Ruble Takedown Exposes Cracks In Putin’s Defense

Putin’s Next Move Is Crucial…

The plunge of the Russian currency this week is the drastic outcome of policies implemented by the major imperialist powers to force Russia to submit to American and European imperialism’s neo-colonial restructuring of Eurasia. Punishing the Putin regime’s interference with their plans for regime change in countries such as Ukraine and Syria, the NATO powers are financially strangling Russia.” Alex Lantier, Imperialism and the ruble crisis, WSWS

“The struggle for world domination has assumed titanic proportions. The phases of this struggle are played out upon the bones of the weak and backward nations.” Leon Trotsky, 1929

Russian President Vladimir Putin suffered a stunning defeat on Tuesday when a US-backed plan to push down oil prices sent the ruble into freefall. Russia’s currency plunged 10 percent on Monday followed by an 11 percent drop on Tuesday reducing the ruble’s value by more than half in less than a year. The jarring slide was assisted by western sympathizers at Russia’s Central Bank who, earlier in the day, boosted interest rates from 10.5 percent to 17 percent to slow the decline. But the higher rates only intensified the outflow of capital which put the ruble into a tailspin forcing international banks to remove pricing and liquidity from the currency leading to the suspension of trade. According to Russia Today:

“Russian Federation Council Chair Valentina Matviyenko has ordered a vote on a parliamentary investigation into the recent activities of the Central Bank and its alleged role in the worst-ever plunge of the ruble rate…

“I suggest to start a parliamentary investigation into activities of the Central Bank that has allowed violations of the citizens’ Constitutional rights, including the right for property,” the RIA Novosti quoted Tarlo as saying on Wednesday.

The senator added that according to the law, protecting financial stability in the country is the main task of the Central Bank and its senior management. However, the bank’s actions, in particular the recent raising of the key interest rate to 17 percent, have so far yielded the opposite results.” (Upper House plans probe into Central Bank role in ruble crash, RT)

The prospect that there may be collaborators and fifth columnists at Russia’s Central Bank should surprise no one. The RCB is an independent organization that serves the interests of global capital and regional oligarchs the same as central banks everywhere. This is a group that believes that humanity’s greatest achievement is the free flow of privately-owned capital to markets around the world where it can extract maximum value off the sweat of working people. Why would Russia be any different in that regard?

It isn’t. The actions of the Central Bank have cost the Russian people dearly, and yet, even now the main concern of RCB elites is their own survival and the preservation of the banking system. An article that appeared at Zero Hedge on Wednesday illustrates this point. After ruble trading was suspended, the RCB released a document with “7 new measures” all of which were aimed at protecting the banking system via moratoria on securities losses, breaks on interest rates, additional liquidity provisioning, easier credit and accounting standards, and this gem at the end:

“In order to maintain the stability of the banking sector in the face of increased interest rate and credit risks of a slowdown of the Russian economy the Bank of Russia and the Government of the Russian Federation prepare measures to recapitalize credit institutions in 2015.” (Russian Central Bank Releases 7 Measures It Will Take To Stabilize The Financial Sector, Zero Hedge)

Sound familiar? It should. You see, the Russian Central Bank works a lot like the Fed. At the first sign of trouble they build a nice, big rowboat for themselves and their dodgy bank buddies and leave everyone else to drown. That’s what these bullet points are all about. Save the banks, and to hell the people who suffer from their exploitative policies.

Here’s more from RT:

“Earlier this week a group of State Duma MPs from the Communist Party sent an official address to Putin asking him to sack (Central Bank head, Elvira) Nabiullina, and all senior managers of the Central Bank as their current policies are causing the rapid devaluation of ruble and impoverishment of the majority of the Russian population.

In their letter, the Communists also recalled Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly in which he said that control over inflation must not be in the way of the steady economic growth.

“They listen to your orders and then do the opposite,” the lawmakers complained.” (RT)

In other words, the RCB enforces its own “austerity” policy in Russia just as central bankers do everywhere. There’s nothing conspiratorial about this. CBs are owned and controlled by the big money guys which is why their policies invariably serve the interests of the rich. They might not call it “trickle down” or “structural adjustment” (as they do in the US), but it amounts to the same thing, the inexorable shifting of wealth from working class people to the parasitic plutocrats who control the system and its political agents. Same old, same old.

Even so, the media has pinned the blame for Tuesday’s ruble fiasco on Putin who, of course, has nothing to do with monetary policy. That said, the ruble rout helps to draw attention to the fact that Moscow is clearly losing its war with the US and needs to radically adjust its approach if it hopes to succeed. First of all, Putin might be a great chess player, but he’s got a lot to learn about finance. He also needs a crash-course in asymmetrical warfare if he wants to defend the country from more of Washington’s stealth attacks.

In the last 10 months, the United States has executed a near-perfect takedown of the Russian economy. Following a sloppy State Department-backed coup in Kiev, Washington has consolidated its power in the Capital, removed dissident elements in the government, deployed the CIA to oversee operations, launched a number of attacks on rebel forces in the east, transferred ownership of Ukraine’s vital pipeline system to US puppets and foreign corporations, created a tollbooth separating Moscow from the lucrative EU market, foiled a Russian plan to build an alternate pipeline to southern Europe (South Stream), built up its military assets in the Balkans and Black Sea and, finally–the cherry on the cake–initiated a daring sneak attack on Russia’s currency by employing its Saudi-proxy to flood the market with oil, push prices off a cliff, and trigger a run on the ruble which slashed its value by more than half forcing retail currency platforms to stop trading the battered ruble until prices stabilized.

Like we said, Putin might be a great chess player, but in his battle with the US, he’s getting his clock cleaned. So far, he’s been no match for the maniacal focus and relentless savagery of the Washington powerbrokers. Yes, he’s formed critical alliances across Asia and the world. He’s also created competing institutions (like the BRICS bank) that could break the imperial grip on global finance. And, he’s also expounded a vision of a new world in which “one center of power” does not dictate the rules to everyone else. That’s all great, but he’s losing the war, and that’s what counts. Washington doesn’t care about peoples’ dreams or aspirations. What they care about is ruling the world with an iron fist, which is precisely what they intend to do for the next century or so unless someone stops them. Putin’s actions, however admirable, have not yet changed that basic dynamic. In fact, this latest debacle (authored by the RCB) is a severe setback for the country and could impact Russia’s ability to defend itself against US-NATO aggression.

So what does Putin need to do to reverse the current trend?

The first order of business should be a fundamental change in approach followed by a quick switch from defense to offense. There should be no doubt by now, that Washington is going for the jugular. The attack on the ruble provides clear evidence that the US will not be satisfied until Russia has been decimated and reduced to “a permanent state of colonial dependency.” (Chomsky) The United States has launched a full-blown economic war on Russia and yet the Kremlin is still acting like Washington’s punching bag. You can’t win a war like that. You have to take the initiative; take chances, be bold, think outside the box. That’s what Washington is doing. The rout of the ruble is perhaps the most astonishingly-successful asymmetrical attack in recent memory. It involved tremendous risks and costs on the part of the perpetrators. For example, the lower oil prices have ravaged important domestic industries, created widespread financial instability, and sent markets across the planet into a nosedive. Even so, Washington persevered with its audacious strategy, undeterred by the vast collateral damage, never losing sight of its ultimate objective; to deprive Moscow of crucial oil revenues, to crash the ruble, and to open up Central Asia for imperial expansion and US military bases. (The pivot to Asia)

This is how the US plays the game, by keeping its “eyes on the prize” at all times, and by rolling roughshod over anyone or anything that gets in its way. That is why the US is the world’s only superpower, because the voracious oligarchs who run the country will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Does Putin have the grit to match that kind of venomous determination? Has he even adjusted to the fact that WW3 will be unlike any conflict in the past, that jihadi-proxies and Neo Nazi-proxies will be employed as shock troops for the empire clearing the way for US special forces and foot soldiers who will hold ground and establish the new order? Does he even realize that Barbarossa 2 is already underway, but that the Panzer divisions and 2 million German regulars have been replaced with high-powered computers, covert ops, color-coded revolutions, currency crises, capital flight, cyber attacks and relentless propaganda. That’s 4th Generation (4-G) warfare in a nutshell. And, guess what? The US attack on the ruble has shown that it is the undisputed master of this new kind of warfare. More important, Washington has just prevailed in a battle that could prove to be a critical turning point if Putin doesn’t get his act together and retaliate.

Retaliate?!?

You mean nukes?

Heck no. But, by the same token, you can’t expect to win a confrontation with the US by rerouting gas pipelines to Turkey or by forming stronger coalitions with other BRICS countries or by ditching the dollar. Because none of that stuff makes a damn bit of difference when your currency is in the toilet and the US is making every effort to grind your face into the pavement.

Capisce?

There’s an expression is football that goes something like this: The best defense is a good offense. You can’t win by sitting on the sidelines and hoping your team doesn’t lose. You must engage your adversary at every opportunity never giving ground without a fight. And when an opening appears where you can take the advantage, you must act promptly and decisively never looking back and never checking your motives. That’s how you win.

Washington only thinks in terms winning. It expects to win, and will do whatever is necessary to win. In fact, the whole system has been re-geared for one, sole purpose; to beat the holy hell out of anyone who gets out of line. That’s what we do, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. So, if you want to compete at that level, you’ve got to have “game”. You’re going to have to step up and prove that you can run with the big kids.

And that’s what makes Putin’s next move so important, crucial really. Because whatever he does will send a message to Washington that he’s either up to the challenge or he’s not. Which is why he needs to come out swinging and do something completely unexpected. The element of surprise, that’s the ticket. And we’re not talking about military action either. That just plays to Uncle Sam’s strong hand. Putin doesn’t need another Vietnam. He needs a coherent gameplan. He needs a winning strategy. He needs to takes risks, put it all on the line and roll the freaking dice. You can’t lock horns with the US and play it safe. That’s a losing strategy. This is smash-mouth, steelcage smackdown, a scorched-earth event where winner takes all. You have to be ready to rumble.

Putin needs to think asymmetrically. What would Obama do if he was in Putin’s shoes?

You know what he’d do: He’d send military support to Assad. He’d arm rebel factions in Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Nigeria and elsewhere. He’d strengthen ties with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador providing them with military, intelligence and logistical support. He’d deploy his NGOs and Think Tank cronies to foment revolution wherever leaders refused to follow Moscow’s directives. He would work tirelessly to build the economic, political, media, and military institutions he needed to impose his own self-serving version of snatch-and-grab capitalism on every nation on every continent in the world. That’s what Obama would do, because that’s what his puppetmasters would demand of him.

But Putin must be more discreet, because his resources are more limited. But he still has options, like the markets, for example. Let’s say Putin announces that creditors in the EU (particularly banks) won’t be paid until the ruble recovers. How does that sound?

Putin: “We’re really sorry about the inconvenience, but we won’t be able to make those onerous principle payments for a while. Please accept our humble apologies.” End of statement.

Moments later: Global stocks plunge 350 points on the prospect of a Russian default and its impact on the woefully-undercapitalized EU banking system.

Get the picture? That’s what you call an asymmetrical attack. The idea was even hinted at in a piece on Bloomberg News. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin academic, wrote in a column on Vzglyad.ru. “Since the reasons for the ruble’s fall are political, the response should be political, too. For example, a law that would ban Russian companies from repaying debts to Western counterparties if the ruble has dropped more than 50 percent in the last year. That will immediately lower the pressure on the ruble, many countries have done this, Malaysia is one example. It’s in great economic shape now.” ( Chicago Tribune)

Here’s more background from RT:

“Major banks across Europe, as well as the UK, US, and Japan, are at major risk should the Russian economy default, according to a new study by Capital Economics. The ING Group in the Netherlands, Raiffeisen Bank in Austria, Societe General in France, UniCredit in Italy, and Commerzbank in Germany, have all faced significant losses in the wake of the ruble crisis…

Overall Societe General, known as Rosbank in the Russian market, has the most exposure at US$31 billion, or €25 billion, according to Citigroup Inc. analysts. This is equivalent to 62 percent of the Paris-based bank’s tangible equity, Bloomberg News reported.

Following the drop, Raiffeisen, which has €15 billion at risk in Russia, saw its stocks plummeted more than 10 percent. Raiffeisen also has significant exposure in Ukraine, which is facing a similar currency sell-off as Russia.” (Russia crisis leaves banks around the world exposed by the billions, RT)

So Putin defaults which nudges the EU banking system down the stairwell. So what? What does that prove?

It proves that Russia has the tools to defend itself. It proves that Putin can disrupt the status quo and spread the pain a bit more equitably. “Spreading the pain” is a tool the US uses quite frequently in its dealings with other countries. Maybe Putin should take a bite of that same apple, eh?

Another option would be to implement capital controls to avoid ruble-dollar conversion and further capital flight. The beauty of capital controls is that they take power away from the big money guys who run the world and hand it back to elected officials. Leaders like Putin are then in a position to say, “Hey, we’re going to take a little break from the dollar system for while until we get caught up. I hope you’ll understand our situation.”

Capital controls are an extremely effective of avoiding capital flight and minimizing the impact of a currency crisis. Here’s a short summary of how these measures helped Malaysia muddle through in 1998:

“When the Asian financial crisis hit, Malaysia’s position looked a lot like Russia’s today: It had big foreign reserves and a low short-term debt level, but relatively high general indebtedness if households and corporations were factored in. At first, to bolster the ringgit, Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim pushed through a market-based policy with a flexible exchange rate, rising interest rates and cuts in government spending. It didn’t work: Consumption and investment went down, and pessimism prevailed, exerting downward pressure on the exchange rate.

So, in June 1998, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad… appointed a different economic point man, Daim Zainuddin. In September, on Daim’s urging, Malaysia introduced capital controls. It banned offshore operations in ringgit and forbade foreign investors to repatriate profits for a year. Analysts at the time were sharply critical of the measures, and Malaysia’s reputation in the global financial markets inevitably suffered.

According to Kaplan and Rodrik, however, the capital controls were ultimately effective. The government was able to lower interest rates, the economy recovered, the controls were relaxed ahead of time, and by May 1999 Malaysia was back on the international capital markets with a $1 billion bond issue.” (, Chicago Tribune)

Sure they were effective, but they piss off the slacker class of oligarchs who think the whole system should be centered on their “inalienable right” to move capital from one spot to another so they can rake-off hefty profits at everyone else’s expense. Capital controls push those creeps to the back of the line so the state can do what it needs to do to preserve the failing economy from the attack of speculators. Here’s a clip from a speech Joseph Stiglitz gave in 2014 at the Atlanta Fed’s 2014 Financial Markets Conference. He said:

“When countries do not impose capital controls and allow exchange rates to vary freely, this can give rise to high levels of exchange rate volatility. The consequence can be high levels of economic volatility, imposing great costs on workers and firms throughout the economy. Even if they can lay off some of the risk, there is a cost to doing so. The very existence of this volatility affects the structure of the economy and overall economic performance.”

That sums it up pretty well. Without capital controls, the deep-pocket Wall Street banks and speculators can simply vacuum the money out of an economy leaving the country broken and penniless. This nihilistic decimation of emerging markets via capital flight is what the kleptocracy breezily refers to as “free markets”, the unwavering plundering of civilization to fatten the coffers of the swinish few at the top of the foodchain. That’s got to stop.

Putin needs to put his foot down now; stop the outflow of cash, stop the conversion of rubles to dollars, force investors to recycle their money into the domestic economy, indict the central bank governors and trundle them off to the hoosegow, and reassert the power of the people over the markets. If he doesn’t, then the speculators will continue to peck away until Russia’s reserves are drained-dry and the country is pushed back into another long-term slump. Who wants that?

And don’t think that Putin’s only problem is Washington either, because it isn’t. He’s got an even bigger headache in his own country with the morons who still buy the hogwash that “the market knows best.” These are the fantasists, the corporate toadies, and the fifth columnists, some of whom hold very high office. Here’s a clip I picked up at the Vineyard of the Saker under the heading “Medvedev declares: more of the same”:

(Russian Prime Minister) “Medvedev has just called a government meeting with most of the directors of top Russian corporations and the director of the Russian Central Bank. He immediately announced that he will not introduce any harsh regulatory measures and that he will let the market forces correct the situation. As for the former Minister of Finance, the one so much beloved in the West, Alexei Kudrin, he expressed his full support for the latest increase in interest rates.”

This is lunacy. The US has just turned Russia’s currency into worthless fishwrap, and bonehead Medvedev wants to play nice and return to “business as usual”??

No thanks. Maybe Medvedev wants to be a slave to the market, but I’ll bet Putin is smarter than that.

Putin’s not going to roll over and play dead for these vipers. He’s got to much on the ball for that. He’s going to beat them at their own game, fair and square. He’s going to implement capital controls, restructure the economy away from the west, and aggressively look for ways to deter Washington from spreading its heinous resource war to Central Asia and beyond.

He’s not going to give an inch. You’ll see.

Anti-Putin Propaganda Not Working

Anyone who follows the news regularly, knows that the media has done everything in its power to smear Vladimir Putin and to demonize him as a tyrant and a thug. Fortunately, most people aren’t buying it.
Yes, I’ve seen the polls that say that Putin and Russia are viewed “less favorably” than they were prior to the crisis in Ukraine. In fact, here’s a clip from a recent PEW survey which seems to prove that I’m wrong:

“Across the 44 countries surveyed, a median percentage of 43% have unfavorable opinions of Russia, compared with 34% who are positive.

Negative ratings of Russia have increased significantly since 2013 in 20 of the 36 countries surveyed…

Americans and Europeans in particular have soured on Russia over the past 12 months. More than six-in-ten in Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the U.S. and the UK have an unfavorable image of Russia. And in all but one of these countries negative reviews are up by double digits since last year, including by 29 percentage points in the U.S., 27 points in Poland, 24 points in the UK and 23 points in Spain.” (Russia’s Global Image Negative amid Crisis in Ukraine: Americans’ and Europeans’ Views Sour Dramatically, PEW Research)

These results strongly suggest that the public blames Moscow for the fighting in Ukraine and (presumably)agrees with the prevailing storyline that Putin is a vicious aggressor who seized Crimea in order to rebuild the Soviet Empire. The problem with the PEW survey is that the results are based random samples of nationwide face-to-face or telephone interviews.

Why is that a problem?

It’s a problem because the man-on-the-street hasn’t the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Ukraine. All he knows is what he’s heard on TV. So, naturally, when he’s asked to offer his opinion on the matter, he’s going to regurgitate some variation of the official version, which is that Putin is responsible.

But try asking someone who’s actually been following events in Ukraine that same question, and you’re going to get an entirely different answer. Among the people who follow the daily developments in Ukraine, roughly two out of three support the Russian position. This isn’t something you’re going to find in the survey data, but if you take the time to comb the comments lines in the international media, you’ll see what I’m saying is true.

I hadn’t figured this out until last week’s G-20 Summit in Brisbane when Canada’s PM Stephen Harper brusquely greeted Putin saying, “I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: you need to get out of Ukraine.”

The incident immediately became headline news around the world as journalists for all the major media heaped praise on Harper for courageously “shirt-fronting” the dastardly Putin. What was left out in the media’s account of the exchange, was Putin’s crisp retort, which was, “Unfortunately it is impossible, (for us to leave Ukraine) because we are not there.”

Touché. As you might expect, Putin’s response did not fit with the media’s narrative, so it was scrubbed from the coverage altogether.

The Harper incident was a particularly big deal in Canada where all the newspapers ran gushing articles lauding the prime minister for his righteousness and fortitude. Oddly enough, however, only a small percentage of the people who commented on the dust-up, saw Harper as the hero. Here’s a few samples of what ordinary people had to say. This is from BobsOpinion:

“Harper embarrasses Canadians again on the international stage. It will take years for Canadians to re-build our international relationships and to re-build our reputation.”

This comment is from redondex:

“Harper made a childish and baseless remark to Putin and walked off with a grin of a proud five year old spoilt kid. All Harper achieved was to ridicule himself in front of the rest of the world. That is our leaders usual behavior.”

This is from Makman1:

“I was under the impression that a proper democracy would first use negotiating as a way to understand the divergent groups involved in the Ukrainian revolution and then apply a political solution, if possible. The present Ukrainian government immediately used force. PERIOD! The Harper government, instead of using its “influence” to attempt to defuse a complex situation blindly followed the actions of the USA. If Harper really cared at all he would ask his foreign minister to get directly involved with Russian and Ukrainian counterparts and help reach a compromise…. Hopefully, Harper is not supporting Ukrainian right wing fascists?”

This is from Jörð:

“It’s not wise for Harper to follow America’s lead on every foreign policy. The USA government has a terrible track record when it comes to getting things right in foreign lands. Also Putin was correct when he responded to Harper’s comment by saying “It’s impossible, we are not there.” Technically Russia is not “In” the Ukraine.”

This is Time4Change:

“This is another example of Harper BLUSTERING backed with NO SUBSTANCE! Why are there NO SANCTIONS on the Russian Energy Giants Rosneft and Rostec? Could it be the hundreds of billions of $s the Russians have invested in the tar sands have caused Harper to be the SOFTEST on ACTIONS while shouting the loudest.”

And this is from Mt Athabaska:

” …one day Harper will reach puberty on global affairs.”

It’s worth noting that these comments were lifted from article that was published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I was shocked at how harshly Harper was criticized by his own countrymen. I was also surprised that the author’s obvious anti-Putin bias had virtually no impact on the opinions of the people who commented on the incident. In fact, it appeared to make many of them mad.

I should also mention that I omitted all of the comments that lambasted Harper for hiding in a broom closet “while a gun battle ensued in a nearby hallway of the Parliament building in Ottawa” in early October. (See here: Needless to say, Harper’s comical performance at the G-20 hasn’t convinced anyone that he’s the courageous leader he imagines himself to be.)

The media is increasingly worried that it’s losing its ability to persuade people to support policies that only serve the interests of elites. The media has rolled out all the heavy artillery in its campaign to demonize Putin, but the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s backfired quite badly leading some publications to cancel their comments section altogether.

And the response from readers has been huge too, mainly because the standoff between two nuclear-armed adversaries has galvanized the publics’ attention. For example, in the CBC article I cited above, more than 2,500 comments have been posted already, while many of the other articles on Ukraine or Putin have exceeded 6,000 comments. This just shows how closely people are following events and how passionate they feel about the policy.

And, as we said earlier, this isn’t just a Canadian phenom either. For example, here are a few of the comments I picked up from an article in the conservative UK Telegraph in an article titled Global economy to suffer as Putin quits G20 early.

Zeug Gezeugt:

“The US supports the neo-Nazi ethnic cleansing campaign in east Ukraine, Russia supports the Russian speaking Ukrainian majority in the east against it. Pretty simple really, and the US enforced sanctions can only harm EU Russian relations, a win-win all round for the neoconservative hawks.”

Pamela Cohen:

“So, the media tells us in the Title that Putin is to blame when the Global economy suffers, because he left the G20 early. What stupidity. And what a statement in bringing warships as their targeted President attends yet another meeting. Good for Putin. Blame the US-backed coup and looting and 4000 deaths on Putin, and blame the Ukrainian plane that shot down a passenger flight on him, too. Then shun him at a world meeting, as if he doesn’t have the right and responsibility to defend his country’s borders, Naval base, pipeline and brothers in the Ukraine as they are shelled and killed by US manipulation.

Instead of shock and awe and intruding where they didn’t belong like the US in all the Mid-Eastern countries according to long-ago made plans, Putin sends humanitarian aid and the people vote in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Putin-not all Americans are stupid sheep. My apologies for the onslaught of ignorance and imperialism. You are standing up to bullies of the worst kind. The world needs peaceful solutions to restore the harm of NWO fanaticism and corrupt bankers. Hold the line.”

MP Jones: “The US never ended the cold war and the ‘useful idiots’ in this context are us in Europe and the UK.”

Richard N:

“Most British people are deeply unconvinced by the flood of US and EU propaganda over Ukraine, trying to cast Russia as the villain – when the civil war there was caused directly by the US and their EU side kicks backing a coup to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country, Ukraine.”

timepass:

“With due respect to the author, you say that his (Putin’s) popularity will rise at home as a consequence of this. Please read the message boards North American and European, you will find his popularity seems to have increased everywhere.

Guess the Brains behind 5 eyes and snooping will now have to move into the new reality of the power of the internet to provide information which they would not like others to get. Just a question of time before they make their next move – Censorship!”

Busufi:

“If, the ‘Seven Dwarfs’ (US, UK, EU, Japan, Australia, Canada, and South Africa) like bullies, weren’t so obsessed with beating Russia or China into a corner, rather than bringing Russia or China into their corner; the world would be a better place. Co-operation works better than devastation.”

John Derbyshire :

“Why all this Anti Russian propaganda. The fools who run the West keep creating bogeymen Bin Laden, ISIS, oddly both had connections to Western Powers. So as we face an economic down in the world economy we need another bogeyman, and up pops Putin in the Capitalist controlled media!

People seem to have short memories of pre Putin era, when Yeltsin backed by the West led the country to economic meltdown. Maybe he has scant regard for democratic institutions, but do Western governments support the views of the people!

All of this came about when the United States pushed Nato’s borders eastward and involved themselves in the Ukraine, particularly Mr Kerry. Russia felt itself threatened not by demands of democracy a device used by the worlds superpower, but the growing influence of the United States in the region. The fact that the USA exploited ethnic tensions only shows what was their intention in the region.”

petergardener:

“If the objective is to make Mr Putin appear isolated on the world stage in order to make him less popular at home, it isn’t working and also shows a profound misunderstanding of the Russian mind-set. ‘

Our Western political leaders also have a profound misunderstanding of strategy. Just about everything they do in relation to Russia is wrong and gains the West nothing. But they do like willy waving. Just a pity they do so much damage while they are at it.”

RedBaron9495: “With the public, the effect is rebounding and probably starting to gain Putin more support and worldwide sympathy. This British news forum is good example of that. They made the mistake of going into overkill…..and the public are wising up to the propaganda. They seen this all before prior to Iraq 2003 invasion…and again with Gaddafi.”

Circle of DNA :

“Well, the lives of average folks in Russia has been drastically improved since Putin took the reins of power. He defends Russian interests, fights the empire of chaos, and is massively supported by his people. He is also well educated and a first class statesmen. What is there not to like about him?”

Alltaxationistheft: “The Russian people appreciate how lucky they’ve been for Vladimir Putin to be around at the right time to resist the Neocon supremacist Wolfowitz doctrine…

Since the 1990s , the war mongering maniacs in the West have been planning to asset strip, and plunder Russia via ”liberal democracy”, claiming its natural resources while funding serial inter-ethnic tribal wars via US allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia…

In the 1990s, Russian people were driven into starvation ,prostitution and suicide under pro American ”Liberal” US corporate puppet Yeltsin… but Putin kicked the CIA EU Mossad lunatics out and has been re-building a Russia into a world power ever since.”

anonymous:

“The classless western free (loading) world that produces very little except paper currency, lies and bullshit. I am surprised Mr. Putin came and surrounded himself with such low life scum.
When all the western oligarchs hate someone as much as they hate President Putin, you know he has to be doing something right.”

There’s no need to be selective. Curious readers should go to any editorial platform that covers the crisis in Ukraine and judge for themselves if what I’m saying is true or not. The comments above are in no way extraordinary. What they do show, however, is that the media is losing the propaganda war in pretty stunning fashion, and that’s a huge victory for ordinary people. It’s very difficult for elites to prosecute their criminal wars or implement their rip-off economic policies when people can clearly see what they’re up to.

Now check out this article in the German paper Zeit Online where the author bemoans the media’s loss of influence. The article is titled “How Putin Divides”:

“Why do so many German citizens judge the crisis in Crimea in a completely different way than politicians and the media?

In my 30 years of experience with debates, I have never seen anything like what is now happening in Germany in the dispute over Russia and Crimea….

Unless surveys are misleading, two-thirds of German citizens, voters and readers stand opposed to four-fifths of the political class – in other words, to the government, to the overwhelming majority of members of parliament and to most newspapers and broadcasters. But what does “stand” mean? Many are downright up in arms. And from what one can gauge from letters to the editor, the share of critics seems significantly higher now than what was triggered by Sarrazin’s inflammatory book back then.” (Zeit Online)

Did you catch that part about the “two-thirds of German citizens.. stand opposed to four-fifths of the political class…and to most newspapers and broadcasters”?

That’s a triumph in itself, isn’t it? And what is the issue they disagree about?

They disagree “about the conflict between an aggressive autocrat (Bad Vlad) and Western democracies.”(the Washington-led troublemakers)

Here’s more from the same article:

“…the legitimacy of international law is being questioned in an offensive manner, while the legitimacy of Putin’s nationalist-imperialist ideology is being seriously considered….. It doesn’t do any good to accuse the majority of sheepishness or base economic selfishness, even if that seems to be the driving motive of some business leaders… The issue goes deeper, much deeper.” (How Putin Divides, Von Bernd Ulrich, Zeit Online)

“The legitimacy of international law is being questioned”?!?

Have you ever read such crybaby gibberish in your life?

Why is “the legitimacy of international law is being questioned”? Because people don’t accept blindly what they read the papers and hear on the news anymore? Because corporate editors no longer control how people think about issues? Because people are using their critical thinking skills to see through the lies and bullshit that idiots like the author ladle out in heaping doses every day? Is that why?

It seems to me that that’s a positive development, that people should question whatever they read in the papers and look for other sources of information before they form an opinion.

The bottom line is that no one believes the goofy propaganda the western media is trying to ram down the everyone’s throat anymore.

As kyle555 at Zero Hedge says: “India, China, Brazil and a host of other countries, representing more than half the world’s population, aren’t buying the western imperialist narrative on Ukraine. Nor are major segments of the domestic populations of the countries that are warmongering against Russia.”

Nor do they believe that US wars are a force for good in the world. Here’s strannick at Zero Hedge:

“Russia has seen firsthand the American dream for other nations, as American backed Oligarchs pillaged Russia while it’s people starved and were impoverished. Putin loves his country, and won’t sit on his thumbs while America attempts to encircle it through proxies while rationalizing its actions through corrupt MSMedia propaganda.”

Nor are they buying the “Putin is Hitler” crappola.

This is from smacker:

“People see in Putin a proud national leader who has the guts to stand up to our own criminals and who has over 80% support from his own population. That is enough to admire the guy, whatever else he might be.”

This is from Gaius frakkin':

“A lot of the hatred from the political puppets in the West is due to Putin’s popularity. They’re jealous sociopaths who yearn to be respected and admired as much as him. The fact that Putin’s popularity is never mentioned is the key tell.”

And this from Joe Tierney:

“Vladdy-Poot is hammering home the point that the euros need to stop being America’s bitches, think for themselves, consider the terrible “costs” accruing to them for “wearing the blue dress” for America.

…America’s “global chaos ploy” is failing. Its cynical, “throw everyone under the bus” strategy just to cut across the rise of Russia-China is exposed for what it is – America cares nothing about the euros or anyone else. All it cares about is its own global dominance in perpetuity, no matter the “costs” to the rest of the world, including its friends and allies.

Putin has balls the size of the moon, and you can damn well bet that right now Russia and Putin are secretly being cheered on a grand scale around the globe.”

There’s a reason why, according to Gallup, Trust in Media (is at an) All-Time Low. It’s because the corporate media is the most perfidious, double-dealing, hypocritical institution in the country today. That’s why the anti-Putin propaganda has fallen on deaf ears. It’s because most people know you can’t believe anything you read in the news.

Welcome To EbolaCare — But The Website Is Down

A well known phenomenon in the animal kingdom is that when taking over a new pride, a lion will sometimes kill all the cubs. We don’t know exactly what kind of feeling drives him in this bloody act, but there’s obviously a lack of attachment. Suffice it to say the problem can be summed up thus: it’s not his family.

America’s pride is falling. And few things illustrate this better than the open-borders mentality that has allowed foreigners to bring diseases — most notably Ebola but also EV-D68 and others — into our country.

There was a time when a threat such as Ebola would have inspired travel bans reflexively. Not today. In this enlightened age, Barack Obama and underlings such as CDC director Tom Frieden tell us, with a straight face, that such measures just wouldn’t work. They also claim that banning commercial flights would frustrate efforts to aid Ebola-affected nations and thus increase the long-term chances of an epidemic in the U.S.

Space constraints preclude me from exploring every detail of their argument, but the bottom line is that it’s fallacious. A travel ban combined with a policy of issuing no visas to citizens from affected nations, a prohibition against entry by any foreign national holding a passport with a stamp from one of them, and a mandatory quarantine for Americans returning from such countries absolutely would work. No, it wouldn’t reduce the chances of more Ebola cases reaching our shores to zero, but such a requirement is unreasonable. We can’t eliminate all murder, but we still see fit to minimize it by having necessary laws, police and a criminal-justice system.

As for aid, it goes without saying that medical professionals and other emergency workers would be granted travel clearance and that charter and military planes could ferry them where they needed to go. Moreover, we’ve isolated Americans who contracted Ebola, and no one claims it prevented us from giving them sufficient treatment.

In fact, the arguments against common sense and the common good are so obviously flawed that it’s clear they are not reasons, but rationalizations. So what really explains our leaders’ common senselessness?National Review’s Mark Krikorian put it well last month:

Much of our political class is simply uncomfortable with the idea that border and immigration controls should be used vigorously and unapologetically to protect Americans. You can hear the objections now: It would be xenophobic, it might stigmatize West Africans, those countries will object to our State Department that they’re being discriminated against.

This is what it boils down to. And there’s a reason why people such as Barack Obama don’t believe in using immigration controls “vigorously and unapologetically to protect Americans.”

People such as Obama are not American.

This has nothing to do with theories about where Obama was born; as Thomas Sowell recently pointed out, native American Benedict Arnold is one of our most infamous traitors, while people born overseas have sometimes risked their necks to defend America. Nor does it even just concern Obama, as the phenomenon in question is exhibited by millions. What it has to do with is attitude.

This brings me to an October Forbes article by evolutionary biologist J.V. Chamary in which he inveighs against travel bans, calling the desire for them understandable but “selfish.” Born in France to parents from Mauritius and now living in the U.K., Chamary is the epitome of the attitude in question; he’s an internationalist, a philanderer of nations and a citizen of the world. And the thinking goes like this: we’re all just people, whether in Sacramento or Sierra Leone, Livermore or Liberia. Why should “my” country’s needs be elevated above another’s? This is the “intellectual” point of view, the conclusion someone arrives at upon thinking deeply and recognizing the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s statement, “Patriotism is the belief your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”

Of course, it warrants noting that the affected West African nations have behaved just as “selfishly,” sometimes quarantining large areas within their borders to contain the Ebola. And neighboring African countries have been “selfish” enough to completely isolate the affected nations. We also might wonder how selfish it actually is if our concern is for others, our fellow Americans. But, no matter, Chamary has a point.

Not a good point — but a point.

Now let’s see if he actually believes it.

An easy way to find out is to ask: would you apply the same unselfish standard to your home? Would you temporarily house a couple of the people from affected nations who’ve been allowed to enter the U.S., thus exposing your children to them on a long-term basis?

When I briefly corresponded with Chamary and asked the above, his said it was a false dilemma that he was “unwilling to waste time addressing.” But it’s sufficiently analogous. Everything said about foreigners relative to Americans applies to outsiders relative to family members. We’re all just people; “undocumented family members” are children of God just like your documented family members. And what is God’s perspective (atheists can view this as a thought exercise), which is the highest perspective? He doesn’t gaze upon our blue orb and deem the Smiths more important than the Johnsons. Why, we could even say that “family patriotism is the belief your family should be prioritized over all other families because you were born in it,” couldn’t we, Mr. Barack Bernard Chamary? So why subordinate outsiders’ needs to your family’s?

This analogy is especially apt because a nation is an extension of the tribe, which in turn is an extension of the family. Yet it’s safe to say that Chamary, Obama and their fellow travelers would not endanger their families as they have the country. Why the different standards?

I suggest that their “enlightened,” citizen-of-the-world perspective isn’t the fruits of intellectualism at all, but is merely what feels right. The difference is that they’re emotionally attached to their families.

They’re not emotionally attached to America.

This is for a simple reason.

America is not their family.

Their pride lies elsewhere

Such people are not just internationalists; they sometimes feel more of a kinship with foreign nations than the one whose passport they happen to carry. And in the case of Obama, the antipathy for his passport place is so profound that he aims to eat the cubs. Or, at least, replace them via immigration.

This is why, even though a nation without secure borders is like a house without walls, Obama will keep his walls and open our borders. For some Americans this will mean death from disease and at the hands of illegal-alien criminals, but Obama doesn’t care. Lions, even cowardly ones, do what they do. And we’re not his family.

2014 Election Business As Usual

Thus far this election cycle has been a dud. Hardly a sweat is broken in the rarified air of partisan politics punditry. The only consistent factor that can always be counted upon to amuse is the reams of paper wasted on the false promises and prevarication made by the esteemed party regulars. It is easy to simply blame the entrenched incumbents or the current crop of insurgents, but it goes much deeper when an entire nation remains mute in the face of the worse run and most condemnable conduct, coming out of the District of Criminals in decades. The party in power traditionally will suffer huge losses in Congress, while the gang of “pols” out of power will start contacting real estate agents within the beltway.

What passes for political news today is not even fit to wrap fish. The meat and potatoes of journalism, once upon a time, were made up of scandals. Under the protection racket department of the media government alliance, the abuse of power never reaches the point of national saturation. The Obama administration has outdone the nastiest of offenses under Lyndon Johnson and William Clinton. The Democrats in the Senate allow Harry Reid to be the sickest dictatorial tyrant in living memory.

Customarily, the party with the majority takes the blame for failures. Yet, with each new transgression and unlawful activity, the purported opposition crew of RINOs shirks their constitutional responsibility and shutter out of fear of being labeled a racist. How sad. But that is exactly the condition and lack of courage out of the GOP leadership.

One might think the Democrats just keep digging the hole deeper that they created. Then again, many partisans will look to shift blame and pin shared responsibility on the Republican deadheads in Congress. Forgotten in the fog out of foggy bottom is that Obama owns the failed policies that have been followed after five and a half years in office.

The chaos at the border is intentional. Failure to revive the economy and implement policies that favor job creation is also deliberate. Perpetuating a foreign policy based upon defiance of international law is maintained in the proud tradition of interventionist empire building. Truly this is the institutional synergism, between both parties, that steer career politicians to the dark side. Lastly, the infamous and destructive Obamacare fiasco is the apex of social engineering.

So why won’t the political establishment respond to this laundry list of malfeasance and repeal bad legislation and caustic regulation or change the direction of national policy? It is very difficult for most Americans to accept that the political class is actively working for the downfall of the country and the substitution of a constitutional republic for the dictatorship of permanent privileged elites.

What makes this faction of ruling vermin different from previous ages is that the overriding sentiment for dominance is based upon the systematic dismantling of the nation state. The façade of protecting the homeland is pure hogwash. With the rise of the internationalism culture for governance, the motivation to legislate as if a representative was a sincere patriot has evaporated.

There are not many reasons to even project an appearance of restoring an independent and self-sustaining national economy, a civilization based upon individual liberties and a society where opportunity builds a viable middle class. No, the day that politicians had sincere respect and devotion to institutions of lawful administration and beneficial programs that actually advanced the public interest are long gone.

So why do the hard core political junkies get so exercised over the latest news on how a particular race is turning? With the bipartisan gerrymandering that takes places after each census, every state gets their chance to game the election system. Since there are a small number of elections that can be described as truly competitive, the attention garnished on the few races that could be decided by greater campaign efforts, goes under the microscope.

Back in 2010 the decisive involvement of the genuine grassroots Tea Party captured the House of Representative for the GOP. How did that work out? For traditional conservatives, this freshman class made a substantial attempt to rock the floor of the chamber. Nevertheless, let no good Congressperson go left unpunished. The leadership of the do nothing and gutless Republicans, could not bring themselves to demonstrate fiscal prudence or foreign policy statesmanship.

Sorry folks, the NeoCons are still very much in control.

For this election cycle, the Senate seems to be in play by nearly all accounts. Races for a Senate seat in Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Kansas are most often talked about holding the keys to the cloakroom. It is incomprehensible that majority leader Senate Harry Reid could muster even the lowest level of respect for the way he has conducted himself in the role of the perfect obstructionist. Yet, Democrat loyalists come to the rescue of his tainted honor, no matter how offensive his behavior and conduct degenerates.

Optimism that Reid will be relegated to the closet motivates discontented votes in the few States that matter. OK, even if the slimy and seedy boss of the Democrat crime syndicate gets demoted, what might be reasonably expected from a Republican majority in the Senate?

Most would expect that the remainder of the Obama Presidency will be dead in the water. Oh, how nice if that would be true. However, be prepared. For what you have already seen from this pathological liar and pretender, who have more in common with Mobutu the African despot, may well foretell an explosive ending.

The nihilism and the mental illness that marks the behavior of this egomaniac gives little reason to think that anything will restrain his one man one rule arrogance. If you watched the blushing admiration that Barry Soetoro showered on the biggest crook that even headed up the Department of Injustice, Eric Holder; you know that this psychotic president flaunts his disgust for America, has more insults left to inflict.

The fact that Republican representatives had no stomach to impeach this madman illustrates the nature of the existential problem that plagues the very foundation of legitimacy and threatens the civil liberties of every honest citizen.

Would a GOP Senate interject backbone into the jelly spines of the legislature branch and commence a revival of in an era of “good government”? Excuse me again, only the dreamers believe that an ethical administration can and will emerge, when morality in its most basic application, is almost nonexistent in the popular culture and the secular society.

Back in the ancient days of the network news monopoly, the three broadcast organizations would sometimes pool their resources to access the same voter count. Tallying ballots always presented the risk of voter fraud. Now, the projection and predicting prognostications are so much more refined. Voter scams are so advanced, using electronic machines to program in the results that only a Boss Tweed could fully appreciate.

Ah, just knowing the time wasted on campaigning is reward enough for those who rate congressional candidates lower than your latest terrorist splinter group. The suspense for the 2014 season better start to build soon or the media moguls will need to invent a different realty show to stage.

Maybe a slight threat of citizen participation could have a remote chance to influence the results in a primary run, but that time has passed. Tuesday, the 4th of November has all the making of another day of shame. Not because there is no qualified champion to support, you already know that to be the case. But for the reason that the likelihood that if a “good” person could be elected, merely means that he or she will be destroyed by the professional caste of political untouchables.

Play ball or your days are numbered. That’s the game and what better chamber exemplifies the experience of blackmail than the “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body”.

If some stubborn and obstinate reformer sticks to their guns, just bring in the NSA for the maximum level of authoritarian extortion.

By now you should all be psyched up for making your X. Soon the latest round of illegal invaders will be getting their identity credentials and drive on over to the booth to pick their macho man official. How many more of these futile elections will it take before the pretense of voting will be just as silly as those candidate projected appearances of being a trustworthy representative of the populace?

This year’s Election Day recommendation has not changed. Show up, be vocal, express your disgust, vote third party or make a point that none of the above is your real selection. The charade of a loyal opposition to the party in power has never been so clear for even the densest “true believer” to come to their senses.

Little ever changes for the good and nothing actually reverses the direction towards national suicide. The reason is clear, it is the plan and every system is firing on all cylinders. The rest of the Obama term is poised to have deceased Americans turning in their graves. For those who claim they are still alive, prove it – show your outrage.

Putin, Not Ukraine, Is Vexing America

Forget about alleged Russian aggression and land grabbing in Ukraine – the real problem for the United States is Vladimir Putin. To be more precise, the real problem is a strong, independent Russia under the leadership of President Putin, a Russia that stands up for its national rights, respect for international norms and which is not prepared to simply roll over to placate American hegemonic selfish interests, like propping up its bankrupt dollar.

As the American-led NATO military alliance meets in Wales this week, it is obvious that Washington and its European minions are thrashing around trying to find a new purpose for an organization that was formed 65 years ago during the Cold War. The summit in the Welsh city of Newport is being billed as «the most important meeting of NATO since the end of the Cold War» – might we wonder why? – more than two decades ago.

US President Barack Obama is in attendance with 60 world leaders, including those of the 28 NATO member states. Shamelessly, there is much high-flown rhetoric about «defending Europe from Russian aggression». NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen even had the gall to state, at the opening of the conference, that «Russia is attacking Ukraine».

«So we continue to call on Russia to pull back its troops from Ukrainian borders, and stop the flow of weapons and fighters into Ukraine», said Rasmussen without a modicum of evidence, or even a semblance of citing evidence.

The day before the NATO summit opened, Barack Obama, speaking in Estonia, used the very same kind of provocative rhetoric, accusing Russia of aggression in Ukraine and violating international law. The American president rolled off slanderous words about «Russian-financed, Russian-armed, Russian-trained, Russian-supported and often Russian-directed separatists in Ukraine».

As Russia’s envoy to NATO, Alexandr Grushko, said of such accusations mouthed by Western leaders, «they are not facts, they are forgeries». Grushko said that NATO was escalating tensions with Russia without any evidence to support its reckless conduct. «There have been no troop build-ups or movements of military hardware», he added.

It is astounding that all the militarist hype surrounding the NATO conference, along with bombastic declarations of collective security and vows to protection «our members in Eastern Europe», has been invoked with absolutely no credible proof, such as satellite images of Russian troop and tank movements, missile launches or aircraft incursions of Ukrainian territory. It’s like policy is being made on the basis of fantasy and preconceptions.

However, that’s not to say that there aren’t real concerns at play. There most certainly are. But the Western powers and their dutiful so-called news media are in full propaganda mode to conceal what those underlying concerns are.

What Obama and other senior US figures have been emphasizing over the past six months has been the need for European members of NATO to «step up to the plate» in terms of financing NATO. For most of its 65-year existence, the US has largely funded the workings of NATO, being by far the largest member. There is good reason for this historical American largesse. NATO has served as the US vehicle to exert a dominant military, political and economic presence over Europe. Without NATO, Washington would have significantly reduced influence over its European «allies». In particular, Washington might have to witness a natural historical tendency for closer political and economic ties between Europe and Russia, if it were not for NATO’s grip on the continent.

It is significant that over the past two decades since the end of the Cold War – and hence arguably the end of NATO’s purpose – European funding of the organization fell from over 30 per cent down to nearly 20 per cent. In other words, that suggests that European states were losing interest in NATO as having any relevance in the post-Cold War era. It seems that what Washington is hell-bent on doing is to revive the relevance of NATO by talking up the threat to European security from Russia. A revived NATO means a revived US presence in Europe, which is essential for American global hegemony.

This would give the real meaning for why Washington has taken the lead over past year in escalating tensions with Russia over Ukraine. This has in turn led to a growing chasm between Moscow and Europe, where up to recently there were cordial diplomatic relations based on substantial economic and trade partnerships.

Of course in this political endeavour Washington has found willing European accomplices to accentuate tensions. The British government has played a trusted lackey role for the American agenda, as has the US handpicked junta in Kiev led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, as well as the pro-Western regimes in Poland and the Baltic states.

This underlying agenda of American geopolitical hegemony – not alleged Russian aggression – was betrayed earlier this week during the joint speeches of Barack Obama and his Estonian counterpart Toomas Hendrik Ilves. When both leaders were asked about their views on the 1997 Founding Act between NATO and Russia, they said that the commitment to non-expansion by NATO was now redundant because the «landscape had changed».

The American-educated Estonian leader said: «That was the security environment of 1997, when Boris Yeltsin was [Russian] President, and there had been no violations of either the UN Charter or the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1990 Paris Charter».

Note that Ilves reiterates groundless assertions that Russia has committed violations of the UN Charter and other treaties. But what is telling is his reference to former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was acceptable to American and Europeans because he was seen as a weak, pliable figure that allowed Western capital free rein in the newly opened Russian territory following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yelstin’s era was also a time of rampant corruption by Russian oligarchs who were closely associated with Western capital. That corrosive culture came to a halt with the election of Vladimir Putin twice as president between 2000-2008, and again in 2012.

In his speech, Obama concurred that «much has changed» since the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, making the latter non-applicable. But Obama’s words gave more away about the deeper political concerns. He said of Russia: «I’ve said consistently our preference is a strong, productive, cooperative Russia. But the way to achieve that is by abiding to international norms, to improving the economy, to focusing on how they can actually produce goods and services that other people want and give opportunity to their people and educate them. That’s not the path that they’ve been pursuing over the last several years. It’s certainly not in evidence when it comes to their strategy in Ukraine».

So what Obama, that is, Washington, is concerned about is not Ukraine or alleged Russian aggression, but rather issues of «economic production and cooperation» – that is cooperation with Western capital. What’s more, «that’s not the path that they’ve [Russian government] been pursuing over the last several years». In other words, that’s not what Russia is permitting the West under the tenure of President Vladimir Putin; and this predates the recent crisis in Ukraine.

These real, underlying American concerns about Putin’s Russia not playing American ball were spelled out in an opinion column in the New York Times earlier this year, on March 23, by the former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul.

Notwithstanding false claims about annexing Crimea, McFaul writes: «The decision by President Vladimir V Putin of Russia to annex Crimea ended the post-Cold War era in Europe. Since the late Gorbachev-Reagan years, the era was defined by zigzags of cooperation and disputes between Russia and the West, but always with an underlying sense that Russia was gradually joining the international order. No more».

The former American ambassador goes on to lament «the collapse of the Soviet order did not lead smoothly to a transition to democracy and markets inside Russia, or Russia’s integration into the West». In other words, Russia did not make a smooth transition that suited American interests.

McFaul lays the blame for this lack of Russian «integration into the West» on President Putin, accusing him of being «an autocrat» and of harking back to the days of the old Soviet Union. McFaul’s invective against Putin is just slander, but what it barely conceals is that Washington is acutely disgruntled with how it perceives Putin’s Russia as not acting like a vassal state, as it was intended to be under Yeltsin at the time of signing the Founding Act between NATO and Russia.

That is why Washington now wants to scrap the Founding Act, and to push NATO expansion around Russia’s borders.

McFaul ended his NY Times column by calling for isolation and punitive sanctions on Russia, a policy that has become ever more pointed in subsequent months.

And it is more than a coincidence that America’s rulers have stepped up their aggression towards Russia since President Putin has embarked on a raft of regional trade and development alliances with Eurasian countries, Iran, China, and other BRICS nations, as well as Latin America. Putin’s declared moves to replace the US dollar with bilateral currencies for transactions in energy trade has also marked him out as a threat to US hegemonic interests. Putin’s Russia has also stood by its Syrian Arab ally over the past three years rather than relenting to the US-NATO criminal agenda of regime change in that country.

This is the context for why Washington is corralling NATO with the «crisis in Ukraine». It is not about Russian aggression. It is about Putin being an independent world leader who is not bowing down to American imperial dictate.

Source: SCF

Happy Workers of The Future

Life In 500 Square Feet…

One Hundred and Twenty Thousand results to a Google search on “city is more competitive”.  The oligarchs who currently control our world intend to herd people in cities where inter-city  contests will keep everyone producing at a high level.

Read how this is already being implemented in China.

More and more of the land is falling under government control and hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed.  American citizens own fewer homes and less land.  If this scenario is successful the earth will be enjoyed by elite overseers while the proletariat toils and lives in tiny cubicles in crowded cities.

I wrote recently about our connection to land

In his daily devotional books R. J. Rushdoony (These books are tightly connected to daily behavior and provide usable righteousness for the Christian seeker.  Buy them here .)describes Rogation Sunday and its practice by early Americans.  In the evening following Sunday prayer for the harvest “each farmer and his family walked the boundaries of their property and gave thanks for the good earth.  As they walked, the boy of the family was ‘bumped’ against the landmarks, the boundary stone, or against a boundary tree.  If a pond or stream marked the boundary he was ducked into it.  Then the boy who was bumped or ducked was given a small gift.  The purpose of the ‘bumping’ and of the gift was to make the boy remember the boundaries of the land he would someday fall heir to.”

Land plays a primary role in the Biblical narrative.  The occupation of the Promised Land, the events the preceded, and the battles that followed make up a significant part of the Old Testament.  The earth is the Lord’s and it is to be carefully maintained.  He provided land for His people and it was apportioned to the Twelve Tribes.  He provided the Year of Jubilee to provide stability and prevent a permanent centralization of wealth and power.

Borders of land are related to God’s Law – both are meant to restrain.

In some of America’s Western States 80 percent of the land is owned by the Federal Government.  Alaska’s land is mostly government property.  Oil drilling rights are controlled in Washington.  If these rights were released United States would be energy independent.  Reliable sources claim the government owns about 30 percent of the entire United States land mass.

There is evidence that powerful elite bankers may be conspiring to take over large tracts of land as collateral for debt.   As our government obligates our posterity for trillions of dollars of debt some of it could be paid by sacrificing government owned land.  This could be the genesis of the recent squabble over cattle grazing.  .

In His provisions for the lands in ancient Israel God allowed the permanent sales of urban properties but had rural lands returned to their original owners in the year of Jubilee.  Stability was vested in the families than owned and cultivated land.  Though often overlooked it is still the same today; the cultivation of land provides sustenance for the populace of the earth.

Water and food are products of the earth.  They sustain life.  Without food and water death comes quickly.  Control over access to water and food is power over life and death.  The earth belongs to The Lord we are short term custodians.  God tells us that those who do not work should not eat.  It is the ability to produce food that is everyone’s God given right.

Robots are being touted as a means of reducing the need for human labor.  The analyzer failed to address the fate of displaced workers.  As technology replaces human labor a problem develops over the use of displaced workers.  When Wal-Mart replaces cashiers with do-it-yourself checkout stations they realize an additional profit but the displaced cashiers are faced with the emergency of being deprived of their livelihood.

Societies benefit from technical progress and work that benefits the general population is deserving of reward.  However, when technical improvements displace energetic workers the workers must be provided with the means of working to earn food and lodging for themselves and their families.

What is to be done with the leisure time our technical progress is giving us?  For many it will be used for self-indulgence.  Most of us work to provide the necessities of life but constantly pine for leisure time. But if leisure time is not filled with activity we soon hope for something to do.  We were created for activity and when we are full of sleep we crave it.

Wealth provides a person with activity choices.  Some wealthy individuals find productive activities; others waste their time in sinful indulgences.  A few amass wealth consistently over several generations and use this tacit control of human life to manipulate world powers with an objective of world domination.

We are created beings vested with the mandate to live under the Law our Creator has provided.  The Law is not an impediment to our happiness; obedience is the vehicle to righteous, peace, joy, and prosperity.  God brings blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.

It is not only difficult to experience but hard to believe that the United States of America is being gutted and destroyed on the altar of world government.  Though the mainstream media is complicit and refuses to publish the atrocities the signs are everywhere.  How can airplanes clearly visible to the entire population fly over our nation and spray long trails of an unknown cloud-like substance while the people, the weather channels, and the major news sources never acknowledge their presence?  How can an entire government, 435 congressional representatives, 100 senators, and one president ignore hundreds of engineers and piles of evidence that the 9/11 attack was false flag operation and allow the policies of our government to be based on its authenticity?  And most shocking of all, how can voters continue with confidence to cast ballots for candidates that invariably betray their trust?

U. S. Voters are like battered spouses that continue to return to the battering partner.  It makes no sense to observers but to the voters its must seem like the only alternative.  An intervention is sometimes the only solution – but how?

The United States of America has been filled with alien immigrants whose only interest is to rape its wealth.  It is engaged in constant wars that sap its strength and destroys its youth.   It has been saturated with pornography and bludgeoned into sodomy. For many years its citizens have been exposed to the most aggressive use of incarceration in the entire world.  It has piled up debt that probably cannot be repaid but will enslave its children for generations.  It is home to so many diverse and ineffective religions that the anarchy of secular humanism is helping push it into tyranny.  Liberty has been lost to the lust for power and we now live under a police force that regularly kills citizens that do not obey.

More and more Americans are becoming concerned with our progressive downfall.  They see the clouds of tyranny approaching and they feel the winds of turmoil.  They are beginning to understand that their government has betrayed them and are apprehensive that unseen forces are overshadowing us. But in spite of this approaching avalanche they are unable to discern the hand of God.

During the 1930s in the small towns of Central United States a deep depression afflicted everyone.  We were grateful to be able to eat from a 25 pound bag of oatmeal three times a day.  Men without work hitched rides on railroad trains that took them to other areas where they hoped to find work.  Those who had food to eat shared with the transients who would often do add jobs in payment.

In the little town where I lived an Evangelical pastor was called to our protestant church.  In an effort to bring the congregation closer to the God of the Bible he began having altar calls.  The altar call was too confrontational for the church leaders whose brush with Christianity consisted of a Sunday School Bible studies where God’s Word could be judged by the participants and they could decide whether they believed it or not.  This minister was soon replaced with one who did not upset the status quo.

Before the Evangelical minister left there was a miracle at my mother’s home.  She has been a Methodist all of her life and following my conversion we sometimes discussed religion.  On this particular day she was sitting in her antique platform rocker in the living room when she asked me about conversion.  I said, “The Bible says you must be born again”.  At that very moment there was a knock on the front door.  It was the recently dismissed minister.  He came in and sat down.  In familiar fashion mother said, “Now, Albert, tell the minster what you were telling me.  I did, the minster affirmed it, and Mother said, “I don’t believe I have ever done that”.   We bowed our heads and mother accepted Christ as her Savior.  The minister left without ever mentioning why he had knocked on our door.

Neither my mother nor I made much progress in the Faith since correct Christian theology was not readily available and when it was preached it usually fell on deaf and recalcitrant ears.  We are a nation of nominal Christians whose faith is selfish and sinful.  We say we believe in God and have accepted Christ as our Savior but instead of becoming obedient servants we expect Him to serve us

During the 1930s there was a Christian patina that covered heavy layers of humanism.   My mother was a good, dependable woman.  She had earned a college degree from University of Illinois but with my father out of work and not having today’s labor saving devices she was forced to work hard to keep up our home and keep food on the table.

For a time my father worked in the WPA but for the most part society during the depression was free from government interference.  Nevertheless, a pride-filled humanism had taken over the country and the seeds for our current tyrannical government were beginning to grow.

Evangelical Christianity brings the good news to individuals but when they are converted the lack of a solid theological base leaves them in a moral limbo that fails to bring change to society.  Once our sins are forgiven and we are made new by the Blood of the Savior God seeks obedience as He always has.  The Jews failed to obey God’s commandments and their disobedience broke the Covenant.  All of God’s blessings are the result of obedience to His Law.

God will not long allow an oligarchy of wealthy humanistic elitists to control His creation.  All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and He will bring blessing from this unprecedented quest for world domination.  Unfortunately Christians who have failed to work against encroaching evil will be severely judged and will not see the blessing in store for His faithful servants.

SOS! Five Hospital Ships Needed To Save Gaza’s Children

The statistics are just beginning to be analyzed—by UN agencies and a myriad of NGO’s whose mandates include salvaging young lives from the nearly incalculable ravages of the five-week (and counting) Zionist aggression upon Gaza. It is of course the third aggression in six years against the 1.8 million Palestinians, sardine-canned into what is increasingly referred to as history’s largest open air prison, but the outcome this time is looking particularly cruel and grim.

As the Netanyahu regime announced (on 8/10/14) that its attacks on Gaza would continue, increasing numbers of obscene calls—for Israel to “finish the job” and “go all the way” etc.—are floating in the Zionist state’s malodorous public echo-chamber, emanating from such figures as the Knesset’s deputy speaker, who advocates driving Palestinians into the Sinai desert and resettling Gaza with Jews.

In Khuza’a “the Israeli military had trapped at least 32 people in a home and then prevented the Red Cross from evacuating them before shelling the area,” reported Lebanese-American journalist Roqayah Chamseddine. Hoping for safe haven, the people in the house sought refuge in the basement of a neighbor’s home, where they found additional families already inside.

“By that point we were 120 people, 10 men and the rest women and children,” Kamel al-Najjar recalled for Human Rights Watch.

After dawn and without warning (no polite leaflets or knocks on the roof apparently), Israel struck the house, killing three people and wounding 15 others.

The toll of the war on Gaza’s children has been “catastrophic,” according to UN agencies. At least 450 have been killed, and those not having their physical bodies buried have found their innocence entombed. It is another casualty in the war—a war against all things daring to live and resist in Gaza. According to Chamseddine:

“Israel has forced the children of Gaza to lay flowers atop headstones, and watch helplessly as coffins that are filled with not only their most beloved family members, teachers, neighbors, and friends but also their most treasured memories, lullabies, lessons learned and those that will never come, descend into the belly of the earth. Their lips will memorize and form prayers for the dead and the stars that defied the siege that flickered freely high above them will be snatched from their skies.”

Increasingly it is being heard from Gazans that “Israel has stolen everything beautiful in our lives,” and Israel’s barbarity confirms this sentiment.

Middle East analysts point out that it is difficult to recall a time in modern history when there has been so much sustained slaughter of this region’s civilian population, with more than two-thirds of the victims being women and children. For the past year, UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations have lamented a simple reality—that there is not a sufficient level of international aid to save lives and treat those in need of emergency and longer term medical care.

But now something is changing.

The horrors we have just witnessed, especially with respect to traumas inflicted on children, is producing, as should be the case, a major and rapidly growing international focus on salvaging young lives. Descriptions and evaluations of the consequences of Gaza wars are being published and urgently discussed. Some analysts and government officials, including Pentagon planners, are calling for a ‘Medical Marshall Plan,’ to save Gaza’s children. One proposed first step is the dispatching of a humanitarian support group of hospital ships that would sail to Gaza without further delay.

What can and must be done, by the United States and other countries with the naval and medical capacity to do so, is to organize a Hospital Ship flotilla to break the siege of Gaza, to anchor offshore, and to begin caring for the medical needs of all, with a special focus on children and their psychological well-being. Call it a Mercy Mission. Initially it could include the following countries—all well known for their hospital ships with up-and-running medical staffs: the USA, UK, France, China, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Australia. Within this group of nations are ships with hundreds of patient beds and fully stocked pharmacies. Moreover, it is a group not likely to be interfered with by those who have imposed the inhumane blockade of Gaza (and of course it even includes some of their collaborators in the region), but perhaps most importantly, every country on the list possesses one or more hospital ships that are fully staffed and available to act.

France is reportedly ready to join such an effort and is also working on a related crisis—in Iraq, where it plans delivery of first aid equipment “in the coming hours,” according to the office of Francois Hollande. The French president has “reaffirmed the will of France to stand by the side of civilian victims of continued attacks” in Iraq, and his spokesmen said that “France will do the same thing for Gaza.”

“The European Union is called upon to also take necessary measures with great urgency to respond to immediate humanitarian needs,” the spokesman added.

Hundreds of EU citizens, with their specialized skills in fields of pediatric medicine and child psychology, are reportedly ready to help the children of Gaza. Two fully stocked and staffed American medical ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, could contribute greatly to the effort. Each ship’s hospital is a full floating medical treatment facility, containing 12 fully equipped operating rooms, a 1,000-bed patient capacity, digital radiological services, medical laboratory, pharmacy, optometry lab, and intensive care ward; each also has a dental clinic with full services, CT scanner, and two oxygen-producing plants.

Helicopter landing decks are available as well, for patient transports, and the ships also have side ports that could take on patients from Gaza fishing boats and other crafts at sea. In addition to these two mammoth-sized medical vessels, dozens of other US Navy ships also have hospitals on board. For example, in one year, the medical department of the USS George Washington handled over 15,000 out-patient visits, drew almost 27,000 lab samples, filled almost 10,000 prescriptions, took about 2,300 x-rays, and performed 65 surgical operations—and nearly 100 other US ships are capable of doing the same.

Just one example with respect to capacity is illustrative. In April of this year, the USNS Comfort—a converted 70,000-ton tanker—sailed from Norfolk, Virginia carrying 900 doctors, nurses, and engineers, including staff from the U.S. military, civilian agencies, non-government charities, and even foreign navies. The ship is designed to be deployed quickly for four month intensive full service medical assistance; yet similar capacities obtain in certain other US ships and in foreign navies as well. All of these resources must be put to immediate use to save Gaza’s children.

Looking at the longer term, the Pentagon should seriously consider ordering a sufficient number of catamaran transports and shallow-draft littoral ships to fill out the flotilla, vessels capable of delivering aid by sea via the relatively shallow Gaza coastline. The success of breaking the siege of Gaza will likely give impetus to a UN Security Council decision to construct a seaport for Gaza, perhaps with a shipping channel to Cyprus.

Similarly, the UK hospital ship, RFA Argus, designated as a ‘Primary Casualty Receiving Ship,’ is moored in Falmouth, England, and is also uniquely designed for this type of humanitarian crisis; and it, too, is reportedly ready to sail once given the green light by Downing Street.

Five Hospital ships are urgently needed along Gaza’s shoreline at the following locations: opposite Jabaliya and North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah.

Although attacking a hospital ship is clearly a war crime, the Israeli pattern of targeting medical facilities in Gaza is well known, and threats from the settler movement and the right wing Likud Party to “sink any ship that enters Gaza waters if judged to be aiding the terrorists” must be taken seriously. Yet one imagines the occupation regime would have to think carefully about sinking another US Navy vessel as it did in 1967 with the repeated bombing of the USS Liberty.

Instead of recycling raw combat power, the White House can best meet the demands of a war-weary American public through an emphasis on missions such as those the USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are designed for. Poll after US public opinion poll reveal that Americans believe their humanitarian values are best reflected when our navy is tailored for delivering humanitarian aid to places like Gaza, and not by delivering munitions to occupying colonial regimes.

Pastors Deliberately Keeping Flock In The Dark​

Research Confirms What I Have Been Saying For Years…

George Barna is the foremost researcher of modern Christianity in the country. He recently spoke about a two-year research project studying why modern-day pastors and churches are so silent regarding political issues. The result of his research only confirms what I have been trying to tell people for years. But there was one thing his research uncovered that did somewhat surprise me. OneNewsNow.com covered the story:

“On Thursday, George Barna–research expert and founder of The Barna Group–shared with American Family Radio’s ‘Today’s Issues’ about new information he’s compiling at American Culture and Faith Institute over the last two years, gauging where theologically conservative pastors are at politically.

“‘What we’re finding is that when we ask them about all the key issues of the day, [90 percent of them are] telling us, Yes, the Bible speaks to every one of these issues. Then we ask them: Well, are you teaching your people what the Bible says about those issues?–and the numbers drop…to less than 10 percent of pastors who say they will speak to it.’

“When researchers ask those pastors what else they are willing to do to get their people active in the political process, Barna said ‘it’s almost nothing.’

“‘So the thing that struck me has been that when we talk about the separation of church and state, it’s that churches have separated themselves from the activities of the state–and that’s to the detriment of the state and its people,’ stated the researcher.”

That 90% of America’s pastors are not addressing any of the salient issues affecting Christian people’s political or societal lives should surprise no one–especially the readers of this column. It has been decades since even a sizeable minority of pastors have bothered to educate and inform their congregations as to the Biblical principles relating to America’s political, cultural, and societal lives. But the part of the research that did somewhat surprise me was this statement by Barna: “What we’re finding is that when we ask them about all the key issues of the day, [90 percent of them are] telling us, Yes, the Bible speaks to every one of these issues. Then we ask them: Well, are you teaching your people what the Bible says about those issues?–and the numbers drop…to less than 10 percent of pastors who say they will speak to it.”

Did you get that? Ninety-percent of America’s pastors say they KNOW that the Bible speaks to all of these issues, but they are deliberately determined to NOT teach these Biblical principles. That is an amazing admission!

It would have been one thing if the pastors had said that these political issues were not relevant to scripture, and, therefore, they didn’t feel called to address them. But the pastors are admitting that, yes, they KNOW that the scriptures DO relate to our current political issues, but they are deliberately choosing to NOT teach those scriptural principles. Holy heads-in-the-sand, Batman!

I confess: this statistic caught me off-guard. So, we can forever dismiss ignorance as justification for pastors remaining silent.

Now, all of the church members out there who have been forgiving of their ministers for not speaking out on the issues by saying things like, “He really doesn’t understand what’s going on,” need to reevaluate their leniency–if they are intellectually honest, that is–and if they truly care about the future of their country.

Church member, admit it: that pastor of yours who refuses to speak out on the issues KNOWS the Bible speaks to these issues, and he is DELIBERATELY refusing to teach those Biblical principles to you and your family.

So, we are not dealing with IGNORANT pastors; we are dealing with DELIBERATELY DISOBEDIENT pastors. They are PURPOSELY CHOOSING to remain silent. Will that make any difference to the Christians in the pews who say they want their pastor to take a stand but are willing to overlook his “ignorance?” Probably not. But, at least, we now know what the real issue is, don’t we?

The report goes on: “Why the disconnect? According to Barna, the answer is simple. He suggests asking pastors how someone would know if their church is ‘successful’–which he did.”

“‘There are five factors that the vast majority of pastors turn to [when asked that question],’ he explained. ‘Attendance, giving, number of programs, number of staff, and square footage.’”

There you have it: pastors are more concerned about being “successful” than they are being truthful. They believe if they tell their congregations the truth, their churches will not be “successful.” And it is so refreshing to see Barna directly ask pastors what “success” means to them. So, now we know (as if we didn’t know before; but, at least now there is definitive research to back it up). The vast majority of pastors believe church success lies in:

*Attendance

*Giving (money)

*Number of programs

*Number of staff

*Square footage (of facilities)

Shazam! Where did pastors come up with this definition of “success?” You know where: from men such as Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, et al.

The megachurch phenomenon of the last several decades transformed how pastors think and behave. Pastors read the “successful church” books and publications; they attend the “successful church” conferences; they watch the “successful church” videos, etc. They, then, try to mimic the tactics and strategies they have been taught. And if there is one constant theme promulgated by the likes of Osteen, Warren, and Hybels, it is pastors must avoid controversy like the plague. Again, one must realize that the goal is NOT being faithful to Biblical principles; the goal is building a “successful” church as noted above.

It is time for Christians to acknowledge that these ministers are not pastors; they are CEOs. They are not Bible teachers; they are performers. They are not shepherds; they are hirelings. It is also time for Christians to be honest with themselves: do they want a pastor who desires to be faithful to the scriptures, or do they want a pastor who is simply trying to be “successful?” BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF, CHRISTIAN FRIEND.

Barna’s research blows the “ignorance” excuse out of the water. Again, it is not ignorance; it is deliberate disobedience.

Barna goes on to say, “Now all of those things [the five points of success listed above] are good measures, except for one tiny fact: Jesus didn’t die for any of them.” Wow! You nailed it, George!

See the report here:

Where do you find anything in the New Testament that measures a pastor’s success by the number of people attending his church? Or by how large his offerings are? Or by how many programs his church has? Or by how many staff members he has? Or by how large his facilities are? In fact, the early New Testament church didn’t even own property or buildings.

When the Apostle Paul listed his ministerial pedigree, here is what it looked like (II Cor. 11):

*Stripes above measure

*In prisons frequently

*In deaths often

*Beaten with rods

*Stoned

*Perils

*Weariness

*Painfulness

*Hunger and thirst

*Cold and nakedness

I don’t see attendance, offerings, programs, staff, or square footage in that list at all, do you?

When Paul wrote his own epitaph, it read, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (II Timothy 4:7). He didn’t say, “I had a large congregation, we had big offerings, we had a lot of programs, I had a large staff, and we had large facilities.”

In the world of Osteen, Warren, and Hybels (and 90% of America’s pastors), the Apostle Paul’s ministry must have been a dismal failure. And how many church pulpit committees would even consider the pastoral résumé such as the Apostle Paul wrote above?

Please understand this: America’s malaise is directly due to the deliberate disobedience of America’s pastors–and the willingness of the Christians in the pews to tolerate the disobedience of their pastor. Nothing more! Nothing less!

Oh, and get this: according to the survey conducted by Barna, guess what the number one reason is why pastors choose to be “successful” and not “controversial?” You guessed it: fear of the IRS 501c3 tax-exempt status. Who would have thought it? (Yes, that question is deliberately facetious.)

The release of this research by George Barna could not have come at a more opportune time. I announced just last week that we have officially launched the Liberty Church Project, whereby we will be helping people around the country to establish non-501c3 churches. I invite folks (pastors or laymen) who are serious about starting new non-501c3 churches–or helping to resurrect patriot pulpits within existing churches–to fill out our online application. We already have several groups that we intend to help and are looking for others. If you are someone who is serious about such an endeavor, and seeks our assistance, please fill out the online application here:

And, in case you missed it, here is my column announcing the launch of the Liberty Church Project:

I want to commend George Barna for his research. I suspect that the vast majority of pastors and churches will ignore it, but, at least now we know the painful truth of the matter: by in large, pastors are deliberately choosing to not teach Biblical truth to their congregations for the selfish goal of being “successful.” But as we come to grips with this reality, we must also acknowledge that pastors are simply (and shamelessly) putting their fingers to the wind and finding that the people in the pews are more interested in their churches being “successful” than faithful to the teaching of Holy Scripture. As Barna noted, it is the churches, themselves, that have chosen to separate from the political affairs of their country.

In the end, it always comes down to We the People, doesn’t it? If you want a church where the pastor is willing to teach the Biblical principles that relate to our everyday lives–including our political lives–you might have to vote with your feet and go find one. That is, if that kind of thing is truly important to you.

Something Sinister Going On?

The Unanswered Questions of MH17…

“Recent history has repeatedly proven that nothing said by Washington and its officials should be accepted at face value. No other government in the world has been implicated in so many egregious lies as the United States.” Bill Van Auken, “US lies and hypocrisy on Gaza and Ukraine“, WSWS

“Mendaci neque quum vera dicit, creditor.” Cicero (“A liar is not to be believed even when he speaks the truth.”)

Without a shred of public evidence to support their claim that Moscow was involved in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the United States and Europe have levied a new round of sanctions on Russia. The sanctions, which are designed to restrict Russia’s access to both capital and technology, will be imposed as soon as August 1, despite the fact that Moscow has repeatedly denied either involvement in the incident or of providing material support for the militants fighting in east Ukraine. Not surprisingly, Russia will not be given a chance to defend itself in court or present its case before an independent tribunal. Due process and the presumption of innocence are breezily jettisoned whenever US interests are involved. Instead, Washington will act as judge, jury and lord high executioner arbitrarily imposing penalties on the country that has provided hard evidence of what actually transpired prior to the crash using data it compiled from radar and satellite imagery. In contrast, the US hasn’t lifted a finger to help the investigation even though it has the most advanced, state-of-the-art surveillance systems in the world and even though it had a satellite — capable of reading a license plate from outer space — hovering directly overhead at the time the aircraft blew up. And here’s something else to consider from blogger Moon of Alabama:

“Pentagon officials told CNN (on Tuesday) that the Ukrainian government fired three ballistic missiles towards the federalists during the last 48 hours.” (Moon of Alabama)

If the Pentagon picked up the ballistic missile launches on their radar, they certainly saw the surface-to-air missiles that brought down MH17. Case closed.

So why hasn’t Washington been more forthcoming with the information they have? Why are they basing their judgment on the nonsense they’ve gleaned from social media and Twitter feeds instead of spy-in-the-sky photos and satellite imagery? Why are they dragging their feet and obstructing the investigation? And why, for God sakes, why has Europe agreed to go along with this charade when they know there’s not a scintilla of evidence linking Russia to the downed plane?

These are just some of the questions that remain unanswered a full two weeks after MH17 was downed by what appears to have been a surface-to-air missile launched from a BUK platform somewhere in east Ukraine. (Although even that fact is now in dispute given that MH17 was being allegedly being shadowed by two Ukrainian warplanes. Some analysts believe the aircraft was actually destroyed by air-to-air missiles fired from one of the two Su25 interceptors.)

One thing that’s clear, is that the lack of public evidence hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from smearing Russian president Vladimir Putin in the media or blaming Moscow for the tragedy that killed 298 passengers. The campaign to hold Moscow responsible started just hours after MH17 crashed and has only intensified over the last two weeks. This is amazing considering that, most of what we know about the incident has been provided by Russia. For example, it was Russia that provided the information about the two Su25 interceptors and the US satellite. It was also Russia that came up with the photographic evidence that showed Kiev had deployed anti-air missile systems (BUK) around the area where flight MH17 was downed. The Kiev government has repeatedly denied claims that it had BUK systems in the area, but on Friday, Russian military analysts released satellite images that made mincemeat of those denials. Here’s the story from RT:

“Satellite images Kiev published as ‘proof’ it didn’t deploy anti-aircraft batteries around the MH17 crash site carry altered time-stamps and are from days after the MH17 tragedy, the Russian Defense Ministry has revealed.

The images, which Kiev claims were taken by its satellites at the same time as those taken by Russian satellites, are neither Ukrainian nor authentic, according to a Moscow statement.

The Defense Ministry said the images were apparently made by an American KeyHole reconnaissance satellite, because the two Ukrainian satellites currently in orbit, Sich-1 and Sich-2, were not positioned over the part of Ukraine’s Donetsk Region shown in the pictures….

At least one of the images published by Ukraine shows signs of being altered by an image editor, the statement added.” (“‘Wrong time, altered images’ Moscow slams Kiev’s MH17 satellite data“, RT)

Ask yourself this, dear reader: Why would you provide “altered” photos that were taken on a different day to prove your innocence if you weren’t guilty as hell? And why would the US go along with this farce unless they were involved too?

Like we said earlier, there’s photographic evidence that Kiev had BUK systems operating in the area at the time of the crash. These “new” fake photos only increase the probability that it was a Ukrainian missile that brought down MH17. That’s why the administration hasn’t released any of its radar data or satellite imagery. It’s because they know the truth.

Consider this: The Obama administration has never inquired about the communications recordings between Air Traffic Control (ATC) and the aircrew of MH17.

Why? Don’t they want to know what happened?

Nor have they asked for:

“The information on the specific instructions from the Ukraine Aviation Administration to the air traffic control units of Ukraine with relation to the imposed restrictions on the airspace utilization in the area of Donetsk and Lugansk.” (RT)

Nor are they interested in why MH17 was rerouted over a warzone, 200 kilometers north of all previous flights for the last two weeks. Or whether MH17 was in fact being followed by Ukrainian warplanes. Or whether Ukrainian SAM units were active in the area before the incident took place.

How does one explain the Obama administration’s total lack of interest in any area of the current investigation? Doesn’t that suggest that they already know what happened? And doesn’t that also suggest that they’re trying to prevent the facts from leaking out?

Readers should take a quick look at the 28 questions that Russia’s Air Transport Agency would like the Ukrainian government to answer in order to clarify what happened to MH17. (See questions here.) This is the approach the Obama administration would take if they were genuinely interested in finding out what happened. The reason the administration hasn’t taken this approach, is because they’re not really interested in what happened. Why is that?

Most of the lies about MH17 have been coming from the State Department, where just last Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows claiming that Moscow had sent “a convoy of about 150 vehicles with armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, tanks, artillery, all of which crossed over from Russia into the eastern part of Ukraine and was turned over to the separatists.”

Imagine making a bold statement like that on five different news programs without even one of the hosts demanding evidence to support the claim. Such is the state of the media in the US today.

So far, neither Kerry nor any of the US Intel agencies have produced proof that Russia is providing material support for rebels in east Ukraine. Zilch. It’s all uncorroborated speculation and unsubstantiated rumor.

Do you remember Kerry said he had proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the Aug. 21 Sarin gas attack outside Damascus, an incident that he hoped would lead the US to launch a war against Syria?

It was a lie. Here’s a clip from Robert Parry:

“A new report by two American weapons specialists, entitled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack,” makes clear that the case presented by Kerry and the Obama administration was scientifically impossible because the range of the key rocket carrying Sarin was less than a third of what the U.S. government was claiming.” (“The Mistaken Guns of Last August“, Robert Parry, Consortium News)

And what about Kerry’s grandstanding repudiation of the fake leaflets in Donetsk that said “Jews had to identify themselves as Jews … or suffer the consequences.”

Right. That was another whopper Kerry used to promote his attack on Russia.

And what about this from CNN: “Kerry: ‘Drunken separatists’ interfering at MH17 crash site“. Or this from Vice News “MH17 Crash Site Reportedly Looted by Rebels“.

It’s all just more outlandish speculation intended to smear Russia. There’s a great article in the Wall Street Journal by journalist Paul Sonne titled “After Flight 17 Crash, Agony, Debris and Heartbreak in Ukraine Villages” that dispels a lot of the lies that have popped up in the media in the last couple weeks. First of all, the rebels have not prevented inspectors from accessing the site (as Kerry claims) Here’s Sonne in an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Wednesday:

“The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has actually gotten very good access to the site with the exception of the first day they showed up, which was the day after the crash where their time there was limited to 75 minutes, and they said that they weren’t given access to every piece of the crash site that they had wanted to see. So after the sort of first day standoff that they experienced with some of the rebel militants, it did seem like they were getting pretty full access to the crash site. The problem was that the investigation team, which is now being led by the Netherlands, wasn’t ready and didn’t, in fact, really arrive in Donetsk until a few days ago. And after they finally assembled in Donetsk, it took, you know, about a week or more. Then, fighting had already started to encompass the crash site. And the reason that they’re not getting access to the crash site now is not because the rebels are not allowing them to go to the crash site. It’s because the crash site has turned into an active, violent fighting zone.”

So the inspectors have had access to the site the whole time except just recently when US-backed goons from the Ukrainian army resumed hostilities in violation of their promise to honor a temporary ceasefire. It sounds like Kiev might have something they want to hide at the crash site, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, according to the Independent, “John Kerry accused the separatists of displaying “an appalling disrespect for human decency” in carrying on fighting close to the area.”

Is Kerry lying again or is he just confused about the facts?

As far as the looting and drunken disrespect for the corpses of the victims; that’s all BS too. Sonne paints an entirely different picture of what took place on the ground. Just check out some of his description and see if it squares with Kerry’s breakdown:

“The plane’s cockpit and dozens of bodies plummeted into Rozsypne, about 2 miles from Petropavlivka. One body fell through a woman’s roof. A pilot strapped to a seat wound up next to a flight attendant in a nearby field. …Charred remains of an engine, landing gear and wings fell in a fireball next to Hrabove, with a tumbling storm cloud of at least 70 bodies, some of them largely intact…

No villagers on the ground died, but they are scared of what they might find next…

“We thought it was the end of the world,” the Orthodox priest says. He stayed on the ground in prayer, preparing to meet God, and then ran up the hill as burning pieces of the plane’s undercarriage and landing gear pelted a field like bombs. Then came a hail of bodies: arms, heads and fingers.

Farmers dashed to the village, afraid it would be engulfed by an inferno. Hrabove Mayor Vladimir Berezhnoi screamed at drivers and motorcyclists to get off the road as fire rolled across a field. When he saw bodies, Mr. Berezhnoi yelled at adults to take their children home.

A few miles away, Oleg Miroshnichenko, a retired miner who became the mayor of Rozsypne about 13 years ago, felt panic as he heard two loud blasts and watched the remains of about 40 passengers rain down on yards and homes. His phone started ringing off the hook.

“There’s a body here, a body there, another body,” he says…

“In mines, you don’t remove a body until they investigate it,” he says.

Villagers and emergency workers decided to start bagging bodies that were rotting in the sun. Local miners joined the effort. Heartbroken residents had been pleading in tears for the bodies’ removal.” (“After Flight 17 Crash, Agony, Debris and Heartbreak in Ukraine Villages“, Wall Street Journal)

See? These people were deeply traumatized by the experience, they weren’t throwing bodies around and disrespecting the dead. That’s pure bunkum, just like the claims that Russia has been firing rounds into Ukraine is bunkum. Just like the leaflets ordering “Jews to register or face deportation” were bunkum. It’s all bunkum. For whatever reason, the State Department doesn’t give a rip about its credibility anymore. They’ll say just about anything as long as they can skewer Moscow.

On Friday, State Department spokesperson Marie Harf was challenged by Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee, who demanded that Harf back up her claims that Russia has been firing rounds into Ukraine with something more substantial than the rubbish she’d read on Twitter. Here’s what the AP journalist said:

“I think that it would be best for all concerned here if when you make an allegation like that you’re able to make it up with something more than just ‘because I said so. You guys get up at the UN security council making these allegations , the secretary [of the State Dept., John Kerry] gets on the Sunday shows and makes these allegations, and then when you present your evidence to back up those allegations, it has appeared to, at least for some, fall short of definitive proof.”

The clearly-flummoxed Harf started backpeddling like crazy, unable to provide any hard evidence that her claims of Russian complicity were anything more than a complete fabrication. As it happens, the so called “satellite imagery data” and “electronic intelligence” that was used to incriminate Moscow was originally posted on coup-backer Geoffrey Pyatt’s Twitter account, which further underlines the fact that the real objective was to shape public opinion with propaganda not to reveal the truth. Here’s a bit more from Antiwar.com:

“During the past several days, there has not been a single report out of Ukraine of an artillery strike against any of their military bases, anywhere in the country. …And this is Ukraine we’re talking about, which comes up with its own dubious stories of Russian attacks on a near daily basis. If Russia was carried out concerted shelling against Ukrainian military targets, Ukraine would be harping on about it constantly. They aren’t even alleging anything close to that is happening. (“US Invents Reports of Russia Attacking Ukraine Bases“, antiwar.com)

A Twitter account, for god sakes! The US State Department is basing its theory on the crap they picked up on Twitter. It’s ridiculous.

Then there’s the State Department’s claim that Russia is massing troops along the border, another fairy tale that’s turned out to be complete baloney. In fact, an International team of inspectors were sent to Russia to check things out and here’s what the found:

“No instances of violations by Russia along the Ukrainian border had been registered by the inspectors,” the ministry said. “The last four months have witnessed 18 separate inspections along the Ukrainian border with the Russian Federation, all in line with the Vienna Open Skies Treaty and the Vienna agreement of 2011.” (RT)

If you’re starting to think that everything you’ve read about the MH17 crash is bullshit, you’re probably right. There’s not much truth to most of it.

But why would the administration lie about things that are so easy to disprove? What’s the point? Are they just getting sloppy and apathetic or is something else going on here?

To get a handle on what’s really going on, we have to understand that Ukraine is not just another bloody afterthought like Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, none of which would dramatically impact the US’s role as the world’s only superpower. Ukraine is different. Ukraine is an essential part of Washington’s plan to pivot to Asia. If Washington is unable to achieve its objectives in Ukraine — create a chokepoint for vital resources flowing from Russia to the EU, establish NATO bases in the heart of Eurasia, and drive a wedge between Moscow and Brussels — then the plan to maintain US global hegemony for the next century will fail. And if the plan fails, then China will gradually become the world’s biggest and most powerful economy, economic ties between Moscow and Europe grow stronger, and the US will slide into irreversible decline. Get the picture?

This is the scenario that Washington wants to avoid at all cost. That’s why the anti-Russia hysteria in the media has been so ferocious and unrelenting. That’s why the State Department assisted in the coup d’état that toppled the Ukrainian government and triggered the crisis. And that’s why ruling elites of all stripes have thrown their support behind a policy that recklessly pits one nuclear-armed adversary against another. It’s because the bigshot money-guys who run this country are bound and determined to be the Kingfish for the next hundred years even if it means plunging the world into the abyss of a third world war. That’s just a chance they’re willing to take.

Obama & Congress: Spending Our Money To Kill Babies

[Author’s note:  Yes, I know that I should be grateful that John McCain wasn’t elected in 2008 because he would have had America in the middle of WW III by now and there probably would have been bunkers and anti-aircraft missile launchers (and also lots of American dead babies) outside my bedroom window instead of just robins, but still…we are already up to our necks in wars, proxy wars and dead babies as it is — and I’m sick of it.]

President Obama and Congress may hate each other’s guts regarding a whole lot of domestic issues — but with regard to foreign policy, Obama and Congress just can’t kiss each other’s butts fast enough when it comes to agreeing to kill as many babies as humanly possible in as many foreign countries as they possibly can.  And ASAP.

Obama and Congress spend American taxpayers’ money on killing babies in foreign lands like there is no tomorrow; as if all our hard-earned money could just magically and automatically replenish itself overnight like some magical ATM that never stops working, an inexhaustible resource that has no limits or end.

“Seven trillion dollars gone forever?  No problem.  It’ll grow back.  The important thing here is to keep producing all those dead babies.”  Can’t stop now.  There are still a few left alive.

In Haiti, dead babies.  “They all would have died in fifty or sixty years anyway.”

In Ukraine, dead babies.  “But those babies were rebels, clearly red-diaper babies!”

Afghanistan’s dead babies keep piling up like cordwood.  “We thought they were Taliban!  Diapers, not head-cloths?  Nah.”

Dead babies in Iraq, murdered by ISIS, weaponized and trained by Obama and Congress.  “Just collateral damage that got in the way of the oil.  Again.  Pesky babies.”

Dead babies in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and, hopefully, Iran next.  “Those babies possessed WMDs!”

Dead babies in Libya, Egypt, Africa and Palestine.  “Ah, the smell of dead babies in the morning.” Dead babies in Honduras.  “They won’t be camping at our borders any more — because they are dead.”

And don’t forget poor bleeding Syria, where Congress and Obama happily released the Kraken, er, ISIS on all kinds of babies that used to be living.  “Those babies were dictators!  They had to go!”

And now Obama and Congress have solemnly shaken hands and agreed that Palestine and Gaza both need more dead babies too.

“The only difference between the “shooting fish in a barrel” attack on the USS Liberty and the “shooting fish in a barrel” attack on Gaza is that there were no babies on board the USS Liberty.  What a waste.”

And even as we speak, Obama and Congress still tirelessly continue to work together, constantly dragging gigantic bags of gold coins over to the Pentagon; hundreds of thousands of black bags that contain over half of all the money that we Americans will ever earn in our lifetimes — huge black bags of gold, all clearly labeled “Dead Baby Fund”.

I want no part of any of this.

Do you?

How The NeoCons ‘Managed’ Saddam Hussein

And Why the Facts Matter Now…

Part One of Four…

“I’m not a journalist and the facts don’t matter.” - Rayelan Allen, RMN owner and editor

“All politics is personal,” or “the personal is political.” Early feminist sayings

In November of 2002 we had been lied to about Weapons of Mass Destruction, the reason given for invading Iraq, resistance to the war was waning. Standing in the way, though this was not publicly known at the time, was Saddam Hussein, who was very willing to leave Iraq forever – if he was paid.

Paying him off would have been far cheaper than the cost of the war. But it would not have accomplished the real goals.

The real drive for war was oil and the dollar. The details were carried out by a group of people who had no conscience, willing to lie themselves into power and lie, cheat, steal and kill, to keep it. Together, they have changed our world, bringing us to the precipice of destruction. These are the acts of individuals who behave in exactly the same way in their personal lives. I know.

The build up to war, constructed by the Bush White House, took place as events in my own life played out in shocking ways but which proved to be highly informative in a horrible way.

The strategies used by those I was forced to deal with personally were the same as those used by the NeoCons who were driving us to war. At the time, I was fighting to protect my daughter, Morgan, from the consequences of her life-long bad behavior and judgment. Later, I realized this was not possible.

She is a psychopath acting on the mistaken belief she can get away with anything. Harming others, or even killing them, was perfectly acceptable to her.

Our internal values determine all parts of our lives and for all parts we are responsible and accountable.

How many people died because of the War in Iraq and the lies told to us? At least a million and a half, though the total is probably higher.

How many people misdirected their life efforts through patriotic fervor incited by people who had intentionally used the symbols and language of honor to defraud us? The number is unbearably high.

How many of us have struggled to understand how this could have happened?

Hold the impact of the war and how this was accomplished in mind as we consider what happened from the time this story began in 1997 until the invasion of Iraq began in the spring of 2003.

The Personal

I first became active in politics during the Goldwater campaign. My goal was to achieve social justice and individual empowerment. While pursing these goals I joined the Libertarian Party in 1974. I managed campaigns, ran for office, did fundraising and organized. I left when it was clear the Kochs had destroyed any potential for effective action in 1988.

I studied the problem of organizations while remaining active. In 1997 I was a Regent for the National Federation of Republican Women and coping with the continuing crises generated by my husband, Craig Franklin. Not filing his taxes, when he owed nothing, was typical of Craig’s irresponsible behavior. I wrote this article about what we called, “The Tax Crisis,” in 2008. 

After I solved the problem Craig decided to leave me and take all the money with him.

Beginning in 1997 Morgan, who had committed the incredibly ugly act of working with Craig to defraud me of millions of dollars during our divorce, had, in October of 1998, started a sexual relationship with an old boy friend of mine, John Fund, then on the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. She wanted a rich husband and decided he would do.

Always ambitious, she had emerged from her childhood, which had traumatized her entire family, functionally illiterate – and her previous prospect for marital bounty,, had flown the coop the month before.

She was actually traveling with my estranged husband, on a tour of New York, London, and Paris, when she and John started their affair. Would she have hesitated if she had known how promiscuous John had become, enabled by the power accrued as a NeoCon operative? Probably not. But she might have played things differently.

John Fund was placed at the WSJ in 1984 by connections who maintained close ties with the people who were already working to put Bush in office by stealing the election in 2000. Positioned as a journalist he is actually a political operative, his first experiences in this coming through the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over the Libertarian Party.

Taking up with your mother’s former boy friend, someone you have referred to as ‘Uncle John’ since you were a child, is scandalous behavior, there is no other word for it. This type of behavior is normal for Morgan.

I had no idea this was going on because I was thousands of miles away caring for my oldest son, Arthur, who had attempted suicide by shooting himself through the brain on March 22, 1998. It would be another year before he would be able to even go to the bathroom himself. My entire focus was on his care.

Morgan and I were not talking because her deviousness and lies had included attempting to persuade me she needed a heart transplant in an attempt to get me to turn off her brother’s life support. She called me to ask for his heart. This happened, I later realized, soon after she had been paid $10,000 to do this by my estranged husband, Craig Franklin.

One of the reasons psychopaths get away with so much is our inability to believe the ugliness of their real motives. This is also true in politics.

When John started his liaison with Morgan he expected a job as speechwriter for the Bush administration, still two years in the future. They were already discussing war with Iraq. John would assist, pushing the agenda in the media.

After years of dealing with Morgan I knew not to believe her if she did not offer proof but I had no reason to distrust John. So, in September, 1999, for practically the only time in her life, Morgan told the truth, with proof.

Puzzled at the persistent rumors about a relationship between her and John, I called to ask him. John and I had been chatting regularly for over twenty years. Asked about the relationship he expressed shock. He denied it, saying he had fed her cat for her once or twice. I believed him. He was completely persuasive, giving the impression of absolute openness.

It was the  recorded by Morgan in September of 1999, which changed my mind.

This is a man who helped lie us into war. His personal ethics match the ones he uses professionally.

One afternoon that September Morgan called me to beg for help. She was broke and about to be evicted from her apartment in Jersey City. John, she said, had forced her to abort his baby the previous March and then dumped her. A heated discussion ensued as I relayed to her my recent conversation with John.

Hearing a call coming in, Morgan put me on hold. It was John. She recorded her conversation with him. You can listen to it on the tape above. A few minutes later I had heard the whole of it.

I was stunned and confronted him on the phone soon afterward. He hung up on me. His cover blown he moved to the next strategy, distancing.

As a result of a  I sent to the WSJ moments later, the job as a speechwriter for the Bush White House, already being promised, vanished. The fax, I was told, was copied at least five times on its way to his office.

The illusion of family values needed to be retained.

Instead of a job in the White House, which John had earned through his work as an operative for the NeoCons, then coming to power, he was told to write a book about how liberals steal elections. This would provide cover for the electronic hacking about to begin.

, would be published September 24, 2004.

The relationship between John and Morgan seemed to stabilize for a while. Fund spent nearly half his time at the apartment I rented in NY at the Rivergate. I was rarely there. John told me he intended to marry Morgan, who he said really loved. I wished them well, glad they had come to some resolution.

But then, in December of 2000 Morgan realized he was sneaking into my empty room to , including Federal judge Diane Sykes, late at night. He left emails where Morgan could find them.

I received copies of these from Morgan via email. This one, Fund sent on  this same year, was typical.

Morgan’s relationship with John continued, headed for rockier and rockier ground as the number of ‘other women’ Morgan discovered increased.

Despite this, they moved in together in Jersey City in July of 2001, just days after Morgan had vented to John Connolly of Vanity Fair. From those interviews Connolly wrote an article titled,  Over my objections Morgan had given him a copy of the tape she had made in 1999.

The article was published September 4, 2001, along with the tape.

Connolly had arranged for the article to be published in Talk Magazine – but Fund intimidated Tina Brown into canceling the story by having his attorney, John J. Walsh, call and make threats. Walsh later billed for services, producing this  Morgan also found a  later.

Instead, the article was published only online on a site called WeaselSearch, from which it got its name. When the site folded it was hosted on American Politics Journal, where it is today.

What Fund did to stop publication is standard operating procedure for NeoCons. He used this later against me.

But because the article refuted the lies John had continued to tell, a scandal erupted anyway.

Understandably, this event did not contribute to bliss in John and Morgan’s relationship but the reasons were far more complex than just one little article.

Morgan called me, outraged. She had refurbished John’s apartment at his request and he was refusing to pay her back. When she moved in the utilities had been turned off because of his non-payment and the plumbing did not work. I made her produce the receipts since I still did not trust her. She kept track of payment for cleaning supplies and repairs, which were complete before she told me John was battering her in the later part of September.

The violence, she later said, had begun one evening after an event at the ALEC Conference in New York in early August.

I had hoped the relationship would work out. To say it didn’t vastly understates the case.

I did not believe her until I heard it happening over the phone, which happened in late September. When I heard John’s demonic glee as he pounded her I felt obligated to take action. As I have said, Morgan lies. Another friend of her’s, Eric Buchanan, confirmed he had also heard this taking place on another occasion. Both of us advised Morgan to leave him. She refused.

During this time , a Republican Woman, called me to express concern for Morgan as a battered woman. She told me she counseled women who had been battered.

Then it came out that her motive was reigniting her brief fling with Fund by assisting him with Morgan. The fling had taken place some time earlier, after Fund spoke to a group to which Molin belonged. Liking what she saw, evidently, she took him home with her. Fund’s parting words were, by report, “You got to swallow.”

We learned Molin had complained to the management at the Wall Street Journal about how she had been treated the year before.

The beatings continued. Morgan filed police  in New Jersey.

Morgan became aware John was still lying about their relationship, saying he barely knew her, while she was living with him. At one point she used her cell phone so I could hear him telling these lies to Lloyd Grove from the Washington Post.

Listening to him lie was stunning. Again, I begged her to leave.

After she found even more emails, from a growing list of other women, she agreed. The emails included these between him and Michele Davis, on ^, and this , revealing the sexual relationship he had begun with law professor Gail Heriot, also on the 13^th of January.

Christine Hall Reis, a new bride, offered the services of herself and her friend, Julie Currie, from Kroll Opposition Research to John on . Christine had sent an unusual photo of herself to John, which he printed and left on the floor, where Morgan found it.

Morgan moved out of the apartment in Jersey City and into an apartment I rented for her in New York around January 24 – 26, 2002. I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was not over. The craziness escalated.

John found out where Morgan was living and moved in with her. He left a litter of papers there, some of which Morgan scanned and sent me to prove this was happening. This letter from  is dated January 25, 2002. Morgan picked it up off the floor in her Manhattan apartment after John left it there. Another incident of battery soon took place just moments before I arrived at the apartment. When I walked in I saw Morgan bloodied and bruised.

The New York  was filed.

John had been told by his two closest friends, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, who occupied adjacent spaces on his speed dial, he needed to provide evidence Morgan had lied. Which she might well have done. But there were witnesses. Buchanan and I had heard beatings take place and were ignored by authorities. Neither of us were ever called though the authorities knew we were witnesses.

Fund received help from some of the other women in his life. A few of these were victims themselves, unaware of what was really happening and are not named. Others, like Gail Heriot, whose relationship with Fund began in a hotel room in December of 2001 or January of 2002, assisted in building the website Fund used to insert lies into public view and wrote letters for him, libeling both Morgan and myself.

Desperate, we sought help from people who were politically at odds with the NeoCons. One of these individuals was Sidney Blumenthal.

It was at this time Blumenthal put a keylogger on Morgan’s computer to steal information about Fund. He had refused to help, trying to persuade her it was enough to  politically. So Morgan returned the keylogger favor, against my advice.

While she can’t write a literate sentence Morgan was a wiz with computers. It was this act which would expose to us the strategy adopted by the Bush White House to ensure the War in Iraq was not stopped in November of 2002.

An attempt to kill Morgan took place in May, 2002. I heard this over the phone as the key turned in the door of her apartment. Morgan threw herself against it and engaged the dead bolt. I believed her. She is not that good an actress.

Then, she went into hiding with a couple in Georgia.

As the campaign to sell the fiction of Weapons of Mass Destruction was hammered into accepted fact Morgan was following Sidney via his emails and reading early chapters of his book, Clinton’s War. Occasionally she would forward me a copy.

By November war appeared to be inevitable. Then, Morgan called me and asked if U-Day was something like E-Bay. The keylogger had turned up something with more surprises than Blumenthal’s book.

Saddam, in communication with Blumenthal, wanted to cut a deal to be paid to leave so war would not be necessary. I had the origin of the email checked out and the expert said it had come from the Emirates and Baghdad was a likely source.

The appointed agents for insuring Saddam would stay put were the Clintons and their old friend, Sidney Blumenthal. This activism on their parts is likely the real source of the largess which flowed into the Clinton coffers, not Hillary’s public speaking abilities or investment savvy.

The previous January Fund had forced Morgan to sign a ‘confession’ saying no abuse had taken place. The documents were dated January 24, 2002, just before she moved out.

Evidently, Fund promised to pay her what he owned her if she signed and, stupidly, she did. Since an accounting of what Fund owed matched what was asked if you add in the outdated checks Morgan found while cleaning, which Fund had given her, it is likely Rove and Cheney decided this was not enough ‘proof’ to be persuasive.

Eric and I knew the statement was hogwash and would have so testified.

The real campaign to destroy our credibility began in 2003, after Fund’s friends realized they had more than one political operation to protect. They needed to protect John, a pivotal political operative, and the truth about Saddam.

So evidence was sought and obtained through trade with those holding it.

Craig, my former husband, was Senior Vice President of Green Hills Software, Inc. He and the company’s president, Dan O’Dowd, had made a deal in 1997 to defraud their partners. Dan would have a fake stock option agreement made to deny me a marital share during our divorce and Craig would lead a walk out to keep Glenn Hightower, Dan’s partner, from exercising his buy out option when Dan exercised it and made him an offer.

Morgan had supplied a recording of Craig gloating about this and in late 1999 I had filed a law suit. Morgan gave a deposition on February 22, 2001. The suit settled and the deposition was never certified, making it illegal to copy.

Green Hills Software, LLC. exchanged a copy of this deposition for defense contracts. Today, Green Hills Software, Inc. is a billion dollar company heavily into drone technology and supplying the Military Industrial Complex.

The campaign to destroy our credibility began in early 2003.

On January 23, 2003 Fund filed an answer to Morgan’s  in New York.

On April 1, 2003 Melinda’s webmaster received a .

On April 3, 2003, Dan O’Dowd decided the desperate need for servicemembers was to provide a measly $5,000 for a child’s college education. He amount pledged, $100.000, with matching funds up to $250.000. The non-profit was incorporated on the 9th and announced publicly on April 10th. The is an embarrassingly minor contribution for a corporation which made billions from contracts flowing from the military.

On April 7, 2003 Craig Franklin handed an enveloped copy of Morgan’s  to Anne
Fisher, his then girl friend, telling her it contained Morgan’s deposition. It was addressed to John Fund.  It was a Green Hills envelope with the postage paid by the company in advance.

On April 8, 2003  was down.

On May 11, 2003, Mother’s Day morning, I wrote an email responding to questions received early that morning from Eric Alterman for an article which would be published on the 15th.

On May 15, 2003 Eric Alterman’s hit piece, “” was published in The
Nation.

On May 16, 2003 Gene Gaudette, Editor of American Politics Journal, received a  from Gail Heriot, one of Funds many girl friends libeling us.

On June 21, 2003 JohnFund.com, a hit site, appeared online. The site came down sometime after May 19th this year. It can be viewed through the 

On July 22, 2003 Wendy MacElroy, who calls herself a feminist but focuses her attack pieces on women, traded a hit piece on Morgan for a gig at Fox News. Wendy, who has known Melinda since the 1970s, failed to call her or Morgan. The  is titled, False Rape Charges Hurt Real Victims.

During this time Melinda received notice from the IRS claiming she owed money. The IRS refused to tell her why since her returns were produced by a CPA and documented all expenses.

Carried out this way, the NeoCon campaign was masked and did not appear to have any relationship with the War in Iraq. It was all ‘personal.’

But all parts of our lives reflect our values, which is why trying to separate the two in this was is wrong.

Clearly, everyone else had agendas which had nothing to do with the simple, provable fact John Fund committed domestic violence. This is a crime and should be prosecuted even if the victim has lied previously and is a jerk. 

In 2004 I wrote , a lightly fictionalized autobiography framed around my daughter, not myself. I am now reissuing a non-fiction version, which includes “the Bunker in Georgia” Story. That story about Saddam began in , in subsection The Bunker in Georgia.

Saddam also knew too much.

No one read the book, though the reviews were very good.

I wonder what would have happened if I had understood the ruthless lack of conscience these people carry behind smiling, and lying, faces in both their personal and professional lives. What choices would I have made, personal and political?

The next years were given over to stark survival and caring for my son. Since Morgan had drained me of money this was much more difficult. I fought back because I had to, using the only tool I could afford, the truth.

Stay tuned for Part Two - What Happens When You Know Too Much

Tracking ISIS’s Supply Line: Even The Devil Has To Eat

Anyone watching the nightly news in America these days has surely seen some of those in-your-worst-nightmare videos showing hair-raising images of the fire-breathing minions of ISIS as they invade Syria and Iraq — blazing across bone-dry deserts in brand new Toyota trucks, brandishing AK-47s and looking like something out of a Hounds of Hell horror movie.  And we all shudder involuntarily, imagining the chaos and terror being spread by these horrible men-in-black, waving pirate flags and screaming for blood.

And we can also probably imagine, far back in the most primitive lobes of our brains, what it would be like to see these very same nightmarish denizens screaming down Route 66, heading toward us too, driving straight for our own town, positively drooling over the thought of beheading us in our sleep and raping our sons and daughters.

But then we come to our senses and realize that this sort of thing can never happen here in America.  This sort of nightmare only plays out in the Middle East (hopefully).

But forget about all that.  Instead, let’s just focus in on the ISIS terrorists and pirates themselves, now safely out there in the Iraqi desert, aka “those terrible rough beasts, their hour come round at last, slouching toward Baghdad to be born, their gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” to paraphrase William Butler Yeats.

And then let’s ask ourselves next, “While happily out there terrorizing and raping the countryside, just what the freak do these guys eat and drink?  And where in the freak do they find a 7-11 or a Raley’s way out there in the desert?  And when the freak do they even have time to cook and do dishes or pee?”  And don’t even tell me that they are the Devil’s minions and thus live only on air.  And where are their burn barrels and port-a-potties?  And where are their grab-and-go bins full of “Meal, Ready-to-Eat,” menu number 15, beef enchilada, made by the Ameriqual Packaging Company, Evansville, Indiana 47710?

Surely even these devilish super-fiends must have an occasional craving for toilet paper?  Or even perhaps the occasional shower?

So exactly who is providing ISIS with its supply line?

Don’t even dare tell me that ISIS doesn’t have one.

These aren’t ghosts or krakens or the mythological First Beasts referred to in the Book of Revelations.  These are just ordinary human schmucks like the rest of us, who still put on their terrorist Halloween costumes one leg at a time.  The Devil’s minions still have to eat.  And pee.  And they still have to get their shiny new Toyota trucks from an automobile showroom somewhere — one obviously not located in Hell.  And they still have to use earthly rocket-launchers, not ones supplied by Lucifer himself.

Plus sacking and looting can only get these pirates so far before they run out of booty.  And even if they now have billions of $$$ in plundered oil, they still have to sell it to someone.  OPEC they are not.

So where do all these tons and tons of food and weapons and terrorist-chic outfits and port-a-potties all come from?   Your guess is as good as mine.  And I am guessing, based on all that I have read and seen lately, that all these goodies are being supplied by American, Israeli and Saudi oligarchs and neo-cons.  And probably at us taxpayers’ expense too. 

These terrible terrorist ISIS operations appear to be all a part of the American, Israeli and Saudi neo-con oligarchs’ continuing (and very successful) “Land for Blood” program — wherein neo-cons get all the land and the men, women and children of the Middle East get to bleed.  

Of course I can’t prove most of this without breaking and entering NASDAQ and CIA vaults.  Hoping for transparency is like flogging a dead horse.  Just ask Edward Snowden about that one.  But there still is a pattern here, one that started in Vietnam, worked its way through East Timor, Kuwait, Iraq and Guatemala, and is now surfacing again in Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Gaza.  Leopards don’t change their spots.

“What the devil…” you might say at this point.  And you would be right.

PS:  And speaking of tracking supply lines, what about all those other supply lines — all those abundant supply lines that should have been pouring out goodies all this time, streaming them out to the average American, Israeli/Palestinian and Saudi citizen like you and me?  What happened to those?

Those supply lines are all pretty much toast.

Just think of all the trillions of dollars that have been spent on all these damned, useless, murderous and unnecessary “wars” that the oligarchs ruling our countries in the past 15-odd years have indulged themselves in — enough dollars to fix all of our infrastructures, pave all of our roads, create jobs for all of us like there was no tomorrow, educate all of our children for free up to a doctoral degree, make sure we all have top-notch healthcare, and dress every single man, woman and child in America, Arabia and Israel/Palestine with at least one pair of Jimmy Choo shoes!

Just because we don’t dress up like Freddy Kruger, don’t play at being the Devil’s disciples and don’t eat live human hearts on national TV doesn’t mean that we don’t need supply lines too.

All these amazing opportunities for you and me have been wasted.  All that money is now gone with the wind, lost, wasted, never to return.  That ship has sailed.

“But Jane,” you might ask next, “does this mean that America, Israel/Palestine and Saudi Arabia are currently being ruled by selfish, immoral and blood-thirsty idiots?”  Well, yeah.

And here’s another hard truth:  American, Israeli and Saudi neo-con supply lines are also limited too.  They just can’t keep goosing us for our life-blood forever.  Eventually the oligarchs will run out of MREs, cruise missiles and port-a-potties too.  Theirs is not an endless supply line either.

Sooner or later, we average Americans, Israelis and Saudi Arabians are going to be empty and broken like the victims of so many vampires.  What then?  How will the neo-cons keep their war machines supplied once We the People are drained of our life’s blood?

How much money can these three countries spend on weapons and Iron Domes that don’t work and drones and bullets and missiles that cost a half-million dollars each (Israeli neo-cons just fired off 1,500 of them at the poor trapped citizens of Gaza) before the economies of these three countries are broken like rag dolls?  Oops, too late.  We are almost already there.

PPS:  And here’s another supply line to track:  Whoever is supplying the United Nations has also clearly purchased its soul as well — lock, stock and barrel.  For instance, this whole devastation of the civilian population of Gaza?  Women and children being slaughtered for their land — and not a peep from the UN in their defense.  Not even one word.  That’s just shameful.

According to journalist Robert Fisk, “The people who lived in Sederot in early 1948 were not Israelis, but Palestinian Arabs.  Their village was called Huj.  Nor were they enemies of Israel.  Two years earlier, these same Arabs had actually hidden Jewish Haganah fighters from the British Army.  But when the Israeli army turned up at Huj on 31 May 1948, they expelled all the Arab villagers – to the Gaza Strip!  Refugees, they became.  David Ben Gurion (Israel’s first Prime Minister) called it an ‘unjust and unjustified action’.  Too bad.  The  Palestinians of Huj were never allowed back.  And today, well over 6,000 descendants of the Palestinians from Huj – now Sederot – live in the squalor of Gaza….” 

The UN is currently as incapable of stopping wars now as the old League of Nations had been back in the day — because the UN’s very reason for being has been bought off by American and Israeli oligarchs.  It is now as dead as the old League of Nations.  The only real difference is that the UN has yet to lie down.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: How About Waging Heavy Peace In Tel Aviv?

On July 17^th Neil Young & Crazy Horse will perform at Hayarkon Park, Tel Aviv, a park built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Al Mirr, a land and people, destroyed and buried amidst unspeakable violence, but not forgotten. 

Neil Young is a Canadian singer, songwriter, guitarist and author of WAGING HEAVY PEACE

Crazy Horse is an American band best known for their association with Young beginning in 1969.

Crazy Horse has been co-credited on 11 studio albums and numerous live albums billed as by “Neil Young and Crazy Horse”.

In Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young’s 2012 autobiography, Young documents his life and career shifting from the past to present and from career to personal experiences.

On page 346, Neil Young wrote:

Somewhere along the line I had suggested the name Crazy Horse after the great Indian chief and the guys liked it. Neil Young with Crazy Horse. Not ‘and’…I liked that I was with them. Like we were together, not separate.

On page 137, Neil Young wrote:

When music is your life, there is a key that gets you to the core. I am so grateful that I still have Crazy Horse…they are my window to the cosmic world where the music lives and breathes. I can find myself there and go to the special area of my soul…

Just getting there is the key thing, and Crazy Horse is my way of getting there…

Am I too cosmic about this? I think not…

Do not doubt me in my sincerity, for it is that which has brought us to each other now.

In 2005, a coalition of over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations launched a campaign calling the international community to boycott Israel culturally, academically, and commercially  UNTIL Israel recognizes the indigenous Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, UNTIL Israel fully complies with international law and finally honors the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION of HUMAN RIGHTS upon which the Establishment of their very Statehood was contingent upon!

 Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

On the day of the termination of the British mandate and on the strength of the United Nations General Assembly declare The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.- May 14, 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel

In November 2006, Father Manuel, the parish Priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza warned the world:

Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry…people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.

Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles…Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.

Gaza cannot sleep…the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!

Because this American cannot improve on this Letter to Neil Young from the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel University Teachers’ Association it follows in full here:

16.03.2014

Besieged Gaza, Palestine

Dear Neil

We are Palestinian students and youth from the besieged Gaza Strip; we write to you now on a night engulfed by huge explosions ripping through our houses and neighborhoods again, more common than the thunder and hard rain also filling the night air.

And now we hear you plan on playing your inspiring music to a packed house in Hayarkon Park, Tel Aviv, a park built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Al Mirr, a land and people, destroyed and buried amidst unspeakable violence, but not forgotten. The residents of that Palestinian village and hundreds of other villages forcibly emptied by the nascent Israeli army, were either killed or denied return, denied the chance to even visit or commemorate the lives they once had. ⁽¹⁾

While the world turns its back, we hope that you don’t turn yours, that you heed the call of over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli regime until it abides by international law and stops denying us the right to live as any other human beings would expect.

Just as you didn’t perform in Apartheid South Africa, just as you stood up against racism in the US South, just as you have so admirably supported indigenous rights in Canada against the drilling for Tar Sands, we ask you to support indigenous, displaced people wherever they may be, including we Palestinians. The words of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in their recent move to boycott the Israeli regime echo the struggle for indigenous rights in America. ⁽²⁾

As this letter is penned the sound of more Israeli bombing reverberates around the tight refugee camps and narrow alleys where we live.

The camps are in complete darkness as the electricity has been cut.

The Israeli siege and previous bombing of our only power-plant has lead to huge fuel shortages, leaving us with just 6 hours of electricity each day.

This is just one night, but it is comparable to many other nights in Gaza, many worse nights.

We are used to facing the wrath of Israeli Merkhava tanks, drones, shellings, bombs and snipers that have brutally murdered and maimed our people for decades, for the crime of being born Palestinians, the wrong “ethnic group” for the Israeli regime who since it was established has done everything to wipe us off the map.

Listening to music is difficult in these circumstances, despite our passion for it. We have our own big range of music we love to play and Debka dance. But we have few instruments. Israel’s air, land and sea blockade of all our borders has meant for years musical instruments were banned from entry to Gaza.^[3]

Other items denied to us were coriander, nutmeg, ginger, dried fruit, fresh meat, lentils, pasta, chocolate, fishing rods, cattle, toys, donkey, workbooks and newspapers. Dov Weisglass, an advisor to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explicitly outlined their intentions to collectively punish our population, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”, he announced, in contravention of article 33 of the Geneva Conventions and condemned by all major human rights organizations. ^(4]

The violence behind Israel’s military occupation of our land is relentless and this week is no different. It began with Israeli border police shooting and killing a 38 year old Palestinian judge Raed Zeitar, the other bus passengers forced to sit and watch as he bled to death. Then 18-year-old Saji Darwish, Humanities student at Birzeit university, was shot in the head in Beitin, near Ramallah. Thousands attended his funeral the following day.

Tuesday saw four more murdered in the West Bank and Gaza.

On Wednesday Israeli authorities approved the construction of 387 housing units in the illegal settlement of Ramat Shlomo, denying the Palestinian towns of Beit Hanina and Shuafat the possibility to expand. And today a three-month old baby Ahmed Ammar Abu Nahal died of enlarged heart and liver as a result of the closure of Gaza crossings, a closure that has also left our hospitals bereft of medical supplies.

And right now we sit paralyzed in our homes as the bombs fall on us in Gaza.

Who knows when the current attacks will end.

Permanently etched on our minds are the rivers of blood that ran through the Gaza streets when for over 3 weeks in 2009 over 1400 were killed including over 330 children, with white phosphorous and other chemical weapons used in civilian areas and contaminating our land with a rise in cancers as a result.

More recently 170 more were killed in the weeklong attacks in late November 2012.

How many more sleeping in their beds now will face the same fate in the coming days, weeks and months? The trauma, fear and uncertainty never goes away.

Over two thirds of the Palestinians here in Gaza are UN registered refugees.

Over half of us are children.

We or our descendants were dispossessed entirely and forcibly removed from our homes.

The extent of this ethnic cleansing was such that one in three refugees worldwide is a Palestinian.

Expulsions of Palestinians continue today especially in Jerusalem and the West Bank, places that we in Gaza are no longer able to visit.

For what crime? The crime of being born Palestinian.

The Israeli regime denies us the freedom to come to enjoy your music, we live our lives surrounded by Navy Gunships along the sea, jeeps and wall tower snipers along the land frontier, and skies filled with the kind of aircraft unleashing yet more devastating attacks tonight.

The Gaza Strip has been made an outdoor prison, a reality beyond which most youth can never imagine, because most can never leave.

Others are hearing us and the world is beginning to wake up.

Many of your contemporaries are taking a stand including Carlos Santana, Roger Waters, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello and the late, great Pete Seeger and Gil Scott Heron, who said he wouldn’t play in Israel “until everyone is welcome there”. ⁽⁵⁾

As Israeli Apartheid week kicked off in South Africa this week, an event that has taken place in over 150 different locations worldwide, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for the world to support the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions of Israel, just as many other Anti Apartheid heroes from South Africa have affirmed. Tutu said in his statement on Monday, “I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.” ⁽⁶⁾

Long before he died, Nelson Mandela demanded that we should have the self determination of any other people. “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”, he said.

Will you sing “living with war” to an audience most of which will have served or are serving in the Israeli army that during the day were bombing our families, or manning the hundreds of checkpoints that make simple journeys daily acts of humiliation?

While we in Gaza can never return to our homes that lay buried around the areas in which you will be travelling freely, will you sing, “A hundred voices from a hundred lands, need someone to listen.  People are dying here and there.”

On the struggle to support First Nations rights in Canada and environmental protection you said: “If you have a conscience, you can`t go through your day without realizing what`s going on, and questioning it, and going, “Is this right?”⁽⁷⁾

This is the question to mull over as here in Gaza a short period of silence has descended after the bombs rained down on us yet again tonight Show the courage to say that this system of violent discrimination and racial segregation is unacceptable in Palestine, just as you showed it to be unacceptable in the American South, unacceptable in Apartheid South Africa and unacceptable for the Indigenous of the Americas.

Stand on the right side of history and stand with us, and don’t entertain apartheid Israel this July.

Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel University Teachers’ Association

###

How about Neil Young & Crazy Horse entertain Tel Aviv and wage some heavy peace by broadcasting this image on the stage at Hayarkon Park on July 17?

References:

(1) http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/place.php?plid=1985

(2) http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/major-indigenous-studies-group-endorses-israel-boycott

(3) http://www.gazagateway.org/tag/musical-instruments/

(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/16/israel#sthash.EtPIzrik.dpuf

(5) http://www.usacbi.org/2010/04/gil-scott-heron-announces-cancellation-of-tel-aviv-concert-artist-won%E2%80%99t-play-in-israel-%E2%80%9Cuntil-everyone-is-welcome-there%E2%80%9D/

(6) http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.578872

(7) http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/18/sbt.01.html

Not Another Article On Syria? Well, Yeah

“Just exactly how many articles on Syria and Iraq can you actually churn out?” a friend of mine asked me recently.  “You were only over in Damascus for five freaking days.  And you haven’t been to Iraq since 2008.  So what makes YOU such an expert on these two countries?”

Even after less than a week spent in Damascus and after only having been to Iraq four-and-a-half times, I apparently already know more about Syria and Baghdad and Al Ambar than all those dingbats in the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA combined.  Unfortunately.

Washington neo-cons and their neo-con counterparts in Tel Aviv have really gotten the Arab world totally wrong.

So, even though I would really rather be writing about almost anything else right now, it is still my civic duty to set these fools straight.  Sorry about that.

What I really want to be writing about this week is the exciting new Freedom Summer 50th-anniversary conference in Jackson, Mississippi, where a bunch of folks are getting together to celebrate having survived the heroic summer of 1964 when so many civil rights workers poured their hearts out in an attempt to finally bring justice to the Ol’ South — and some of them lost their lives while doing it too .

But apparently justice in the Ol’ South will have to wait a bit longer.  Right now we need to talk about justice in the Middle East first.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., Washington neo-cons needed a new boogeyman to scare Americans into handing over our hard-earned tax dollars to the military-industrial complex.  And so the military-industrial complex came up with the idea of making Islam the bad guy.  But then apparently Washington neo-cons actually began to believe their own hype — and even went so far as to actually start creating and financing “Islamic Militants” where none had existed so far.

According to journalist Fenian Cunningham, “The biggest recruitment office for such groups [as ISIS] is the British government and its criminal militaristic foreign policy, which has been destroying countries for years, overtly and covertly.  That same destructive British state-sponsored terrorism, alongside that of its American and other NATO allies, is also why millions of Syrians and Iraqis are living in tents, unable to feed their families.”

The thumbscrews were not only put onto various Islamic countries until “militants” actually did start to emerge, but then Wall Street and War Street — bound and determined to sell as many weapons as possible — actually started creating “Islamic Militants” themselves (and of course all the while praying for another “Pearl Harbor”)

According to an article in Information Clearinghouse, “Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials…Former US State Department official Andrew Doran wrote in the conservative National Review magazine that some ISIS warriors also hold US passports.”

Neo-cons began manufacturing these Frankenstein monsters left and right, actually paying thousands of poor unfortunate souls in the Middle East to go on “jihad”.  https://veracityvoice.com/?p=20684

Even way back in the 1970s I could have warned the military-industrial complex that these acts of folly would eventually start leading to blow-back — not to mention the sky-rocketing cost of gasoline as a result of all this footsie-playing in the Middle East.

According to journalist Juan Cole, “During the past ten years, American drivers have seen their gasoline bill go up tremendously – though not as much as it by all rights should have – and stay there.”  

Apparently, The M-IC’s money-making scheme in the Middle East was that various U.S. and Israeli neo-cons would be constantly stirring up the pot there, turning Arab against Arab until they all freaking started to butcher each other like so many crabs in a barrel.  And then the U.S. and Israeli neo-cons would steal everything that wasn’t nailed down while no one over there was looking.  It sounded like a good plan.  Until the rest of us Americans and Israelis finally began to realize that there was nothing in this witches’ brew for the rest of us except danger to ourselves.

According to me, ISIS is nothing but a bunch of pirates, the Taliban are murdering wife-beaters, the idiots in charge of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Iraq are dictators and Libya is overrun by barbarians.  And who created all these proto-zombies?  Neo-cons in Israel and the U.S.  Of course.

According to Franklin Lamb, who seems to be legendary in Damascus for fabricating stories and mooching off of the Syrian government, ISIS, Syria’s arch enemy, is practically a freaking benevolent organization who succors the poor, has nukes of its own and whose goal is to unite all the downtrodden Arabs in the Middle East into one coherent version of the freaking Red Cross and then liberate Palestine and wash Israel into the sea. https://veracityvoice.com/?p=20664 .

However, Palestinians in Syria did not support ISIS’s brutality and refused to be drawn in — so ISIS bombed the crap out of them instead.  And the Palestinians in Israel already have neo-cons killing their kids — and don’t need any more neo-con-backed pirates adding even more “creative chaos” to the mix.

Huh?  No.  Forget about the sparkling clean Red Cross wannabe image.  These ISIS guys are down and dirty pirates.  And that’s “all she wrote” about that.  And apparently we American taxpayers are paying for all of ISIS’s new Toyotas, rocket-launchers and Nikes as well.

“You talk as though the military-industrial complex may finally be starting to get its comeuppance for generating such a devious plot — but, frankly, it is not,” you might comment at this point.

No, it is not.  Not yet.  But if Wall Street and War Street continue to play their cutesy little “Divide and Conquer” games in the Middle East, keep on messing with its political eco-system, breaking down its civil society in this bad way, and creating and financing even more Al Qaedas, Talibans and ISISs and driving world gas prices sky-high, then eventually it will suck to be you! 

Even against all odds and proof, I still have faith that the rest of us Americans, us average decent salt-of-the-earth types, will finally put a stop to all these nefarious neo-con schemes and finally start bringing our money and our troops home from the Middle East instead — and stop picking on all these poor Arabs before they end up going completely freaking nuts as they see their parents, wives and children constantly being blown to bits before their very eyes by these neo-con monsters.

Not sure why I keep holding out hope that this will happen.  But do I really have any other choice?

Who Is Intolerant Because Ashamed: Creationists or Evolutionary Theologians

It’s no longer easy to be a faithful Christian in America, says Dr. Robert P. George, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.  Our culture increasingly condemns Christian beliefs as bigoted and hateful: 
 
“They despise us if we refuse to call good evil and evil good.” (American Christians Should Prepare to Be Despised, Official Tells National Prayer Breakfast, Rob Kerby, ChristianHeadlines.com, May 15, 2014) 
 
The Princeton University professor and author told Washington, D.C.’s 10th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast that American culture no longer favors faithful Christians. For example, he asked attendees to consider, 
 
“….the derision that comes from being pro-life and pro-traditional marriage (they) threaten us with consequences if we refuse to call what is good, evil, and what is evil, good. They demand us to conform our thinking to their orthodoxy, or else say nothing at all…”  
 
Dr. George told the prayer breakfast: 
 
“The intimidation to remain silent is insidious and growing…what American Christians are facing is the 21st century version of the question, ‘Am I ashamed of the Gospel?”   
 
If anything, some evolutionary theologians and their gullible Christian flocks, both evolutionary theist and progressive creationist, are at least as hostile if not more so toward faithful defenders of the miracle of Special Creation than are their evolutionary atheist and occult pantheist counterparts: Luciferians, god-men, goddesses, shaman, Satanists, witches, necromancers, and astrologers. 
 
The usual diatribe thrown against altogether despised creationists goes something like this:  
 
Since Darwin introduced the theory of evolution some Christians have been uncomfortable with the idea that all species (i.e., reptiles, birds, bugs, dogs, apes, humans) share a common ancestry moving from primordial matter to creeping things, crawling things, swimming things, knuckle-dragging things to man under the direction of the God of evolution.   Thus the Earth was not created instantaneously as St. Augustine held or created in six days as most early Church Fathers affirmed. Nor was Adam created by the One God in three Persons as a living soul embodied in flesh, fully person, fully man right from the beginning.   Adam and Eve, if they even existed were emergent products of evolution, their closest relative soulless hominids.  Thus the events described in Genesis are not meant to convey the miraculous creation ex nihilo but the scientific ‘reality’ that the universe has an impotent creator that made and ignited a Cosmic Egg (Big Bang) which generated matter and energy. Then after billions of years of God-directed evolution eventuating in the suffering and death of millions of life-forms (God’s fault, btw) man inexplicably fell from grace even though God is the guilty party, the real cause of death and suffering.  
 
According to this counter-intuitive Gnostic-laced tale of nonsense, evolutionary science, not God’s Revelation, is a reality in nature explainable by reason and empirical observation and faithful Christians who deny this are in denial of reality.  Faithful Christians who actually affirm the Revelation of God and Special Creation are guilty of defending the backwards, anti-scientific, anti-evolution ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation of the book of Genesis thus are not only a cause of embarrassment to fashionably-correct, scientifically enlightened Christians, but are also guilty of harming Christianity. (Creationism Harms Christianity, ) 
 
However, it isn’t faithful Christians who are ‘embarrassments’ but rather intellectually arrogant evolution-obsessed theologians.  These wolves in sheep clothing mesmerize and persuade susceptible Christian sheep to uncritically accept dangerous esoteric ideas like evolution.
 
 With respect to Darwin’s theory, Darwin is not its’ inventor. He received the idea from his nature-worshipping pagan grandfather Erasmus Darwin, an important name in European Masonic anti-Christian Church organizations engaged in destructive revolutionary activism. Erasmus mentored his grandson Charles: 
 
“Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the first man in England to suggest those ideas which were later to be embodied in the Darwinian theory by his grandson, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who wrote in 1859 Origin of Species.” (Scarlet and the Beast, Vol. II, John Daniel, p. 34) 
 
According to anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, longtime director of the American Museum of Natural History, ancient pagans are the inventers of modern evolutionism. In the introduction to his history of evolutionism Osborn wrote:
 
 “When I began the search for anticipations of the evolutionary theory….I was led back to the Greek natural philosophers and I was astonished to find how many of the pronounced and basic features of the Darwinian theory were anticipated even as far back as the seventh century B.C.” (Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin, p. xi) 
 
By its’ nature evolutionism belongs to the category of naturalism (all that exists is nature or cosmos), making it antithetical, or in fierce opposition to the infinite Triune God, the supernatural dimension and special creation.  The personal Triune God is outside of His creation—the natural dimension of space, time, matter and energy—thus He is not subject to the laws of science: 
 
“….science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited: either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief.” (Until the Sun Dies, Robert Jastrow, Ph.D. Theoretical Physics, pp. 62-63, 1977) 
 
Only by conceptually murdering the supernatural Triune God and replacing Him with a ‘god’ within the natural dimension (naturalism), thus subject to scientific inquiry, can intellectually arrogant theologians presume to speak for god, claiming that he made and exploded a Cosmic Egg and directs evolutionary transformism together with the rest of their twisted theology dressed in Christian clothing.
 
 As an idea evolution is like an onion consisting of multitudinous layers of esoteric meaning.  Darwin’s theory occupies two or three layers. The many other layers already existed prior to Erasmus going back to the Renaissance and before that to ancient Chaldea and India thence to ancient Greece and Rome where evolution is always and everywhere connected to reincarnation and spiritual evolution (transformism).    
 
On ancient pagan conceptions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution early Church Father Gregory of Nyssa said: 
 
“[I]f one should search carefully, he will find that their doctrine is of necessity brought down to this. They tell us that one of their sages said that he, being one and the same person, was born a man, and afterward assumed the form of a woman, and flew about with the birds, and grew as a bush, and obtained the life of an aquatic creature—and he who said these things of himself did not, so far as I can judge, go far from the truth, for such doctrines as this—of saying that one should pass through many changes—are really fitting for the chatter of frogs or jackdaws or the stupidity of fishes or the insensibility of trees” (The Making of Man 28:3; A.D. 379).  
 
Evolution appeared in Christendom during the Renaissance when certain Christian theologians, mystics and scholars such as Emanuel Swedenborg had discovered Chaldean astrology, Hermetic magic, occult Jewish Kabbalah, Eastern mystical traditions and the ancient ways of ‘going within’ (contacting spirits).  All of this was accompanied by conceptions of reincarnation and spiritual evolution.  They studied these ancient occult traditions which they translated resulting in Hermetic Kabbalah. Then like Pico della Mirandola, they argued that occult hermetic science – the divine technology or Magic Way of reaching divine status and powers through ritual procedures and spiritual evolution is the best proof of the divinity of Christ.  (God and the Knowledge of Reality, Thomas Molnar, pp. 78-79) 
 
Father Richard John Neuhaus pulls all of these occult traditions together in his analysis of modern evolutionary scientism as a revitalization of ancient spiritual traditions closely connected to elemental spirits. In his book, “American Babylon,” Neuhaus argues that astrological elemental spirits (powers and principalities) have been recast as, 
 
“…evolutionary dynamics, life forces, or laws of nature.” Though described as laws rather than spirits, these elemental “forces”…. work their inexorable ways in cold indifference to reason, to will, to love, and to hope. In short, it is suggested that the elemental spirits are in charge and that human freedom is a delusion.” (p. 226)
 
 Despite that modern evolutionary theologians validate their esoteric projects as empirical or observational science in reality observational science is their enemy.   For instance, evolutionary theology alleges that hominids are supposed to be our ancestors, the so-called transitional life-forms linking modern humans to the common ancestor of all life.    
 
However, the hominid claim has fallen flat on its’ face, said Carl Wieland. In “Making Sense of Apeman Claims,” Wieland reports that a consistent pattern has emerged in direct opposition to the evolutionary story.  Over the decades, each new fossil find has been falling quite naturally into one of only three major groups.    And two of these, Neanderthal and Homo erectus turn out to be strikingly similar, in fact, Neanderthals are “clearly human descendants of Adam.” (Creation, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2014, p. 38)
 
 Although the third category generates the most excitement among evolution-worshippers it turns out to be an extinct non-human primate group, anatomically not between apes and humans.    
 
Sequencing of Neanderthal DNA clearly shows interbreeding with modern populations, particularly those from Eastern Europe, meaning that Neanderthals are not a separate species, despite evolutionary claims that they split off from the human lineage 500,000 years ago.  This evidence is a major blow to evolutionary theist and “progressive” or “old-earth creationist notions.” (p. 38). 
 
It is because evolutionary ‘old-earth’ theologians reject what God said in favor of what man said, their starting point is fallible secular dating, hence they, 
 
“….must regard Neanderthals as pre-Adamic soulless nonhumans despite all the archaeological evidences of their humanity.   But DNA now makes this completely dead in the water, having children together means they must be the same created kind.”  (pp. 38-39) 
 
Among the scientifically affirmed finds showing that Neanderthals were human are: 
 
1. Stone tools and specialized bone tools for leatherworking. 
 
2. The controlled use of fire, including heating birch bark peelings to make special pitch to haft wooden shafts onto stone tools. 
 
3.  Perfectly balanced, finely crafted wooden hunting javelins. 
 
4. Jewelry 
 
5. Evidence of body decorations and cosmetics. 
 
6. Burying their dead with ornaments. 
 
7. Cooking utensils and the use of herbs in food. 
 
8. Symbolic thinking 
 
9. High-tech ‘superglue’ 
 
10. A complex structure built 1 mile underground where no daylight penetrates suggests the technology and know-how to transport sustained fire as a source of light that far down. 
 
11. Evidence of dwellings made of timber draped with animal skins 
 
12.  Recent detailed analysis of hyoid bone (associated with the voice box) indicates they could speak, as does recent genetic evidence.  (ibid, Wieland) 
 
“For he spoke and they were made: he commanded and they were created.” Psalm 33:9  
 
Either the infinite personal One God in three Persons spoke or He did not. If He did, then Jesus is God in the flesh, the Creator and Living Word (John 1: 1-5) the Light that came into the world (John 3: 1-9) who perfectly fulfills all prophecy from the antediluvian world to the post-flood world: 
 
“And he said: I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face: for he durst not look at God.”     Exodus 3:6 
 
If the One God in three Persons spoke then what He revealed to Moses with respect to the miracle of creation is thesis (True Truth), making evolution antithesis (the lie).  The faith of the Christian Church and of the average Christian has had, and still has, its foundation as much in the literal and historic elements of Genesis, the book of beginnings revealed ‘mouth to mouth’ by the Angel to Moses, as in that of the person and deity of Jesus Christ.  
 
The Return of an Ancient Heresy  
 
The primary tactic employed by defiant, intellectually proud theologians eager to accommodate Scripture and the Church to modern science and pagan evolutionary thinking is predictable. It is the argument that evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible when Genesis, especially the first three chapters, is viewed in its entirety in a non-literal, non-historical context. This is not a heresy unique to modern times. The early Church Fathers dealt with this heresy as well, counting it among the heretical tendencies of apostate Jewish Cabbalists, Origenists and Gnostic pagans such as Simon Magus. 
 
Fourth-century Fathers such as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and Ephraim the Syrian, all of whom wrote commentaries on Genesis, specifically warned against treating Genesis as an unhistorical myth or allegory. John Chrysostom strongly warned against paying heed to these heretics, 
 
“…let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Fr. Seraphim Rose, p. 31)
 
 As St. Cyril of Alexandria wrote, higher theological, spiritual meaning is founded upon humble, simple faith in the literal and historic elements of Genesis as Revealed by God and one cannot apprehend rightly the Scriptures without believing in the historical reality of the events and people they describe. (ibid, Seraphim Rose, p. 40) 
 
In agreement, Vishal Mangalwadi (1949- ), founder-president of BOMI/Revelation Movement observes that the Revelation of God is the only available foundation for truth, freedom and faith in God’s gift of reason.  But Western theologians and intellectuals have closed their minds to Revelation, hence Truth, reason and Special Creation.  Because “intelligent” Americans no longer believe in “True Truth” (Francis Schaeffer) they invent stories and use empty god words as substitutes for the infinite, personal Triune God.  Thus Gospel Truth is now ‘Gospel Story’ and history a series of unfolding stories such as the physical science story (Big Bang) which may or may not include the use of a god-word; the biological science story (evolutionary transformism), the climate science story (global warming or change), and the social science story (gay marriage): 
 
“Doing science” increasingly means peddling politically correct dogma – that is, stories that have evolved into myths. No one really knows if there was only one Big Bang or other bigger bangs as well; whether we live in a universe or multi-verse; whether life evolved on this planet or came from outer space . . . but if you want a tenured position in a university, and if you want your research projects funded, you have to toe politically correct storyline – champion dogma.”  (How Did the West’s ‘Rational Animal’ Become Incapable of Using Reason? Mangalwadi) 
 
The abandonment of God’s Revelation in favor of story-telling   
 
Christendom and Protestant America did not emerge from the darkness of story-telling and god-words but arose to illustrious heights on the awe-inspiring wings of the Revelation of God, hence the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo, the uniquely Christian definition of man as a person because created in the spiritual image of the infinite One God in three Persons, God’s unchanging Moral Law and the Biblical view of man’s sinful condition. Their subsequent fall was traced by Richard Weaver in his book, “Ideas Have Consequences” (1945). 
 
Weaver writes that 14th century Western man had made an “evil decision” to abandon his belief in the transcendent Triune God, His Revelation and unchanging universals, thus the position that “there is a source of truth higher than and independent of man…” The consequence of this ‘evil decision’ is a still unfolding catastrophe reaching fullness in our own time: 
 
“The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably…the denial of truth. With the denial of objective truth there is no escape from the relativism of ‘man is the measure of all things.” (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 32-33) 
 
The substance of ‘man is the measure of all things’ is idolatry.  The beginning of idolatry is pride (narcissism), which together with selfishness demonstrates preference for one’s self instead of the Triune God, His Revelation (hence ‘True Truth’) and neighbor (and unwanted, inconvenient human life, i.e., babies).  Just as no violation of the Law can occur without one first being an idolater, envy/covetousness and murder are its’ final results, for where ‘self’ is primary then ‘self’ deserves everything it can get, no matter the cost to other people.   
 
The fall of the West and America is due to the idolatry of darkened souls turned by choice toward evil.  From the antediluvians to our own age, the truth as to this evil said Athanasius, 
 
“….is that it originates, and resides, in the perverted choice of the darkened soul” which, “materialized by forgetting God” and engrossed in lower things, “makes them into gods,” and thereby “descends into a hopeless depth of delusion and superstition,” whereby “they ceased to think that anything existed beyond what is seen, or that anything was good save things temporal and bodily; so turning away and forgetting that she was in the image of the good God, she no longer… sees God the Word after whose likeness she is made; but having departed from herself, imagines and feigns what is not (and then) advancing further in evil, they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the principles of which bodies are composed….“(Against the Heathen, New Advent) 
 
Having descended into delusion and superstition darkened souls imagined that “all that exists” is the natural dimension, meaning the universe of matter, animated powers, forces, and deterministic laws, all of which they celebrated and attributed miraculous powers to just as modern evolution worshippers do, whether secular or theological: 
 
“There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it ‘Spirit,’ and Obi-Wan called it ‘the Force’…..This energy, spark, and electricity that pulses through all of creation sustains it, fuels it, and keeps it growing. Growing, evolving, reproducing…” (Love Wins, Rob Bell, pgs. 144-145) 
 
Evolutionary scientism is not observational science in search of how things really work in this world but rather a disastrous occult science tradition whose taproot stretches back to Babylon and before that the pre-flood world.   The ‘Christian’ teachers and defenders of this demonic heresy are guilty of leading unwitting sheep astray, possibly to their doom, and of besmirching and defaming faithful defenders of special creation as backwards, anti-science, anti-evolution destroyers of the faith.   However, in reality creationists are the defenders of thesis (True Truth) against the damnable incursion of antithesis (occultism) into the good news, the Gospel of Christ. 
 
 In this light, what are vicious attacks against Special Creation as well as those against the sanctity of human life, and traditional one man one woman marriage but evil wills offended by and resentful of Higher Authority, True Truth, ‘other’ (unwanted, inconvenient human life) and moral restrictions and limitations? 
 
“For whoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s, and of the holy angels.”    Luke 9:26 
 
Who are the intolerant ones, the highly offended because ashamed of our Lord and his words?  Who are the selfish, intellectually arrogant story-tellers whose embarrassing doctrine of change (evolution) is “really fitting for the chatter of frogs or jackdaws or the stupidity of fishes or the insensibility of trees”‘?   
 
Hint:  Not Creationists or any of the faithful. 

A Wasteful, Growing, Fear-Mongering Beast

What The DHS Is Building Is Indeed A Beast…

One of the great concerns of our Founding Fathers was a large standing army on American soil. James Madison spoke for all of America’s founders when he said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” I wonder what Madison and the rest of our founders would have to say about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

John Whitehead, the president of The Rutherford Institute, recently wrote a trenchant summary of the DHS. He began by saying, “If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most–a standing army on American soil.”

Whitehead observes that the DHS employs over 240,000 full time workers and has an annual budget of $61 billion. Sub-agencies of the DHS include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Whitehead states, “In the 12 years since it was established to ‘prevent terrorist attacks within the United States,’ the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS’ purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

“A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: one, the agency lacks leadership; two, terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; three, the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; four, the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; five, ‘An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification’; and six, the agency is just plain bloated.”

In addition to Kenny’s reasons for shutting down the DHS, Whitehead adds the following indictments:

“Militarizing police and SWAT teams. The DHS routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, ‘paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.’ The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war–and the citizenry are the enemy combatants.

“Stockpiling ammunition. DHS, along with other government agencies, has been stockpiling an alarming amount of ammunition in recent years, which only adds to the discomfort of those already leery of the government. As of 2013, DHS had 260 million rounds of ammo in stock, which averages out to between 1,300 to 1,600 rounds per officer. The US Army, in contrast, has roughly 350 rounds per soldier. DHS has since requisitioned more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammo, ‘enough,’ concludes Forbes magazine, ‘to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.’

“Distributing license plate readers. DHS has already distributed more than $50 million in grants to enable local police agencies to acquire license plate readers, which rely on mobile cameras to photograph and identify cars, match them against a national database, and track their movements. Relying on private contractors to maintain a license plate database allows the DHS and its affiliates to access millions of records without much in the way of oversight.

“Contracting to build detention camps. In 2006, DHS awarded a $385 million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary to build detention centers on American soil. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of ‘an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs’ in the event of other emergencies such as ‘natural disasters.’ Viewed in conjunction with the NDAA provision allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens, it would seem the building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality.

“Tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices. Distributed to local police agencies as a result of grants from the DHS, these Stingray devices enable police to track individuals’ cell phones–and their owners–without a court warrant or court order. The amount of information conveyed by these devices about one’s activities, whereabouts and interactions is considerable. As one attorney explained: ‘Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover’s house, in a psychologist’s office or at a political protest.’

“Carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities. Each year, DHS funds military-style training drills in cities across the country. These Urban Shield exercises, elaborately staged with their own set of professionally trained Crisis Actors playing the parts of shooters, bystanders and victims, fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers, bystanders and the media into thinking it’s a real crisis.

“Using the TSA as an advance guard. The TSA now searches a variety of government and private databases, including things like car registrations and employment information, in order to track travelers’ before they ever get near an airport. Other information collected includes ‘tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law enforcement or intelligence information.’

“Conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners. Under the direction of the TSA, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced patdowns at airports to bag searches in train stations. In response to public outrage over what amounted to a virtual strip search, the TSA has begun replacing the scanners with equally costly yet less detailed models. The old scanners will be used by prisons for now.

“Carrying out soft target checkpoints. VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams have laid the groundwork for the government’s effort to secure so-called ‘soft’ targets such as malls, stadiums, bridges, etc. Some security experts predict that checkpoints and screening stations will eventually be established at all soft targets, such as department stores, restaurants, and schools. DHS’ Operation Shield, a program which seeks to check up on security protocols around the country with unannounced visits, conducted a surprise security exercise at the Social Security Administration building in Leesburg, Fla., when they subjected people who went to pick up their checks to random ID checks by federal agents armed with semi-automatic weapons.

“Directing government workers to spy on Americans. Terrorism Liaison Officers are firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees who have received training to spy on and report back to government entities on the day-to-day activities of their fellow citizens. These individuals are authorized to report ‘suspicious activity’ which can include such innocuous activities as taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs, and buying items in bulk.

“Conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers. Data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency, fusions centers–of which there are at least 78 scattered around the U.S.–constantly monitor our communications, collecting and cataloguing everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police. Despite a budget estimated to be somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion, these fusion centers have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on ‘flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.’”

On a personal note, I can testify to Whitehead’s warning regarding fusion centers. When I ran as the Constitution Party’s candidate for President back in 2008, DHS fusion centers funneled warnings to the State of Missouri law enforcement agencies to be on the look-out for people sporting bumper stickers with my name, Ron Paul’s name, and Bob Barr’s (the Libertarian Party candidate for President that same year) name. People with these bumper stickers were said to be “potential dangerous militia members,” “extremists,” etc.

When word of this blatant violation of fundamental liberties publicly surfaced, tens of thousands of outraged Americans inundated the political offices within the State of Missouri. Ron, Bob, and I sent a letter to the governor and MIAC officer in charge demanding an apology and that the statements be removed from Missouri law enforcement memos. Public pressure was so massive that it didn’t take long for Missouri officials to apologize to us and remove the libelous statements. However, if you think this kind of conduct is not continuing, you are very mistaken.

I have had several liberty-minded law enforcement officers (in several states) personally show me interoffice memos and computer reports depicting me (and several other liberty-minded public figures) as “extremists,” “radicals,” “hate-group leaders,” etc. Virtually, every such memo or report is being distributed to local police departments and sheriff’s offices via DHS fusion centers–in concert with the ultra-liberal Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Whitehead continues:

“Carrying out Constitution-free border control searches. On orders from the DHS, the government’s efforts along the border have become little more than an exercise in police state power, ranging from aggressive checkpoints to the widespread use of drone technology, often used against American citizens traveling within the country. Border patrol operations occur within 100 miles of an international crossing, putting some 200 million Americans within the bounds of aggressive border patrol searches and seizures, as well as increasingly expansive drone surveillance. With 71 checkpoints found along the southwest border of the United States alone, suspicionless search and seizures on the border are rampant. Border patrol agents also search the personal electronic devices of people crossing the border without a warrant.

“Funding city-wide surveillance cameras. As Charlie Savage reports for the Boston Globe, the DHS has funneled ‘millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a “surveillance society” in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost.’ These camera systems, installed on city streets, in parks and transit systems, operating in conjunction with sophisticated computer systems that boast intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification, military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime and facial recognition software, create a vast surveillance network that can target millions of innocent individuals.

“Utilizing drones and other spybots. The DHS has been at the forefront of funding and deploying surveillance robots and drones for land, sea and air, including robots that resemble fish and tunnel-bots that can travel underground. Despite repeated concerns over the danger surveillance drones used domestically pose to Americans’ privacy rights, the DHS has continued to expand its fleet of Predator drones, which come equipped with video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. DHS also loans its drones out to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies for a variety of tasks, although the agency refuses to divulge any details as to how, why and in what capacity these drones are being used by police. Incredibly, the DHS has also been handing out millions of dollars in grants to local police agencies to ‘accelerate the adoption’ of drones in their localities.”

Whitehead concludes by saying, “It’s not difficult to see why the DHS has been described as a ‘wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.’ If it is a beast, however, it is a beast that is accelerating our nation’s transformation into a police state through its establishment of a standing army, a.k.a. national police force.”

See John Whitehead’s report here:

When the British government employed such tactics (in their own way, given the lack of technology in the mid-1700s), the pulpits of Colonial America thundered forth the call of liberty. Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Separatists, Anglicans: it didn’t matter. Pastors from across the denominational spectrum boldly and courageously implored their congregants to resist these tyrannical tactics. And resist they did!

So, what are our pastors and churches doing today in the face of this burgeoning police state? For the most part, they are sitting back mute and dumb. If they are not absolutely apathetic to the rise of this beast, they are actually assisting it. Through the egregiously unbiblical interpretation of Romans 13, whereby pastors are telling their adherents to submit to evil government, or through the fear of losing their precious 501c3 tax-exempt status, pastors are deliberately leading their churches as sheep to the slaughter.

And make no mistake about it: what the DHS is building is indeed a BEAST. And prophecy buffs should be well-acquainted with that word. Does not the Scripture warn us that there are “many” anti-Christs in the world? Is not the word “beast” and “anti-Christ” synonymous? They absolutely are. Prophecy students are also well aware of the fact that the prophetic “beast” is as much a system as it is a person. Without a doubt, this beastly system is being constructed before our very eyes.

Interestingly enough, this beast was created by the professing Christian president, G.W. Bush. Is that why Christian pastors are so complacent? Are they truly that gullible? A “conservative” Republican creates the beast, and a “liberal” Democrat feeds it. Both are equally culpable.

These pastors can talk about following Jesus all they want; they can cry crocodile tears when they sing Amazing Grace all they want; they can preach about Heaven all they want; and they can talk about being “born again” all they want. But if they are not warning their people about this growing beast, and if they are not emphatically imploring their people to resist this beast, they are helping to feed their sheep to the wolves.

Dear Christian friends, get out of these churches! As nice as the pastor seems to be, as sincere as he seems to be, as doctrinally-sound as he appears to be, by his refusal to resist this growing police state he is helping to put the chains of slavery around the necks of your children and grandchildren. He is facilitating the rise of a very dangerous and hungry beast in our land.

Real men of God throughout history have been noted by their courage to resist the evil beasts that have attempted to devour God’s people. From Gideon and Samson to Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, and from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller to Jonas Clark and James Caldwell, these men of God were indefatigable and heroic champions of liberty.

The “standing military force” and “overgrown Executive” are here! Now, where are the patriot pulpits to resist them?

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