Kiss Your Safety & Liberty Goodbye
by Andrew P. Napolitano
What a week we have all just endured! While the Democrats were re-writing the federal takeover of health care behind closed doors, the public face of the federal government was fixated on denying and then explaining all the gaps in its intelligence gathering. The Obama administration has been finger-pointing over who in the government let a murderous thug on a plane in Amsterdam that he tried to explode over Detroit. First, the government said that the system worked. Then the President said it didn’t. Then he announced that the intelligence communities and security people would start to talk to each other so the bad guys could be kept out. Weren’t they supposed to be doing this all along?
At Newark Liberty Airport last Sunday, a TSA agent left his post, and a young man walked past it to kiss his girlfriend good-bye. Then the young man turned and left the secured area and left the airport. So far no harm, no foul. But because the government’s surveillance cameras in the airport didn’t work, the feds panicked and ordered over 10,000 passengers to leave the terminal, go out into the 15-degree Newark, NJ cold at night, and then re-enter the airport. Flights were delayed and missed, kids did not get to school on Monday morning, and soldiers were listed as AWOL. All because the government overreacted to a kiss. This humiliated the feds: New Jersey’s 86-year-old senior Senator Frank Lautenberg demanded that the guy who kissed his gal be hunted down and prosecuted because of the chaos he caused. He caused? Let’s see; the government has cameras that watch us every time we scratch our noses, and when those cameras don’t work, the government blames the person whose picture it was taking? Come on.
All this, of course, brings out the false argument of liberty versus security. And we hear that the government must take our freedoms in order to keep us safe. That’s hogwash.
What Really Is A Conspiracy Theory?
December 17, 2009
By Rand Clifford
hat tip: Countercurrents.org
Imagine saying to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “My, you’re very tall.”
Imagine denigrating anything not hailed as truth by institutions such as government, or mainstream media, as “conspiracy theory.”
What’s the connection? Much deeper than at first it might seem, much deeper than the absence of critical thinking—it’s a pattern of apathy. Both instances lack wit and subtlety…no thinking, whether stating the obvious, or scoffing at any truth not “official.” So why has conspiracy theory become such a knee-jerk label? First, let’s look at what “conspiracy theory” means, institutionally and officially.
Conspiracy theory is most often used to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom from the people. “Wikipedia” even adds the zest, or invitation for the absurd (more on this in a moment), of secret plots by conspirators of “…almost superhuman power and cunning.”
America’s plague of conspiracy-theory labeling subverts critical thinking; one of our least popular endeavors—critical thinking that is, has much to do with protecting one’s comfort zone and avoiding cognitive dissonance…much to do with choosing what to believe, regardless of evidence. A fine example is Americans’ attitude regarding official confessions that the anthrax attacks soon after 9/11 were false flag. (1)
So many obvious lies marched out as official truths have made 9/11 the ultimate mother lode of so-called conspiracy theories; one of which portrays the anthrax attacks as false flag terror, an inside job. Despite the government finally admitting that of course the anthrax attacks were an inside job, a shocking number of people still believe anything that strays from the anthrax attacks being Muslim terror is, of course, conspiracy theory. For those comfortable in their comfort zone, will truth ever be enough for them to give up the reassuring lies?
What is “false flag terror?” Essentially, false flag terrorism occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces attack their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely blamed on an enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy.
Sound familiar? It’s a trick as old as war.
Read more.
The Underwear Bomber: More to the story
Kurt Haskell describes The Well Dressed Man and the Man in Orange by Pete Johnson January 6, 2010 As we all know, on Christmas Day Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Mutallab) boarded a plane in Denmark with a makeshift bomb hidden in his underwear. Thanks to an alert passenger and the technical difficulty involved, the bomb did [...]
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Speaks Out in Support of Gaza Freedom March, Blasts Israeli-Egyptian “Siege” of Gaza
Hat tip: Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the world famous British musician Roger Waters. He’s best known as a founding member, bassist, singer, songwriter for the iconic rock band called Pink Floyd. The band is perhaps best known for their record The Wall.
Well, Roger Waters is also a supporter of the Gaza Freedom March and an outspoken critic of Israel’s separation wall with the West Bank and the underground wall Egypt’s building with Gaza that Ali Abunimah was just talking about.
Democracy Now!’s Miguel Nogueira spoke with Roger Waters this weekend and asked him about Gaza.
ROGER WATERS: We implore the Egyptian government to allow this peaceful, nonviolent protest at the siege of this country to proceed. I have a feeling they will. This again points to the power, or the potential power, of this demonstration. I think the Egyptian government may find that if they deny this due process of the rights of human beings to peacefully protest when they see a crime being committed, then they will find themselves on very dangerous shifting sands and put into a very difficult position themselves. So this again speaks to the fact that the organizing committee of the Freedom March on Gaza have already achieved—even before they start, they’ve achieved, to some extent, their aim, because this is becoming big news around the world, and it will become bigger and bigger news.
Line Item Veto is Dangerous
by Christopher C. Cantwell
2010 Liberty Candidate for the first district of the New York House of Representatives.
www.voteforcantwell.com
As the conservative revenge for the Obama Administration, and the 111th Congress, brews in America, I am hearing more and more talk of a constitutional amendment for “Line Item Veto” power for the President.
It seems like a good idea at first, because we all know how things get done in Washington, Representatives and Senators buy votes for terrible legislation by trading earmarks to bring money back to their states and districts, which helps them buy votes and get re-elected. A way to eliminate that practice seems priceless to many people, and line item veto promises to do it.
For those unaware, currently when a bill is passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate, the bill goes to the President and he may sign it into law or veto it and send the bill back to the House of Congress from which it originated with his comments. Line Item Veto would allow the president to veto individual line items or sections of a bill, without sending it back to Congress.
The current health care debate gives us great examples of both the good and bad of this power.
On the good side, if President Obama had line item veto power, he could veto the deal Senator Ben Nelson made for his vote, a provision exempting his state from paying the usual share of costs for new Medicaid patients, a deal critics have dubbed the Cornhusker Kickback and is expected to cost the federal government $100 million over 10 years. Or Mary Landrieu’s $300 Million “Louisiana Purchase” Which she has actually bragged about saying “I am not going to be defensive. And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix”. Or Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s $100 Million earmark for a health care facility in his state. So right there, if you trust the President to do so, could have saved us $500 Million.
On the other hand, we have the amendment which prohibits taxpayer funded abortions in the bill, which the President could just as easily veto before passing the bill into law, as well as language which would deny coverage to illegal immigrants.
To keep up my Libertarian habit of attacking Congress and the President in a bipartisan fashion, we wouldn’t have been any better off with this power in the hands of President Bush. The little bit of restraint left in the Patriot act and other Orwellian nightmare legislation passed under his watch could have been removed by line item veto under his watch as well.
Deep Secrets, Copenhagen World Government, the M-Fund, and the Future
Hat tip: Public Intelligence Blog
Phi Beta Iota: Conventional minds cannot handle the esoteric, in part because they have been dumbed down by really rotten educational systems that emphasize rote learning, and in part by social conventions that reward loyalty to idiocy over self-discovery and “branching.” We are seeing a convergence in “revelations” as more individuals achieve “hacker-like” open minds despite the Paradigms of Failure. Today we bring together three stories: Deep Secrets; UN use of climate change to achieve World Government “functionality” (an oxymoron); and the M-Fund in Japan.
by: David Pozen
Stanford Law Review, Forthcoming
This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles.
Copenhagen World Government
Here are two of the most troubling sections.
Page 18, paragraph 36 states the following:
“It should include a financial mechanism and a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies, as the prevailing instrument, to which market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate, in order to assure the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention.”
In other words, the bureaucrats and politicians will try to ‘buck’ the market. The conclusion from this paragraph is that the market will be “subordinate” to the decisions of public policy makers.
Shining Light on Roots of Terrorism
By Ray McGovern
hat tip: opednews.com
“I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at” is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denney LeBoeuf put it, according to The New York Times on Saturday.
No problem, says Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims to have “great confidence” that other evidence – apart from what may have been gleaned from the 183 times Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, for example – will suffice to convict him.
Maybe so, but what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.
For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.
It is not like there is no evidence on this key issue. Rather, it appears that the Israel-Palestine connection is pretty much kept off limits for discussion.
Yet, as Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators go to trial, the FCM’s tacit but tight embargo will be under great strain. Eyes will have to be averted from the sensitive Israeli-Palestinian motive even more than from torture, which most Americans know about (and, God help us, are willing to explain away).
