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.

The War Against Our Natural Right of Self-Defense Continues

Culprits Include The City Of Chicago, Big Retailers, The Media, And Churches…

Proponents of the Nanny State have been trying to take away man’s Natural right of self-defense ever since the United Nations was created back in 1945. Of course, the Natural right of self-defense is totally unknown in communist and socialist countries; and big-government toadies in several so-called “democratic” countries have also succeeded in turning citizens into subjects by removing or severely restricting the Natural right of self-defense. Obviously, I’m talking about countries such as Great Britain, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.

By self-defense, I am talking about a man’s right to carry a Personal Defense Weapon (PDW)–which, in modern times, mostly requires a firearm–anywhere and everywhere he goes. A state that does not allow a man to be personally armed in his day-to-day activities is literally stripping him of his right of self-defense. To require a citizen to keep his or her PDW in their home or vehicle is to deny the citizen’s Natural right of self-defense. To say a citizen may lawfully protect himself in only limited and duly-prescribed locations is to make the citizen a subject of the state. Furthermore, it removes from him the most fundamental of all the Natural rights that were granted to him by his Creator: the right of self-defense.

Four-legged predators are constantly on the prowl for animals that are defenseless. Two-legged predators do the same thing. These human predators do not respect “gun-free” zones. Like all predators, they are opportunistic beasts. They prey on the weak and vulnerable. When the state takes away a person’s right to be always armed, it makes the entire citizenry weak and vulnerable. As I have said many times, guns don’t kill people; gun-free zones kill people.

Gun control laws are among the most egregious violations of Natural Law. Men and women who are truly free are allowed to carry a PDW everywhere they go. Banks, schools, government buildings, churches, etc., should be no exceptions. It is no coincidence that just about every single mass-shooting in recent memory has taken place in a so-called “gun-free” zone, where the only people who were armed were the perpetrators. Gun-free zones turn free men into human prey.

For all intents and purposes, several states and major cities within the United States have become “gun-free” zones, in that they mostly deny their citizens the right to carry a PDW on their person. Whether the people of these cities and states realize it or not, they have lost the right to be called free men and have been turned into human prey by their own State and municipal governments. There is no greater example of this tyranny than the city of Chicago, Illinois.

Chicago has some of the strictest and most stringent gun-control laws in the entire nation. The government of Chicago has, in effect, turned the town into a giant killing-field where ravenous two-legged beasts are allowed to feast on the millions of defenseless prey that inhabit our country’s third largest city. For example, over the past Independence Day weekend, 82 people were shot and 14 people were killed in Chicago violence. Breitbart.com covered the story:

“Breitbart reported that the violence was high on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning, but when Thursday, the final hours of Sunday, and the first few hours of Monday morning were added to the accounting, the rate of violence proved to be even more appalling.

“On Monday morning, July 7, the Chicago Tribune shocked the city with the list of weekend violence reporting that between Thursday, as the holiday weekend began, to the early hours of Monday morning, Chicago experienced 82 shootings with 14 killed.”

Included in the Breitbart report is the fact that one man’s life was actually saved by virtue of the fact that he had a concealed carry permit (no small feat in the City of Chicago) and used his PDW to protect himself against three violent miscreants. In this case, one of the dead was a violent predator. Had the innocent citizen not been armed, he would have been the statistic. In addition, the report states that eight of the dead were at the hands of Chicago police officers in the line of duty, proving, once again, that policemen carry guns, not for the protection of the citizenry, but for their own protection.

Predictably, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blamed the increased violence on “weak” gun laws in the neighboring states of Indiana and Wisconsin.

See the Breitbart.com report here:

Of course, what Emanuel won’t tell you is that the violent crime rates of those states where the right to keep AND BEAR arms is less infringed are far less–far less! For example, there are 11 states in the country that allow their citizens to carry firearms freely and openly with no permit or license required. Those states are Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota, Vermont, Kentucky, and Virginia. So, using Emanuel’s logic, one could expect that there should have been hundreds of shootings in those states last weekend–what with their “weak” gun laws and all, right? You know that’s not true.

Check the incidents of shootings in the above-listed states and we might even discover that the City of Chicago may have had more shootings over this past Independence Day weekend than those 11 states COMBINED. Think of it: the City of Chicago (with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country) may have had more shootings than the combined shootings of the 11 states that recognize their citizens’ Natural right of self-defense by allowing them to freely and openly carry a PDW.

Of course, it’s not only various and sundry governments (though they are the most egregious usurpers of the Natural right of self-defense) that want to deny people the right to bear arms; many large retailers are adding their weight to the anti-self-defense hysteria.

Just a few days ago, the giant retailer, Target, announced a corporate policy that asks its patrons to leave their firearms at home. Once again, Breitbart.com covers the story.

“On July 2nd, Target ‘respectfully’ asked law-abiding citizens to ‘not bring firearms’ in their stores.

“The department store chain did this via an announcement posted on its website and shared by interim CEO John Mulligan.

“The announcement says:

“‘As you’ve likely seen in the media, there’s been a debate about whether guests in communities that permit “open carry” should be allowed to bring firearms into Target stores. Our approach has always been to follow local laws, and of course, we will continue to do so. But starting today we will respectfully request that guests not bring firearms to Target–even in communities where it is permitted by law.’

“By taking this step, Target joins Chipotle, Jack in the Box, Sonic, and Chili’s in asking law-abiding citizens not to carry guns in their businesses.”

The author of the report, AWR Hawkins, notes, “Within two weeks of asking law-abiding customers to come unarmed, two Jack in the Box stores were robbed, and a shooting took place at a third. Patrons were robbed at gunpoint in one of the robberies, as well.”

See the report at:

But the war against your Natural right to self-defense doesn’t stop with the City of Chicago or the Target chain-stores. The mainstream media seem absolutely determined to take away your right to defend yourself and your loved ones.

After CNN sacked Piers Morgan due to his immense unpopularity, which was mostly due to his arrogant attacks against America’s Second Amendment, the cable network recently announced that it was replacing Morgan with former America’s Most Wanted host, John Walsh, who immediately proclaimed that his show would continue Morgan’s attacks against the Second Amendment.

Once more, Breitbart.com covers the story:

“Former America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh is hosting a new show on CNN on which he vows to keep the push for gun control and the war on the NRA alive.

“According to The Wrap, Walsh said:

“‘I’m the father of a murdered child. I’ve done nothing but track violence in America since my son was murdered. We have a serious problem with guns in this country… and the NRA solution to arm every grammar-school 80-year-old teacher with a gun is absolutely ludicrous.’

“He claims the NRA has gotten so big and financially powerful through relationships with gun manufacturers that ‘they’re not a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, they’re a gun manufacturer rep.’

“Walsh’s new show, The Hunt, premieres July 13. Walsh says he did not initially realize ‘how much his gun control efforts would be a part of his new show.’”

See the report at:

Obviously, CNN is hoping that it’s continued anti-Second Amendment agenda will be more palatable to the American people if it comes from a fellow American–especially one with whom everyone can truly sympathize with by virtue of his losing a child to an act of violence (although Adam Walsh’s murder did not involve the use of a firearm)–than from the arrogant and pompous British elitist, Piers Morgan. But make no mistake about it: the anti-Second Amendment message is the same. Only the messenger has changed.

And most sadly, churches, too, are often at the forefront of the anti-self-defense fanaticism. Christian leaders from denominations across the board are often the ones who promote gun control (even gun confiscation) among their congregations and who deny their parishioners the right to be armed on church property.

For example, back in 2004, the president of the LDS church issued a declaration to all Mormon churches in Utah that gave “public notice that firearms are prohibited in the church’s houses of worship, including temples, meetinghouses, the Assembly Hall, the Salt Lake Tabernacle, and the Conference Center.”

The declaration went on to say, “Once such public notice is given, persons who bring firearms into a church house of worship should be informed of the church’s position and politely asked to take their firearms to another safe location. Persons who refuse to take their firearms from the house of worship or repeatedly ignore the church’s prohibition should be referred to local law enforcement officers for possible criminal prosecution.”

See the church statement here:

But if you think the LDS church is the only church in the country that has taken such a position, you are sadly misinformed. My educated guess is that the vast majority of denominations and churches in America have a very similar position.

But instead of denying the Christian people of America from exercising their God-given right of self-defense on church property, church leaders should be boldly teaching the Biblical Natural Law principles of self-defense and encouraging their people to jealously guard this most fundamental liberty. By demanding that Christian people not be armed on church property, church leaders are no better than Rahm Emanuel–who insists that Chicago’s residents not be allowed to protect themselves–and are opening up their churches to those two-legged wolves who would seek to devour the sheep.

There are only a small handful of countries today that recognize the Natural right of self-defense. The advent of the United Nations has facilitated the demise of this right in country after country. The United States is the last major power that yet somewhat protects this most precious Natural right.

Obviously, several State and local governments within the United States (not to mention the worst offender of all: the federal government in Washington, D.C.) have themselves assisted the dismantlement of the right of self-defense. Several giant retailers are assisting the attacks against our Natural right of self-defense. The mainstream media is incessant in its attacks against the Second Amendment. And even many of America’s churches have set themselves against the right to BEAR arms. The war against our Natural right of self-defense continues.

However, I need to point out that the architects of the Nanny State have been trying to disarm the American people since even before the United Nations was created. And while the right to keep and bear arms has been severely restricted by myriads of federal, State, and local laws, the American people continue to be the most heavily armed people in the world. Not only is the American citizenry an armed citizenry, it is an absolutely determined citizenry. The message to any and all potential tyrants who would attempt to remove our Natural right of self-defense is the same–whether they are from King George’s London, Mao’s Beijing, Stalin’s Moscow, Emanuel’s Chicago, Obama’s Washington, D.C., or the U.N.’s New York City: MOLON LABE, COME AND TAKE THEM!

Establishment Partisan Politics Protection Racket

The enormous energy spent on analyzing candidates and predicting elections is time wasted when the actual decisions are predetermined before the voting takes place. Even excluding voter fraud from the final count, the party selection process has made the decision. The pretense that primaries reflect the will of the electorate deceives the registered voter, amuses the party insiders and benefits the advertisement and media moguls. Ideas, policy positions and core principles take a back seat to the art of spinning and negatively defining the opponent.

Rivals start within your own party. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the Republicans Tighten Grip on Debates in 2016 Race.

“Party leaders want to tighten their grip on a presidential primary season they believe has grown unruly and too long. This year, the party moved to set the nominating calendar by scheduling the first four contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — for February, allowing other states to begin voting in March and holding winner-take-all primaries starting March 15.

Taken together, these procedural steps could thwart an underfunded insurgent who needs the free exposure of televised debates and would be hurt by a series of rapid-fire contests in March that could be tilted toward an establishment-backed contender.

A few conservative stalwarts on the committee are nervous about the establishment’s consolidation of power over the primaries. “Do we want a committee of the national committee, which will surely be controlled by the national chairman, picking which candidates participate in all Republican presidential debates?”

This point is illustrated in the AP report RNC Changes debate Rules for 2016. “The RNC rules panel endorsed the creation of a 13-person committee that would limit how many presidential debates can take place and who can ask the questions. The full committee on Friday went along with that plan to ban candidates who participate in scofflaw debates from future RNC-backed sessions, by a 152-to-7 vote.”

Before the usual ceremonial indignation takes hold, ask yourself what is exactly sacrosanct about a stacked primary system that has little to do with an open contest. Patricians that make up the GOP establishment long ago graduated from the country club set.

Nonetheless, the bleeding hearts over at Salon would have you believe that the Democrats operate by different rules. Why Democrats need a primary, too offers advice why the anointed “Queen of Mean” that Rodman woman, would attain a benediction from going through an orchestrated charade before her canonization.

“Clinton would benefit from that input just as all incumbents and other party luminaries do, despite the fact that they would rather not have to have that fight. It is not good for a president to take the office without having taken the temperature of his or her supporters and understanding what they care about and what they expect. During a tempestuous period like this one, it’s even more important than usual. It would only be to her advantage to have a challenger who could bring forth those issues and allow the public to see them argued before she goes up against a Republican.”

Lost in the fervor of progressive rhetoric is that the Democratic Party is just as elitist as the Republicans are. Both operate as useful idiots and corporatist tools of a system that has long ago abandoned the practice of free enterprise.

Contrast this American version of a Punch and Judy show that has an elephant bully bemoaning the folk hero Robin Hood, who actually resembles an ass, with the exceptional Broadway Play, “The Best Man” by Gore Vidal. Watch the 1964 movie version and consider just how far the political system has collapsed in half a century.

The basic assumption in the play and movie is that the nominee of the Democratic Party will handedly beat their Republican opponent. Characterizing convention ballot voting by delegates as a genuine selection process may be strange to those who were raised on the myth that registered voters in a state primary really has a voice in the inauguration of the next President.

A system of party bosses and smoke room dealmakers, surely must be far worse from the televised mortifying pilgrimage and penitent self-flagellation that goes into winning the party’s nomination? Or, is it . . .

Remember the way the primaries served the faithful Democrats in 2008.

“According to news reports, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went out of their way to hold their long-awaited private meeting in a very specific location – not at Hillary’s mansion in Washington – but in Northern Virginia, which also just happens to be the scene of the 2008 Bilderberg meeting.The neo-liberal website Wonkette, which had previously ridiculed “conspiracy theorists” for ascribing power to Bilderberg, seemed to take a somewhat different tone when it made the connection between Obama and Hillary’s meeting and the Bilderberg Group.”

Orders from on high or more to the point, international deciders had their “heart to heart” with Hillary, passing her over, and giving her a maybe for 2016. George W. Bush liked to call himself the decider, but we all should know that decisions out of Skull and Bones are not based upon primary results.

Vidal’s screenplay portrayed a party convention as a real nomination fight. To whatever slime degree existed in the horse-trading to win delegates back then, the appearance in today’s selection makes no pretext of concealing the hidden hands behind picking the next President.

The partisan politics protection racket has but one goal; namely, serve and safeguard establishment interests of the elites, who really command the ultimate power. In addition to the Presidency, Congress shares broad similarities in their version of The Incumbent Protection Racket.

“In the U.S. House of Representatives, over the past five elections, incumbents have been re-elected at an average rate of 96 percent. According to my unscientific calculations, a congressman is more likely to be eaten by a polar bear while panning for gold in Key West than to be voted out of office.”

Serious challenges in Congressional district primacies are rare. The exception was in 2010 with the success of Tea Party candidates. However, such expression of the will of the people cannot stand in the polluted Potomac sewer that passes for representative democracy. Just look at the concerted efforts to sabotage populist support to retool the excesses in the federal government. Party Goers – What Do You Take With Your Tea?, indicates that all the sugar in the Caribbean will not prevent the political diabetes disease from going into shock. The bipartisan protection con knows how to close ranks among the political class.

“When main street middle class beleaguered taxpayers resonated that, the system was out of whack, the damage control team went into overdrive. This background helps to explain why the face of unprompted Tea Party individualism must be distorted, maligned and redirected.”

Great disappointment among Tea Party activists in the hostile welcome from establishment NeoCons has set in. The alternative to playing the no win beltway game provided in Dissecting U.S. Elections – the People vs. the Pols, best states the rational solution.

“What if a real grassroots national movement emerged that supersedes all ideology with a singular purpose – remove all careerist “pols” from office. Forget about the phony No Labels effort to diffuse popular disgust. The solution is to attract the very citizens who NEVER vote in elections.

A national campaign – No Confidence – would be the clear message that the arrogant confidence game crooks could understand.”

Drawing upon a universal appeal to break from the travesties of the two party frauds is necessary to register countrywide outrage. Only through vigorous dissention will The Meaning of Third Parties in America, bring the necessary pressure to collapse both the Democrat and Republican Parties.

“The solution to implement meaningful reform is to defuse the political power that is presently concentrated within the ‘Tweedle-dumb and Tweedle Dee’ parties. The notion that differences between them are based upon core principles, denies the unending descent into ‘collectivism’. The edges have varied shapes, but the centers are formed from the same sponge.”

You can always resolve that either party will never nominate “The Best Man”. If you are so delusional to believe that a woman is the answer in the oval office, look in a different direction. Elizabeth Warren the self-proclaimed Pinocchio-hontas, is a sorry excuse for an accomplished liar. Flush with law school disingenuous skills, this want-a-be feminine messiah would have you believe that Hillary is the New World Order’s favorite grandmother.

Nonetheless, fake opposition simply projects the image that there is a choice in candidates. Noam Scheiber, in the New Republic writes, “A Clinton-Warren matchup would have all sorts of consequences, none of them especially heartwarming. The most immediate is that Warren would probably lose.” Well so much for a contest between squaws, better suited for commitment to the Hiawatha Insane Asylum.Partisan politics is mostly a ruse designed to divert attention from service to the substantial interests of establishment globalists. The noise generated around campaigns and media coverage, ignores or conceals the existent deals that serve the real goals and intentions of the master puppeteers. The terminal lesson is that establishment politics treats the public as reservation squatters.

Federal Government Seldom Able To Police Itself

America’s founders, largely distrustful of centralized power, created several checks and balances into the U.S. Constitution to help insure that one person, or one group of people, would not be able to unilaterally exert his or their will over the American citizenry. First, the federal government itself was divided into three separate and distinct branches–each holding the capability (and responsibility) to check the power of the other. Second, the Bill of Rights was made part of the Constitution for the protection of individual liberties. Third, the “free and independent states” of the nation retained their sovereignty and independence after the central government was created (by the states), with the Tenth Amendment specifically recognizing their authority and jurisdiction over matters not directly delegated to the federal government.

It was also assumed that the freedom of the press and the freedom of religion would help the citizenry be sufficiently informed and inspired to keep the would-be despots at bay. And, of course, “We the People” are recognized as being the ultimate guardians of liberty by the recognition that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” (Declaration) The “consent of the governed” was given teeth by the constitutional recognition of the people’s right to wield the power of the voting booth, the jury box, and, as a last resort, the cartridge box.

What has become increasingly obvious to a large segment of the American populace is the complete unwillingness of the national media to hold the federal government accountable. Neither do America’s pulpits provide the moral leadership necessary to maintain good government. The freedom of the press and religion accomplish precious little today in the safeguarding of liberty. And it is also absolutely clear that the three branches of government in Washington, D.C., adamantly refuse to use the constitutional obligations placed upon them to hold the federal government in check.

The latter was made crystal clear by a recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. Here is the report:

“A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to ‘detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,’ according to critics.

“The high court this week refused to review an appeals court decision that said the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals.

“The firm of William J. Olson, P.C., which filed a friend-of-the court brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of the request for review.
‘The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,’ the legal team said in a statement to WND. ‘The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people–and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.'”

The report continues: “The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to ‘represent an enduring security threat to the United States.’

“Journalist Chris Hedges was among the plaintiffs charging the law could be used to target journalists who report on terror-related issues.

“A friend-of-the-court brief submitted in the case stated: ‘The central question now before this court is whether the federal judiciary will stand idly by while Congress and the president establish the legal framework for the establishment of a police state and the subjugation of the American citizenry through the threat of indefinite military arrest and detention, without the right to counsel, the right to confront one’s accusers, or the right to trial.’

“The brief was submitted to the Supreme Court by attorneys with the U.S.
Justice Foundation of Ramona, California; Friedman Harfenist Kraut & Perlstein of Lake Success, New York; and William J. Olson, P.C. of Vienna, Virginia.”

Amici Curiae of the brief included U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall, Virginia Senator Dick Black, Gun Owners of America, Downsize DC Foundation, Western Journalism Center, The Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, Tenth Amendment Center, Policy Analysis Center, Constitution Party National Committee, Professor Jerome Aumente, and yours truly, among others.

See the brief here:

The WND report goes on to say: “The 2012 NDAA was fast-tracked through the U.S. Senate, with no time for discussion or amendments, while most Americans were distracted by the scandal surrounding A&E’s troubles with ‘Duck Dynasty’ star Phil Robertson.

“Eighty-five of 100 senators voted in favor of the new version of the NDAA, which had already been quietly passed by the House of Representatives. [Disgustingly, Montana’s only U.S. House member, Republican Steve Daines, who purports himself to be a staunch conservative, voted for the indefinite detention provision of the NDAA, as did Montana’s two Democrat Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester. How did your congressman and senators vote? In my opinion, this is a monumentally-important vote, and a vote granting this unconstitutional power to the military and federal police agencies is inexcusable and demonstrates how both Democrats and Republicans will unite together to dismantle the constitutional protections of the American people in the name of “national security.”]

“Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and others filed a lawsuit in 2012 against the Obama administration to challenge the legality of an earlier version of the NDAA.

“It is Section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, and its successors, that drew a lawsuit by Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alex O’Brien, Kai Warg All, Brigitta Jonsottir and the group U.S. Day of Rage. Many of the plaintiffs are authors or reporters who stated that the threat of indefinite detention by the U.S. military already had altered their activities.

“‘It’s clearly unconstitutional,’ Hedges said of the bill. ‘It is a huge and egregious assault against our democracy. It overturns over 200 years of law, which has kept the military out of domestic policing.’

“Hedges is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and was part of a team of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.”

See the complete WND report here:

Remember that it was Republican President George W. Bush and a Republican U.S. House and Senate that shackled the American people with the USA Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security–along with the rest of the gargantuan police state apparatus under which the people of the United States are now being forced to live. And it is Democrat President Barack Obama and a Democrat U.S. Senate–along with a Republican U.S. House–that continues to expand the reach of this police state. One thing that both Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals agree on is the construction and implementation of a police state. Under the rubric of “national security” or “law and order,” the Bill of Rights is being systematically and deliberately expunged by both sides of the political aisle.

And now we know the judicial branch of government in Washington, D.C., also refuses to hold the executive and legislative branches of government in check–as if we needed more evidence. Both Republican-appointed and Democrat-appointed justices refused to say a word condemning this draconian abuse of power within the NDAA. By so doing, the Supreme Court showed itself unwilling to stand in between the liberties of the American people and an ever-burgeoning police state.

In fact, when it comes to holding the government in DC in check, when does the Supreme Court ever intervene? Hardly ever! If it is a dispute between the states and the federal government or between individuals and the federal government, SCOTUS almost always rules in favor of DC.

Once-in-awhile, one or the other branch of government (including the judicial branch) in DC will be willing to protect constitutional liberties from another branch of government in DC, but such instances are the exception, not the rule.

And since the liberties of the American people have few friends in the national media or in the country’s pulpits, the protection of our freedoms has quickly come down to the states, the local media (yes, some local media is still friendly to freedom), county sheriffs, and the people ourselves.

Currently, there is a huge momentum building among State legislatures to begin pushing back against the overreach of Washington, D.C. For example, the State of Texas is squaring off against the BLM over tens of thousands of acres along the Red River border of Texas and Oklahoma, and the State of Utah has already passed legislation claiming more than 30 million acres currently controlled by the federal government. Here is an excerpt from a Breitbart.com report:

“Utah Governor Gary Herbert (R), earlier this year, signed the Transfer of Public Lands Act. This new state law calls upon the federal government to turn over control of more than 30 million acres to the State.”

See the complete report at:

Plus, more and more county sheriffs are beginning to stand against federal encroachments. Read this report:

And, of course, just recently it was “We the People” standing against a brutish, totalitarian-style federal assault against the Bundy family in Bunkerville, Nevada. And among the brave souls at Bunkerville were State and local officials and even county sheriffs. And I was there, too. Here is the video of my message to, and prayer service for, the Oath Keepers and militia on the ground there in Bunkerville:

As the three branches of government in Washington, D.C., become less and less accountable to the checks and balances assigned them by the Constitution, it is going to require that the states, county sheriffs, and people ourselves become more and more engaged in pushing back against federal overreach and abuse of power.

Time For Western States To Evict Feds

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, “It’s time for Western states to take control of federal lands within their borders, lawmakers and county commissioners from Western states said at Utah’s Capitol on Friday.

“More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-,timber-and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.

“‘It’s simply time,’ said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. ‘The urgency is now.’

“Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was flanked by a dozen participants, including her counterparts from Idaho and Montana, during a press conference after the daylong closed-door summit. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee addressed the group over lunch, Ivory said. New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington also were represented.

“The summit was in the works before this month’s tense standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing, Lockhart said.

“‘What’s happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem,’ Lockhart said.”

See the report here:

Now we are getting somewhere!

The western states have been used as both playground and sugar stick for big-government politicians since before most of the western states became states. Compare the percentage of State land owned by the federal government in the western states to that of the eastern states.

Here is the percentage of land owned by the federal government in seven eastern states:

Illinois: 1.8%

Ohio: 1.7%

Alabama: 1.6%

Maine: 1.1%

New York: 0.8%

Rhode Island: 0.4%

Connecticut: 0.4%

By contrast, here is the percentage of land owned by the federal government in seven western states:

Wyoming: 42.3%

California: 45.3%

Arizona: 48.1%

Idaho: 50.2%

Oregon: 53.1%

Utah: 57.4%

Nevada: 84.5%

The situation with the Bundys in Nevada highlights the heavy-handed tactics that the federal government employs against anyone who dares to challenge the manner in which the feds are attempting to kick hard-working, productive citizens off of federal lands. Remember that ranchers and farmers such as Cliven Bundy were promised access to these federal lands in perpetuity back in the nineteenth century when all of these land deals were being negotiated between the states and the federal government. Beyond that, ownership of the land by the federal government was supposed to preserve and protect the land for the people, not for the federal government.

A few years ago, there were dozens of successful and prosperous ranchers in the area around the Bundys. But since the BLM was given legislative mandates when Congress enacted the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) in 1976, Cliven Bundy is now the only rancher in the area still standing.

The BLM has grown into a totalitarian monster.

Today, the BLM regulates hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, boating, hang gliding, shooting, off-highway vehicle driving, mountain biking, bird watching, and visiting natural and historical sites. The BLM also regulates logging, mining, fracking and other activities. What ranchers such as Cliven Bundy are going through loggers and miners are also experiencing. In fact, it is no hyperbole to say that, for all intents and purposes, the ranching, logging, and mining industries in the western states are being systematically regulated out of existence.

And in the case of Cliven Bundy, it is not about saving the Desert Tortoise or grazing fees or anything of the sort. It is all about letting fat-cat politicians such as Harry Reid negotiate lucrative solar energy deals with Communist China. Hey, folks: if the land doesn’t belong to Cliven Bundy, it doesn’t belong to Harry Reid, either!

The BLM’s evil twin sister is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was established in 1970. These two federal agencies have become the Wicked Witch of the East and Wicked Witch of the West in what used to be a beautiful land paved with yellow brick roads.

I dare say that if the eastern states were enduring the haranguing and harassment that the western states are enduring, the BLM would have been brought under control years ago. Absent national unity from eastern states on the matter, it is time for the western states to take matters into their own hands.

The legislative action being contemplated by the above-mentioned State legislators who assembled in Salt Lake City last Friday is a terrific first step. It is absolutely time for the western states to use their eminent domain authority to reclaim the lands within their borders that are currently owned by Washington, D.C. With the exception of National Parks, states should serve notice that they are taking back the land owned by the federal government–land that should never have been ceded to the central government to begin with.

The second problem that the siege against Cliven Bundy illustrates is the unconstitutional police powers assumed by federal agencies such as the BLM. Originally, the only federal agency that was lawfully allowed to make arrests on behalf of the U.S. government was the U.S. Marshals Service, which was created back in 1789–the year that the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Today, there are scores of alphabet agencies of the federal government who carry a badge and a gun and are allowed to enforce law at bayonet point. And the vast majority of these agencies are acting on assumed authority–authority not granted them constitutionally. Among these, there is no greater culprit than the BLM.

“You don’t send the Seventh Cavalry to collect a bill, and that’s exactly what happened,” Pat Buchanan told Sean Hannity on his radio show last Monday.

Buchanan went on to say, “And when they put all those forces out there-that’s what attracted all the others, the history of what happened at Waco, Ruby Ridge. And so these folks came to that rancher’s defense. But the initial problem here is [the] sending of all the force of arms out there to that ranch, which was a provocation to which these folks responded.”

See the report here:

The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Constitution delegates only three crimes to the federal government: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. That’s it. No other crimes are mentioned. That means that all other crimes are the purview of the states–including local and State police, sheriff’s deputies, and citizen militias and posses.

Of course, the problem is the Congress (and Court) in Washington, D.C., has used the “Necessary and Proper Clause” of Article. I. Section. 8. to justify all sorts of federal law enforcement enactments.

The result of this unconstitutional federal expansion of police powers is we now have scores of federal agencies that are using unchecked and unbridled power–power that is turning the United States into a giant police state.

The states must push back!

Not only must states reclaim millions of acres of land within their borders that are now controlled by the federal government, they must also pass legislation requiring federal bureaucracies such as the BLM to obtain the consent of county sheriffs in order to execute arrest warrants. States must make it clear in unmistakable terms that only the U.S. Marshals Service may execute federal warrants within their states; otherwise, only the county sheriff is authorized to execute arrest warrants within their states.

Furthermore, the U.S. Congress needs to disarm the countless federal bureaucracies that are currently terrorizing the American people. In truth, very few federal agencies need to carry guns. The politicians in Washington, D.C., love to try to disarm the American people, but the ones they should be disarming are most of the federal alphabet agencies.

Why do employees of the federal Department of Education need to carry guns? Why do postal employees need to carry guns? Why do agents of the BLM need to carry guns? Why do employees at NASA need to carry guns? Why do employees of the EPA need to carry guns? Why do employees at NOAA need to carry guns? Why do employees of the National Weather Service need to carry guns? Why do employees of the Social Security Administration need to carry guns? Why do employees at the Department of Agriculture need to carry guns? Why do employees of the National Marine Fisheries Service need to carry guns?

Ladies and gentlemen, law enforcement is mostly the responsibility of State and local governments. Why are so many federal bureaucracies carrying guns? Agencies of the federal government are not soldiers; and they are not even policemen. Furthermore, the American people are not the enemy!

Pat Buchanan is right: had not BLM agents marched onto the Bundy ranch like Nazi Stormtroopers, none of the events that are still playing out in the Nevada desert would have taken place. The memory of Waco and Ruby Ridge are still very vivid in the collective memory of the people of the United States. If anything burns deep in our collective conscience, it is that THERE MUST NEVER AGAIN BE ANOTHER WACO OR RUBY RIDGE. And that is exactly why those Americans have put themselves between the federal government and the Bundy family down in Bunkerville, Nevada.

The events in Salt Lake City, Utah, conducted by dozens of legislators from the western states last Friday were as monumental as the events in Bunkerville, Nevada, conducted by the citizen militia the previous Saturday.

Free and independent states and “We the People” have always been the guardians of liberty in this land. And if freedom is going to be preserved for our posterity, it is going to take the combined effort of both the individual sovereign states and individual citizens to arise and stand in the gap once again. It would also seem that the rise has already begun. Praise God! The only thing missing now is the patriot pulpit.

P.S. I have been inundated with requests from pastors and laymen alike to help them establish non-501c3, unaffiliated, unorganized, unincorporated churches. I have heard their pleas; and I have a very important announcement regarding this matter coming in the very near future. Stay tuned.

God’s Land: Our Responsibility

 about our cultural fantasy that forgets we are totally dependent on soil and water.  At the end of his Commentary on the Book of Numbers R. J. Rushdoony writes as follows: “For modern man land has become a commodity and an investment, not essentially a faith inheritance.  Our modern outlook thus warps our perspective.  For this reason, our federal government thinks nothing of allowing in as immigrants an increasing number of people who are religiously and racially hostile to us.  They see no relationship between faith and land.  As a result the United States and the Western world have embarked on a suicidal course.  They reject the concept of Christendom and embrace instead the humanistic “family of man” and thus immigration policies in the U.S. and Europe are based on myths and illusions of a destructive nature.  Because neither land nor inheritance is now seen from the perspective of faith, we have problems in these spheres.  The modern state sees itself as the primary owner, and hence eminent domain is basic to its life, and it therefore views itself as the primary heir with death taxes.  Both a tax on the land and death taxes are anti-Biblical.”

I am not sure that linking our immigration problem to a lack of understanding of the relationship between land and faith is entirely true.  Immigration in America is Balkanizing the nation and destroying the culture.  It is satanic in nature and is being promoted by powerful forces that seek world government without national borders. The Christian religion itself is a target for destruction.

Nevertheless, human beings are land based creatures and Christianity is a land based religion. We are but sojourners in a world that God created.  We are vested with the responsibility of passing God’s land to the next generation in an untainted condition.

When we hear of conversations in elite circles about the need to exterminate millions of useless eaters because the world is overpopulated we can, in part, attribute this arrogant discussion to our inattention to our earthly umbilical cord.

This separation from terra firma has been enhanced by modern farm machinery which allows planting and reaping with very little contact with the media.  Farmers with soil on their clothing and on their persons were ever aware of the element that grew their crops. Now air conditioned tractors provide comforts on a par with the offices of business executives.

Please understand, I am not advocating a return to the horse and buggy.  Mechanical inventions are a boon to mankind and we are blest to have them.  The problem is with the egomania these marvelous inventions have created, making gods of men and enhancing the humanism that is responsible for creeping despotism.

Without the absolute legal standards of the God of the Bible human beings with their diverse opinions and desires are incapable of peaceful existence.  We are more like devils than gods and when we give in to the sinful desire to be like God we inevitably create confusion and misery.  We were made to be obedient to our Maker and are unable to live in freedom without adhering to His commandments.

The terrifying dangers of men beginning to act as gods are becoming apparent in our manipulation of our soil and seeds.  We started by ignoring God’s Sabbath for the land.  The practice of allowing land to lie fallow for one year in every seven was abandoned and fertilizers and chemicals were added to allow the production of continuous annual crops.  Now we are manipulating seeds creating mutations that are designed to produce beneficial protections.  We have appropriated the right to manipulate the creation as if it belonged to us.  The results of this arbitrary manipulation can be catastrophic.

Social sophisticates often view farmers with disdain.  Farming is considered an occupation of dull, dirt tainted, bumpkins that do not fit into the upper classes of our culture. This Pharisaical spirit elevates urban life and bears responsibility for the detrimental error of forgetting the source of our sustenance.

My mother was born and raised on a farm.  She walking four miles each way to attend a school that housed 8 grades. She graduated from University of Illinois in the early years of the Twentieth Century and her sister, who was educated in that same humble classroom, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Northwestern University.  There were two boys in that Irish led family.  The boys remained with the land but the two girls married professional men.  The two boys were my uncles.  One died early without progeny the other had one son who with a college degree in Agriculture remained in farming.  He produced a girl and a boy.  The son remained on the farm and produced a son who has no interest in agriculture.  All of the land my Grandfather homesteaded will soon be leased out.

Mother’s family was Methodist.  She dominated my father.  Methodism stressed human control of behavior rather than obedience to God and His Law.  Land was a commodity rather than an intricate part of the Christian religion.

Government has been busy acquiring land in the United States.  Estimates place the total U. S. land at about 2.25 billion acres and the total federal and states ownership at close to 45 percent; The Federal Government owns about 700 million acres and rising.  In thirteen Western states two thirds of the entire land mass is Government property; 87.5 percent of the State of Arizona and over 90 percent of the State of Nevada.  The United States Government owns a larger percentage of the nation’s land than do the Communist regimes in Russia and China.

A Google search on “city is more competitive” produced over a hundred thousand results.  The elite pagans who currently control our world would like to herd people into cities where an intercity economic competition would keep everyone striving.   More and more of the land is falling under government control and hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed.  The intent seems to be for wealthy lords to live handsomely on the labor of the world’s serfs who would exist in tiny cubicles in crowded cities.

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 that owned and cultivated land.  Though the processing, packaging, and merchandising of food has blurred the connection it is still the same today; the cultivation of land remains the source of sustenance for the world’s population..

In one of his daily messages in “” Rushdoony relates the early American practice of Rogation Sunday.  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.”

We are prone to forget that the One True God is still sovereign over His creation.  His perspective is infinite and ours is miniscule it is often difficult to see His participation. Nevertheless, He does not change and He still punishes those who presume on His authority.  Human control of His creation will ultimately fail and the ravages of Hell await the perpetrators.

Wicked, ungodly men and women have risen to positions of power in our time.  These “sons of
Belial” are attempting to turn God’s creation into a vicious police state; a hell on earth designed by evil minds to accommodate deviant lusts.

Extensive, mysterious efforts to control the weather are being conducted in our skies.  Though they are visible to everyone, thousands of weather forecasters never acknowledge their existence.  Our citizens, too, are frightened and often reluctant to comment on these brazen experiments. It is frightening to see such a massive manipulation play out above us. The beautiful deep blue of space and the billowy, floating clouds that have treated our views for millenniums have been replaced by man-made lines haphazardly drawn over God’s creation.

God’s Word is full of promises of favorable weather in return for diligent obedience and men who attempt to control what God has claimed as His own are at war with God.

Though we common folk appear to be the victims of the new world order’s Procrustean bed we too are culpable. We have failed to abide by God’s law concerning His creation. Farmers willingly till their soil without giving it rest.  Local authorities levy taxes against farm land interfering with the ownership and stability God intends.  We have broken God’s Law and have elected rulers that do so as well. Captivity is God’s punishment for intractable sin and the solution is to return to a proper relationship with our Creator.  Repentance involves understanding that we are servants and He is our Master and our King.  It is our duty to worship and obey Him.  Attempts to manipulate God will fail.  The Bible is not an instrument for discussion but for obedience.  We are appointed to judge the world by the yardstick of God’s Law.  First we ourselves obey then seek to bring our nation into obedience.

It is foolhardy to pray for a nation of sinners who disregard God’s sovereignty and ignore His commandments.   God is bringing captivity on the world because His people made in His image, sin against Him by living their lives independent of His Will.  The world falls deeper into sin as each day passes. Instead of hearing and obeying every word that comes from the mouth of God, we insult Him by picking apart His Word and deciding what we will believe and what we will ignore.  We treat the Christian religion like a toy that is fun for a season but that we can put aside whenever we wish.

Sources  and .

China Becomes Largest Trading Nation

The globalists put their plan into motion decades ago. The proper meaning of the headline is not that China is an economic miracle, but that the United States, systematically stripped of its industrial might, is destined to fall even further. The Chinese economy is a haven of direct transnational integration. The outsourcing of manufacturing from domestic capacity is not solely a response of cheaper economic cost of goods production. No, the underlying reason for the migration of product assemblage is to weaken an independent American economy.

The news of this long awaited milestone, primarily announced in the foreign press, almost has a ring of glee. The Guardian reports that China surpasses US as world’s largest trading nation.

“China’s annual trade in goods passed the $4tn (£2.4tn) mark for the first time last year according to official data, after exports from the world’s second largest economy rose 7.9% to $2.21tn and imports rose 7.3% to $1.95tn.

As a result total trade rose 7.6% over the year to $4.16tn. The US is yet to publish its 2013 trade figures, but with trade totaling $3.5tn in the first 11 months of the year, it is unlikely to beat China.”

Further coverage presented in the Telegraph, the Financial Times and the BBC, reflects I told you so attitude.

“It’s always been a matter of time until China surpasses the US … and there are good reasons to believe that China is likely to retain this pole position for the foreseeable future.

“The trade figures look very healthy and the factors underpinning them are structurally sustainable. It is hard to see them being reversed significantly, at least in the short to medium term.”

Contrast this viewpoint with the assessment out of Marketwatch.

“And let’s not forget: The economic data out of Chinese agencies has long been seen as a bit questionable. Even the country’s own statistics office has said it is trying to clean up the inaccuracies. As our own Michael Kitchen points out, trade data has come under particular suspicion, as businesses disguise some money flows as trade to try to bypass controls.”Of course, the U.S. press continues to make excuses that conceal the betrayal of American trade policy goals and practices. These are the same business journalists that repeat the statistical figures coming out of recent administrations that need revisions, when caught in dramatic errors of omission or deception.

Proponents of a structured destruction of America’s economy, laud international trade, as long as it slanted to eliminate domestic survival and reduces our standard of living. This lunacy, stated in Benefits of International Trade, does not square with the aftermath of a trade deficit that has become a permanent fixture.

Some important benefits of International Trade

•  Enhances the domestic competitiveness

•  Takes advantage of international trade technology

•  Increases sales and profits

•  Extend sales potential of the existing products

•  Maintain cost competitiveness in your domestic market

•  Enhance potential for expansion of your business

•  Gains a global market share

•  Reduce dependence on existing markets
•  Stabilize seasonal market fluctuations

Now examine the real significance of this “Free Trade” globalist plan for America.

1. How can domestic competitiveness improve, when entire industries move offshore?

2. Where is the advantage in developing new technology domestically and transferring it to foreign plants, even if owned by “so called” U.S. national companies?

3. Increase sales and profits, booked by foreign subsidiaries, means that the capital is not repatriated back.

4. If products produced domestically, shipped, and sold to overseas markets, there would be a valid benefit. However, the direction is in reverse.

5. Maintaining cost competitiveness translates into closing domestic facilities.

6. Expansion of business means look overseas because domestic consumers have less money to spend.

7. Oh yes, the holy grail of market share, means last company standing, since domestic markets have reduced sales.

8. Yep, now that existing domestic markets are sinking, move your boat to a different ocean.

9. Seasonal fluctuations means that booms are past profit spikes, the new normal is a perpetual dip.

The Chinese perspective as reported in China Daily from Wang Haifeng, a researcher with the Institute for International Economic Research at the National Development and Reform Commission, needs especial emphasis.

“The size of the value of the trade in goods tells just one side of the story. The other side is that China’s export competitiveness, as well as the competitiveness of its trade structure, is far behind the US. The competitive advantage of US exports centers on its technology, quality and brands, with added-value being very significant. China’s export prices are much cheaper on average and a large part of its exports are from OEMs (original equipment manufacturers),” Wang said.

When an economic system intentionally transfers their technological advantages, inventions and intellectual edge to a foreign country so that companies can avoid domestic taxation or onerous regulation, the future adverse and inevitable consequences with such relocations, are preordained.

According to World Bank data, in 2011, the US GDP reached $15 trillion while China totaled $7.3 trillion. Just how long will it take this gap to narrow and surpass the U.S. GDP?

If a comparison of gambling revenue is a leading indicator, just look at Chinese Territory Broaden Lead as Global Casino Capital. “It now takes Macau’s gamblers just one day to wager what’s bet in an entire week on the Las Vegas Strip.” To make thing even worse, Nevada’s biggest casinos lose $1.35B in 2013.
This example demonstrates the extravagant cash flow and disposable income that is circulating in China. Much of this opulence comes from the pocketbooks of struggling Americans, who buy essential or sustainable goods that have a made in China label.

Tech firms transfer the secrets of their products and software to their Chinese partners as the U.S. government subsidized consumer or the remnant middle class, just deepen this destructive cycle. This absurd economic bargain drives the wealth disparity to irrational levels. That is exactly the objective of the globalists, and the rest of us are mere spectators as the Chinese laugh at our stupidity.

Ten Most Corrupt Politicians In Washington DC

Marriane Williamson, author of the book A Return to Love, announced this past fall her plan to run for Congress in the 33^rddistrict of California to stop the “Culture of Corruption” in our nation’s capital.

Without a doubt, deep, systemic corruption thrives in our U.S. Congress. It flourishes in our White House.  Thomas Jefferson, our third president, tried to pass term limits, but failed in the face of those who love power and expect to maintain it.

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, released its 2013

List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.”  , the list, in alphabetical order, includes:

•  Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH)
• CIA Director John Brennan
• Senator Saxby Chambliss
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
• Attorney General Eric Holder
• Former IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller / Former IRS Official Lois Lerner
• Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
• President Barack Obama
• Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)
• Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius

Dishonorable Mentions for 2013 include:

• Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
• Outgoing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) / Incoming Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D)
• Former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
• National Security Adviser Susan Rice

As a 27 year old staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee, Ms. Hillary Clinton suffered firing by her supervisor, lifelong democrat Jerry Zeifman who said, “She is a liar. She was unethical and dishonest.  She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

If you remember the murders at the U.S. embassy in Benghazi that suffered a terrorist attack that killed four people, her reply, “What difference does it matter?”

Mr. Barack Obama continues his cover-up of his incompetence in fortifying the embassy and ignoring all calls for help.  Good men died because of malfeasance and ineptitude.

Let’s start with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH):

House Speaker John Boehner became a master at what Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer calls the “Tollbooth Strategy.” As Schweizer explains in his new book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets:

“You pay money at a tollbooth in order to use a road or bridge. The methodology in Washington is similar: if someone wants a bill passed, charge them money to allow the bill to move down the legislative highway.”

According to Schweizer, Boehner used the “.  Reference:

Additionally, Boehner continues his blockade of the E-Verify Bill to force employers to check legal status of anyone seeking employment.  I suspect the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, up to its eyeballs in promoting illegal immigration cheap labor, paid big bucks to keep E-Verify from passing into law.  No doubt Marriott, Holiday Inn, Tyson Chicken, McDonald’s, Chipotle’s, Hormel, La Quinta, endless restaurant chains, construction, painting, landscape and other huge companies paid huge bribes to make sure they continue to hire illegal aliens rather than American citizens at a living wage.

Speaker Boehner does not stand-alone.

Attorney General Eric Holder lies so much, hides so much, aka, Fast and Furious, that he cannot tell the truth from a lie.

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) makes the “Ten Worst” list for what he actually did in 2012, but which was finally exposed in 2013. Just as with House Speaker Boehner, Chambliss’s misdeeds were revealed in Peter Schweizer’s book, 

Judicial Watch said, “Chambliss is highlighted as one of the key abusers who used  to convert campaign cash into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members.

The  reported, “The book details the extravagant expenses of Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, for instance, whose leadership PAC spent $10,000 on golf at Pebble Beach, nearly $27,000 at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, and $107,752 at the exclusive Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Fla. The amount Mr. Chambliss spent at the Breakers in the 2012 election cycle, the book reports, is three times what the senator gave to the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the same period.”

Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano may be one of the biggest liars of all. In August 2013 Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stepped down from her post with “pride and regret” stemming from her failure to help push through the so-called “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.” The truth: Napolitano played a major role in doing an end run around existing immigration law by helping President Obama implement his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive in lieu of DREAM Act passage.

 by Judicial Watch in June 2013 revealed that Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) “Abandoned required background checks in 2012, adopting, instead, costly “lean and lite” procedures in effort to keep up with the flood of amnesty applications resulting from the DACA directive.”

The granddaddy liar of them all: Barack Hussein Obama.

President Barack Obama actually tops this “Top Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” list for 2013 as the driving force behind so many of the misdeeds.

This is Obama’s seventh straight year on the list, dating back all the way to 2007 (in 2006, he earned a “Dishonorable Mention”). He is a master at catch-me-if-you-can, corrupt politics.

“This year, he has again acted as a one-man Congress, rewriting entire sections of federal law on his own,” said Judicial Watch.  “Not only is his administration secretive and ; its callous disregard for the rule of law undermines our constitutional republic. Examples include:

Perhaps Obama’s most outrageous actions over the past year were his continual lies about the ability of Americans to keep their own health insurance under Obamacare. According the  Obama misled the American people a total of 36 times between 2008 and 2013 with his promise, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.” And according to , Obama knew, even as he repeated his lie, that “more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.”

Let us not forget Nevada Senator Harry Reid and all the senators that voted for the S744 Amnesty Bill that legalizes 20 to 25 million illegal aliens.  They and he never stood up for enforcement of internal employment laws against employers of illegal aliens, or our borders, but they bend over for big business’ cheap labor interests—against American workers.

Last year, Harry Reid made the Judicial Watch Ten Worst list for his influence-peddling scandal involving ENN Energy Group, a Chinese “green energy” company for which Reid “” – and which happened to be a major client of the Nevada law firm in which Reid’s son, Rory, is a principal.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts totally.  As Marriane Williams said, “We face a culture of corruption” in Washington DC that works against the interests of all Americans—but we continue voting them back into their power positions to screw all of us.  Then we wonder why our country continues an 11-year useless war, $18 trillion debt, 14 million unemployed, 48 million subsisting on food stamps, endless immigration, falling wages and vanishing Middle Class.

The American Indian

Book Review…

“The white man wanted what we had, our land, but he didn’t want us.  We wanted what the white man had his improvements, his guns, his modern conveniences – but we didn’t want him.  And so we fought, each wanting what the other had but not wanting the other and trying to eliminate him; and we lost.  That’s the story.”    A mid-Twentieth Century account by an old Indian at the Owyhee reservation in Nevada.  From “The American Indian” R. J. Rushdoony

The late Rousas Rushdoony was born to immigrant parents and raised in an Armenian society on a farm in California.   He was a Christian truth-seeker with a brilliant mind, a photographic memory, and a work driven disposition.  His perspective on the American culture was not maligned by popular partisan descriptions and his accurate evaluations were often prophetic.

Though we never met his writing transformed my understanding of Christianity.

Truth steps on the toes of those who live and defend fantasy and Rushdoony had big feet.  Arminianism denuded Christianity.  It is a ubiquitous heresy and Rushdoony brought the full weight of his mighty intellect against it.  He exposed the sinful insanity of claiming to follow Christ while refusing to obey His legal standards.  As it always does his true pronouncements dragged him into controversy.

Ross House Books recently released “The American Indian” a paper-backed book of slightly over 100 pages. It chronicles Rushdoony’s mission to the Shoshone and Paiute Indians at the Owyhee reservation in Nevada from 1944 to 1953.     

Rushdoony’s portrays the Indian differently than the dream laden pictures presented in our movies and history books.  He found the older Indians to be astute, realistic, and pragmatic.  They were quick to notice that White American Christians did not actually believe in the religion they were trying to transmit; they did not practice it, their schools did not teach it, and their government did not follow its principles.  This sad reality resulted in the subtitle of the book, “A Standing Indictment Against Christianity and Statism in America.

Rushdoony liked and admired the Indian character.  They were realists and so was he.  Yes, they were savages capable of shocking cruelty but they were also open to technical advances and were more willing to offer others hospitality than most Christians.  An Indian was never without food and shelter since every family would unquestionably provide it whether to a stray adult or an orphaned child.

The book vividly portrays the devastation that results from dependence on government handouts. Tribal life centered on survival and since the government provided everything they needed the core of their life was destroyed. The result is wide spread debauchery, gambling, alcoholism, sexually immorality, and rape.

A tendency to addiction combined with the malignancy of government dependence contributed to the alcohol problem.  The old Indians called it “The Whiskey Religion”.  They reasoned that what Christians look for in Christ, alcoholic Indians (Whites too) find in the bottle.  Alcohol was not the only problem: Peyote, a narcotic, was worshiped and used extensively with devastating results.    

Indian children were coddled; never disciplined.  Rushdoony reasoned that such leniency resulted in an inability to withstand frustration and this weakness contributed to widespread alcoholism.  When the doctrine of original sin is missing discipline is usually lacking.

Indians were trained to be valiant.  The old Indians remembered in past times young Indians entered manhood through a ritual that involved cutting open and exposing back muscles that were then thonged and tightened to keep the initiate on his tiptoes.  They were forbidden to acknowledge pain and urged to dance around a pole for three days and nights.  If they passed out they ruptured their back muscles and waited at least another year to enter manhood. 

Before the arrival of the White man survival was the primary objective of Indian culture.  The story of Jenny Owyhee showcases Indian spiritism, savagery, and intent to survive.  Jenny and Rushdoony arrived on the Reservation about the same time.  Jenny had worked for a family named Riddle.  Grant Riddle died at the age of eighty. He said Jenny had worked for his family before he was born and had grown children when he was a child.  She remembered the tribe being marched to the Reservation and would have been close to 120 year of age.  Rushdoony writes, “Jenny told me that her first four babies were girls.  At the birth of the fourth, her husband broke the power of the spirits by grabbing the new-born girl and braining her on a rock.  Jenny’s next child was a boy.  She was a kind and thoughtful woman. For her, the killing of the girl was a sad necessity in order to insure a boy – for a boy meant survival in the wilderness.”

Rushdoony had great respect for Indians warriors.  He believed Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians was the “greatest military strategist the North American continent has ever produced.   He writes that Chief Joseph with a “handful” of warriors defeated the U. S. Army several times while transporting and protecting a large number of women and children.  Superior numbers and superior equipment were needed to defeat the resilient Indians who refused to give up.

Indians were never enslaved; they fought or they ran away.   They could not be converted to servant hood.  The older Indians viewed Negros as inferior because they allowed themselves to become slaves.

Both the writer and the Indians had great respect for realism.  Sentimentality is condemned and there is no reference to repentance. Rushdoony expresses disdain for recounting past offenses instead of concentrating on current behavior.  He recounted the indiscretions of both the Indians and the White settlers.  The White settlers bore additional guilt because they were supposedly Christians but there is nothing about the incursion of European civilization into what had previously been Indian occupied territory.

Important information about this period of Rushdoony’s ministry is mysteriously missing.  His first wife, Arda, bore him four children (Rebecca, Joanna, Sharon, and Martha) and they adopted an Indian child (Ronald).  Arda is not mention in his writing nor is her image found in the several pictures taken at the Owyhee Reservation. Following a divorce she became a non-person.  Dorothy Rushdoony, his second wife, who after giving birth to a son (Thomas Kirkwood, Jr.), had also been divorced, took Arda’s place as if she never existed.  I could find only one reference to Arda on the Internet.  Read it here.

There may be good reason for the dearth of information on Arda and Ronald Rushdoony; but since information is not available the mystery remains.  These events certainly influenced the family.

An appropriate ending to this essay comes from a story Rushdoony recounts about a Whisky religion renegade Indian who had been in the armed services and occupied various jails around the country.  In the midst of a session of bragging about his brawls he became serious and said, “Look at those people of mine.  They’re no good.  They’re like me, just no account.  All they are fit for is a reservation where someone puts a fence around them.  That’s it.  They are not fit for anything else.”

“But,” he went on, “I’ve been across the country two or three times now in the last few years, and I’ve learned something: the white man isn’t much better.  He has reservation fever now.  He wants someone to put a fence around the whole North American continent and take care of him.  He wants the government to give him a handout and look after him just like Uncle Sam looks after us. And he is going to get it. If some outfit doesn’t come in and do it for him, some foreign country will turn the whole United States into a reservation: he’ll to do it to himself.  You wait and see. ‘Cause he’s got reservation fever.”

What America Will Look Like In 2050 – Acute Water Predicament

Acute water shortages, aquifers exhausted, contaminated rivers…

Few Americans understand what their children face within 37 years with the addition of 100 million immigrants to the United States of America.  The ramifications of passage of mass Amnesty Bill S.744 guarantee devastating consequences to our country.  I hope, as you read this series, you understand that your children will become victims of your apathy and inaction.

Instead of this crisis standing front and center at the national leadership and media levels—America’s population predicament remains the most ignored, evaded and suppressed issue of our time.

I’m not exactly certain why we stand in denial of the effects of adding 100 million immigrants.  You could ask the average American on the street about the implications of S744 and he or she wouldn’t possess the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.

As a reminder validating the reason for this series: demographic experts project the United States adding 100 million immigrants to this country by 2050—a scant 37 years from now.  All totaled, since we reached 300 million in October of 2007, we will add 138 million people by 2050 to total 438 million people—enough to duplicate 20 of our top cities’ populations to our country.  That 100 million people will have to be watered, fed, housed, transported and provided medical services. The enormity of it transcends understanding.  The Pew Research Center, U.S. Population Projections by Fogel/Martin and the U.S. Census Bureau document those demographic facts.

Today in America, seven states suffer water shortages in 2013: Florida, Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.  They may be able to water their populations at this time, but they stand on the edge of acute water shortages.

Florida sustains 18 million people in 2013, but demographic projections show them doubling to 36 million within 37 years—all of it because of legal immigration.  Texas, at 26 million, expects to hit 36 million by 2050.   The whopper granddaddy of them all: California holds 38 million on their way to 58 million.

What amazes me: no one whispers a word.  Somebody with a brain in the media or government must be pulling their hair out while wondering why the media always reports “downstream” or after the catastrophic event already occurred.

But when the “Water footprint” disaster hits, we will have already added 100 million immigrants.  At that point, everyone becomes victims.

(We pollute our drinking water with trash and chemicals all over the planet. Notice the mountain of plastic debris; but you can’t see the chemical contamination within the water.  Not until, of course, you contract cancer.)  Photography

“Without sustainability, ’severe’ water scarcity by 2050” By 

“Today, 36% of the global population — approximately 2.4 billion people — already live in water-scarce regions and 22% of the world’s GDP ($9.4 trillion at 2000 prices) is produced in water-short areas,” said Nusca. “Moreover, 39% of current global grain production is not sustainable in terms of water use.

“According to IFPRI’s analysis, current “business as usual” water management practices and levels of water productivity will put at risk approximately $63 trillion, or 45 percent of the projected 2050 global GDP (at 2000 prices), equivalent to 1.5 times the size of today’s entire global economy. Moreover, 4.8 billion people (52 percent of the world population) will be exposed to severe water scarcity by 2050.”

(This is the kind of water contamination I have seen in my world travels. Many beaches around the world feature knee deep plastic trash. Worse, most of it sinks to the bottom and disrupts ocean, river and lake eco-systems.  Yet, not one world leader or corporations calls for a 25 cent deposit-return law.)  Photography by 

As their water shortages slam home, where do you think they flee?  Answer: first world countries.

Interestingly enough: these figures stand for our current 7.1 billion humans.  Projections show another 3.1 billion added to that to reach 10 billion by 2050.

Something will happen and it won’t be pretty.

• 1 out of 6 people in the world lack access to clean water – that equals 1.1 billion people
• 9 million people will die this year from lack of access to clean water
• Every 15 seconds a child dies from water related illness

Exactly how do we Americans think we will escape those realities by adding 100 million immigrants?

(Imagine millions gallons of chemicals being dumped into America’s lakes and streams 24/7 because that’s what’s happening. Leaking gas tanks from gas stations and individual oil dumps poison our ground water. Dairy, beef, pig and chicken farms cause enormous ground water pollution.  Add another 100 million immigrants and we face humongous consequences that will become irreversible and unsolvable.) Photography by 

Facts about Pollution from Livestock Farms

Livestock pollution and public health

• California officials identify agriculture, including cows, as the major source of nitrate pollution in more than 100,000 square miles of polluted groundwater.
• In 1996 the Centers for Disease Control established a link between spontaneous abortions and high nitrate levels in Indiana drinking water wells located close to feedlots.
• Manure from dairy cows is thought to have contributed to the disastrous Cryptosporidiumcontamination of Milwaukee’s drinking water in 1993, which killed more than 100 people, made 400,000 sick and resulted in $37 million in lost wages and productivity.

Water expert Ken Midkiff said, “In just a few short decades in the US, we have depleted our water supply. In the eastern states, which once had an abundance of water, bitter disputes and legal battles have become commonplace over water shortages caused by overpopulation. In the western states, where water has always been in short supply, population growth in dry areas has led to water shortages that threaten to severely restrict or perhaps even bar further growth.”

How do you “bar growth” by adding over 100 million people to America inside of four decades?

Just imagine with me: within 37 years, endless immigration will add 20 million immigrants to California.  Anyone want to guess the outcome of that many people on the water supplies?

Water is essential for all dimensions of life.  Over the past few decades, use of water has increased, and in many places water availability is falling to crisis levels. More than eighty countries, with forty percent of the world’s population, are already facing water shortages, while by year 2020 the world’s population will double. The costs of water infrastructure have risen dramatically. The quality of water in rivers and underground has deteriorated, due to pollution by waste and contaminants from cities, industry and agriculture. Ecosystems are being destroyed, sometimes permanently. Over one billion people lack safe water, and three billion lack sanitation; eighty per cent of infectious diseases.

What America Will Look Like In 2050

Does anyone in the United States understand or comprehend what America will look like in 2050 “IF” we continue endless immigration into our country? Does any leader possess an inkling of the ramifications of adding the projected 100 million immigrants, their kids and chain-migrated relatives?

That’s correct, at the current rate of immigration legalized by the 1986 Reagan amnesty, we continue on course to add 100 million immigrants from all over the world. They arrive legally at 1.0 million annually. They birth 900,000 babies among their numbers annually. (Source: Dr. Steven Camorata, www.cis.org) With chain migration, that means each “new” American may invite 10 of his or her relatives to join them with “family-reunification.” If the current S744 amnesty bill passes, your US Congress jumped that 1.0 million to 2.0 million legal immigrants annually.

Do the math! Any way you cut it, that means America will experience an avalanche, a human tsunami, or simply the biggest wave of humanity ever to hit our country or any country, ever. We will grow from our current 316 million to well over 438 million people within 37 years. The extra 38 million will come from our own “population momentum.” These figures stem from our country reaching 300 million in October of 2007. We grow by 3.1 million annually.

What’s it going to look like? Answer: it will become ugly on multiple levels—environmentally, sociologically, linguistically, culturally, quality of life and downgraded standard of living—for starters. Parts 1 through 5 will cover what we face.

First of all, 100 million immigrants will equal our adding 20 of our most populated cities. Think of it: we will add another New York City, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and eight other American cities.

We face watering 100 million more people, housing them, transporting them, warming them, feeding them and finding jobs for them.

Today in 2013, seven states face shortages: Georgia, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. But Georgia will grow from 8.2 million to 16.4 million. Florida expects to grow from 18 million to 36 million. For the whopper fact of all, California expects to jump from 38 million to 58 million.

Our cities face resembling present-day Mumbai, India; or Tokyo, Japan; or Paris, France; or Shanghai, China—bursting at the seams with 50 to100 mile traffic jams, people smooched into 200 square foot apartments rising out of the ground like mindless stalactites.

Our rivers will run with endless chemicals from industrial, farm, human and acid rain pollution. Our National Parks will become so crowded that you will be forced to draw a lottery number in order to visit them.

Every last bit of arable land and wildreness will be destroyed by what scientists call “ecological footprint.” In Ethiopia, it takes .4 (4/10ths) of an acre of land to feed, water and house a person. In the USA, it takes 25.4 acres of land to support one person. (Source:www.allspecis.org)

With those 100 million immigrants, we must destroy 2.54 BILLION acres of land. That, in turn, guarantees accelerating our current 250 species suffering extinction annually in the lower 48 to double that number which will mean 5,000 species a year suffering extinction at the hands of our encroachment on the natural world.

As those enormous human numbers impact the carbon footprint and impact the “water footprint”, we face water predicament that will become unsolvable and irreversible. We face water wars, water confrontations, water irrigation problems heretofore never imagined.

Our giant aquifers like the Ogallala will dry up leaving us with no irrigation of our corn, wheat and hay fields.

We incorporate a Faustian Bargain in 2013 to reap a Hobson’s Choice in 2050—a scant 37 years from now.

Our quality of life cannot help but degrade into severe limitations as to hunting, fishing, wildlife extermination, energy exhaustion and resource depletion.

Let’s talk about energy: we hit Peak Oil in 2011. We face the last 50 percent of all oil remaining on the planet. It takes more energy units to pump it and less energy units out of the ground. Finally, at some point, we will be left with little oil at staggering prices—but a 438 million population to feed. Of sobering note, the world will have added 3.1 billion humans to feed, to this nightmare extends beyond our borders.

How about the environment? Anybody want to guess how much damage our carbon footprint will wreak havoc on our oceans with acidification and warming of the waters? My guess: we face annual Hurricane Sandy’s and Katrina’s. More tornadoes will mow humans down at an outstanding rate.

Additionally: I’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg of what we bequeath to our children.

As I sit here with the scientific facts, my own world travels having seen the 12 largest cities on the planet and my own scientific experiences in Antarctica—I am appalled that the American people and our leaders gallop into this added 100 million more immigrants without so much as a shout, whimper or cry.

Our kids will curse our stupidity, arrogance and outright disregard for their futures. My own two U.S. Senators understand what we face because I spent 45 minutes explaining the facts to their staffs, but they voted to add 2.0 million legal immigrants annually to make our fate arrive even faster than 37 years.

My guess: our leaders resemble intellectual lunatics. Our people resemble the dumbest sheep on the planet.

Finally, why am I one of the few Americans who “sees” this so clearly? Why aren’t there tens of millions of Americans who “see” and take it to “60 Minutes” ; “Charlie Rose” ; “Today Show” ; “DateLine” ; “Good Morning America” ; Scott Pelley, Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams, Wolf Blitzer, Kelly Mygen, Shepard Smith and every other media leader? Why don’t we demand a national discussion?

If we refuse to act, remain too apathetic to act, or don’t act—the S744 Amnesty Bill will pass and add that 100 million immigrants to this country in a blink of time. God help our children when they inherit our legacy of 100 million immigrants.

Confessions of a Drone “Warrior”

He was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and killed countless people, but could not always tell you precisely what he was hitting. Meet the 21st-century American killing machine. Who’s still utterly, terrifyingly human.

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.

It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.

He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”

That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.

The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.

Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.

Despite President Obama’s avowal earlier this year that he will curtail their use, drone strikes have continued apace in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. With enormous potential growth and expenditures, drones will be a center of our policy for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers.) Most Americans—61 percent in the latest Pew survey—support the idea of military drones, a projection of American power that won’t risk American lives.
And yet the very idea of drones unsettles. They’re too easy a placeholder or avatar for all of our technological anxieties—the creeping sense that screens and cameras have taken some piece of our souls, that we’ve slipped into a dystopia of disconnection. Maybe it’s too soon to know what drones mean, what unconsidered moral and ethical burdens they carry. Even their shape is sinister: the blunt and featureless nose cone, like some eyeless creature that has evolved in darkness.

For Bryant, talking about them has become a sort of confessional catharsis, a means of processing the things he saw and did during his six years in the Air Force as an experimental test subject in an utterly new form of warfare.

Looking back, it was really little more than happenstance that had led him to that box in the desert. He’d been raised poor by his single mom, a public-school teacher in Missoula, Montana, and he struggled to afford tuition at the University of Montana. In the summer of 2005, after tagging along with a buddy to the Army recruiting office, he wandered into the Air Force office next door. His friend got a bad feeling and bailed at the last minute, but Bryant had already signed his papers. In short order he was running around at Lackland Air Force Base during Warrior Week in the swelter of a Texas summer. He wasn’t much for military hierarchy, but he scored high on his aptitude tests and was shunted into intelligence, training to be an imagery analyst. He was told he would be like “the guys that give James Bond all the information that he needs to get the mission done.”

Most of the airmen in his intel class were funneled into the drone program, training at Creech Air Force Base in the sagebrush desert an hour north of Las Vegas. Bryant was told it was the largest group ever inducted. His sensor-operator course took ten weeks and led into “green flag” exercises, during which airmen piloted Predators and launched dummy Hellfires at a cardboard town mocked up in the middle of the desert. The missiles, packed with concrete, would punch through the derelict tanks and wrecked cars placed around the set. “It’s like playing Dungeons & Dragons,” says Bryant. “Roll a d20 to see if you hit your target.” His training inspector, watching over his shoulder, would count down to impact and say, “Splash! You killed everyone.”

Within a few months he “went off” to war, flying missions over Iraq at the height of the conflict’s deadliest period, even though he never left Nevada.
His opening day on the job was also his worst. The drone took off from Balad Air Base, fifty miles outside Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle. Bryant’s orders, delivered during a pre-shift mission briefing, were straightforward: a force-protection mission, acting as a “guardian angel” over a convoy of Humvees. He would search out IEDs, insurgent activity, and other threats. It was night in the U.S. and already daylight in Iraq when the convoy rolled out.

From 10,000 feet, Bryant scanned the road with infrared. Traffic was quiet. Everything normal. Then he spotted a strange circle, glowing faintly on the surface of the road. A common insurgent’s technique for laying IEDs is to douse a tire with gasoline, set it afire on a roadway, and dig up the softened tar beneath. The technique leaves a telltale heat signature, visible in infrared. Bryant, a fan ofThe Lord of the Rings, joked that it looked like the glowing Eye of Sauron.

Bryant pointed the spot out to the pilot, who agreed it looked like trouble. But when they tried to warn the convoy, they realized they couldn’t. The Humvees had activated their radio jammers to disrupt the cell-phone signals used to remotely detonate IEDs. The drone crew’s attempts at radio contact were as useless as shouting at the monitor. Brandon and his pilot patched in their flight supervisor to brainstorm a new way to reach them. They typed frantically back and forth in a group chat, a string of messages that soon included a cast of superiors in the U.S. and Iraq. Minutes passed, and the convoy rolled slowly toward the glowing circle. Bryant stared at the screen, heart pounding, scarcely breathing. The lead Humvee rolled across the eye. “Nothing happens,” says Bryant. “And we’re kind of like, maybe it was a mistake. Everyone’s like Whew, good on you for spotting it, but we’re glad that it wasn’t what you thought it was.” He remembers exhaling, feeling the nervous tension flow out of him.

“And the second vehicle comes along and boom.…”

A white flash of flame blossomed on the screen. Bryant was zoomed in as close as he could get, toggling his view between infrared and day-TV, watching in unblinking horror as the shredded Humvee burned. His headset exploded with panicked chatter from the ground in Iraq: What the fuck happened? We’ve got guys down over here! Frantic soldiers milled around, trying to pull people out of the smoldering wreckage. The IED had been tripped by either a pressure plate or manual detonation; the radio jammers would have done nothing to prevent it. Three soldiers were severely wounded, and two were killed.

“I kind of finished the night numb,” Bryant says. “Then you just go home. No one talked about it. No one talked about how they felt after anything. It was like an unspoken agreement that you wouldn’t talk about your experiences.”

The pace of work in the box unraveled Bryant’s sense of time. He worked twelve-hour shifts, often overnight, six days a week. Both wars were going badly at the time, and the Air Force leaned heavily on its new drone fleet. A loaded Predator drone can stay aloft for eighteen hours, and the pilots and sensors were pushed to be as tireless as the technology they controlled. (Bryant claims he didn’t get to take leave for the first four years he served.)

Even the smell of that little shed in the desert got to Bryant. The hermetically sealed control center was almost constantly occupied—you couldn’t take a bathroom break without getting swapped out—and the atmosphere was suffused with traces of cigarette smoke and rank sweat that no amount of Febreze could mask. One bored pilot even calculated the number of farts each cockpit seat was likely to have absorbed.

Mostly the drone crews’ work was an endless loop of watching: scanning roads, circling compounds, tracking suspicious activity. If there was a “troops-in-contact” situation—a firefight, ground troops who call in a strike—Bryant’s Predator could be called to the scene in minutes with its deadly payload. But usually time passed in a haze of banal images of rooftops, walled courtyards, or traffic-snarled intersections.

Sitting in the darkness of the control station, Bryant watched people on the other side of the world go about their daily lives, completely unaware of his all-seeing presence wheeling in the sky above. If his mission was to monitor a high-value target, he might linger above a single house for weeks. It was a voyeuristic intimacy. He watched the targets drink tea with friends, play with their children, have sex with their wives on rooftops, writhing under blankets. There were soccer matches, and weddings too. He once watched a man walk out into a field and take a crap, which glowed white in infrared.

Bryant came up with little subterfuges to pass the long hours at the console: sneaking in junk food, mending his uniforms, swapping off twenty-minute naps with the pilot. He mastered reading novels while still monitoring the seven screens of his station, glancing up every minute or two before returning to the page. He constructed a darkly appropriate syllabus for his occupation. He read the dystopian sci-fi classic Ender’s Game, about children whose violent simulated games turn out to be actual warfare. Then came Asimov, Bryant pondering his Three Laws of Robotics in an age of Predators and Hellfires. A robot may not injure a human being….

Bryant took five shots in his first nine months on the job. After a strike he was tasked with lingering over a site for several haunting hours, conducting surveillance for an “after-action report.” He might watch people gather up the remains of those killed and carry them to the local cemetery or scrub the scene by dumping weapons into a river. Over Iraq he followed an insurgent commander as he drove through a crowded marketplace. The man parked in the middle of the street, opened his trunk, and pulled two girls out. “They were bound and gagged,” says Bryant. “He put them down on their knees, executed them in the middle of the street, and left them there. People just watched it and didn’t do anything.” Another time, Bryant watched as a local official groveled in his own grave before being executed by two Taliban insurgents.

In the early months Bryant had found himself swept up by the Big Game excitement when someone in his squadron made “mind-blowingly awesome shots, situations where these guys were bad guys and needed to be taken out.” But a deep ambivalence about his work crept in. Often he’d think about what life must be like in those towns and villages his Predators glided over, like buzzards riding updrafts. How would he feel, living beneath the shadow of robotic surveillance? “Horrible,” he says now. But at first, he believed that the mission was vital, that drones were capable of limiting the suffering of war, of saving lives. When this notion conflicted with the things he witnessed in high resolution from two miles above, he tried to put it out of his mind. Over time he found that the job made him numb: a “zombie mode” he slipped into as easily as his flight suit.

Bryant’s second shot came a few weeks after targeting the three men on that dirt road in Kunar. He was paired with a pilot he didn’t much like, instructed to monitor a compound that intel told them contained a high-value individual—maybe a Taliban commander or Al Qaeda affiliate, nobody briefed him on the specifics. It was a typical Afghan mud-brick home, goats and cows milling around a central courtyard. They watched a corner of the compound’s main building, bored senseless for hours. They assumed the target was asleep.

Then the quiet ended. “We get this word that we’re gonna fire,” he says. “We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.” The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.

Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.”

Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.

“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”

Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.

If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn’t have cared about wasting a $95,000 Hellfire to avoid what he believed had happened. But as far as the official military version of events was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pilot “was the type of guy to not argue with command,” says Bryant. So the pilot’s after-action report stated that the building had been destroyed, the high-value target eliminated. The report made no mention of a dog or any other living thing. The child, if there had been a child, was an infrared ghost.

The closest Bryant ever got to “real” combat—the roadside bombs and mortar fire experienced by combat troops—was after volunteering to deploy to Iraq. He spent the scorching summer and fall of 2007 stationed at the airfield in Balad, flying Predators on base-defense missions—scanning the area for insurgents. Some troops thanked the drone crews for being “angels in the sky,” but more often they were the butt of jokes, mocked as “chair-borne rangers” who would “only earn a Purple Heart for burning themselves on a Hot Pocket.”

Bryant struggled to square the jokes with the scenes that unfolded on his monitors. On one shift, he was told by command that they needed coordinates on an insurgent training compound and asked him to spot it. There was a firing range, and he watched as a group of fighters all entered the same building. One of the issues with targeting insurgents was that they often traveled with their families, and there was no way to tell who exactly was in any given building. Bryant lasered the building as he was ordered. Moments later, smoke mushroomed high into the air, a blast wave leveling the entire compound. An F-16, using Bryant’s laser coordinates as guidance, had dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on the building—ten times the size of a Hellfire. “They didn’t actually tell us that they were gonna blow it up,” says Bryant. “We’re like, ‘Wow, that was nice of you to inform us of that.’ ”

In 2008, Bryant was transferred to a new post in “the shittiest place in the world,” a drone squadron out of Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico, where, Bryant says, “the air is not oxygen, it’s basically cow shit.” He continued as an operator for several more years, but his directive had changed. He was now mainly tracking high-value targets for the Joint Special Operations Command—the same secret-shrouded branch of the service that spearheaded the hunt for Osama bin Laden. “We were going after top dudes. They started showing us PowerPoint presentations on who these people are,” he says. “Why we’re after him, and what he did. I liked that. I liked being able to know shit like that.”

Bryant has never been philosophically opposed to the use of drones—he sees them as a tool, like any other, that can be used for good ends, citing their potential use to fight poachers, or to monitor forest fires. For him it’s about who controls them, and toward what ends. “It can’t be a small group of people deciding how they’re used,” he says. “There’s got to be transparency. People have to know how they’re being used so they’re used responsibly.”

Transparency has not been the defining feature of U.S. drone policy over the last decade. Even as Bryant was being trained to operate drones in our very public wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a parallel and clandestine drone war was being waged in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Since 2004, the CIA has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistani territory, cutting secret deals with Pakistani intelligence to operate a covert assassination program. Another covert CIA drone base was operated from Saudi Arabia, launching strikes against militants in the lawless and mountainous interior of Yemen. While Bryant never flew for the CIA itself, their drone operators were drawn directly from the Air Force ranks.

While stationed in Clovis, among the highest-value targets Bryant’s squadron hunted was Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born Yemeni imam and Al Qaeda recruiter. Al-Awlaki was ultimately killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 (as was his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a few weeks later). But Bryant claims his Air Force squadron “did most of the legwork” to pinpoint his location.

By 2011, Bryant had logged nearly 6,000 hours of flight time, flown hundreds of missions, targeted hundreds of enemies. He was in what he describes as “a fugue state of mind.” At the entrance to his flight headquarters in Clovis, in front of a large bulletin board, plastered with photographs of targets like al-Awlaki, he looked up at the faces and asked: “What motherfucker’s gonna die today?”
It seemed like someone else’s voice was speaking, some dark alter ego. “I knew I had to get out.”

By the spring of 2011, almost six years after he’d signed on, Senior Airman Brandon Bryant left the Air Force, turning down a $109,000 bonus to keep flying. He was presented with a sort of scorecard covering his squadron’s missions. “They gave me a list of achievements,” he says. “Enemies killed, enemies captured, high-value targets killed or captured, stuff like that.” He called it his diploma. He hadn’t lased the target or pulled the trigger on all of the deaths tallied, but by flying in the missions he felt he had enabled them. “The number,” he says, “made me sick to my stomach.”

Total enemies killed in action: 1,626.

“After that first missile hit, I didn’t really talk to anyone for a couple weeks.” Bryant spoke to me while driving his beat-up black Dodge Neon in looping cursive circles around his hometown of Missoula. A yellow support-the-troops sticker on his bumper was obscured by a haze of road salt. The car’s interior was festooned with patches from the different units he’d served with; in the back seat was a military pack stuffed with equal parts dirty laundry and bug-out gear. The gray midwinter sky weighed on a procession of strip malls and big-box stores; the snowy crenellations of the Bitterroot Range stretched far away to the south. He stared ahead as though watching the scene of his shot on an endless loop. “I didn’t know what it meant to kill someone. And watching the aftermath, watching someone bleed out, because of something that I did?”

That night, on the drive home, he’d started sobbing. He pulled over and called his mother. “She just was like, ‘Everything will be okay,’ and I told her I killed someone, I killed people, and I don’t feel good about it. And she’s like, ‘Good, that’s how it should feel, you should never not feel that way.’ ”

Other members of his squadron had different reactions to their work. One sensor operator, whenever he made a kill, went home and chugged an entire bottle of whiskey. A female operator, after her first shot, refused to fire again even under the threat of court martial. Another pilot had nightmares after watching two headless bodies float down the Tigris. Bryant himself would have bizarre dreams where the characters from his favorite game, World of Warcraft, appeared in infrared.

By mid-2011, Bryant was back in Missoula, only now he felt angry, isolated, depressed. While getting a video game at a Best Buy, he showed his military ID with his credit card, and a teenage kid behind him in line spoke up. “He’s like, ‘Oh, you’re in the military; my brother, he’s a Marine, he’s killed like thirty-six dudes, and he tells me about it all the time.’ And I turn around and say, ‘If you fucking ever talk like this to me again, I will stab you. Don’t ever disrespect people’s deaths like that ever again.’ ” The kid went pale, and Bryant took his game and left.

At the urging of a Vietnam veteran he met at the local VA office, Bryant finally went to see a therapist. After a few sessions, he just broke down: “I told her I wanted to be a hero, but I don’t feel like a hero. I wanted to do something good, but I feel like I just wasted the last six years of my life.” She diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It was an unexpected diagnosis. For decades the model for understanding PTSD has been “fear conditioning”: quite literally the lasting psychological ramifications of mortal terror. But a term now gaining wider acceptance is “moral injury.” It represents a tectonic realignment, a shift from a focusing on the violence that has been done to a person in wartime toward his feelings about what he has done to others—or what he’s failed to do for them. The concept is attributed to the clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who in his book Achilles in Vietnam traces the idea back as far as the Trojan War. The mechanisms of death may change—as intimate as a bayonet or as removed as a Hellfire—but the bloody facts, and their weight on the human conscience, remain the same. Bryant’s diagnosis of PTSD fits neatly into this new understanding. It certainly made sense to Bryant. “I really have no fear,” he says now. “It’s more like I’ve had a soul-crushing experience. An experience that I thought I’d never have. I was never prepared to take a life.”

In 2011, Air Force psychologists completed a mental-health survey of 600 combat drone operators. Forty-two percent of drone crews reported moderate to high stress, and 20 percent reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. The study’s authors attributed their dire results, in part, to “existential conflict.” A later study found that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as traditional combat aircrews. These effects appeared to spike at the exact time of Bryant’s deployment, during the surge in Iraq. (Chillingly, to mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.)

In the summer of 2012, Bryant rejoined the Air Force as a reservist, hoping to get into the famed SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), where he would help train downed pilots to survive behind enemy lines. After so much killing, he wanted to save people. But after a severe concussion in a training accident, he dropped out and returned once more to Missoula. He walked with a cane, had headaches and memory lapses, and fell into a black depression.

During the worst of it, Bryant would make the rounds of Missoula’s dozens of roughneck bars and drink himself to blackout on whiskey and cokes, vanishing for days or weeks on end. Many of those nights he would take his government-issued minus-forty-degree sleeping bag and pull into a parking lot in the middle of town next to the Clark Fork river. There’s a small park with a wooden play structure there, built to look like a dragon with slides and ladders descending from it. He would climb to the little lookout deck at the top, blind drunk, and sleep there, night after night.

He doesn’t remember much of that hazy period last summer, but his mother, LanAnn, does. Several times he had left a strange locked case sitting out on the kitchen table at her house, and she had put it back in the closet. The third day she woke to find the case open, with a loaded Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic pistol lying out. Terrified that he might kill himself, she gave it to a friend with a locked gun safe. She’d only told her son about it a week earlier. He had no memory of any of it.
“I really thought we were going to lose him,” LanAnn Bryant says now.

Something needed to change. Bryant hoped that by going to the press, people would understand drone crews’ experience of war, that it was “more than just a video game” to them. In the fall, he spoke to a reporter for the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. The story was translated into English, and the British tabloid Daily Mail picked it up, posting it with the wildly inaccurate headline drone operator followed orders to shoot a child…and decided he had to quit. The story went viral.

The backlash from the drone community was immediate and fierce. Within days, 157 people on Bryant’s Facebook page had de-friended him. “You are a piece of shit liar. Rot in hell,” wrote a former Air Force comrade. In a sort of exercise in digital self-flagellation, Bryant read thousands of Reddit comments about himself, many filled with blistering vitriol and recrimination. “I read every single one of them,” he says. “I was trying to just get used to the negative feelings.” The spectrum of critics ranged from those who considered drone warfare a crime against humanity to combat veterans who thought Bryant was a whiner. He’d had death threats as well—none he took seriously—and other people said he should be charged with treason and executed for speaking to the media. On the day of one of our interviews, The New York Times ran an article about the military’s research into PTSD among drone operators. I watched as he scanned a barrage of Facebook comments mocking the very idea that drone operators could suffer trauma:

>I broke a fucking nail on that last mission!
>Maybe they should wear seatbelts
>they can claim PTSD when they have to do “Body Collection & Identification”
And then Bryant waded in:
>I’m ashamed to have called any of you assholes brothers in arms.
>Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t a video game. How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them too?
>Yeah, it’s not the same as being on the ground. So fucking what? Until you know what it is like and can make an intelligent meaningful assessment, shut your goddamn fucking mouths before somebody shuts them for you.

Bryant’s defense—a virtual battle over an actual war—left him seething at his keyboard. He says that when flying missions, he sometimes felt himself merging with the technology, imagining himself as a robot, a zombie, a drone itself. Such abstractions don’t possess conscience or consciousness; drones don’t care what they mean, but Bryant most certainly does. Now he plans to study to be an EMT, maybe get work on an ambulance, finally be able to save people like he always wanted. He no longer has infrared dreams, no longer closes his eyes and sees those strange polarized shadows flit across them.

Bryant closed his laptop and went out into the yard, tossing a tennis ball to his enormous bounding Japanese mastiff. Fingers of snow extended down through the dark forests of the Bitterroot, and high white contrails in the big sky caught the late-afternoon sunlight. The landscape of western Montana, Bryant observed, bears a striking resemblance to the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan—a place he’s seen only pixelated on a monitor. It was a cognitive dissonance he had often felt flying missions, as he tried to remind himself that the world was just as real when seen in a grainy image as with the naked eye, that despite being filtered through distance and technology, cause and effect still applied. This is the uncanny valley over which our drones circle. We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves.

Source: GQ  |  MATTHEW POWER  | PHOTOGRAPHS BY ETHAN LEVITAS

Boston Marathon, This Thing Called Terrorism, And The United States

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

Do not the survivors of US attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere, and their loved ones, ask such a question?

The survivors and loved ones in Boston have their answer – America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That’s what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber has said in custody, and there’s no reason to doubt that he means it, nor the dozens of others in the past two decades who have carried out terrorist attacks against American targets and expressed anger toward US foreign policy. 1 Both Tsarnaev brothers had expressed such opinions before the attack as well.  2 The Marathon bombing took place just days after a deadly US attack in Afghanistan killed 17 civilians, including 12 children, as but one example of countless similar horrors from recent years. “Oh”, an American says, “but those are accidents. What terrorists do is on purpose. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

But if the American military sends out a bombing mission on Monday which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Tuesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and then the military announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” And then on Wednesday the American military sends out a bombing mission which kills multiple innocent civilians, and the military then announces: “Sorry, that was an accident.” … Thursday … Friday … How long before the American military loses the right to say it was an accident?

Terrorism is essentially an act of propaganda, to draw attention to a cause. The 9-11 perpetrators attacked famous symbols of American military and economic power. Traditionally, perpetrators would phone in their message to a local media outlet beforehand, but today, in this highly-surveilled society, with cameras and electronic monitoring at a science-fiction level, that’s much more difficult to do without being detected; even finding a public payphone can be near impossible.

From what has been reported, the older brother, Tamerlan, regarded US foreign policy also as being anti-Islam, as do many other Muslims. I think this misreads Washington’s intentions. The American Empire is not anti-Islam. It’s anti-only those who present serious barriers to the Empire’s plan for world domination.

The United States has had close relations with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar, amongst other Islamic states. And in recent years the US has gone to great lengths to overthrow the leading secular states of the Mideast – Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Moreover, it’s questionable that Washington is even against terrorism per se, but rather only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There has been, for example, a lengthy and infamous history of tolerance, and often outright support, for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. Hundreds of anti-Castro and other Latin American terrorists have been given haven in the US over the years. The United States has also provided support to terrorists in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran, Libya, and Syria, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further foreign policy goals more important than fighting terrorism.

Under one or more of the harsh anti-terrorist laws enacted in the United States in recent years, President Obama could be charged with serious crimes for allowing the United States to fight on the same side as al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Libya and Syria and for funding and supplying these groups. Others in the United States have been imprisoned for a lot less.

As a striking example of how Washington has put its imperialist agenda before anything else, we can consider the case of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention in the 1980s by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how these horrible men spent their time when they were not screaming “Death to America”. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material”. 3 This did not prevent the United States government from showering the man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan. 4 Hekmatyar is still a prominent warlord in Afghanistan.

A similar example is that of Luis Posada who masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, killing 73 civilians. He has lived a free man in Florida for many years.

USA Today reported a few months ago about a rebel fighter in Syria who told the newspaper in an interview: “The afterlife is the only thing that matters to me, and I can only reach it by waging jihad.” 5 Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have chosen to have a shootout with the Boston police as an act of suicide; to die waging jihad, although questions remain about exactly how he died. In any event, I think it’s safe to say that the authorities wanted to capture the brothers alive to be able to question them.

It would be most interesting to be present the moment after a jihadist dies and discovers, with great shock, that there’s no afterlife. Of course, by definition, there would have to be an afterlife for him to discover that there’s no afterlife. On the other hand, a non-believer would likely be thrilled to find out that he was wrong.

Let us hope that the distinguished statesmen, military officers, and corporate leaders who own and rule America find out in this life that to put an end to anti-American terrorism they’re going to have to learn to live without unending war against the world. There’s no other defense against a couple of fanatic young men with backpacks. Just calling them insane or evil doesn’t tell you enough; it may tell you nothing.

But this change in consciousness in the elite is going to be extremely difficult, as difficult as it appears to be for the parents of the two boys to accept their sons’ guilt. Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, stated after the Boston attack: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world. In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks … We should be asking ourselves at this moment, ‘How many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?’” 6

Officials in Canada and Britain as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice have called for Falk to be fired. 7

President Kennedy’s speech, half a century ago

I don’t know how many times in the 50 years since President John F. Kennedy made his much celebrated 1963 speech at American University in Washington, DC. 8  I’ve heard or read that if only he had lived he would have put a quick end to the war in Vietnam instead of it continuing for ten more terrible years, and that the Cold War might have ended 25 years sooner than it did. With the 50th anniversary coming up June 13 we can expect to hear a lot more of the same, so I’d like to jump the gun and offer a counter-view.

Kennedy declared:

Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims such as the allegation that “American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war … that there is a very real threat of a preventative war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union” … [and that] the political aims – and I quote – “of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries … [and] to achieve world domination … by means of aggressive war.”

It is indeed refreshing that an American president would utter a thought such as: “It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write.” This is what radicals in every country wonder about their leaders, not least in the United States. For example, “incredible claims such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of war’.”

In Kennedy’s short time in office the United States had unleashed many different types of war, from attempts to overthrow governments and suppress political movements to assassination attempts against leaders and actual military combat – one or more of these in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, British Guiana, Iraq, Congo, Haiti, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Brazil. This is all in addition to the normal and routine CIA subversion of countries all over the world map. Did Kennedy really believe that the Soviet claims were “incredible”?

And did he really doubt that that the driving force behind US foreign policy was “world domination”? How else did he explain all the above interventions (which have continued non-stop into the 21st century)? If the president thought that the Russians were talking nonsense when they accused the US of seeking world domination, why didn’t he then disavow the incessant US government and media warnings about the “International Communist Conspiracy”? Or at least provide a rigorous definition of the term and present good evidence of its veracity.

Quoting further: “Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.” No comment.

“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people.” Unless of course the people foolishly insist on some form of socialist alternative. Ask the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, British Guiana and Cuba, just to name some of those in Kennedy’s time.

“At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends …” American presidents have been speaking of “our friends” for many years. What they all mean, but never say, is that “our friends” are government and corporate leaders whom we keep in power through any means necessary – the dictators, the kings, the oligarchs, the torturers – not the masses of the population, particularly those with a measure of education.

“Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides.”

Persistent, yes. Patient, often. But moral, fostering human rights, democracy, civil liberties, self-determination, not fawning over Israel … ? As but one glaring example, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, perhaps the last chance for a decent life for the people of that painfully downtrodden land; planned by the CIA under Eisenhower, but executed under Kennedy.

“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”

See all of the above for this piece of hypocrisy. And so, if no nation interfered in the affairs of any other nation, there would be no wars. Brilliant. If everybody became rich there would be no poverty. If everybody learned to read there would be no illiteracy.

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”

So … Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and literally dozens of other countries then, later, and now, all the way up to Libya in 2012 … they all invaded the United States first? Remarkable.

And this was the man who was going to end the war in Vietnam very soon after being re-elected the following year? Lord help us.

Bush’s legacy

This is not to put George W. Bush down. That’s too easy, and I’ve done it many times. No, this is to counter the current trend to rehabilitate the man and his Iraqi horror show, which partly coincides with the opening of his presidential library in Texas. At the dedication ceremony, President Obama spoke of Bush’s “compassion and generosity” and declared that: “He is a good man.” The word “Iraq” did not pass his lips. The closest he came at all was saying “So even as we Americans may at times disagree on matters of foreign policy, we share a profound respect and reverence for the men and women of our military and their families.” 9 Should morality be that flexible? Even for a politician? Obama could have just called in sick.

At the January 31 congressional hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, Senator John McCain ripped into him for his critique of the Iraq war:

“The question is, were you right or were you wrong?” McCain demanded, pressing Hagel on why he opposed Bush’s decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the so-called ‘surge’.

“I’m not going to give you a yes-or-no answer. I think it’s far more complicated than that,” Hagel responded. He said he would await the “judgment of history.”

Glaring at Hagel, McCain ended the exchange with a bitter rejoinder: “I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it.” 10

Before the revisionist history of the surge gets chiseled into marble, let me repeat part of what I wrote in this report at the time, December 2007:

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided – a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who’s keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. A recent analysis by the Washington Post left the administration’s claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: “The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.”

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead, wounded, in exile abroad, or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons. So the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n’est-ce pas? nicht wahr?) – Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down. On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like … well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that “Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq”; as well as exaggerating “Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.” The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

How long can it be before vacation trips to “Exotic Iraq” are flashed across our TVs? “Baghdad’s Beautiful Beaches Beckon”. Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a “business development/tourism” expert to work in Baghdad, “with a particular focus on tourism and related services.” 11

Another argument raised again recently to preserve George W.’s legacy is that “He kept us safe”. Hmm … I could swear that he was in the White House around the time of September 11 … What his supporters mean is that Bush’s War on Terrorism was a success because there wasn’t another terrorist attack in the United States after September 11, 2001 while he was in office; as if terrorists killing Americans is acceptable if it’s done abroad. Following the American/Bush strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there were literally scores of terrorist attacks – including some major ones – against American institutions in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific: military, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States.

Even the claim that the War on Terrorism kept Americans safe at home is questionable. There was no terrorist attack in the United States during the 6 1/2 years prior to the one in September 2001; not since the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It would thus appear that the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States is the norm.

William Blum speaking in Wisconsin, near Minnesota

Saturday, July 13th, the 11th Annual Peacestock: A Gathering for Peace will take place at Windbeam Farm in Hager City, WI. Peacestock is a mixture of music, speakers, and community for peace in an idyllic location near the Mississippi, just one hour’s drive from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Peacestock is sponsored by Veterans for Peace, Chapter 115, and has a peace-themed agenda. Kathy Kelly, peace activist extraordinaire, will also speak.

You can camp there and be fed well, meat or vegetarian. Full information at:http://www.peacestockvfp.org 11

Notes

1. William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, chapters 1 and 2, for cases up to about 2003; later similar cases are numerous; e.g., Glenn Greenwald, “They Hate US for our Occupations”, Salon, October 12, 2010 ↩
2. Huffington Post, April 20, 2013; Washington Post, April 21 ↩
3. Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990), p.149-50. ↩
4. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II ↩
5. USA Today, December 3, 2012 ↩
6. ForeignPolicyJournal.com, April 21, 2013 ↩
7. The Telegraph (London), April 25, 2013; Politico.com, April 24 ↩
8. Full text of speech ↩
9.  ↩
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2013 ↩
11. Anti-Empire Report, #52, December 11, 2007 ↩

Now You Can’t Drink Water

Americans take so many mood-altering and addictive pills that water supplies are being contaminated. Just ask the fish. Do the drugs in your water pose a risk to your health—and even your sobriety?

The idea that we’re being unwittingly drugged when we drink a glass of ordinary tap water smacks of dystopian science fiction or political conspiracy theory. Accusations that Communists were spiking America’s water with sedatives—under the cover of the federally instituted fluoridation program—were such a staple of Cold War–era paranoia that Stanley Kubrick satirized it in his 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. While such fear-mongering may seem quaint, what’s truly ironic is that Americans today are consuming prescription drugs—including addictive psychoactive ones—via the water supply. Who knew?

There’s a good chance that if you live in an urban area, your tap water is laced with tiny amounts of antidepressants (mostly SSRIs like Prozac and Effexor), benzodiazepines (like Klonopin, used to reduce symptoms of substance withdrawal) and anticonvulsants (like Topomax, used to treat addiction to alcohol, nicotine, food and even cocaine and crystal meth). Such are the implications of environmental studies that have been leaking out over the past decade. Whether or not this psychoactive waste has any effect on the human nervous system remains unclear, but when such pharmaceuticals are introduced into the ecosystem, the fallout for other species is demonstrable—and potentially dire.

There’s no mystery to the way prescription medications wind up in our tap water. Whether you flush a bottle of old pills down the toilet or, more likely, excrete the remains of a daily dose (an estimated 80% isn’t broken down in our bodies), active chemicals get recycled back into reservoirs because sewage treatment plants aren’t able to filter them out. “They just fly right through,” says Michael Thomas, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Idaho State University.

Although government officials and scientists are in no rush to look into this potential threat, some environmentalists are becoming worried. In a preliminary study at the University of Idaho, fathead minnows were plunked in water spiked with a combination of SSRIs and anticonvulsants—a lab version of American tap water. After swimming in the contaminated water for 18 days, the minnows exhibited 324 genetic alterations associated with human neurological disorders, including autism.

Mutated minnows admittedly do not signal a hazard of global-warming dimensions. Yet messed-up genes are what cause disease. Studies have shown that regular doses of SSRIs can sometimes damage human DNA, most notably in sperm. The minnows offer evidence that even trace amounts of SSRIs can infiltrate DNA. For now, the implications for humans of ongoing exposure can only be extrapolated from the effects on wildlife: According to a 2008 AP investigation, trace pharmaceuticals already contaminate a wide variety of species, from algae on up to mammals.

The peculiarities of sedative-fed perch were highlighted last month in a front- page article in The New York Times. The fish had been fed trace doses of oxazepam—a benzodiazepine commonly used in Europe—over a period of two months, as part of a Swedish study. The fish exposed to the anti-anxiety medication socialized less but ate more zooplankton and swam further, behaviors with potential long-term consequences for local ecosystems. This sparked fears among environmentalists that under the influence, the fish are more susceptible to predators, which could weaken the strength of the species. Not mentioned in the Times piece is the fact that SSRIs have been detected in plankton, which are a “foundation” organism in the food chain. “It’s inescapable,” Sudeep Chandra, an associate professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, told the AP. “There’s enough global information now to confirm [trace pharmaceuticals] are affecting organisms and wildlife.”

“This looks like a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public,” a British Parliament member charged.

This drugs-in-our-drinking-water issue has remained mostly below the radar of the government, researchers and the media. The AP chalked up the lack of focus on the issue partly to government agencies’ and nonprofits’ wariness about stoking public fear. “It’s a hard topic to talk about without creating fear in the general public,”said the Water Research Foundation’s Robert Renna.

While the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that other kinds of contaminants, such as pesticides and lead, be filtered out before our drinking water flows through a municipal tap, there remain no guidelines at all for pharmaceuticals, despite the fact that as far back as 2000, a US geological survey found low levels in 80% of the rivers and streams sampled. Nor is much funding available for even rudimentary studies of this potential public health problem.

The EPA does not even track the statistics collected by the few municipalities that do surveillance. In 2008, after surveying results from the municipalities that did test, the AP found over 50 pharmaceuticals that “could harm humans” in the water of 41 million Americans. Because most cities don’t test—and those that do generally refuse to release their findings, citing “security concerns” —the actual number of affected people is almost certainly much higher. “I think we have a lot of work to do,”said the EPA’s Benjamin Grumbles.

The problem is not restricted to the US. Over a hundred trace pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the globe, from Pakistan to Finland. But the highest concentrations of drug pollution by far are here at home, where nearly half the population is on at least one prescribed medication. The 10% of Americans who take antidepressants (mostly SSRIs) accounted for 255 million scripts in 2010. With all that runoff, you might think Americans would be happier—and less addiction prone—than they are.

In Britain, where psychoactive drugs are prescribed at a fraction of US levels, a 2004 Environment Agency study cited “low-level, almost continuous discharge” of Prozac through the tap water there. Parliament member Norman Baker stated ominously, “This looks like a case of hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public.” Yet no US municipalities have done similar measurements that quantify the amount of each drug detected. It’s reasonable to assume, however, that consistent quantities of trace antidepressants flow through American taps—especially since fish collected in fresh-water bodies near several urban centers have tested positive for these contaminants.

New York City is widely believed to have the nation’s cleanest tap water, which is supplied from protected upstate reservoirs. The feds consider these reservoirs so pure that the Big Apple’s H2O is not required to be filtered. As far as is known, no official agency has tested the city’s water supply for pharmaceuticals. Yet a 2008 study by Stony Brook University found a number of sedatives and anti-depressants in upstate waterways that feed the reservoirs. A just-released study by the Citizens Campaign for the Environment found that contrary to public health guidelines, over 50% of the medical facilities in nearby Suffolk County flush their unused meds down the toilet.

Because pharmaceutical compounds make their way into the watershed itself, private wells are also affected; as for the bottled stuff, it’s no purer than most tap water because it comes from the same water sources. If prescription medications are being passed into the water supply, it follows that some illegal drugs must take the same route, although in substantially lower quantities. Sure enough, aSpanish study found cocaine in 22 of 24 random samples of that country’s tap water and an Italian study found cocaine flowing through the Po River.

The future social and ecological fallout, if any, from the drugs in our drinking water is impossible to foresee. But in the short term, within the 12-step community, the issue could have a special resonance. Many AA members believe that true sobriety requires abstinence from all mood-altering drugs, whether addictive (like benzodiazepines) or not (like antidepressants). A pamphlet issued by AA’s General Services Conference warns that it’s “generally accepted” that these meds can “threaten the maintenance of sobriety.” But given the prevalence of these substances in the water supply, it appears that you can’t even drink a glass of good, old tap water without going off the wagon. Where does that leave people who believe in a literal interpretation of the Big Book? Crossing Italy and Spain off the travel itinerary is easy enough. It may also be time, for sanity’s sake, to take another look at what “total abstinence” means.

Matt Harvey is an award-winning freelance journalist whose writing has appeared on AnimalNY.com, Black Book, the New York Post and the New York Press, among other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

Source: The Fix

Government Subsidizes And Bankrupt Companies

There are many forms of government subsidies. Ambitious politicians ingeniously design schemes to expand their power and repay their donor patrons. Opportunist corporate enterprises beg for favor to fund projects or guaranteed loans. The role of government venture capitalism has produced a much-sordid record for the taxpayer. The sheer concept of picking winners and losers is a pure political play that defies pragmatic prudence. In spite of this, actuality, the rush to squander public money is one of the few growth industries. The pitiful results of the predictable bankruptcy are the common fate of this flawed business model.

The latest outrage has Buyers Circle Around Ailing Fisker Automotive. Yet, some critics of this assessment would have you believe that Fisker Automotive is in a sharp contrast to competitor Tesla Motors.

“But the fact that potential buyers are from China is already raising alarms about Fisker, which raised $1.2 billion in venture capital and spent about $192 million in federal loans to build a factory. “Technology developed with American taxpayer subsidies should not be sold off to China,” Republican senator Charles Grassley told Bloomberg. He compared it to the acquisition of A123 Systems by China-based auto parts company Wanxiang Group.

By contrast, Tesla Motors, which also received a DOE loan to build its factory, is crossing into higher volume production. Yesterday, Tesla announced that it expects to be profitable this quarter and is making its Model S at a rate of 400 a month, which will allow it to hit its annual target and meet demand for the electric sedan. (See, Tesla’s Explosive Revenue Suggests a Bright Future.)

One crucial difference between Tesla and Fisker, which is well known for its bold designs, has been Tesla’s manufacturing expertise. Fisker may well still go public and be a successful EV supplier. But for energy-related startups to go the route of Tesla rather than Fisker, they’ll need innovative technology, access to capital, supportive policies, and great business execution.”

The Obama environmental cult would argue that it is largely appropriate to spend public resources to fund private technological businesses. Some will be successful while others will fail. However, the partnership role with government in this new state/capitalist prototype is necessary to achieve the greater good of a fossil free ecosystem. Expensive cars, not designed for the commuter, are now joint venture public finance missions, in order to curtail gas fumes.

Henry Ford is rolling in his grave and Enzo Ferrari is searching for the electric switch.

The notorious “Green” sector has vivid examples of bribery, theft, incompetence and high-priced inefficient technology. The Foundry publishes a most informative list ofPresident Obama’s Taxpayer-Backed Green Energy Failures. “So far, 34 companies that were offered federal support from taxpayers are faltering — either having gone bankrupt or laying off workers or heading for bankruptcy.” Examine the specific site links for expanded details.

 

1.    Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*	12.  Abound Solar ($400 million)*	23.  Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
2.   SpectraWatt ($500,000)*	13.  A123 Systems ($279 million)*	24.  Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
3.    Solyndra ($535 million)*	14.  Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*	25.  Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
4.    Beacon Power ($43 million)*	15.  Johnson Controls ($299 million)	26. GreenVolts ($500,000)
5.    Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)	16.  Brightsource ($1.6 billion)	27.  Vestas ($50 million)
6.    SunPower ($1.2 billion)	17.  ECOtality ($126.2 million)	28.   ($151 million)
7.    First Solar ($1.46 billion)	18.  Raser Technologies ($33 million)*	29.  Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
8.    Babcock and Brown ($178 million)	19.  Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)	30.  Navistar ($39 million)
9.    EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*	20.  Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*	31.  Satcon ($3 million)*
10.  Amonix ($5.9 million)	21.  Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*	32.  Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
11.  Fisker Automotive ($529 million)	22.  Range Fuels ($80 million)*	33.  Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)

 

Now expand the creativity of the subsidy culture to the bankruptcy constituency. The report, Union That Bankrupted Hostess to Receive Generous Government Subsidies, will push you over the edge.

“Last year, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union refused to accept concessions that would have kept Hostess in business. The company had tried to cut costs as it faced high labor expenses, rising ingredient costs, and decreasing sales. The Teamsters union accepted the concessions, but the Bakery union would not, choosing to strike. Unable to continue operating, Hostess filed for bankruptcy.

Now those who helped bring down an American icon will receive generous, taxpayer-funded benefits from the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. These generous benefits come in addition to existing unemployment insurance, job placement, and job training programs. TAA benefits include:

• Up to two years of job training in an approved training program,

• Up to 52 weeks of Trade Readjustment Allowances for workers in job training,

• Job search and relocation allowances,

• A refundable “health care tax credit” that covers 65 percent of a worker’s health insurance premiums in qualifying health plans, and

• A two-year wage insurance program that partly replaces workers’ earnings if they accept lower-paying jobs.”

The civic grant philosophy is not just for corporatists. Union goons prefer that their rank in file lose their livelihood, so that they can enjoy the welfare stipends of the state-run insolvent society. The prospects of a Mandarin logo on a Fisker vehicle are hardly on the same scale of transferring innovative technology to Cantonese creditors. However, the common practice of squandering national treasure for dubious purposes seems to be the primary product of the political careerists.

Leave it to the progressives over at The American Prospect, for an unintended analogy, in the essay The Twinkie Defense – the unions made us do it. “Hostess Brands is classic case of private equity engineers and executives looting a viable company, loading it up with debt, and then asking the employees to make up the difference.”

Regretfully, but with no remorse; the political class plays the role of private equity engineers, as the government plunders our economy, through crony spending and swelling of the debt, while saddling the taxpayer with the bill.

37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy

The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama?  The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy.  Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions.  Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should not go to Obama alone.  Certainly much of what we are experiencing today is the direct result of decades of very foolish decisions by Congress and previous presidential administrations.  And of course the Federal Reserve has more influence over the economy than anyone else does.  But Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to criticize anything that the Federal Reserve has done and he even nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman despite his horrific track record of failure, so at a minimum Barack Obama must be considered to be complicit in the Fed’s very foolish policies.  Despite what the Obama administration tells us, the U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and that decline has accelerated in many ways over the past four years.  Just consider the statistics that I have compiled below.  The following are 37 statistics which show how four years of Obama have wrecked the U.S. economy…

1. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.

3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 tomore than 128 million today.

5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.

6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.

7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.

8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

9. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.

10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America.  According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years.  Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce.  Approximately 53 percentof all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.

13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.

14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”.  Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.

15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.

17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losinghalf a million jobs to China every single year.

18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percentof all global economic activity in 2001.  That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.

20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East.  We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that.  Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent.  Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent.  Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actuallydecreased by 36 percent.

21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84.  Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is$3.26.

22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.

23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.

26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.

28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.

31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable.  For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.

32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.

33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.

34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is up to 103 percent.

35. During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.

36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.  Are you ready to contribute your share?

37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise.  Newsweek recently heralded Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming“, and at Obama’s pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses…

At Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Braxton reportedly crafted his speech around Obama’s personal political slogan: “Forward!”

Obama, said Braxton, was just like Moses facing the Red Sea: “forward is the only option … The people couldn’t turn around. The only thing that they could do was to go forward.” Obama, said Braxton, would have to overcome all obstacles – like opposition from Republicans, presumably, or the bounds of the Constitution. Braxton continued, “Mr. President, stand on the rock,” citing to Moses standing on Mount Horeb as his people camped outside the land of Israel.

But it wasn’t enough to compare Obama with the founder of Judaism and the prophet of the Bible. Braxton added that Obama’s opponents were like the Biblical enemies of Moses, and that Obama would have to enter the battle because “sometimes enemies insist on doing it the hard way.”

So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?

Source: The Economic Collapse

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