderly people, whom he and his wife paid assiduous attention to, to leave money to the university instead of their families. These potential donors were never invited to their home, instead, Dr. Franklin and his wife entertained them at the Los Angeles Country Club, membership paid for by the USC. Listening to them discuss these people, gloating over their success and the anticipated consternation of the donors children, was disgusting.

Craig and his siblings grew up seeing this as normal.

Anne Fisher, another woman abused by Franklin

Anne Fisher, whose relationship with Craig continued for many years, first contacted me in the beginning of 2003 by email. Our communications continued sporadically over the years.

Craig had told her a story about his childhood he had not shared with me. When Craig was around two he wandered into the hallway at night and his mother, dressed in a scanty negligee, saw him, became angry, and spanked him with a Bible. According to Craig, as reported by Anne, she then went into her bedroom and engaged in sexual intercourse with her husband. It is, naturally, impossible to know if this happened, but from Anne’s report it clearly had heavy significance for him.

Craig told me about his arousal with Priscilla, but I did not realize this was anything more than a single incident. Over the years we were together, however, I was occasionally uncomfortable at his insistence I have plastic surgery so I looked like his sister. I refused. Priscilla is blond, blue-eyed and her face is highly neotenous.

I took his peculiarities to be simple eccentricities of no real significance. I was obviously wrong on this point.

After Craig left me Ayn told me Craig had long been exposing himself to her when she walked past our room and I was not in the house. Further pieces of information seeped in through several sources, although I have never really been in contact with Craig again.

The same year I began talking to Anne a private detective I hired to get Craig’s address for service of papers found Incest Pornography and a receipt from the sex shop in his trash neatly contained in a gift bag. He had watched Craig deposit it there.

Anne Fisher did not initially tell me very much about her relations with Craig. It was a serious relationship in that Anne became financially dependent on Craig, who agreed to fund a business she was starting and buy ‘them’ a home. He even took her and her two children to look at houses and found one he agreed to buy. Declaration Time Line No. 1 Time Line No. 2

The relationship was highly traumatic for her, and the stories she told me directly, and through letters and other documents she sent, were chilling.

Her relations with Craig put her, and her two children, at real risk, disrupted her real relationships and left her, and her children, homeless.

This is reproduced from Time Line 2 , which Anne sent me in 2008. The events chronicled date from around 2005, taking place after Craig had enticed her into dependence on him and then raped and destroyed her ability to make a living. Craig reentered her life when she was mending matters.

Anne Fisher – “HE ASSURED ME THAT HE WOULD NEVER EVER DO THAT AGAIN… and that we would work together at this business, he with his business experience and my technical trade knowledge. I began to build the business.

At first it was great, until I was at the point of contracts and office space and equipment purchases. He became evil… during this time… That is the best way to describe it. He had me in his control again and he used me as anything but a business partner.

He held over my head that he would take the business, destroy the business… He used me as his own private escort service, making me meet with prostitutes, writing letters to his prostitutes and promoting him as a decent man so that possibly? He could get whatever he wanted. I found notes from other girls that he was investing in their company at the same time and sleeping with them and lies… to me… He gave one girl 30k, and he told me he could only give me 5500/month and had no money for the operating start up cash he had promised…. So, I had to pay my bills, around 3k and then take about 2k a month to push the company forward each and every month and in this time I was used like a butt wipe and was privy to the other arrangements that made me realize that I was being taken advantage of, however, I couldn’t step back or lose it all and I couldn’t really step up because? I felt I owed craig his share and would lose it all. In 2007 he paid my daughter 3k/month to help out and the halfway through the year, cut me off, and kept her on (to punish me or cause grief)… and my entire family saw me, my children, saw me homeless… after craig had promised me all this. I tried to commit suicide twice or more. Entered therapy I cannot afford and have terrible shame, guilt and embarrassment due to this being a small town and having craig not “not” have the money, but choosing not to continue me or help me until I can get a job. It’s like he enjoys seeing me lose it all and then he’ll be back… to offer me money since I am completely at a loss to keep things and not lose anymore, my self esteem is in the bucket and I have no friends because how can you tell anyone what you are going through like this?

Craig has basically destroyed my reputation and my ability to be seen my those in my town as anyone other than a “hustler or a gold digger or a stupid ho”. This is far from who I am and from who I came here to be…”

Over the years Anne and I talked on the phone and got to know each other, to some extent, though we never met in person. On the phone she also provided information. All of this information was provided for my use and at my discretion because she was frustrated with her inability to either extract herself from Craig’s circle or successfully find justice.

In a declaration Anne sent to me she states Craig raped her four times. Verbally, she had told me about two occasions involving herself and another audio tape she has of Craig admitting his rape of Ivory May Kabler.

Anne told me she attempted,twice, to report Craig to the police, who refused to listen. Craig was, after all, protected as the Senior Vice President of a seemingly respectable company, Green Hills Software, Inc. Those with wealth are protected by both law enforcement and our courts.

It was Anne who also told me Craig had been meeting women online and using frequent flyer miles, available through his travel for Green Hills Software, to bring them to Santa Barbara for the weekend where he would rape them and put them, traumatized, back on the return flight. This was pure aggression and a violation of the Mann Act. These women were not in his ‘target zone,’ for young girls, just lonely women who believed they had found someone who really cared about them.

Emotionally destroying, raping, and humiliating women was, clearly, a goal for Craig, an element of his continuously repeating pattern of abuse.

At one point Anne gave me a tour of one of the ‘Sugar Daddy’ sites she handled for Craig. It was horrifying to realize how she had been used as she took me through the site and showed me letters she had read for Craig from other women.

The betrayal theme, which is present in Craig’s core fantasy, was very much being fed, if what Anne told me was true. I have no reason to believe it was not, as I later heard from Morgan he had brought one of these women down to meet her while she was moving from her original apartment to a cheaper one down the street. These themes are also present in Morgan’s 2001 Deposition.

Craig continually returned to Anne through the time they knew each other, according to her time lines and declaration and from what she told me. This is a typical form of extended control used by psychopaths to destroy the self-confidence and integrity of the victim. Anne has survived, and started her own business, which was no easy thing. But she is very much the exception in these cases. Talking to her persuaded me of Craig’s ruthlessness and lack of conscience. Anne was treated like a utility to be picked up, enjoyed, and then again destroyed while Craig enjoyed every step of the process.

Craig lived out the same scenario with multiple women, whose names I have. Details will be provided in the book, now being prepared.

But Craig, while enjoying these interludes, also keeps his eye on the future with long on planning. A clear learning curve appears as he grows more and more ruthless in his pursuit of his goal.

During the years past he was also pursuing other lines of action. The long term planning for the goal of incest included seeking a woman young enough to have children, preferably girls. In parallel, Craig also attempted to get unsupervised visitation with his eight-year old granddaughter, the daughter of his oldest son, Jonathan Scott Franklin, when Scott was charged with paying a hit man to murder his estranged wife and her new boy friend. Craig entirely ignored the existence of his grandson, two years older.

Scott’s wife, Kathy, alarmed at this, resisted Craig having any such visitation and this was denied by the court, who put her and the two children in a victim protection program.

Craig and Scott had conspired to leave Kathy destitute, which doubtless suited Craig’s own ultimate goal, even if Scott had not tried to have Kathy murdered. Craig’s comment to Anne on being told was, “How could he (Scott) be so stupid? They always suspect the husband!” No shred of concern for Kathy was expressed.

When my youngest daughter, Ayn, had a little girl Craig refocused his attentions there and made plans to ‘become a part of his grand-daughter’s life.’

Craig is a danger to little girls, who he immediately begins to manipulate. This is true for his own relations and for others. His points of entry into relationships include music and the film industry.

Songs, especially ballads and country western music plays a part in Craig’s plans. Craig planned a children’s album and wrote a song for his grand-daughter, the lyrics for which appear here, and were produced for the album, “Celeste Sings for Kids,” The album was publicized professionally, and Craig thanked those who helped publicize it. Here is one of his thank yous which appears on a list of endorsers. The site is To Market Kid.

“Craig Franklin, President – Romantic Realist Records, LLC

“Words can’t begin to describe the difference Regina has made with my children’s music project and its visibility in the marketplace. Regina took my project from 0-100 in two months! She has made all the difference! Anyone who has the good fortune to work with Regina Kelland should jump at the chance!” “

It is not possible to know when you are dealing with the disordered, necessarily, especially when you never have the opportunity to know them more than professionally.

Note that the song, “Justin’s Lullaby” was not written by Janet Smith and Craig Franklin. It was written by Craig, tuned up by me in 1983. Justin is my son with Franklin. Psychopaths continually reinvent history to suit their purposes. On this site Craig features a song, “To Have and to Hold,” he wrote on the occasion of our formal wedding. I am, naturally, not mentioned.

Craig also positioned himself as being adversarial to sex offenders by funding a movie titled, “Barracuda,” a B sort of movie produced by Mercury Rising Films. Both of these ventures were well thought out to put him in place to form relationships allowing for access to young girls by simply spending money and continuing to play around with his guitar.

After Green Hills removed Craig from their management team last summer Craig moved on to another project, “Craig Franklin’s Tea Party,” a movie. The webmaster is an associate from Mercury Rising Films, which would produce the film.

Over the last several years I have been outing both Craig Franklin and Green Hills Software. My most recent website, Craig Franklin and Green Hills Software, went up within 45 minutes of reading this email, which I published on the site.

Craig is a sexually deviant psychopath whose focus is seduction, sexual violence, betrayal, and leaving the victim homeless. One of these scenarios plays out as raping little girls, preferably daughters, or grand-daughters now, when they are around twelve years old. Here, he also begins with seduction, moves to building trust and thereafter devolves into a series of betrayals, sexual and financial, intended to leave both the mother and daughter completely traumatized and financially destitute.

It is impossible to know how many women and girls he has traumatized or what he has cost these individuals in peace of mind, financially, and so many other ways. But, in retrospect, it is very easy to see what he will continue to do.

Green Hills Software, Inc., enabled this behavior, conspiring with Craig to destroy both myself and my children. They, Dan and others in the company, did this to secure Craig’s cooperation when it was needed. They removed him from their ‘team’ when the risk of exposure finally became to high. They profited enormously over the years and now are repositioning themselves with absolutely no show of conscience.

Craig’s website, Romantic Realist, is now down, as is the Romantic Realist My Space. But his Ivory May My Space site is still up.

Anne expressed a wish to ensure Craig’s sexually predatory behavior would be brought to an end. These articles, and the book, are being written, in part, to accomplish this goal.

Next: Morgan and Craig, a relationship.

Dan O’Dowd, Green Hills Software, Inc., Green Hills Software, LLC, and Integrity, missing from the equation.

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