Archive for April, 2011
Fun With Graphics
Alfred Lambremont Webre interviews Robert Stanley
In an exclusive April 29, 2011 interview on ExopoliticsTV with Alfred Lambremont Webre, Robert Stanley, weekly correspondent for the Washington Times investigative radio, has stated after a clear on-camera demonstration that purported certificate of live birth released by U.S. President Barack H. Obama on April 27, 2011 is a forensic forgery.
Mr. Stanley had earlier on April 29, 2011 reported this breaking news on Washington Times investigative radio while being interviewed by reporters John McCaslin and Amy Holmes, also a correspondent for CNN.
U.S. Patent No. 4686605 – HAARP ?
Twilight of the Psychopaths
– by Dr. Kevin Barrett
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon
. . . . . .
When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing. Civilized people, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years. Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.
Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization – the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers- was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non- psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies – especially military hierarchies. Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers – unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.
In “On Killing”, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”
Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers – the 5% who are natural- born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators- did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)
The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers’ behavior in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society’s perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.
How could that be? In “Political Ponerology,” Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want. In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies. The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.
So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.
Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as that power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld- the criminal syndicate or overlapping set of syndicates that lurks above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. In 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, we are seeing the final desperate power-grab or “endgame” of brutal, cunning gangs of CIA drug-runners and President-killers; money-laundering international bankers and their hit-men, economic and otherwise; corrupt military contractors and gung-ho generals; corporate predators and their political enablers; brainwashers and mind-rapists euphemistically known as psy-ops experts and PR specialists-in short, the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so- called civilization. And they are running scared. It was their terror of losing control that they projected onto the rest of us by blowing up the Twin Towers and inciting temporary psychopathic terror-rage in the American public.
Why does the pathocracy fear it is losing control? Because it is threatened by the spread of knowledge. The greatest fear of any psychopath is of being found out. As George H. W. Bush said to journalist Sarah McClendon, December 1992, “If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” His statement to McClendon should be taken seriously.
Psychopaths go through life knowing that they are completely different from other people. They quickly learn to hide their lack of empathy, while carefully studying others’ emotions so as to mimic normalcy while cold-bloodedly manipulating the normals.
This manipulation of shame has the added benefit of making psychopathic organizations effectively invisible to normal society. Despite easily available media reports, American voters in 2004 simply refused to see that the two major-party presidential candidates had lain naked in a coffin masturbating in front of older Bonesmen in order to gain admission to “Skull and Bones” and thus become members of the criminal overworld. Likewise, many Americans have long refused to see that hawkish elements of the overworld, operating through the CIA, had obviously been the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK, JFK Jr., Malcolm X, ChÈ, AllendÈ, Wellstone, Lumumba, Aguilera, Diem, and countless other relatively non-psychopathic leaders. They refuse to see the continuing murders of millions of people around the world in what amounts to an American holocaust. They refuse to see the evidence that the psychopaths’ guilds running America’s most powerful institutions use the most horrific forms of sexualized abuse imaginable to induce multiple-personality-disorder in child victims, then use the resulting mind-control slaves as disposable drug-runners, prostitutes, Manchurian candidates, and even diplomatic envoys. And of course they refuse to see that 9/11 was a transparently obvious inside job, and that their own psychopath-dominated military-intelligence apparatus is behind almost every major terrorist outrage of recent decades.
All of this psychopathic behavior at the top of the social hierarchy is simply too shameful for ordinary people to see, so they avert their gaze, just as wives of husbands who are sexually abusing their children sometimes refuse to see what is happening in plain view. If deep, deep denial were a river in Egypt, American citizens’ willful blindness would be more like the Marianas Trench.
Truly, we are witnessing the twilight of the psychopaths. Whether in their death throes they succeed in pulling down the curtain of eternal night on all of us, or whether we resist them and survive to see the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name, is the great decision in which all of us others, however humbly, are now participating.”
The Teflon Don of American Capitalism
Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting begins this morning. 40,000 stockholders are said to be in attendance for the event. My friend Shira will have a liveblog up for WSJ Deal Journal staring at 9:30 am EST (link below) and that’s where I want you to be, but let me get something off my chest real quick.
I’m seeing and hearing a lot of this kind of nonsense:
“Will Warren apologize for the David Sokol incident?”
“Will Buffett take responsibility?”
“Is more being done by Warren Buffett to protect us from this kind of thing?”
To which I say, will you please do us all a favor and just STFU?
Warren Buffett owes YOU an explanation? GTFO! Sell Berkshire if you don’t like it. Buffett had an employee who did something stupid. BIG DEAL! What did it cost you?
Warren Buffett is the very manifestation of American Capitalism, you should be honored that he even chooses to say anything publicly and for your benefit at all. He is, as Doug Kass calls him, the Mozart of Investing. The fact that there’s been a public vehicle for regular folks to be invested in is nothing short of miraculous.
O, the trades us shareholders have been privileged enough to have participated in! The stealing of Goldman Sachs and the rescue of GE – both paying us loanshark-esque interest rates with equity upside kickers.
How about the Burlington Northern deal? We own a railroad outright, Warren is taking it back to the Age of the Industrial Barons with us along for the ride. And lest you think the BNI purchase was because Warren likes to play with his choo-choo trains, understand that we now control the flow of Powder River Basin coal to China, Warren just Suge Knighted the whole global energy game – and we are his partners!
Buffett was buying housing-related companies (paint, carpet, siding) in 2000-2002 while you were gorging and choking on dot com stocks. He predicted and cleaned up on the housing boom and you don’t even realize it. He’s avoided tech from 2000 up until today, to the derision and disbelief of the world. The Nasdaq and 90% of its large cap stocks have done zero since then – who’s sneering now?
So please, keep your pointed fingers away from our Buffett, he is untouchable – teflon – and he should be. This Sokol stuff will fade away as it should and all that will remain are the gains and compounded returns.
He doesn’t owe you any answers for anything.
In the words of Kanye West, his presence is a present.
Dr. Andrew Weil: “Are You Depressed, or Just Human?”
by Dr. Andrew Weil
“Depression can be devastating. Its worst form, major depressive disorder, is marked by all-encompassing low mood, thoughts of worthlessness, isolation, and loss of interest or pleasure in most or all activities. But this clinical description misses the deep, experiential horror of the condition; the suffocating sense of despair that can make life seem too arduous to bear.
Here’s something else we can say confidently about depression: it is complex. The cause is often a mix of factors including genetic brain abnormalities, sunlight deprivation, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, and social issues including homelessness and poverty. Also, cause and effect can be hard to tease apart – is social isolation a cause or an effect of depression?
Unfortunately, we can make one more unassailable observation about depression: the disorder – or, more precisely, the diagnosis – has gone stratospheric. An astonishing 10 percent of the U.S. population was prescribed an antidepressant in 2005; up from 6 percent in 1996.
Why has the diagnosis become so popular? There are likely several reasons. It’s possible that more people today are truly depressed than they were a decade ago. Urbanized, sedentary lifestyles; nutrient-poor processed food; synthetic but unsatisfying entertainments and other negative trends, all of which are accelerating, may be driving up the rate of true depression. But I doubt the impact of these trends has nearly doubled in just ten years.
So here’s another possibility. The pharmaceutical industry is cashing in. In 1996, the industry spent $32 million on direct-to-consumer (DTC) antidepressant advertising. By 2005, that nearly quadrupled, to $122 million. It seems to have worked. More than 164 million antidepressant prescriptions were written in 2008, totaling $9.6 billion in U.S. sales. Today, the television commercial is ubiquitous:
* A morose person stares out of a darkened room through a rain-streaked window.
* Quick cut to a cheery logo of an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, the most common type of antidepressant pharmaceutical).
* Cross-fade to the same person, medicated and smiling, emerging into sunlight to pick flowers, ride a bicycle or serve birthday cake to laughing children.
* A voice over gently suggests, “Ask your doctor if [name of drug] is right for you.”
The message – all sadness is depression, depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, this pill will make you happy, your doctor will get it for you – could not be clearer. The fact that the ad appears on television, the ultimate mass medium, also implies that depression is extremely common.
Yet a study published in the April, 2007, issue of the “Archives of General Psychiatry,” based on a survey of more than 8,000 Americans, concluded that estimates of the number who suffer from depression at least once during their lifetimes are about 25 percent too high. The authors noted that the questions clinicians use to determine if a person is depressed don’t account for the possibility that the person may be reacting normally to emotional upheavals such as a lost job or divorce (only bereavement due to death is accounted for in the clinical assessment). And a 15-year study by an Australian psychiatrist found that of 242 teachers, more than three-quarters met the criteria for depression. He wrote that depression has become a “catch-all diagnosis.”
What’s going on? It’s clear that depression, a real disorder, is being exploited by consumer marketing and is over-diagnosed in our profit-driven medical system. Unlike hypertension or high cholesterol – which have specific, numerical diagnostic criteria – a diagnosis of depression is ultimately subjective. Almost any average citizen (particularly one who watches a lot of television) can persuade him or herself that transient, normal sadness is true depression. And far too many doctors are willing to go along.
The solution to this situation is, unsurprisingly, complex, cutting across social, medical, political and cultural bounds. But here are three major changes that are needed immediately:
* Medically, thousands of studies confirm that depression, particularly mild to moderate forms, can be alleviated by lifestyle changes. These include exercise, lowered caffeine intake, diets high in fruits and vegetables, and certain supplements, particularly omega-3 fatty acids. Physicians need to be trained in these methods, as they are at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson. See Natural Depression Treatment for more about these low-tech methods, or the “Depression” chapter in the excellent professional text, Integrative Medicine by David Rakel, M.D. (Saunders, 2007).
* Politically, if Congress – which seems hopelessly addicted to watering down all aspects of health care reform – can’t manage to ban all DTC ads in one stroke, it should start by immediately ending those for antidepressants.
* Personally, be skeptical of all DTC ads for antidepressants. The drugs may turn out to be no more effective than placebos. Many of them have devastating side effects, and withdrawal, even if done gradually, can be excruciating. While they can be lifesavers for some people, in most cases they should be employed only after less risky and expensive lifestyle changes have been tried.
Finally, recognize that no one feels good all the time. An emotionally healthy person can, and probably should, stare sadly out of a window now and then. Many cultures find the American insistence on constant cheerfulness and pasted-on smiles disturbing and unnatural. Occasional, situational sadness is not pathology – it is part and parcel of the human condition, and may offer an impetus to explore a new, more fulfilling path. Beware of those who attempt to make money by convincing you otherwise.”
About the author: Andrew Weil, M.D., is the founder and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and the editorial director of www.DrWeil.com
Declare Your Independence From the Empire
– by Mike Rozeff
The peoples of the world once looked up to America and Americans. They held them in high respect and esteem. They respected their ideals. They respected their know-how and products.
Now, by its foreign policies of empire and their domestic counterparts, the U.S. government is destroying the dignity of America and Americans. Our morality is falling along with our productivity. Today, there is less and less of which Americans can be proud and there is more and more of which to be ashamed.
America can go in one of two ways. It can continue on the path of empire, in which case it continues downhill and impedes the world’s progress; or it can renounce empire, in which case it restores the dignity of Americans and imparts new opportunities to the peoples of the world.
America can lead the world down, in which case it becomes a backwater; or it can lead the world up, in which case Americans establish a moral center for freedom that radiates light to the world and opens up new paths for freedom everywhere.
To move America and the world into a more hopeful future in both word and deed, American leadership should make a 180 degree turn. It should renounce empire.
The only major politician who is leading America in this direction is Congressman Ron Paul. His is a lonely but courageous voice in Washington. The commendable directions he is proposing add up to renouncing empire.
What does renouncing empire involve? In his speeches, Congressman Paul has mentioned many of the specific steps as he condemns the American empire. The reader may search for Ron Paul + American empire to find a good many of his thoughts on this subject.
What do Americans generally believe concerning their empire? What changes in beliefs does the renunciation of empire entail?
Like all social structures, the American empire makes heavy use of falsity, lies, illusions, deceptions, and myths that come to be taken as truths by those who are immersed in a structure. There is no social structure, be it family, society, state, business, association, church or religious establishment, that does not hide truths about itself and whose members do not act according to various falsehoods that pass for truths. The state and empire are not exceptions.
In order to pursue the new direction of renouncing empire, Americans are going to have to face up to their false beliefs concerning the empire. They then have to adopt new beliefs. Hopefully, these will contain a greater measure of truth.
Perhaps about half of Americans do not believe that they have an empire. A very small voluntary poll of 37 people finds opinion almost evenly split. Another small poll finds about half the respondents saying that the U.S. is not really an empire or they do not know. A Fox News poll finds 68 percent approval for an American empire. These polls may have serious biases.
It is safe to say that Americans tend to support America’s foreign involvements, for these have grown over the years and people keep electing candidates who fund the empire. Americans tend to believe that these involvements are for the good, especially when they are first begun. For example, in October of 2001, 90 percent of Americans approved of the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. By September of 2009, this had fallen to 47 percent approval of the war, 42 percent disapproval, and 11 percent not knowing. At the outset of the Iraq War in 2003, 74 percent of Americans viewed it as the right decision. By 2006-2007, something like 50-60 percent of Americans thought that the war was a mistake and that the situation in Iraq was not worth a war.
There is a good chance that Americans do not fully appreciate either the extent of empire or its costs, especially the long-term aggregate costs, simply because these are not routinely reported.
Whatever the extent of American support for empire is, these supportive beliefs have to change if empire is to be renounced in the hearts and minds of Americans in any kind of permanent fashion. Americans have to understand that they have an empire and that its effects are a net negative for them and for the rest of the world’s peoples.
Americans attribute each of our numerous foreign involvements to specific causes and aims, like securing oil, securing America’s borders, protecting Israel, anti-terrorism, saving Europe from the Kaiser, spreading democracy, spreading freedom, humanitarianism, anti-Communism, creating stability, national security, and so on. The government provides these rationales, the press parrots them, and people believe them. These particularistic explanations are like finding different excuses every time one’s alcoholic uncle gets drunk. If the government makes a case for some sort of war, Americans tend to approve it in large numbers, at least at the outset.
Americans need to understand that only a broader underlying factor can explain America’s foreign policy history over the last 100-150 years. That factor or policy is empire. The U.S. is running an empire. American leaders have again and again made this perfectly clear. They have said in honeyed words that they wanted American domination, but they have avoided using that term much less referring to their worldwide construction as an empire. American involvements are always couched in terms of doing good deeds, like bringing peace to the world. In the Fox News Poll, "68% of Americans said they support the establishment of an American empire, ‘if it brings peace to the world.’"
Americans believe that all these specific causes are in the service of achieving good, or that they are undertaken with good intentions. This unthinking belief leads Americans astray in several fundamental respects of which most Americans are unaware.
In the first place, Americans are unconcerned with the violent methods that are being used to achieve these supposed ends. These are rarely questioned or even mentioned. In the Fox News poll, 58% favored cuts in domestic spending "in order to support military occupations around the world." Americans avoid thinking about the evils employed and produced in the pursuit of what they think are good ends. They do not seem to realize that in this world the over-zealous pursuit of supposedly good or moral ends, especially when it becomes a very strong and broad pursuit that aims at coercively eliminating evils, itself is evil and creates evils. Besides, the supposedly good ends are usually not all that good anyway. The Crusades are an example. One historian specialist on this era writes that "High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed…the Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God."
It is often said that America cannot alleviate or eliminate all the evils in the world, or, more narrowly, cannot deal with all the foreign political evils of which we become aware. This is surely true. This is not simply a matter of a lack of will power, a lack of efficient governmental execution, and a lack of resources. If we had those, we still could not eliminate all the evils. The reason is that we, as a state and society, or as a collective, are not committed to peaceful means. We are committed to using money, manipulation, subterfuge, threats, pressures, coercions, covert CIA operations, and far more violent means and methods than those. We do not act collectively like loving exponents of Jesus Christ any more than most of us act that way individually. Our crusades are no better than those 700-1,000 years ago.
The means that we use in our empire are evil in themselves. Using evil means, we encourage and reward evil motives among us. Using evil means to accomplish what we think are good ends invariably gives rise to more evils in many forms when we practice the evil methods.
Stopping terrorists looks like a good end. Stopping every terrorist anywhere on earth looks even better. Nevertheless, this pursuit, even if it were done with the best of intentions, produces numerous evils. The evidence of this result is plain in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is plain within America where the abridgment of freedoms is ongoing. It is plain in the use of torture, kidnappings, and indefinite imprisonment of persons without any kind of judicial proceedings. It is plain in an FBI that continually seduces persons into "terrorist" conspiracies.
The war on drugs has produced the same kind of situation. In pursuit of what seems to be a good thing to many people, we have filled the prisons with an enormous number of people. We have created stronger and stronger gangs who batten on the illegality of drugs. We have created police corruption.
The lesson is that we cannot use the collective force of the state to organize our society into a massive pursuit of any supposed good without producing evils. To drive this point home, consider a domestic case. Suppose we attempted to rid our country of all crimes of any sort. This too would produce many evils. We’d be under constant observation. We’d be spied on. We’d lose privacy. We’d face indoctrination and control by those who are anxious to stop crime before it takes root in our minds. We’d be under the thumb of police. We’d be seeing police and monitoring devices everywhere we looked. Our movements and activities would be constantly tracked. Life would become intolerable under such conditions. Freedom of thought, speech, and activity would become risky activities.
The law would become an institution of oppression. The police would have to enforce laws. New laws create new crimes. In our society where laws can be passed to regulate almost any behavior, the attempt to enforce laws and wipe out crime becomes totalitarian oppression. Laws and their ironclad enforcement using our typical methods of punishment do not make for justice, and more so when the laws are bad laws. Indeed they undermine justice because justice requires attention to the details of every individual case and it requires methods other than enforcing arbitrary laws and then locking people up who disobey them.
Here too, in this hypothetical case which is actually becoming less and less hypothetical in modern America, we’d find that, in not acting like loving exponents of Jesus and in propounding Pharisaism, we are creating evils in a misguided attempt to wipe out crime.
Thus, after recognizing that we have an empire, we have to acknowledge that we are not acting in a Christ-like fashion, no matter how good we think our ends are. We have to understand that the more intensely and systematically that we attempt to achieve some supposedly good end by using force, and this is what the state at best hopes to accomplish through its collective might, the more evilly we are ourselves behaving and the more evils we are causing.
That’s the best case. That’s the case in which our aims are good ones. But in reality this is not what is happening. For, in the second place, empire, rather than being an honorable and pure pursuit of good ends via the state, arises from all sorts of questionable motives of the people and interest groups that promote empire. Although our leaders constantly disclaim any ambitions related to empire and the educational establishment propagates this myth, it is simply another one of the falsities upon which the social structure is built.
The American empire is not a purely humanitarian endeavor. It advances the interests of specific persons and groups. Americans are only dimly aware of the special interest groups, such as the armaments companies, that lie behind the empire. They are only dimly aware of the Halliburtons and Bechtels that profit from war. They are only dimly aware of the panoply of institutions, such as central banking, that support the empire. They are only dimly aware of the foreign policy establishment and its intellectual offshoots that basically own and run foreign policy and the empire. The size and strength of the military are, in their minds, causes for celebration and pride. The absence of a military draft and the suppression of battlefield information by the press support a careless attitude toward the military and its overseas engagements.
The awareness of the empire’s feet of clay is changing. The reality of many strange foreign entanglements is helping to change this perception. The huge national debt and the huge government deficits are helping to make people uneasy and question the unimaginably expensive military adventures of the empire. Numerous exposures of corruption and specific crimes and misdemeanors of government figures help.
But Americans tend to forget too or never learn the lessons they should have learned. The society and state constantly press forward with their myths and this too counteracts what people might otherwise realize are the truths of empire.
Vietnam is a distant memory, if that. It is well to recollect the Vietnam War and its aftermath in order to understand the futility of the empire’s wars and the potential for peace that opens up when America withdraws from such fields of combat and acts peacefully. The last American soldier was killed in Vietnam on April 29, 1975. The total number of American military deaths due to hostilities in that war was 47, 413. The total costs of the Vietnam War run far in excess of that.
But within 15-20 years of the war’s conclusion, America and Vietnam were conducting friendly business and trade relations. On July 28, 2000, this communist nation opened a stock market in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).
In sum, if Americans want to regain their dignity and radiate the beams of liberty once again, they have to start thinking in several new directions. They have to realize that the pursuit of good by evil means creates more evil. They have to realize that they cannot eliminate all the world’s evils and shouldn’t attempt to do so by force or force-related means. They have to realize that their motives have not been pure, but mixed in with interests pursuing gains for themselves, no matter what the consequences for others. Falsity has to be bared.
To shift away from empire, Americans have to disavow it. They have to go directly against the powerful interest groups that favor it. If they really want to end the empire, they can find the ways to do it. They can stop electing pro-war and pro-military politicians. They can end the central bank. They can end the income tax. They can dismantle the worldwide American structure.
Renouncing empire means articulating a new global foreign policy. Americans can go back to the historic American policy of neutrality to all nations and non-intervention.
The existing policies of empire wouldn’t be with us if the promoters of empire had not made them sound good, even if they are dreadfully bad. The neoconservatives promoted and still are promoting benevolent hegemony. This includes the idea that America is exceptionally good and so are Americans, so that if we have to break a few heads (that is, kill and maim people) while spreading our goodness to the benighted of this world, we are justified in doing so. An omelet, we are told, cannot be made without breaking eggs.
Given the most threadbare of justifications or even none at all except a suspicion that some country somewhere might do something bad or harbor some terrorists or people with terrorist ambitions, the benevolent hegemony idea is that the U.S. has a right or even duty to be the world’s benevolent policeman and jump in with military forces and methods. We can see what this has brought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier in American history, this policy or something like it brought Americans into World War I, which was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. World War I had catastrophic consequences, including setting the stage for World War II. Similarly, the war on terror, advertised as a hundred years war, is one of these goals of empire in which the single-minded, never-ending, and all-encompassing pursuit of something that sounds good actually has already created far more evils than it has eliminated.
American empire involves tripwire alliances like NATO that involve collective security. This is a recipe for becoming involved in the politics of others. If they get into a war, it means that Americans also usually get into it. Renouncing empire means that Americans have to stop the policy of collective security.
It has been a policy of the U.S. to protect Americans wherever they may travel in the world or locate businesses. This policy involves all Americans in protecting the interests of some Americans. Taxes are forced from taxpayers that then go to subsidizing the protection of those of us who happen to go overseas or locate businesses overseas. Instead of this policy of subsidizing private interests, businesses that incur overseas risks in their pursuit of gains should internalize the costs of protection themselves. Their customers should pay for it, not taxpayers at large. If this is the case, we can expect a more efficient market for insurance and protection to evolve than using political means that drag in whole countries against one another due to the actions of a few.
Renouncing empire is going to cause howls of protest from the beneficiaries and supporters of empire. The least little bit of instability in some foreign land will provide ammunition for the proponents of empire to declare that America cannot abandon its supposedly constructive peacekeeping role in the world. This is one reason why renouncing empire has to have broad and deep public support and understanding as the right thing to do.
The U.S. government has generally to withdraw its military forces, pare them back, end its covert CIA operations, and end its use of economic and financial aids and pressures upon governments. This will be a tacit acknowledgment of our limitations, but it will also be both prudent and moral.
Withdrawals will be derided as defeats, as hasty, as ill-advised, and as cowardly. We will be told that we are turning back the clock. We will be told that we are appeasers. We will be told that we are isolationist. We will be told that we are shirking our responsibilities. Renunciation of empire is going to provoke a full scale war of words.
In order for renunciation to succeed, Americans will have to understand that the costs of empire far outweigh its benefits. They will have to understand that it is renunciation or America’s continued deterioration. The end of empire is not by any means going to solve the problems of many lands. Some of them will worsen. The old temptations to ship arms, send advisors, choose up sides, send in aid, foment revolutions, impose sanctions, and send in the military will all beckon. It will be difficult to remain neutral and wait for others to resolve their difficulties on their own without American interference. Renunciation of empire means breaking such entrenched habits and ending the institutions that support them.
The overblown war on terror must be officially ended. It has replaced anti-communism as a rationale for the geopolitical aims of U.S. policies. It is a cover story for American engagements worldwide on a long-term basis. There can be no renunciation of empire without also ending the war on terror.
There are going to be withdrawal symptoms. There will be problems of credibility. At first, others will not believe that a major power will permanently reverse its course. However, the British Empire did it. The Russian Empire did it. Whatever steps America takes have to be preceded by a shocking change in policy that announces the new directions, acknowledges the faults of the previous course, announces that world history is changing, explains why it has to change, and makes some dramatic steps that prove to the world that the U.S. means what it says. Americans must be warned that the immediate results are going to be changes in a number of nations and political instability in some. The dismantlement of the empire then has to start proceeding rather quickly. The momentum cannot be lost.
Renouncing empire means also that the domestic defense (war) budget has to be cut. Imagine the howls of pain from countless Congressmen about military cutbacks in their districts. There is no choice. Such cutbacks should be accompanied by permanent tax cuts. This raises the credibility of the shift with the American people and it improves the incentives for Americans to get back to work producing high-quality goods that the world values, not an expensive military establishment that wastes America’s capital.
The particulars of retrenching the empire require a degree of sophisticated consideration because the U.S. government has involved us in a worldwide web of entanglements and commitments. These commitments are going to be broken. There are going to be foreign governments that are going to fall. Some wars may break out. Some conflicts will heighten. Powers will rise and fall.
In laying out some of what renouncing empire means, it looks like a tall order. It isn’t. Renunciation is feasible and possible. The prime example is Great Britain in the 1960s and following years when it ended its empire. In its own way, somewhat the same sort of thing happened to the Soviet Union when its empire ended, although more quickly and in less of a planned or controlled fashion. In both cases, various limitations had made it impossible to sustain the empire. Political figures began to make the transition away from empire. The end result was a shrunken degree of dominance over various lands that became more independent.
The same thing is happening to America. Its limitations in the maintenance of its empire are becoming more and more evident. The costs of empire are rising and visible without accompanying benefits. So too will the American empire come to a close.
The political path that will occur as America retrenches is anything but clear. My main apprehension is that the supporters of empire will continue to use the powers of government to raise the degree of its totalitarian rule domestically – all, of course, in the name of good. This is the most worrisome trend of the past decade, made concrete in the Department of Homeland Security. The integration of military methods into police forces combined with national organization of these forces is an extremely troubling development. These forces have technological and weapons advantages over the broad public. The public has to bring these forces under control or else the empire’s supporters will use them to cow the public into submission. If these forces gain the upper hand, this country will witness an exodus of people and capital.
In addition, rather than making a rational transition away from empire, the latest administration has expanded government even more. It has not made serious efforts to renounce the empire or take significant steps in that direction. If public attitudes do not rapidly shift and raise the standing of a Ron Paul or of others who stand for his recommended policies, then we can expect higher inflation and continued economic difficulties simply because the costs of empire are a heavy tax on American productivity.
Even if the military is cut back, we face another problem. America has a domestic empire in which the federal government is running impossibly expensive domestic welfare programs while heavily regulating the economy. This cannot go on either. This empire will also fall. This administration and the preceding one have made this problem worse by increasing the welfare state.
These problems are surfacing in an inflationary economy that is stagnant, in which standards of living decline.
The only way out of this trap is to renounce the foreign empire and renounce the domestic empire.
Renunciation can occur at the national level from the top down with a bottom up impact from the voting public, or it can occur from the bottom up away from Washington in localities, states, and throughout the justice system. National renunciation is not the only course. The other ways have great merit. Americans themselves can devise ways to nullify what their federal government is doing, at the state level, for example. Americans can create their own monies and their own decentralized parallel economies. Americans can use jury nullification. Americans can devise religious-based communities that obtain exemptions. Americans can gain control over police oversight boards and halt the militarization of police. Americans on their own can find ways to make themselves independent of the domestic and foreign empires.
April 30, 2011
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com
Steve Quayle on The Vinny Eastwood Show – April 28, 2011
Steve discuses the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, the Japanese nuclear disaster, preparation and drill around the U.S. New Madrid fault area. Steve believes that advanced weapons are responsible. Global forces wish to wipe out the old world and replace it with the New World Order.
The Alex Jones Show – for Friday, April 29, 2011
Friday April 28, 2011
Alex welcomes in-studio author, researcher and radio host Webster Griffin Tarpley and the former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force in the Ford and Carter administrations, and a former United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with 101 combat missions, Bob Bowman. Tarpley’s is the author of Obama: The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate, Surviving the Cataclysm: Your Guide Through the Worst Financial Crisis in Human History, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography. Dr. Bowman campaigned nationwide for the nomination of the Reform Party of the United States of America for the presidency in 2000. Alex also covers the news and takes your calls.
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US Government Takes Down HAARP Website To Conceal Evidence of US Weather Modification and Manufactured Earthquakes
The HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) website has been down for the past 3 weeks. It was ordered taken down by the US government to conceal US weather modification and earthquake inducing warfare activities against foreign states. The HAARP website was publishing very damaging evidence of US military weather modification and earthquake triggering operations against foreign states. HAARP’s waterfall charts and magnetometer charts gave evidence of an ongoing weather war between the United States government and foreign states. The magnetometer presented concrete evidence that HAARP triggered the Japan earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
HAARP’s magnetometer can be used to predict as well as give evidence of a HAARP created earthquake. A magnetometer measures disturbances in the magnetic field in Earth’s upper atmosphere. HAARP was broadcasting a 2.5 Hz frequency (the signature frequency of an earthquake) from just before midnight on March 8, 2011 and continued to broadcast the frequency for the entire days of March 9, 2011 and March 10, 2011. The 2.5 Hz frequency continued to be broadcasted and recorded by the magnetometer for another 10 hours the day of the Japan 9.0 magnitude earthquake.
Scientists at the HAARP institute discovered that a 2.5 Hz radio frequency is the signature frequency of an earthquake. Since this discovery the HAARP phased array antennas have been used by the US military to beam the earthquake frequency into the ionosphere and the ionosphere reflects it back to Earth – penetrating as deeply as several kilometers into the ground, depending on the geological makeup and subsurface water conditions in a targeted area.. By beaming the frequency at a specific trajectory HAARP can trigger an earthquake any place on Earth. A short burst isn’t enough to disturb solid matter (the Earth crust) so they keep beaming the 2.5 Hz earthquake frequency for hours or days – until the desired effect is achieved.
[Truth11]
The Boiling Frogs Interviews John Young of Cryptome.org
Sibel Edmonds & Peter Collins
John Young provides us with a brief overview of the history, purpose and mission of his well-known website Cryptome.Org. He talks about the recent controversy involving Microsoft Corporation’s attempted legal action against Cryptome, and the temporary shutdown of the site by the ISP Network Solutions. He speaks to the importance of the free flow of information and challenging the governments’ self-serving secrecy as prerequisites for an informed citizenry and a functioning democracy, the importance of whistleblowers and anonymous disclosures, the existence of various trap websites, impostors and false flag operators to manipulate information, trick whistleblowers, and or plant specific propaganda, and more.
John Young is a New York based architect and online archivist who owns and operates Cryptome.Org, a website that functions as a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance. In February 2010, the ISP Network Solutions shut down Mr. Young’s website after he posted a document summarizing Microsoft’s dealings with law enforcement agencies. Shortly after initiating legal action to suppress a document on how to subpoena online user data Microsoft withdrew the complaint, and the website was restored.
- Here is our guest John Young unplugged!
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Saturday, 13. March 2010
