Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Congress is cracking down on homemade soap . Yep, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Susan Collins, in their infinite wisdom, are concerned that the health of Americans will be impacted by handmade soaps and cosmetics that are made from all-natural products. The Personal Care Products Safety Act, as their bill is called, would strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) authority to regulate the ingredients in personal care products – not only the name-brand ones made by big companies but also the homemade products such as all-natural soap made in home businesses across America. Although most bills that are introduced don’t become law, this one has a solid chance. That’s because Feinstein and Collins have received endorsements on the bill from the biggest names in the cosmetics business: Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Revlon, Estee Lauder, Unilever and L’Oreal. Federal regulations on cosmetics have not been updated in 75 years, the senators say. “From shampoo to lotion, the use of personal care products is widespread, however, there are very few protections in place to ensure their safety,” Feinstein said. “Europe has a robust system, which includes consumer protections like product registration and ingredient reviews. I am pleased to be introducing this bipartisan legislation with Senator Collins that will require FDA to review chemicals used in these products and provide clear guidance on their safety. In addition, the legislation has broad support from companies and consumer groups alike.” The Personal Care Products Safety Act would mandate that all cosmetic businesses complete government registration forms and detail each ingredient used. The Handmade Cosmetic Alliance (HCA), which represents more than 300,000 small handmade cosmetic companies throughout the US, opposes the bill, saying it “imposes burdensome fees, registration requirements and reporting mandates” that will “jeopardize” handmade cosmetic companies in the US. “The HCA along with other handmade cosmetic organizations support efforts to make meaningful policy changes to enhance cosmetic safety,” said Debbie May, executive director of the HCA. “However, subjecting small handmade cosmetic companies which operate with less than a handful of employees to onerous regulation is not only unfair and unprecedented, but creates regulatory requirements that will force businesses to close their doors.” HCA said small businesses “primarily use food-grade ingredients that can, and often are, purchased in local grocery stores.” “Handmade cosmetic companies should be exempt from product registration and ingredient filings with the FDA since handmade products already bear labels with all ingredients listed,” HCA said. Specifically, HCA said there should be exemptions for small business with average sales of less than $2 million per year. Small farms and business were exempt from the Food Modernization and Safety Act, and small cosmetic companies should be exempt from the latest bill, HCA said. Big companies have enough money to pay for extra regulations. Small businesses often do not. “Yet, the little guy–the competition–often works on a shoestring and doesn’t have the support or robust finances to endure these regulations,” wrote Julie Gunlock at the Independent Women’s Forum website. “And so these companies are often the ones really hurt by these unnecessary regulations.” Both sides say the bill has some good points. Among them, it would require the FDA to test the safety of the five most common chemicals found in all cosmetic products, including those used by big business. Initially, the bill would require the FDA to study the safety of quaternium-15, diazolidinyl urea, propyl paraben, lead acetate and methylene glycol/formaldehyde.
There's a radical cleric in Pakistan, named Sheikh Gilani, and there's videotape of him explicitly saying I'm setting up...
Posted by Lou Dobbs on Monday, January 19, 2015
WOW! Saturday night, Judge Jeanie Pirro sent a loud and clear message to the "PC police" who have condemned the victims...
Posted by Col. Rob Maness (ret.) on Monday, May 11, 2015
Obama Cabinet Official: ‘Most’ of the Relief Money to
Iran Won’t Fund Terrorism Treasury Secretary Jack Lew acknowledged that large sums of money will be given to Iran
as part of the sanctions relief, adding that “most” of it won’t directly fund
terrorist operations in the Middle East. Speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s 30th Anniversary
Gala last week, Lew alluded to the sanctions relief process and state-funded
terrorism concerns, saying:
“Many Americans, and many of our closest allies, are understandably
concerned that Iran will use the money it receives as a result of sanctions relief
to fund terrorism and support destabilizing proxies throughout the Middle
East.”
Lew continued, adding that the Obama administration shares those concerns.
He also insisted that the administration will maintain sanctions that
specifically address “these [terrorist] activities.” Lew assured the attendees
that “most” of the relief money given to Iran will not fund terrorism:
“But it’s important to note that the connection between nuclear sanctions
relief and Iran’s other malign activities is complicated, and most of the money
Iran receives from sanctions relief will not be used to support those
activities.” During Lew’s remarks, he said that Iran will be under “enormous pressure” to
improve its domestic economy, adding that funding terrorism is a “relatively
small” part of Iran’s budget. However, not everyone’s buying Lew’s statement. Mark Dubowitz, executive
director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, spoke to Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin about the effort to give Iran relief
money. Dubowitz said that: “when you give bad people bad money, they use it for bad things.” This week, Secretary of State John Kerry voiced his dissatisfaction with the “hysteria” over the
nuclear deal with Iran. Kerry insisted that inspectors will have access “every
single day.”
In September 1989, Hurricane Hugo, a
Category 4 storm, made landfall in South Carolina with wind gusts clocked as
high as 120 mph. The storm left a wake of destruction along the state’s
beachfront and to the so-called Low Country areas, leaving hundreds of
thousands without power, and either
completely destroying or inflicting major damage to more than 20,000 single
family homes throughout the state.
As part of preparing for the storm,
then-Gov.
Carroll Campbell Jr. issued a ‘shoot-on-sight’ order to the South Carolina
National Guard.
A few days after the storm had
passed, Mary T. Schmich, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, wrote about the
devastation to the area and the heart wrenching scene, as “7,000 residents of
the Isle of Palms and neighboring Sullivans Island were unable to return to
their houses,” as the connecting bridge from the mainland was badly damaged,
and too dangerous to cross.
…they were only vaguely consoled by
the news that martial law had been declared on the island to deter looters.
The National Guard are firing
shots in front of boats to keep them from docking…And they`re shooting at
looters.
Well, guess what?
There was little to no looting in
the aftermath of the almost Biblical hurricane, though structures were left
opened with riches for the taking.
The ‘shoot-on-sight’ order
worked.
Now, fast forward 25 years to
Ferguson, MO, and a few months later to Baltimore, MD…
Because the police had been given
orders in both cities to basically stand down, hundreds of businesses were both
looted and destroyed by fires. Of course, many of those shops will never
re-open, as was the case after the wholesale sacking of South Central Los
Angeles, after the ‘Rodney King Riots’ in 1992.
If we continue to tolerate such
brazen, barbaric behavior…we will eventually see many of our cities become
uninhabitable. As it stands…the inmates are running the asylum.
Another in a series of Obama hates the military.
We are at war and the American people have not woke up yet.
We are at war and the enemy has already invaded our sovereignty.
We are at war and Obama continues to bring in more of the enemy under the guise of refugees.
We are at war because the enemy has declared war on America.
We are at war and the enemy's Commander in Chief lives in the White House. ...and Bill O'Reilly has not woke up yet!
Obama supports reduction in military retirement pay By Dave Boyer - The Washington Times - Monday, March 30, 2015 President Obama said Monday he supports the recommendations of a military commission that would reduce the size of traditional military retirement pay by about 20 percent and offer a new defined-contribution benefit for troops who leave before 20 years of service.
In a letter to congressional leaders, Mr. Obama said the proposals are "an important step forward in protecting the long-term viability of the all-volunteer force, improving quality-of-life for service members and their families, and ensuring the fiscal sustainability of the military compensation and retirement systems."
Mr. Obama said he has directed his advisers to refine some recommendations, and that the White House will report to Congress on any proposed changes by April 30.
Under the recommendations, the plan would continue to offer full retirement benefits to anyone who has served 20 years or more.
The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission issued a report in January report calling for shrinking the size of traditional military retirement pay by about 20 percent and offering a defined-contribution benefit for troops who separate before 20 years of service. Lawmakers of both parties raised sharp questions about the panel's stated belief that the changes will satisfy service members while also saving money for the Treasury.
The commission's proposal include decreasing the "multiplier" that the Pentagon uses to calculate traditional retirement pensions from 2.5 to 2.0, lowering the initial value of retirement checks by 20 percent.
Under the new plan, the Defense Department also would contribute up to 6 percent of basic pay into individual troops' retirement savings accounts.
by Norman E. Hooben It seems we have a fundamental problem within the Catholic Church…or maybe I should rephrase that…within the Catholic Chuch leadership. The Pope being the ultimate authority on matters of faith and morals whereas he cannot err according to the church. To put that into comparison, even I cannot err when it comes to matters of capitalism vs socialism; one does not have to be immoral to be a successful capitalist. Pope John Paul II believed in capitalism but the problem of greed within that system was his major concern (my viewpoint is the same; greed is the mortal sin of capitalism). In the book, God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism, John Paul answers the question of whether capitalism should be the “goal” of developing nations, in particular, those that are rebuilding after failed experiments with collectivism. If I were writing the same book I would change that line to read, “All nations fail when they experiment with collectivism.”
Excerpt from God and Money: The Moral Challenge of Capitalism
In the history of mankind there has never been a
successful form of collectivism…aka socialism.Even the English settlers of the 1600’s tried it in what is now
Massachusetts and it was a miserable failure.Capitalism on the other hand has proven to be successful until that
element of greed creeps into the proletariat or lower class who want something for
nothing from the upper class.For this
to happen, the upper class would already be exposing their greed in the form of
excess profits.What is a fare and
reasonable profit?I leave that question
unanswered and instead bring you the wisdom of an earlier pope, Pope Leo XIII:
To remedy these wrongs the
socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away
with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become
the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal
bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals
to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to
rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there
is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the
controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be
among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they
would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create
utter confusion in the community.
It is surely undeniable
that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive
of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own.
If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the
purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his
needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not
only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just
as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and, for greater
security, invests his savings in land, the land, in such case, is only his
wages under another form; and, consequently, a working man’s little estate thus
purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he
receives for his labor. But it is precisely in such power of disposal that
ownership obtains, whether the property consist of land or chattels.
Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of
individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every
wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his
wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and
of bettering his condition in life. (Circa 1891)
So the effects of
socialism the working man himself would be among the first to suffer and
deprive him of bettering his condition in life.Well said, Pope Leo, well said!One could conclude from this is that socialistic policies inherently
maintain a lower class.If you don’t
think this is true, tell me where you find an all equal society that is
perfectly happy.Completely socialist
countries enjoy equal misery.
In a nutshell, more good
has come from capitalism than any other form of government.
But when it comes to forms
of government ideologies the present Pope may have just committed the biggest
blunder of all time…or at least prior to the time of Pope Leo XIII.More than his lopsided views on economics (I
guess he never heard of the notable economist, Fredrich von Hayek…one of the
greatest), his views on liberation
theology may qualify as a mortal sin against his own church.Strong words you say… read on, the following
story just breaks my heart.~ Norman E.
Hooben
The Blaze The New Catholic Scandal: Pope Francis Courts Raul Castro and Forgets What Communism and Atheism Have Done to the World This weekend, the Communist President of Cuba Raul Castro met with Pope Francis in private for an “unusually long time,” according to Gerard O’Connell, Vatican correspondent for America Magazine. When he emerged from his meeting with Pope Francis, which a Vatican spokesman called a “very cordial talk,” Castro exchanged gifts with the Holy Father. Castro gave the pope a commemorative medallion in honor of the 200th anniversary of the building of the Havana Cathedral, and a locally produced painting “inspired” by the pope’s advocacy for progressive immigration policies. In return, Pope Francis gave Casto an image of St. Martin covering the poor with his cloak, which Pope Francis called “an insight into what we have to do.” His second gift was a copy of his controversial Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. America Magazine reports: “Looking at [Castro] with a smile, [Pope Francis] remarked, ‘There are here some declarations that you will like!’”
Pope Francis waves to well-wishers upon arrival from Sri Lanka, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015 at suburban Pasay city, south of Manila, Philippines. (AP/Bullit Marquez)
When Pope Francis first issued Evengelii Gaudium shortly after his election in 2013, much was made of the conservative backlash. “This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope,” said conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh, citing the document’s use of buzzwords often found in the rhetoric of the anti-Christian left. “‘Unfettered capitalism?’ That doesn’t exist anywhere. ‘Unfettered capitalism’ is a liberal socialist phrase to describe the United States.” Limbaugh was, of course, quite right. And many Christians devoted to facing down the Obama administration agreed with him. After all, the infamous Health and Human Services mandate was still fresh on American Catholics’ minds. It was a blatant attack on religious liberty which operated precisely by means of attacking the economic liberty of Christian employers such as the Little Sisters of the Poor.
For any serious Christian, the culture war against the left was as much a defense of free markets as it was a defense of pro-life Christian doctrine. But some Christians were less serious, and more eager to defend the pope, right or wrong, than to defend the Church. One stalwart Catholic journalist who agreed with Limbaugh, Fox’s Adam Shaw, boldly denounced the pope’s “misguided” Apostolic Exhortation in an op-ed. He was promptly fired from his job with the Catholic News Service. Back to Raul Castro’s visit with Pope Francis: After their meeting, Castro revealed to reporters he had assured the pope that Cuba’s leaders read his speeches “every day.” Castro had even told the Holy Father, “If you continue talking like this … I will return to the Catholic Church. I am not joking. I may convert again to Catholicism, even though I am a Communist.”
Fidel Castro with brother Raul.
Castro offered some context for his attraction to Pope Francis’s Church, citing his friendship with a man named Frei Betto, described in America Magazine as “a Brazilian Dominican priest and liberation theologian.” Two weeks ago, a top KGB defector revealed that the “liberation theology” movement in Latin America was a Communist “invention” designed to dupe Catholics into the atheist ideology of Marxism. The ploy was especially effective among the vulnerable Christians of South America during the 1960’s and 70’s, where Communist operatives planted deep roots. Neither Pope St. John Paul II nor his trusted friend and successor Benedict XVI were taken in by liberation theology. John Paul fought Communism throughout his pontificate, and Benedict was equally forceful against liberation theology’s interpretation of the traditional “preferential option for the poor” as a preferential option for violent state-mandated wealth-redistribution. According to historian Nikolas Kozloff, Pope Benedict called liberation theology a “singular heresy,” and “a ‘fundamental threat’ to the church.” This “fundamental threat” to the church is now welcome in Pope Francis’s Vatican, where the Holy Father is making headlines by his efforts to “rehabilitate” liberation theology. In a matter of months, Pope Francis has announced a desire to “quickly” beatify a deceased liberation theologist bishop, reconciled with a Sandinista activist priest who once called Ronald Reagan a “butcher” and an “international outlaw,” and even invited the founder of the liberation theology movement, Rev. Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak on the need for a “poor Church for the Poor” at an official Vatican event this week.
Pope Francis leaves at the end of an Armenian-Rite Mass to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, in St. Peter’s Basilica, at the Vatican, Sunday, April 12, 2015. Pope Francis sparked a diplomatic incident with Turkey on Sunday by calling the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks “the first genocide of the 20th century” and urging the international community to recognize it as such. Turkey, which denies a genocide took place, immediately summoned the Vatican ambassador to express its displeasure, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Ankara, speaking on customary condition of anonymity. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
It might be added that Raul Castro’s friend Frei Betto is a Marxist who once compiled a series of interviews with Fidel Castro and published them as a pro-Castro book called “Fidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology.” As Victor Gaetan reported in an enlightening 2010 series at the National Catholic Register, Fidel used the book to insist, again and again, “that Christianity and his revolutionary goals, namely full socialism, are compatible.” Raul Castro has expressed a similar hope of reconciling Marxism with Catholicism. When asked about his own faith, he once responded, “I’ve kept the principles of Christ … and the revolution carries them out.” What the revolution in Cuba carried out was 30 years of mandated atheism, the persecution and near-starvation of a Christian people, the state imposition of free-abortion-on-demand, and, even today, the suppression of the dissident wives and children of numerous Catholic Cuban men arrested by the Castros for daring to demand religious liberty. Catholics who condemned “anti-Catholic” whistleblowers and rushed to the defense of bishops who covered for predator priests during the sex abuse scandal must now live in shame. Today’s Catholics who defend Pope Francis against his critics ought to remember who some of those poor critics are. For the most part, Pope Francis’ critics are not the anti-Christian leftists who have berated the Church all along. Rather, his critics are Cuban Catholics who feel crushed to see Pope Francis fraternizing with their oppressors. They are American Catholics whose long, thankless battle against the culture of death seems to be of little concern to a pope intent on making friends with the enemies of religious liberty. While journalists are being fired by Catholic news providers for questioning the Bishop of Rome, Christians ought to consider how much longer they should put their sacred faith in a position that requires defending Pope Francis’s views. A new Catholic scandal is upon us, and not since the sex abuse scandal have so many Catholics defended the powerful and demonized the weak. Stephen Herreid is an Associate Editor of the Intercollegiate Review and a contributor to TheBlaze.com. His work is archived at candidworldreport.com, and has been published at Crisis Magazine, Aleteia.org, CatholicVote.org, The Intercollegiate Review Online, and other publications. Reach him at sherreid@candidworldreport.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHerreid
"Crisis is the best weapon the elites have at their disposal, and exercises like Jade Helm show that they may use that weapon in the near term. The defense that defeats crisis is preparation — preparation not just for yourself, but for others around you. War is coming, and while we can’t know the exact timing, we can assume the worst and do our best to be ready for it as quickly as possible."
Note from Norm (This is no inuendo, just pure indoctrination!): A French Jew who was a Communist who was running a Republican Newspaer... Gimmee a break! See the Max Boot Video below
When The Elites Wage War On America, This Is How They Will Do It By Brandon Smith This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt Market.
The consequences and patterns of war, whether by one nation against another or by a government against the citizenry, rarely change. However, the methods of war have evolved vastly in modern times. Wars by elites against populations are often so subtle that many people might not even recognize that they are under attack until it is too late. Whenever I examine the conceptions of “potential war” between individuals and oligarchy, invariably some hard-headed person cries out: “What do you mean ‘when?’ We are at war right now!” In this case, I am not talking about the subtle brand of war. I am not talking about the information war, the propaganda war, the economic war, the psychological war or the biological war. I am talking about outright warfare, and anyone who thinks we have already reached that point has no clue what real war looks like.
The recent exposure of the nationwide Jade Helm 15 exercise has made many people suspicious, and with good reason. Federal crisis exercises have a strange historical tendency to suddenly coincide with very real crisis events. We may know very little about Jade Helm beyond government admissions, claims and misdirections. But at the very least, we know what “JADE” is an acronym for: Joint Assistance for Deployment and Execution, a program designed to create action and deployment plans using computer models meant to speed up reaction times for military planners during a “crisis scenario.” It is linked with another program called ACOA (Adaptive Course of Action), the basis of which is essentially the use of past mission successes and computer models to plan future missions. Both are products of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
As far as I know, no one has presented any hard evidence as to what “HELM” really stands for, but the JADE portion of the exercise explicitly focuses on rapid force deployment planning in crisis situations, according to the government white paper linked above. This fact alone brings into question statements by the Department of Defense that Jade Helm is nothing more than a training program to prepare military units for “foreign deployment.” This is clearly a lie if Jade Helm revolves around crisis events (which denotes domestic threats), rather than foreign operations.
Of course, if you also consider the reality that special operations forces ALWAYS train like they fight and train in environments similar to where they will fight, the entire notion of Jade Helm as a preparation for foreign theaters sounds absurd. If special operations forces are going to fight in Iraq, Iran or Syria, they go to training grounds in places like Kuwait. If they are training in places like Fort Lauderdale, Florida (including “infiltration training”), then there is no way around the fact that they are practicing to fight somewhere exactly like Fort Lauderdale with a similar culture and population.
I would further note that Jade Helm exercises are also joint exercises with domestic agencies like the FBI and the DEA. Again, why include domestic law enforcement agencies in a military exercise merely meant to prepare troops for foreign operations? I often hear the argument that the military would never go along with such a program, but people who take this rather presumptive position do not understand crisis psychology. In the event of a national catastrophe many military personnel and government employees may determine that they will do what is “best for them and their families”. And if following orders guarantees the security of their families (food security, shelter, etc), then they may very well follow any order, no matter how dubious. Also, a large scale crisis could be used as a rationale for martial law; otherwise well meaning military men and women could be convinced that the loss of constitutional freedoms might be for the “greater good of the greater number”. I believe some military will indeed resist such efforts, but of course, Jade Helm may also be a method for vetting such uncooperative people before any live operation occurs.
So if Jade is actually a crisis-planning system for the military and the military is training for domestic operations, what is the crisis it is training to react to? It’s hard to say. I believe it will come down to an economic disaster, but our economic and social structures are so weak that almost any major event could trigger collapse. Terror attacks, cyberattacks, pandemic, a stiff wind, you name it. The point is the government expects a crisis to occur. And with the advent of this crisis, the ultimate war on the American people will begin.
Why wait for a crisis situation? With the cover of a crisis event, opposition to power is more easily targeted. For my starting point on the elite war strategy, I would like to use the following presentation on guerrilla warfare by Max Boot, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and military adviser, at the elitist World Affairs Council.
I would first point out that Boot claims his work is merely a historical character study of interesting figures from the realm of insurgency and counterinsurgency and is not “polemical.” I’m afraid that I will have call horse hockey on that. Boot is direct adviser to the Department of Defense. His work and this presentation were obviously a study of guerrilla tactics from the perspective of counterinsurgency and an attempt to explore strategic methods for controlling and eradicating guerrillas and “terrorists.”
Any defense the American people might muster against elitist dismantling of constitutional liberties would inevitably turn to “insurgency”. So using CFR member Boot’s views on counterinsurgency as a guideline, here is how the elites will most likely wage open war on those within the American population who have the will to fight back. Control Public Opinion
Boot stresses the absolute necessity for the control of public opinion in defeating an insurgency. Most of his analysis is actually quite accurate in my view in terms of successes versus failures of guerrilla movements. However, his obsession with public opinion is, in part, ill-conceived. Boot uses the American Revolution as a supposed prime example of public opinion working against the ruling powers, claiming that it was British public opinion that forced parliament and King George III to pull back from further operations in the colonies.
Now, it is important to recognize that elitists have a recurring tendency to marginalize the success of the American Revolution in particular as being a “fluke” in the historical record. Boot, of course, completely overlooks the fact that the war had progressed far longer than anyone had predicted and that the British leadership suffered under the weight of considerable debts. He also overlooks the fact that pro-independence colonials were far outnumbered by Tories loyal to the crown up to the very end of the war. The revolution was NEVER in a majority position, and public opinion was not on the revolutionaries’ side.
The very idea of the American Revolution is a bit of a bruise on the collective ego of the elites, and their bias leads them to make inaccurate studies of the event. The reality is that most revolutions, even successful ones, remain in a minority for most, if not all, of their life spans. The majority of people do not participate in history. Rather, they have a tendency to float helplessly in the tides, waiting to latch onto whatever minority movement seems to be winning at the time.
Boot suggests that had the Founding Fathers faced the Roman Empire rather than the British Empire, they would have been crucified and the rebellion would have immediately floundered because the Romans had no concern for public opinion. This is where we get into the real mind of the elitist.
For now, the establishment chooses to sway public opinion with carefully crafted disinformation. But what is the best way to deal with public opinion when fighting a modern revolution? Remove public opinion as a factor entirely so that the power elite are free to act as viciously as they wish. Engineered crisis, and economic crisis in particular, create a wash of other potential threats, including high crime, looting, riots, starvation, international conflict, etc. In such an environment, public opinion counts for very little, if people even pay attention at all to anything beyond their own desperation. Once this is achieved, the oligarchy has free reign to take morally questionable actions without fear of future blowback. Control The Public
Another main tenet Boot describes as essential in defeating insurgency is the control of the general population in order to prevent a revolution from recruiting new members and to prevent them from using the crowd as cover. He makes it clear that control of the public does not mean winning the “hearts and minds” in a diplomatic sense, but dominating through tactical and psychological means.
He first presents the example of the French counterinsurgency in Algeria, stating that the French strategy of widespread torture, while “morally reprehensible,” was indeed successful in seeking out and destroying the insurgent leadership. Where the French went wrong, however, was their inability to keep the torture campaign quiet. Boot once again uses the public opinion argument as the reason for the eventual loss of Algeria by the French.
What Boot seems to be suggesting is that systematic torture is viable, at least as a hypothetical strategy, as long as it remains undetected by the overall public. He also reiterates this indirectly in his final list of articles for insurgency and counterinsurgency when he states that “few counterinsurgencies (governments) have succeeded by inflicting mass terror, at least in foreign lands,” suggesting that mass terror may be an option against a domestic rebellion.
Boot then goes on to describe a more effective scenario, the British success against insurgents in Malaya. He attributes the British win against the rebellion to three factors: 1) The British separated large portions of the population, entire villages, into concentration camps, surrounded by fences and armed guards. This kept the insurgents from recruiting from the more downtrodden or dissatisfied classes. And it isolated them into areas where they could be more easily engaged. 2) The British used special operations forces to target specific rebel groups and leadership rather than attempting to maneuver through vast areas in a pointless Vietnam-style surge. 3) The British made promises that appealed to the general public, including the promise of independence. This made the public more pliable and more willing to cooperate.
Now, I have no expectation whatsoever that the elites would offer the American public “independence” for their cooperation in battling a patriot insurgency, but I do think they would offer something perhaps more enticing: safety.
I believe the British/Malayan example given by Boot would be the main methodology for the elites and the federal government in the event that a rebellion arises in the U.S. against planned shifts away from constitutional republic or martial law instituted in the wake of a national emergency. Isolate Population Centers
There is a reason why certain American cities are being buried in technologically sophisticated biometric surveillance networks, and I think the Malayan example holds the key. Certain cities (not all) could be turned into massive isolated camps, or “green zones.” They would be tightly controlled, and travel would be highly restricted. Food, shelter and safety would likely be offered, after a period of disaster has already been experienced. A couple months of famine and lack of medication to the medically dependent would no doubt kill millions of people. Unprepared survivors would flock to these areas in the hopes of receiving aid. Government forces would confiscate vital supplies in rural areas whenever possible in order to force even more people to concentrate into controlled regions.
I have seen the isolation strategy in action in part, during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. More than 4,000 police and National Guard troops locked down the city center, leaving only one route for travel. The first day, there were almost no protesters; most activists were so frightened by the shock-and-awe show of force that they would not leave their homes. This is the closest example I have personally experienced to a martial law cityscape. Decapitate Leadership
The liberty movement has always been a leaderless movement, which makes the “night of long knives” approach slightly less effective. I do not see any immediate advantage to the elites in kidnapping or killing prominent members of the movement, though that does not mean they will not try it anyway. Most well-known liberty proponents are teachers, not generals or political firebrands. Teachers leave all their teachings behind, and no one needs generals or politicians. The movement would not necessarily be lost without us.
That said, there is a fear factor involved in such an event. The black-bagging of popular liberty voices could terrorize others into submission or inaction. This is why I constantly argue the need for individual leadership; every person must be able and willing to take individual action without direction in defense of his own freedoms, if the need arises. Groups should remain locally led, and national centralization of leadership should be avoided at all costs.
According to the very promoters of Jade Helm exercises, training will center on quick-reaction teams striking an area with helicopter support, then exfiltrating within 30 minutes or less. Almost every combat veteran I have spoken with concerning this style of training has said that it is used for “snatch and grab” — the capture or killing of high value targets, then exfiltration before the enemy can mount a response. Fourth-Generation Warfare
The final method for war against the American people is one Boot does not discuss: the use of fourth-generation warfare. Some call this psychological warfare, but it is far more than that. Fourth-generation warfare is a strategy by which one section of a population you wish to control is turned against another section of the population you wish to control. It is warfare without the immediate use of armies. Rather, the elites turn the enemy population against itself and allow internal war to do most of their work for them. We can see this strategy developing already in the U.S. in the manipulation of race issues and the militarization of police.
The use of provocateurs during unrest in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore suggests that a race war is part of the greater plan. I believe law enforcement officials have also been given a false sense of invincibility. With military toys and federal funding, but poor tactical philosophies and substandard training, LEOs are being set up as cannon fodder when the SHTF. Their inevitable failure will be used as a rationalization for more domestic military involvement; but in the meantime, Americans will be enticed to fight and kill each other while the elites sit back and watch the show.
4th Gen warfare also relies on fooling the target population into supporting measures that are secretly destructive to the people. For example, liberty movement support for controlled opposition such as Russia or China, or liberty support for a military coup in which the top brass are elite puppets just like the Obama Administration. Think this sounds far fetched? It has already happened in our recent history! Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler was hired by corporate moguls to lead a paid army in a coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt (also an elitist puppet) in 1933. Butler luckily exposed the conspiracy before it ever got off the ground. Both sides were controlled, but the coup if successful could have resulted in popular support for the expedient erosion of the Constitution, rather than a slow erosion which is what took place. This is the epitome of 4th Gen tactics – make the people think they are winning, when they are actually helping you to defeat them. Know Thy Enemy
I have outlined the above tactics not because I necessarily think they will prevail, but because it is important that we know exactly what we are dealing with in order to better defend ourselves. Such methods can be countered with community preparedness, the avoidance of central leadership, the application of random actions rather than predictable actions, etc. Most of all, liberty champions will have to provide a certain level of safety and security for the people around them if they want to disrupt establishment efforts to lure or force the population into controlled regions. Crisis is the best weapon the elites have at their disposal, and exercises like Jade Helm show that they may use that weapon in the near term. The defense that defeats crisis is preparation — preparation not just for yourself, but for others around you. War is coming, and while we can’t know the exact timing, we can assume the worst and do our best to be ready for it as quickly as possible. This article has been contributed by Brandon Smith of Alt Market.
Warning... This may be too sophisticated for the average person under 40...maybe even 50...or 60!
We have seen in the last two Presidential elections, an electorate who despite having more information at their fingertips than anytime in our history, are still the most unsophisticated electorate in my lifetime. ... a "bumper-sticker" mentality.
Anyone with an understanding of what the colonists were fighting against and fleeing from would understand why the founding documents are the way they are. Instead, when we have a President who says the Constitution is fundamentally flawed because it does not contain entitlement language, we get an entire generation yelling, "That's right!" ~ From the comments
“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
It is not often you’ll find me quoting a New Englander like Emerson, whose philosophy was typical of how the Yankees — who in the 17th century had hanged witches and whose penchant for fanaticism gave rise to every manner of antinomian heretical sect in subsequent generations — by the mid-19th century came to prefer secular moralism to anything that might be learned from the Bible. Well, Ideas Have Consequences, but at this point in our nation’s descent into degenerate anarchy, there’s no need to resurrect ancient grudges and lost causes. Everyone who is willing to fight against the onlaught of terror is a potential ally, and is welcome to join the Camp of the Saints. “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Do the young read Emerson anymore? Do they know anything about Teddy Roosevelt? Are they taught anything at all about our nation’s actual history and cultural traditions? We have abundant evidence that youth have been plunged into Stygian darkness, an endless night of permanent and incurable ignorance. Not only do they know almost nothing, they have no curiosity about any of the things they do not know — which, as I say, is nearly everything. Rarely does one meet a person under 40 who isn’t virtually destitute in terms of actual knowledge. Youth nowadays believe they don’t need to know anything, because they have what educational bureaucrats call “learning skills.” As long as they are capable of finding something with a Google search, what does it matter whether or not they ever actually do Google it? Their entire mental life is built around the idea expressed by every apathetic student taking a required course in college: “Is this going to be on the exam?” So we have many millions of allegedly “educated” Americans, people with college degrees who haven’t opened a book since they received their diploma. They went to college in order to obtain a credential that would qualify them for an office job with a salary, benefits, paid vacation and everything else deemed necessary to middle-class life. Once they got the requisite credential, their interest in “education” ended, and so they spend their leisure watching Netflix or playing XBox or in some other amusement. Read a book? Why would anyone want to read a book? “Is this going to be on the exam?” Speculative philosophy never really interested me. If I learned anything in college about Plato or Rousseau, it was only enough to pass a test. Other people’s opinions don’t impress me much. Just give me the facts, and I can form my own opinions, thank you. This is also why I don’t read much fiction. History has always fascinated me. Literature? Meh. Anyway, a commenter quoted that Emerson passage in response my post about “Feminism’s Mirage of Equality.” His point about intellectual “duplicity and falsehood” as a sort of counterfeiting — “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults” — struck me as quite relevant to the way feminists parasitically defraud “the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.” The piling up of theory as a substitute for actual knowledge is the characteristic humbug of our age. We are expected to heed feminist gender theory about the development of human identity when the authors of these theories typically have never raised a child and, quite often, are temperamentally averse to participation in the natural process by which human offspring are generated. Today is Mother’s Day, and what the average mom knows about “gender” as a natural fact is far more trustworthy than any feminist professor’s intellectual theory. For comments on this post go here: http://theothermccain.com/2015/05/10/worth-reading-carefully/
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The danger to America
is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with
the presidency. It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama
presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to an
electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is
much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what
ails us. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast
confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a
Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those
who made him their president.” ~ Author
Unknown
Catholic Unversity President John Garvey standing in front
of one of the many campus crosses (Photo by Rafael Crisostomo)
It
appears that when the Democratic Party made sure that God would not be a part
of their agenda during the 2012 Democratic Party Convention they really meant
it. Questions for the reader...
After you read the following, what are you going to do about it? Do you think
the Democrats have gone too far? And who's side will you be on when the next
civil war begins? If you don't think that stifling religious freedom is cause
for war, you better check your history books! ~ Norman E. Hooben Source: Beliefnet News Complaint says crosses at Catholic school offensive, prevent Muslim prayers Crosses in every room at Washington D.C.’s Catholic University of America are a human rights violation that prevent Muslim students from praying.
That’s the complaint to the Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights filed by a professor from rival George Washington University across town.
GWU Law School Professor John Banzhaf takes the Catholic institution to task for acting “probably with malice” against Muslim students in a 60-page complaint that cites “offensive” Catholic imagery all over the Catholic school, which he says hinder Muslims from praying.
Baffled Catholic University officials say they have never received a complaint from any of the schools Muslim students.
Banzhaf, who already has a pending lawsuit against the university over ending its policy of allowing mixed-gender dormitories and has a history of filing civil rights suits on such topics as childhood obesity and smoking, filed the complaint alleging that Muslim students are not given their own prayer rooms.
He alleges that the university, “does not provide space – as other universities do – for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion,” according to the Tower, Catholic University’s student newspaper.
The complaint further objects that Muslims must pray at the school’s chapels “and at the cathedral that looms over the entire campus – the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.”
A spokesperson for the human rights office said they are investigating Banzhaf’s complaint — and the inquiry could take as long as six months.
“This attorney is really turning civil rights on its head,” observed Patrick Reilly of the Cardinal Newman Socity. “He’s using the law for his own discrimination against the Catholic institution and essentially saying Catholic University cannot operate according to Catholic principles.”
The complaint is absurd, writes Thomas Peters on the website CatholicVote.
“Can you imagine a law professor helping Catholic students to sue a Jewish or Muslim school to demand that the schools install crosses, remove their religious symbols, and allow the Catholics to construct a chapel on their property?” wrote Peters. “Can you imagine the argument being that Jewish and Muslims schools using their religious symbols and following their faith traditions would be described in the legal brief as “offensive”?!
“Normally I would have confidence that this lawsuit will be deemed without merit, but the way things are going these days, I just can’t be sure anymore. Simply incredible.”
