eveningstandard--2019-02-25--Society dehumanises vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers including aposIsis brideapos Sha

Society dehumanises vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers — including 'Isis bride' Shamima

When I was pregnant, I had lunch with a taut, snippy writer from American Vogue who had written a dull book about the hair-colouring habits of Manhattan socialites. Her publisher had refused to send it to me, I think out of embarrassment.  At the time the papers were full of the Iraq war — indeed, I’d spent the morning ghosting a Comment piece for Andy McNab — but this writer lent across the table, switched off my tape recorder and savaged me for not having read her canon of work on, I don’t know, hemlines.  I felt boiling rage as I left the restaurant. I was reminded of it this week when I looked at Luciana Berger and the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle), and the unremitting onslaught of needless bile that both these pregnant women are subjected to.  How do they stay sane? And is this dehumanisation of vulnerable women the real marker of how low society has sunk?  My first reaction to the fashion troll was to refuse to write the interview. But my editor suggested I let loose. “Write what happened,” he said.  Perhaps my anger was infectious: he slapped that particular broadsheet’s first ever use of the word “bitch” in the headline.  Now, I am not pretending that boiling rage is an emotion unfamiliar to me, but boiling rage while feeling hormonal and vulnerable is a potent cocktail, as any woman who has been pregnant will attest. (I still wince with guilt when I think of the poor old lady who came over to tell me my toddler was too noisy in a café the day before I gave birth to my third.)  And then there’s the hormone switch post-birth, which takes you by the hand to the cliff-edge of emotion. Your boobs feel like a life vest suddenly inflated inside the aircraft, and the idea that something might happen to this small, damp, defenceless creature, wholly in your care, makes you hallucinate.  Which brings me to Shamima Begum, the 19-year-old “Isis bride” who left Bethnal Green aged 15 thinking she was heading for the sunlit uplands of the caliphate, and has just had her third baby in the grim surroundings of al-Hol refugee camp.  Begum’s British citizenship is being revoked, in part because of interviews she gave (some while still pregnant) in which she said she was “unfazed” by the sight of a severed head in a bin.  She was also unwilling to condemn the evil that is Islamic State ideology.  I am not excusing her appalling decision to immerse herself in this hell on earth, or gloss over what she has said. But I have covered war. War is trauma. Her instinct to survive is visceral. Camp inhabitants say they have spotted former IS soldiers who have shaved off their beards trying to hide nearby. What do those screaming abuse at her from the comfort of British sitting rooms want her to say when faced with this threat?  Nor should they forget the deaths of Shamima’s first two babies — arguably a medieval form of punishment in itself. Surely the mark of a good society is understanding and empathy, especially for those in the thrall of raging hormones and blind fear.  When I interviewed him for Friday’s paper, John McDonnell told me he agreed with Labour deputy Tom Watson that there was racist bullying in the Labour Party. There wasn’t room to quote him on this but I was struck by the contrast in mood when I saw Jeremy Corbyn tell Sky News that he did not agree with Watson and would “be speaking to [him] in the near future”.  McDonnell and Corbyn are often seen as interchangeable. Certainly they are close — “in and out of each other’s offices all day” as one special adviser put it — and have been since their Seventies demo days.  But McDonnell is as awake as Watson to the vitriol in Labour. He said: “I agree with [Watson], he’s expressed real concerns. And we’ve got to deal with it”. On media outriders that stoke fires supposedly on Labour’s behalf, he said: “When you have a big movement like ours, people get attracted to it. Some of those … we don’t want associated with us.” He had a message for them: “Just because someone disagrees with you on something, doesn’t mean they are automatically the enemy.”  Half-term in Dorset was cut short by convulsions in Westminster, so I took my son to our Lobby office in the Commons. He had a Twix in Portcullis House (the lunch queue was too long), saw Business Secretary Greg Clark make a statement on Honda, and heard Speaker John Bercow say “or-daaaah”.  Then, through Hogwartian passageways and lifts, I swept him up to the “Burma Road” (the third floor corridor where the press sit). He looked impressed. Might he want to be a journalist one day? He nodded, vigorously. “One was watching a Fortnite video and playing Apex Legends.”


eveningstandard--2019-06-18--Anthony Hilton Big companies are not loved but they can fix societyaposs ills

Anthony Hilton: Big companies are not loved but they can fix society's ills

The business press in this country does not really do business. There is finance aplenty, economics and interest rates by the ton, profiles of the great and the good and reports on markets by the score. Family finance gets a mention too.  But it is not business — nothing on marketing or sales, no production or distribution, no product launch, either blockbuster or failure — in spite of these organisations being the economy’s lifeblood.  There is some interest in property but again it is not business. Housing is certainly up there but most people have a home, want to own one, or despair of being able ever to afford one, and it is house prices which dominate, not anything else. There is a certain interest in offices and shops and supermarkets but again normally this is because either a landlord has made a pile, or as is now the case, landlords are resisting cuts.  There is no mention of warehouse operator Prologis and the way distribution is being transformed by building centres close to towns and with huge extra space to handle returns, in spite of the fact that Amazon wants these and is one of the biggest businesses to have grown up in the past 15 years.  The travails of Neil Woodford did not matter to most people. I have no idea how many clients were invested but if he had £10 billion in total, and everyone had £100,000 with him that would give him a clientele of just 100,000, ignoring those institutions with many millions. If he had £5 billion with £25,000 invested it would give him 200,000.  He might have more, he might have fewer, but he is only filling Wembley stadium once or perhaps twice, so why the fuss?  The reason is that the press still think most people are interested in shares and bonds and are captivated by the daily ebb and flow of the markets. In reality, however, most are not.  Business ought to be a different matter because most people are involved in it, even if it is only their own, or as an employee where their primary concern is that it will not go bust on them.  True, Boris Johnson was dismissive, but it really does matter. It matters because the negativity contributes to the alienation and lack of involvement of business in some of the critical societal issues of our age — climate change, inequality, healthcare provision, urbanisation and, not least, employment.  Business is painted as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Yet none of these issues can be solved without the development and application of technology. Only business, in combination with academic and research institutions, can provide that.  Ian Davis, chairman of Rolls-Royce and former head of McKinsey, made these points at the Wincott Press Awards lunch.  According to a study of annual reports of large public companies across the world, the words governance and risk were twice as likely to appear in the reports of UK and western European companies as in the reports of US companies.  The words growth, innovation and investment were almost twice as likely to be in US company reports.  He said the overblown negativity matters. It leads to excessive risk aversion, ever more focus on governance and controls and tighter regulatory regimes. This gets in the way of innovation and increases the incentives to move out of the public markets into private ownership and to encourage the offshoring of business to more accommodating regulatory regimes.  One may not be able to prove it but these attitudes probably contribute to the relatively lacklustre performance of British business with the implications for jobs, economic growth and national income and competitiveness.  Is the negativity towards big business deserved? And does it matter? Big business is a gift that keeps on giving when it comes to scandalous behaviour or crises. But it needs to be put in context. Carillion and Sir Philip Green and PPI are not great ads but are they representative of the whole? It is not as though the charity sector or NGOs or even the media have not had their challenges.  Although the majority of people do not trust business, typically more than 75% of people working in business trust the company they work for.  Big business has never been much loved and probably never will be. But its role and contribution to society is crucial, Davis says. It needs to be better appreciated.  Failure to do so will not just damage business but will impede and prevent progress on many of the defining societal issues of this century.


foreignpolicy--2019-05-01--The Ancient Rites of the Worlds First Postmodern Society

The Ancient Rites of the World’s First Postmodern Society  On Wednesday, in Japan’s Imperial Palace, court chamberlains presented Crown Prince Naruhito an ancient sword and jewel. In accepting them, he was formally recognized as Japan’s new emperor, only the fifth in the past 150 years. Along with an equally ancient mirror, the sword and jewel comprise the Imperial Regalia that have been passed down through generations of the world’s oldest continuous monarchy. No one but the emperor and a few senior Shinto priests is actually allowed see the sacred treasures, but in taking charge of them, Naruhito became Japan’s new sovereign. At a later enthronement ceremony (sokui no rei) in October, he will appear in elaborate ancient court robes inside a gazebolike structure topped by a golden phoenix and containing a simple throne. His wife, Crown Princess Masako, will sit in even more elaborate robes inside her own throne enclosure.  Unlike much of the modern world, Japan holds fiercely to many of its traditions. In a country often billed as the world’s first postmodern society, the reality is that modernity and tradition dwell side by side, sometimes uneasily but largely in unacknowledged harmony. It is perhaps this stability that has helped Japan navigate the pitfalls of the past 30 years, since the popping of its economic bubble in the late 1980s, when Emperor Akihito ascended the throne.  When Akihito was enthroned as emperor in November 1990, his father, Hirohito, had been dead for almost two years. Akihito represented an evolutionary step in Japan’s imperial system. His father had come to the throne in 1926, controversially reigning during World War II. Hirohito’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, was the first emperor in Japan’s modern period, starting in 1868. He was a constitutional figurehead who nevertheless had great influence over his government. It was his restoration of the imperial system after 700 years of samurai rule that reintroduced a host of real and imagined traditions surrounding the emperor, many of which were used to unify the country and give it an unambiguous polestar through a period of dramatic socio-economic change. It also helped prop up Tokyo’s imperialist policies during the 20th century.  Yet in the decades after World War II, both Hirohito and Akihito strove to modernize the image of the emperor, wholeheartedly embracing their constitutionally circumscribed roles in line with the U.S.-written postwar constitution. As Japan rapidly recovered after the war, the imperial house acted as a stabilizing element in a country that was becoming ever more urbanized, technologically advanced, and internationalist. Precisely because the emperor was thoroughly insulated from domestic politics, he was seen as the ultimate symbol of the Japanese nation and a tie to a familiar past that was quickly disappearing.  Akihito and his wife, Empress Michiko, broke tradition in other ways, as well. She was the first imperial consort not of royal blood. Rather, she was the daughter of a successful industrialist. Their courtship was played out in public (literally, as they met while playing tennis), and the excitement surrounding the wedding of the dashing young prince and his bride in 1959 equaled the fervor over Charles and Diana’s marriage two decades later. Since then, the emperor has sought to atone for Japan’s World War II atrocities, in part by refusing to visit the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Class A war criminals are enshrined, and has been a persuasive representative of the nation abroad.  Unlike other royal families, the inner life of Japan’s imperials is tightly shielded from public view. If there are scandals among them, little word, if any, ever gets out. Yet their outside activities have replicated much that the world finds admirable about Japan, such as its focus on education. Like his father before him, Akihito is a recognized marine biologist, while soon-to-be Emperor Naruhito has degrees in history. Naruhito’s younger sister, Sayako (who left the imperial family when she married in 2005), studied ornithology, and their various cousins also have pursued advanced degrees. And all the royals act as patrons of various nongovernmental social, educational, and cultural organizations.  It might seem that the imperial system would then be of little overall utility in Japan, simply the object of veneration of conservatives, a reminder of Japan’s imperialist past, and a family almost stultifyingly normal by any other measure. But support for the institution is deep, and the imperial system is an inextricable thread in the fabric of Japan. As one Japanese scholar told a longtime observer of the country, “If there’s no emperor, what is Japan?”  It is this tenacious sense of national uniqueness, exclusionary yet modern, that accounts for the continued existence of the Japanese emperor. On the grounds of the Imperial Palace at the heart of Tokyo lie several imperial shrines meant solely for the emperor to carry out his unique duties. He still offers prayers for the nation daily and during auspicious times of the year, such as New Year’s—though as a private citizen, thanks to the postwar separation of church and state.  Yet the line between politics and religion is tested in other ways. The emperor both plants the country’s ceremonial first rice seedlings and harvests them every year, offering them to the sun goddess Amaterasu; this year, since it will be the first harvest of the new emperor’s reign, it will have a special name: the daijosai. Here’s how the New York Times described a different daijosai in 1990:  It is at his first autumn harvest festival that the emperor supposedly communes with Amaterasu, thereby partaking of part of her divinity. In prewar Japanese thinking, the act led him to become a “living god,” a theologico-political status that was dropped only in 1946 at the insistence of the U.S. occupiers of Japan. As it did in 1990, the continuation of this apparently ancient rite will rile anti-monarchists and those who believe that Japan should still be held accountable for the aggression committed in the name of the new emperor’s grandfather.  But for the overwhelming majority of Japanese, such rites are central to their sense of nationality. The emperor and his family have proved to be the unchanging foundations of a country that has struggled since the early 1990s to recover from its economic stagnation and which has seen its role on the global stage usurped by a China far more powerful than Japan ever was at its height.  Some observers fear the country is turning more inward—becoming more conservative under long-serving premier Shinzo Abe. But it is equally likely that Japan has simply become comfortable in its postwar, post-bubble reality, that it sees the race between the United States and China for supremacy and knows it will be left behind no matter who wins. In that world, the imperial family is both a link to the past and a reassurance that regardless of what comes next, Japan contains an identifiable, perhaps eternal, kernel of greatness.


fortruss--2019-04-04--Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom

Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom?

In the mid-1990s, a series of exposés featured on the London Independent and elsewhere brought a dark secret to light.  Many were startled by the revelation that the entire evolution of 20th century modern art was directed in large measure by the CIA! This not only included the direct financing of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose works now regularly sell for over $100 million apiece, but also powerful literary magazines like Salon and Encounter, interpretive dance schools, and the remarkably ugly a-tonal music of Arnold Schoenberg.  The instrument selected to re-shape western cultural tastes in the wake of World War II came to be known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950 with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the CCF was designed to 1) promote the de-Nazification of Germany and 2) fight the cultural war against the communist world that had just recently been organized by Sir Winston Churchill. The logic of the Cultural Cold War asserted that since communism and fascism relied on “realist/rigid iconography” to advance itself, the “free world” on the other side of the Iron Curtain would rely on abstract, emotional “freedom”. Where communism was based on the sacrifice of the individual for the “good” of the whole, this Cold War democracy asserted that the needs of the whole were separate from the arbitrary freedom of the individual to “do whatever feels good”. The degree to which the new modernism offended order and logic was proportional to the degree to which it defended “democracy and liberal capitalism”.  It is noteworthy that the CCF was run largely under the direction of the same Lord Bertrand Russell who had just a few years earlier called for the pre-emptive nuking of the Soviet Union in order to achieve a one world government.  Russell’s active work subverting the arts should not be seen apart from his imperial political views, or his efforts to impose a system of shackles upon the minds of scientists who would forever be rendered creatively sterile due to a belief that fixed mathematics governed the universe as outlined in his Principia Mathematica [1]. Zeus cannot after all tolerate knowledge of fire (science), the freedom to use it (politics) or the instincts to use it well (culture). It is only by thinking in terms of those three interconnected aspects of the human condition, that one can understand the 20th century or history more generally. Describing his view of culture Russell wrote in the 1951 Impact of Science on Society:  “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.”  Russell’s leading intellectual collaborators within the CCF included such misanthropes as musicologist Theodor Adorno, sociologist Max Horkheimer, poet W.H. Auden, and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.  Adorno, whose theories on music are still considered a gold standard in modern academia and who also ironically created the foundation for the “top 40 hits” as part of the creation of a culture for the masses detached from an “elite culture” for the oligarchy and its managers, described his ideal of the “new music” in the following terms:  “What radical music perceives is the un-transfigured suffering of man…. The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks…. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.”  Since Adorno exemplified the oligarchical belief in the inevitable decay (entropy) of all existence and the associated belief that the arts should MIRROR that reality, Adorno wrote in his Philosophy of Modern Music that ultimately “necrophilia is the last perversity of style”.  It is no wonder that the ultimate enemy of an oligarchy is found in the optimistic belief that moral reason exists within the essence of all human nature as a unique species made in the image of a Good and loving Creator. What types of art reflect that divine sense of humankind? What types of systems of political philosophy express it? Is a system of hereditary power equal to a system that posits that “all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights”? Is it true that Bach’s Jesu Meine Freud or Mozart’s Requiem should be treated as somehow equal to the “sophisticated” atonal music of the 20th century? Should a painting by Rembrandt or Davinci be treated as equal to the ink splatterings of Pollock or the blurry squares of Rothko? What happens to the powers of judging right from wrong, and truth from lies in a society which embraces an art which is animated by love and beauty vs an art animated by pessimistic ugliness? Which type of society would be easier to manipulate?  A Return to the Universal in Art: Schiller as Antidote to the CCF  The German poet Friedrich Schiller, who was shaped by the global republican movement that spread in the wake of the American Revolution asked in his Aesthetical Letters (1794) “how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion.” If the masses are debased to believe that poison is their drug, then how could a true artist cater to their desires, no matter how popular? To do this requires an extremely advanced moral disposition since both money and fame must be sacrificed in order to challenge a society to become better. Schiller said that for one to be committed to truth and its corollary Freedom in the highest pursuit of Beauty, an artist had to find a way to balance existing in space and time, but always strive to transcend their temporal society’s limitations in a constant search for the eternal. In his sixth letter Schiller wrote:  “No doubt the artist is the child of his time, but unhappy for him if he is its disciple or even its favorite! He will, indeed, receive his matter from the present time, but he will borrow the form from a nobler time and even beyond all time, from the essential, absolute, immutable unity. There, issuing from the pure ether of its heavenly nature, flows the source of all beauty, which was never tainted by the corruptions of generations or of ages, which roll along far beneath it in dark eddies.”  Schiller’s thoughts were not written in an ivory tower, but were driven by his leading efforts as a playwright, poet and founder of a field of research known as the Science of Universal History. Although his life was short, he not only left an incredible opus that inspired some of the most noble works of music such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Verdi’s operas, he also directly shaped a network of other artists, scientists and statesmen through the Weimar Renaissance such as both Humboldt brothers and Wolfgang Goethe to name a few.  The need to cure society of its tendency to fall under the sway of either extreme of abstract intellectual matters devoid of emotional growth on the one side and emotional chaos detached uninformed from reason on the other was the basis of Schiller’s own self-development and his guiding light in the creation of a culture capable of attaining true political freedom.  It is this spirit that the perverted “end of history” zombies of the CCF wanted to destroy through their manipulation of global affairs leading into World War I, their humiliation of Germany under the Versailles Treaty and their financing of Adolph Hitler through Wall Street and the City of London’s Bank of International Settlements. The fact that these same forces who created the world wars and fascist monsters of the 20th century were also given the authority to offer the “cure” in the form of the CCF de-nazification of Germany and new “democratic” culture of abstract art, modernist music and existential philosophy is akin to allowing the murderer give the eulogy at his victims’ funeral.  Now that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is leading a new paradigm of win-win cooperation we are witnessing an inspired re-awakening of popularity in classical artistic standards in music, art, and even architecture. The choice is once again being placed in front of all citizens: Do we wish to continue to swim in the pigsty of cultural decadence and pessimism unleashed by the CCF, or do we want to embrace a future more becoming of a species made in the Creator’s image?  [1] Luckily for the world, Einstein’s close friend Kurt Gödel inspired by his studies of Gottfried Leibniz, put an end to this endeavor in 1931 by demonstrating that Russell’s belief in a closed mathematical system was impossible as all systems are intrinsically open and thus susceptible to constant perfectibility. Unluckily for Gödel, Russell never forgave him and made sure that the remaining years of his life were hellish with Gödel finally meeting a tragic end in 1977 convinced that Bertrand Russell and international secret societies were trying to destroy Leibniz and were also trying to poison him.  [For a larger presentation by the author on the subject of Schiller’s Philosophy entitled How Painting Liberates Us From the Shackles of the Sense, CLICK HERE.]  BIO: Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the  He is a regular author with Fort-Russ and the Duran, and his works have been published in Executive Intelligence Review, Global Research, Global Times, The Duran, Nexus Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Veterans Today and Sott.net. Matthew has also published the book “The Time has Come for Canada to Join the New Silk Road” and three volumes of the Untold History of Canada (available on untoldhistory.canadianpatriot.org). He can be contacted at [email protected]


foxnews--2019-02-28--Ben Carson warns morality of our society at stake in abortion debate

Ben Carson warns 'morality of our society' at stake in abortion debate

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Ben Carson, in an interview with Fox News on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference, warned Thursday that the "morality of our society" is at stake in the abortion debate that has surged back onto the floors of state legislatures and Congress.  Speaking to Fox News moments after addressing the conservative gathering, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development said the issue should be at the forefront as the 2020 presidential race starts to take shape.  “I think it’s a critical issue because we are talking about the morality of our society,” Dr. Carson told Fox News.  FOR THE BEST CPAC MOMENTS, GO TO FOX NATION  “Are we going off the deep-end here or are we still loving and compassionate people?”  Asked what he would tell Democrats who voted to block a Republican bill that threatened prison time for doctors who don't try saving the life of infants born alive during failed abortions, Carson said: “I would say please stop and spend a little time educating yourself about what life is all about, and about when babies can feel and when they can respond to external stimulation.”  BEN SASSE: CUOMO 'PERVERTED' COLOR PINK BY LINKING IT TO ABORTION, NOT BREAST CANCER  Carson’s comments come after the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act stalled amid Democratic opposition in Congress. It would have required that "any health care practitioner present" at the time of a birth "exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age."  The bill, which would exempt the mother from prosecution, also would have required practitioners to "ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital." It prescribed a possible term of imprisonment of up to five years for violations, not including penalties for first-degree murder that could have applied.  ABORTION SURVIVOR: SENATE DEMS ARE 'WILLING TO SACRIFICE LIVES LIKE MINE TO KEEP ABORTION-ON-DEMAND'  All Democratic 2020 presidential candidates in the Senate opposed the measure, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.  Opponents called the bill unnecessary, considering it's already a crime to kill a newborn, and described it as an "attack" on women's health.  In response, President Trump tweeted: "This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress."  CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP  The vote came in the wake of New York easing restrictions on late-term abortions, as several other states including Illinois consider similar measures.


freedombunker--2019-02-16--Why Our Society Has Become a Shame Factory

“Since I am experienced [in sewing], tonight I am working on a special project making rape resistant shower curtains for the prisons.” – Craig Cesal  Craig Cesal is serving a life sentence in federal prison for doing body work on trucks that were moving marijuana, a first-time offense. Our public servants would not let him out to see his son's funeral. Rapists and murderers have come and gone during his time in America's prison camps. He often works 16-hour shifts sewing for the US government, he says, making “rape resistant” shower curtains.  Craig's exile inside the belly of our government reveals things that remain hidden to us free folks on the outside. What human creatures make others sew rape-resistant showers for fellow captives to hide behind? Who in their right mind made this kind of legal system? Why do millions of Americans take rape-adjacent showers every night in local, state, and federal warehouses for nonviolent choices? Why do Americans think the evil of throwing humans into cages for victimless acts is okay if a majority of group-thinkers complies?  Our government is built on the threat of rape. Every law against nonviolent choices—from suspended licenses to raw milk regulations to workplace rules and coming speech codes—are enforced by the threat of deprivation of freedom, family separation, and, ultimately, assault and rape.  The more our justice rituals fail to bring prosperity, peace, and fairness, the more unsatisfying their cover stories become.  We all know this to some degree but because it is not in our face and because others tolerate it, we remain locked in a societal bystander effect. We are incapable of moving to our neighbors' defense. Just as Stanley Milgram's disturbing experiment showed, most humans tend to go along with the rules of dominance and submission games as long as they are told it is okay by an authority and that they will not be held individually responsible.  But the more we see the failure of prohibitions and regulations and taxation to make our world better at the expense of the sacrificed few, the more the shame of our compliance builds. This shame is supposed to be safely contained on the backs of our designated scapegoats: our prisoners and policemen and soldiers sent to unnecessary decades-long wars. But the more our justice rituals fail to bring prosperity, peace, and fairness, the more unsatisfying their cover stories become. The shame is leaking onto all of us. It is seeping into all of our institutions. Social media sites are flooded with daily shame mob battles of rage. Even football has become stained with the shame of concussions, battered wives, and police shootings.  We have nowhere to hide from shame. The left was quick to try to quarantine their minds from the shame storm of recent stories of refugee children being placed in cages. When popular images of migrant children wrapped in foil in kennel-like enclosures turned out to be the doing of their adored role model Obama, they quickly shielded their minds from the painful realization that they hired this man, most of them two times, to carry out this behavior on their behalf and largely stayed silent.  Nevertheless, many faithful voters persist that the children in cages at the border were solely the shame of Trump voters. Like playing a game of hot potato that can sear a hole through their chests, those who see themselves as morally better than their politically incorrect nemeses feel the need to dump all responsibility for caging and family separation onto their rivals.  Just like their Republican rivals before them, when their tribal leaders pitched elective wars for obviously dubious reasons, they submitted.  But the shame cannot be contained. Leftists know they supported politicians who destroyed Yemeni, Syrian, and Libyan children for no defensible reason. They know they share the blame for knowingly voting for more mass incarceration-related family separation, drone strikes of children, and other ghastly barbarism in recent elections. And just like their Republican rivals before them, when their tribal leaders pitched elective wars for obviously dubious reasons, they submitted. Now they stand up to their knees in shame with nowhere to drain it.  The Covington Catholic schoolboys were a promising target for shame shifting. Their smiles in the face of an elderly Native American's drumming felt like an obvious symbol of unrepentant shame. Finally, millions could relieve their own cauldron of shame for choices like voting for drug war politicians and status quo keepers of political prison camp laborers like Craig Cesal. Then the mob fervor was sabotaged by alternative cameras that revealed the relative composure the teenagers showed in the face of bee-lining grandstanding adults and slurs from another group.  Of course, President Trump has been a perennial target of people full of shame. But he fails to be an effective outlet because he is so shameless. He refuses to indicate the posture of guilt for anything. A cleansing requires the accused to admit sin so that the accusers can feel comparatively exonerated. Trump simply will not play this role. Meanwhile, he himself places the shame of creeping debt and socialism onto the backs of his rival party while conveniently doing little to allow young people to opt out of failed socialist schemes like Medicare and Social Security.  It is popular in culture to be ashamed of race, gender, family togetherness, marriage, children, wealth, competence, able bodies, technology, language, religion, nationality, fitness, and meat. Each of these categories are occasions for difference and differentiation is where people can sometimes engage in shameful behavior. Shame is driving us to erase all differences and boundaries and thus erase all meaning behind these categories of life.  Perhaps the way to relieve our shame is to realize it need not exist at all. Shame exists because we refuse to trust in the sovereign power of love.  But if children could vote, and white men became a tiny impoverished minority of the population, and gender became completely fluid, and wealth was equally printed out to every human in the land, and religion was privatized and pluralized, and meat was completely grown in labs, and body shapes had no preference, would we still bomb a country that threatened our world reserve currency? Would we still place dissidents of new regulations and speech codes in cages with rapists and murderers? Would we wrap our jails with barbed wire fences or cotton candy? Would we reform the prisons we kept by forcing misfits of our new undifferentiated glory into reeducation programs meant to reform their minds for their own good? What if they fled the classroom? Would they be tranquilized or hugged by social justice correctional officers?  Would we still be submerged in shame?  Perhaps the only way to relieve our shame is to realize it need not exist at all. Shame exists because we refuse to trust in the sovereign power of love. Love requires us to unplug from toxic groupthink and reclaim our personhood. When we love ourselves, we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves. When we care for ourselves, we will not want to initiate physical suffering on others. When we are free of shame, we will have nothing but love left for our neighbors. We will not hide behind collective complacency with violence against misfits. We will be free.  Watch my interview with Craig here:


freedombunker--2019-05-28--Why a Free Society Cannot Transform Wishes into Rights

Any careful observer of American politics must be struck by the ever-expanding roster of things people have asserted rights to. But when such arguments are seriously considered, there is little to them beyond shared desires or wishes for certain things, which supposedly implies that there ought to be rights to them.  From there, it is but one further step to legislative, executive, or judicial attempts to create such rights, promoted as social improvements guaranteed by government.  This “ought implies is” argument about rights reverses the claim that “is implies ought,” which David Hume famously shot down. It ignores that in a world where scarcity is inescapable, our desires always outpace what is producible, which means that newly asserted rights may well be impossible delusions. Further, it ignores that making good on any particular newly created right must violate other’s existing rights to themselves and their efforts. And it, too, deserves rejection.  Few have thought as carefully about this confusion between wishes and rights as Leonard Read. His insights are particularly well developed in his “Doctor, Whoever You Are,” section in his 1969 Let Freedom Reign. In a world where turning one wish into a political right leads to still more attempts to use the same magic on another wish, and every such step further erodes liberty, Read’s views are worth serious consideration on their 50th anniversary.  "Now in vogue is a fearful combination of wishes and methods, as fanciful as Aladdin’s lamp…the transmutation of wishes into rights! Do you wish for better housing? Then better housing is a right. Do you wish for…higher returns for goods and services, shorter hours of labor, protection from competition? Then these are rights. Do you wish for free medical care? Then free medical care is a right!" "And what is the nature of the jinni called upon to transmute wishes into rights?... government. It extorts from all, allocating the legalized loot to those who effectively make their wishes heard." "How do we go about healing this sickness? We must acquire an understanding that wishes, regardless of how numerous, do not constitute a right. I have no more right to your professional attention than you have a claim on me to wash your dishes. We are dealing with an absurdity." "We live and prosper by specialization and exchange…others tend to encourage me to specialize at what is of value to them, and I tend to encourage them to specialize at what is of value to me. This is how people in a free society exert their wishes. But note that these wishes do not carry with them any right on my part to command what others shall produce or any right to force on them the terms of exchange." "When the notion that a wish is a right is put into effect by police force—the only way it can be done—then specialization is no longer guided by consumer wishes nor are the terms of exchange…Other citizens are then forced to perform labor for which they receive absolutely nothing in return. Exchange is by coercion rather than by free choice." "The fact that many of us wish more medical attention than we can afford does not give us a right to your [physician] services or a right to force others to [finance them]…wishes to the contrary notwithstanding!"  Benjamin Franklin is said to have written, “If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.” He was referring to the problems our wishes would cause ourselves. But we go far beyond causing ourselves problems whenever we try to transform our wishes into rights.  We cause all our fellow citizens problems because our efforts to create rights for ourselves must pick their pockets—assert our ownership of their resources rather than acknowledging their self-ownership—despite lacking moral or ethical justification. Leonard Read rightly recognized this as no different than looting enforced by a “might makes right” mentality.  Only by defending voluntary arrangements, respecting one another’s self-ownership, can we achieve positive progress.  If not for the corrupting lure of something for nothing, people would long ago have rejected the idea that wishes imply rights. But as ever-more goodies have been added to bait the lure, most Americans seem to have decided to stop thinking about the burdens borne as a result of these invented rights.  Our reasoning has been warped by a too-narrow view of our self-interest, which ignores what we can achieve jointly only by defending voluntary arrangements, which respect one another’s self-ownership. That makes it particularly important to revisit Leonard Read’s wisdom about wishes and rights, for otherwise our coveting will corrupt and punish us further and further.


freedombunker--2019-07-02--Hong Kong Protests Show Dangers of a Cashless Society

It can be easy to take cash for granted, especially in a wealthy, developed economy. Those fortunate enough to live in a stable society usually suffer no lack of payment options. They are getting more advanced all the time, with financial technology (fintech) companies constantly developing new ways to quickly and cheaply make purchases and send money. It sometimes seems the days of old-fashioned cash, with its dormant physicality, are numbered.  Allowing cash to die would be a grave mistake. A cashless society is a surveillance society. The recent round of protests in Hong Kong highlights exactly what we have to lose.  The current unrest concerns a proposed change to Hong Kong's extradition laws that would allow island fugitives to be transferred to Taiwan, Macau, and mainland China. The proposal sparked mass outrage, as many Hongkongers saw it as little more but a new way for the People's Republic of China to erode the legal sovereignty of Hong Kong.  This week, anti-extradition protests reached another crescendo, as Hongkongers took to the streets again to commemorate the anniversary of Hong Kong's handoff to China, highlighting the deep political dynamics at play.  Specifically, protestors fear that the Chinese judicial system, with all its attendant human rights baggage, would come to supplant Hong Kong's. This would be no small problem. China isn't shy about cracking down on political dissidents, even those from other states under their control. For example, in 2017, a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist was detained in China and sentenced to five years in prison for "subverting [Chinese] state power" in his home country.  So tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way.  In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform.  But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.  So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry.  But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked."  Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.  What could protestors do in a cashless world? Maybe they would have to grit their teeth and hope for the best. But relying on the benevolence or incompetence of a motivated entity like China is not a great plan. Or perhaps public transit would be off-limits altogether. This could limit the protests to fit people within walking or biking distance, or people who have access to a private car—a rarity in expensive dense cities.  If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice. A chorus of commentators call for an end to cash, whether because it frustrates central bank schemes, fuels black and grey markets, or is simply inefficient. We have plenty of newfangled payment options, they say. Why should modern first world economies hew to such primordial human institutions?  The answer is that there is simply no substitute for the privacy that cash, including digitized versions like cryptocurrencies, provide. Even if all of the alleged downsides that critics bemoan were true, cash would still be worth defending and celebrating for its core privacy-preserving functions. As Jerry Brito of Coin Center points out, cash protects our autonomy and indeed our human dignity.  We don't even need to contemplate hypotheticals of what a digital financial surveillance system would look like. China's ubiquitous social media and messaging service WeChat doubles as a primary payment method for millions of mainland Chinese. It's easy, it's effective, and it's integrated into every facet of Chinese digital life.  But Coin Center's Peter Van Valkenburgh calls apps like WeChat Pay "tools for totalitarianism" for good reason: Each transaction is linked to your identity for possible viewing by Communist Party zealots. No wonder less than 8 percent of Hongkongers bother with hyper-palatable WeChat Pay.  Of course, Western offerings like Apple Pay and Venmo also maintain user databases that can be mined. Users may feel protected by the legal limits that countries like the United States place on what consumer data the government can extract from private business. But as research by Van Valkenburgh points out, US anti-money laundering laws afford less Fourth Amendment protection than you might expect. Besides, we still need to trust government and businesses to do the right thing. As the Edward Snowden revelations proved, this trust can be misplaced.  Hong Kong is about as first world as you can get. Yet even in such a developed economy, power's jealous hold is but an ill-worded reform away. We should not allow today's relative freedom to obscure the threat that a cashless world poses to our sovereignty. Not only can "it happen here," for some of your fellow citizens, it might already have.


freedombunker--2019-07-20--Libertarianisms Place In Society

Libertarianism’s Place In Society

The thesis here is that libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time. Everywhere we look, we see the influence and effect of the state as an apparatus that guides and oversees the machinations of modern civilization. We speak not merely of the obvious libertarian issues like taxes and regulation but we see in the modern western state a cultural force. We so often push the idea that politics is downstream from culture, that we have lost the culture and therefore the state has followed the path of destruction.  But as was hinted on the AL editor’s blog, it is far more likely that Paul Gottfried has it right: the state has morphed into something much more sinister and it now leads the culture toward its own ends. The modern administrative state is the creator of culture and culture is now downstream from the state. Gottfried is especially succinct as to his meaning in his short excerpt:  We have entered into a full politicization of society; there is nothing that the state-cultural complex does not touch. It guides the way we interact with others, the way we process and interpret events, and the way we think about social norms and basic social units and institutions.  Now then, to bring this back to the thesis: “libertarianism as a political theory only carries the veneer of importance and centrality due to the strength and power of the democratic, administrative, state in our time.” Since the state is everywhere we look, and libertarianism has a set of particular ethical critiques against the state, it seems to follow that libertarianism plays such an important place in our lives.  Stated differently, according to the libertarian doctrine, the initiation of aggression against the body or exterior property of others is a breach of ethically-laden rights; and the state is the most systematic, constant, and egregious violator of the principle. And as the state surrounds our every move, so we see libertarianism as a response to so much of our world.  This creates the illusion that libertarianism plays a fundamental role in society. That political theory itself is of primary importance for a people who wish for a better world, a world that is both more ethical and more free. And from this, we work to create a libertarian political strategy and a libertarian movement as well. And thus, the disease of modern administrative statism, which takes over our minds as the lens through which we find meaning, produces the impulse that one ought to dedicate himself to libertarianism as a path toward social preservation.  But it should be made clear that the only reason libertarianism as such seems to play such a fundamental role in the self-identity and life-meaning of so many in libertarian circles is due to the politicalization of society. We live in the administrative state’s world and thus we even put our path toward social improvement strictly in terms of the political. It is not just that the state formally speaking is everywhere we look, it is that there is hardly any longer a culture that is distinct from the state. When Buck Johnson recently asked Paul Gottfried whether the Left or the State was the chief enemy in our time, Gottfried quickly responded: “what’s the difference?”  In times past libertarians correctly and properly held firm that “we” are not the state! Society and the state were separate and the state is an artificial entity as compared to society, which is natural. While importantly and profoundly still true, this does not take into account the extent to which the state has replaced natural and spontaneous society with its artificial one. It is true that the natural society is not born out of the state; the state is not the thing that naturally binds together peoples. But as the administrative, democratic state has come of age, it has created its own artificial society which is of course a society of Egalitarian Terror.  Under a free society that is not created by or bound up in the existence of the state, libertarianism plays much more the role of a legal theory, not a political theory. It’s important to remember that libertarianism chiefly speaks wisdom to scenarios of tension and strife between people who want to use scarce resources for their own ends. Libertarianism offers a standard by which we can determine who gets to use which good and in what way.  The role of libertarianism is to help us resolve disputes and arbitrate in situations of conflict. In other words, libertarianism is chiefly a legal theory that of course has political ramifications once society faces the creation of the state as an institutionalization of aggression (or as Murray Rothbard described it, “a band of robbers writ large.”).  Thus, our good friend Jonathan Goodwin, blogging as Bionic Mosquito, offers:  What this means to me is that men are not connected to other men on the basis of libertarianism. Marxist political movements, for instance, purport that classes are held together by their economic status: workers of the world unite. You are neither German nor Russian nor English. You are a worker, or you are a member of the bourgeois.  It is not the same with libertarianism, or at least a meaningful and realistic libertarianism over against the more universal libertarianism. Let me be clear here: libertarianism is only the thing that binds us is we presume the state’s politicized world! The Marxist worldview is at its root political so it makes sense that Marxism as an ideology binds them.  But libertarianism plays a different role in a free (non-politicized) society; it comes to the picture as a set of principles and guidelines by which we can judiciously determine what is criminal and what is legal, what should be responded to with coercion (such as murder or theft), and what should not be responded to with coercion (such as creating goods and services on the market).  In this case, those of us who are beginning to pay particular attention to the rapid and concerning leftist social revolution likely have more in common with each other, outside the bounds of libertarianism as a legal theory. And as the left-libertarians and mainstream libertarians in general either praise these developments as at the culmination of the “libertarian spirit” or at least just watch it all with neutral expressions and ambivalent reaction, they likely have more in common, generally speaking, with the progressive left.  The response to this is so often that “libertarians are to connected not by their cultural preferences but by their anti-statism!” But this is only true under a politicized worldview. Putting aside the issue of politics, which presumably all libertarians would eventually want out of the way anyway, there is nothing else that binds us. And thus, our pretending that we are transcendentally bound by our libertarianism is exactly the sort of artificial connections that the state has aimed for!  Men form society not on the basis of a unifying legal theory, but the legal theory is adopted post-society. Libertarianism is a helpful tool in the development of peaceful civilization; it is neither the spring nor the engine from which society flows. Libertarianism as a unifying spirit is only conceivable because we operate in a world that has experienced the imposition of a political society. But perhaps, to presuppose this statist-world moving forward, and to subsequently work toward a bigger libertarian political movement, is to have already made the very mistake that continues to undermine our efforts toward a free society.  The post Libertarianism’s Place In Society appeared first on LewRockwell.


freedombunker--2019-11-23--The Conspiracy To Control and Dominate Education in the United States Has Caused the Downfall of Soc

What a normal human being often fails to see in light of everyday struggles and strife, of political upheaval, of commitment to false national pride, is the unbelievable majesty of life. In order to discover this singularly unique beauty, love must be present, but love alone cannot sustain the tragedy of life that is the division consuming the human mind, body, and spirit today. Intelligent thought is necessary. The destruction of learning, with the inadequate replacement of commonality, has bred by design a society steeped in an ignorance of life, and an unnatural contempt for others. This intentional eradication of individual intellect brought with it a hostile prejudice toward the sanctity of our souls, and left emptiness in its place.  The emptiness I speak of is evident in all of modern society, and fulfillment of lost desires seems out of reach in this current state of chaos. But why did this happen? Why have people come to hate one another? Why has conflict and anger become commonplace, while the golden rule is virtually ignored?  An evil exists in our midst, and this evil entity created a nationwide system that allowed a process of mass indoctrination to take root. In order for this phenomenon to capture the psyche of an entire people, a diabolical plan was necessary, and implementation of that plan had to be sold to the public in order to gain popular support. In other words, collusion by the controlling elite and the government was necessary for this deception aimed against the American populace to succeed. And succeed it has.  As I wrote in my article: The Ongoing Destruction of the Minds of Children, “The experiment called compulsory schooling, now referred to as “public education,” began in Massachusetts in 1852, and became widespread just after the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910 the majority of children were in public schools. Since that time “education” as administered by the state has been a horrible failure, if learning was the desired end. But learning and knowledge were never the goals of forced schooling; training the young to honor authority, discipline, and nationalism were the true goals sought.”  Compulsory schooling began in the mid-nineteenth century, and was the brainchild of the ruling elite monopolists of the day, those led by John D. Rockefeller. The goal was to limit the intellectual growth of the general population in order to create an obedient society of workers without the motivation to question the ruling class. This was necessary in order for the corporate oligarchs to gain and keep control over the people, and by the early part of the twentieth century, this plan was in high gear.  The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace while plotting this deception had decided after the end of World War I, “they must control education in the United States” in order to accomplish their mission. They realized this was “too big a project to do alone,” so the “Rockefeller Foundation was approached,” and the two began working together to take over the education system. The Rockefeller Foundation was to handle the domestic side, and the Carnegie Endowment was to handle the international side. As time passed, the Ford Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation were also involved.  This conspiracy was revealed by the Reese Committee investigation headed by Norman Dodd in 1953. The Committee’s inspection of the Carnegie minutes was staggering to say the least, and exposed the goal sought by tax-free foundations that “America’s future should be one of collectivism administered with characteristics of American efficiency.” In other words, build a mediocre society that could function only at a level that would allow for an elite monopoly control of war, the economy, politics, and education, all with little interference by the voting public.  It should be noted that according to Mr. Dodd, “These policies, the foundations’ allegiance to these un-American concepts, are all traceable to the transfer of the funds into the hands of trustees. It’s not the men who had a hand in the creation of the wealth that led to the endowment for what we would call public purposes.”  What has happened to this country since the founding is a grim reminder of the fact that evil forces are always with us, and without the capability to think critically or to understand real history, we are left with an ignorant and confused populace. Any society that falls to this level does not have the capability to stop the onslaught of power that will always rise up at every opportunity. The controlling monopolies will most always gain control of the governing system as a way to control the common people. When these elites design the education system, and their puppets in government run it, the commoners have little chance of retaining any freedom or control of their own destiny. That is the state of this country today.  The saddest part of this conversation is that all this information, and much more, is available for any to see and understand, but few have any desire to seek out the truth. It seems obvious to me that if people understood the truth, and were able to comprehend the conspiracy that has been used against them, a revolution of sorts would be possible. The tyrants who now control the system are able to do so because they took measures to stifle the natural intellect of individuals. If that dynamic could be reversed, so could the current state of slavery that has a hold on all of us.  The post The Conspiracy To Control and Dominate Education in the United States Has Caused the Downfall of Society appeared first on LewRockwell.


freedombunker--2019-12-04--The Transformation of Religion and the Control Over Society

“Religion is still useful among the herd – that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.    Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else…”    ~ H.P. Lovecraft  Worship by the human animal began long ago, and has taken many forms. The human species has forever looked for the answers to life, and has looked toward those who claim to speak to God, and has also looked to science. The reverence shown toward those wearing royal robes, vestments of service to God, has never been completely isolated to the claimed devout. Mankind has always been filled with fear and has been gullible, so those he followed and worshipped could be any port in the storm. Fear and gullibility is a dangerous pairing to be sure, and in this progressive and multicultural world of today, the end result of false religious fervor could be one of total societal control.  Religion has always been about control. In the church a thousand years ago, the highest member of clergy might claim that he talked directly to God, and that because he had exclusive knowledge of divine power, all should do as he says. They should turn over their money and individual freedom in order to comply with God’s will. At that time, this was accepted, as the masses of common people put faith in such beliefs as these, and due to fear, complied. That is not the case today, as with time, this bowing down to “holy” masters is mostly seen as foolish. So those seeking to control others needed a new religion, one that would be more widely accepted.  Rulers by definition seek to rule, and in order to accomplish their mission, control over others is necessary. In modern times, control over society has remained in place, but the basis of that control has dramatically changed. There is an old saying that a “Tiger never changes his stripes,” and this is an accurate description concerning the ruling elites, as money, power, and control have always been their only gods. Instead of magic and superstition, instead of faith-based religious rule, instead of the rule of royalty, and instead of rule by the majority, the planned rule sought will be one guided by “science” and technology. Real science is not considered in this equation, as future rule will be based on politicized science, which is completely immune from steadfast scrutiny, from question, from doubt, and from unrelenting challenge. In other words, the politicized science of today is not science at all, but is merely agenda driven fake science.  Legitimate individual scientists understand the concept of extensive and continuous research, of challenge, of new information, and of dissent, but when science is politicized, it is no longer valid. When most all science agrees, it is false. No truth can come from the group, as any group is essentially made up of different individuals, so mass scientific consensus is a certain sign of corruption. That corruption is guaranteed because the bulk of science today is funded from outside sources, and therefore is agenda driven. When scientists are paid to study and research, they are bound to a particular outcome, an outcome that is desired by those funding the research. This is obvious in the entirety of today’s scientific research at the university level, at the corporate level, and at the government level. In fact, all these shameful entities work together to achieve a particular end. The result sought is the control of everything and everybody.  Those who have an agenda to control the United States, as well as the rest of the world, are committed to rule administered by a select few experts that relies on science and technology as the basis for curing the human condition. This is a rule called Technocracy, and is now being quietly implemented at a rapid pace. The public at large so far is going along without much resistance, and this is a dangerous precedent to set.  While this anticipated rule by the elites is multi-faceted in nature, the single most important aspect of the propaganda necessary to fuel this takeover of human behavior is the con-game called “climate change.” This lie of politicized science is the driver of a technocratic agenda that will allow for domination of the world’s populace. In my opinion, this is the most dangerous type of control possible, as it will be all consuming, and based on capturing the entirety of humanity. This is a plan to affect a total behavioral change through technological means in a system without escape, and on a worldwide scale.  The choice now is clear. If the people at large decide to accept technocratic rule, they will be doomed to outright social and societal control. In a society such as this, living in a herd will take on new meaning, as people will voluntarily join the ranks of fenced in farm animals, dependent on their masters for their very lives and existence. Those who resist will be a minority, and a chaotic war of sorts amongst the people will likely follow. This resistance if it fails, will lead to an attempt by the elites to propagandize this failure in an effort to solidify the crowd, so they can hasten the implementation of a top-down technologically dominated system.  “Technocracy finds that the production and distributions of physical wealth on a global scale for the use of all citizens can be accomplished only by an accounting of technology – a holarchial style of governance of efficiency and function; A technate.”  “The term “Technate” refers to an operational area where the resources, means of production and other technical aspects of a civilization come under the management of technical experts. A Technate works through a distributed, holonic power structure, where technical decisions are made at the local level by those with the necessary technical expertise. All social decisions are being made in a direct democratic, consensus-driven process.”  Is this the new authoritative religious paradigm that Americans seek? Will mass ignorance and indifference allow for this systematic takeover of all individual behavior to flourish? Will the new lord of religion be Technocracy, and if so, what will it bring? Only time will tell, but total social and societal control will not be utopia, it will be dystopia.  The post The Transformation of Religion and the Control Over Society appeared first on LewRockwell.


globalresearch--2019-01-22--The Socialization of Society

The Socialization of Society

One hundred years ago this month, on January 15, 1919, the great revolutionary thinker and anti-war activist, Rosa Luxemburg, was murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps paramilitary group, with her body dumped into the Landwehr Canal.  Her comrade in opposition to the Social Democratic Party of Germany support for German involvement in World War 1, and in splitting from the SPD to eventually form the Communist Party of Germany, Karl Liebknecht, was also murdered in the course of the same events.  Luxemburg occupies a special place in the traditions of the global left for her powerful political interventions and ceaseless invocation of revolution to break the hammerlock of capitalism on democracy and development, and for her major economic text, (1913), linking capitalist development to dispossessions, imperialism and militarism. Her searing critique of capitalist democracy was central to a political strategy that combined an insistence on the capacity for revolt and self-organization of the masses with recognition of the role of the socialist party in education, agitation, and parliamentary representation and struggle in the interests of the working classes. One hundred years on, Luxemburg remains a source of political inspiration and integrity for socialists around the world.  We reprint here her call (published in December 1918) for political control of the state and socialization of the economic system in the midst of the German revolts of 1918-1919. “While we are enlisting fighters for the revolution, we are creating Socialist workers for the future, workers who can become the basis of a new social state…. There is still an old world to be overthrown. A new world must be built!”  The revolution that has just begun can have but one outcome: realization of Socialism! The working class, in order to accomplish its purpose, must, first of all, secure entire political control of the state. But to the Socialist political power is only a means to an end. It is the instrument with which labour will achieve the complete, fundamental reconstruction of our entire industrial system.  Today all wealth, the largest and most fruitful tracts of land, the mines, the mills and the factories belong to a small group of Junkers and private capitalists. From them the great masses of the labouring class receive a scanty wage in return for long hours of arduous toil, hardly enough for a decent livelihood. The enrichment of a small class of idlers is the purpose and end of present-day society. To give to modern society and to modern production a new impulse and a new purpose – that is the foremost duty of the revolutionary working class.  To this end, all social wealth, the land and all that it produces, the factories and the mills must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people. It thus becomes the foremost duty of a revolutionary government of the working class to issue a series of decrees making all important instruments of production national property and placing them under social control.  But this is only the first step. The most difficult task, the creation of an industrial state upon an entirely new foundation, has only just begun.  Today, production in every manufacturing unit is conducted by the individual capitalist independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner. Nowhere does labour have the slightest influence upon these questions. It is simply the living machine that has its work to do.  In a Socialist state of society all this will be changed. Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated upon an entirely new basis, from a wholly different point of view.  In the first place, now that production is to be carried on for the sole purpose of securing to all a more humane existence, of providing for all plentiful food, clothing and other cultural means of subsistence, the productivity of labour must be materially increased. Farms must be made to yield richer crops, the most advanced technical processes must be introduced into the factories, of the mines only the most productive, for the present must be intensively exploited. It follows, therefore, that the process of socialization will begin with the most highly developed industries and farm lands. We need not, and will not deprive the small farmer or artisan of the bit of land or the little workshop from which he ekes out a meager existence by the work of his own hands. As time goes by he will realize the superiority of socialized production over private ownership and will come to us of his own accord.  In order that all members of society may enjoy prosperity, all must work. Only he who performs useful service to society, manual or mental, will be entitled to a share of products for the satisfaction of his needs and desires. Idleness must cease and in its stead will come universal compulsory labour for all who are physically capable. Obviously those who are unable to work, children, invalids and the aged, must be supported by society. But not as it is done today, by paltry alms. Bountiful sustenance, socialized education for the children, comfortable care for the aged, public health service for the sick – these must form all important part of our social structure.  For the same reason, i.e., in the interest of general welfare, society will be more economical, more rational in the utilization of its commodities, its means of production and its labour power. Waste such as we find today on every hand, must cease. The production of munitions and other implements of warfare must pass out of existence, for a Socialist state of society needs no tools of murder. Instead the precious materials and the enormous labour power that were devoted to this purpose will be used for useful production. The manufacture of useless and costly foolishness for the edification of wealthy idlers will stop. Personal service will be prohibited, and the labour power thus released will find more useful and more worthy employment.  While we are thus creating a nation of workers where all must be productively employed for the general welfare, labour itself must be completely revolutionized. Today labour in industry, on the farm and in the office is usually a torture and a burden to the proletariat. men and women work because they must in order to obtain the necessities of life. In a Socialist state of society, where all work together for their own well-being, the health of the individual worker, and his joy in his work must be conscientiously fostered and sustained. Short hours of labour not in excess of the normal human capacity must he established: recreation and rest periods must be introduced into the workday, so all may do their share, willingly and joyously.  Proclamation of the Bremen revolutionary republic, outside the town hall, on 15 November 1918.  But the success of such reforms depend upon the human beings who will carry them out. Today the capitalist with his whip stands behind the workingman, in person or in the form of a manager or overseer. Hunger drives the worker to the factory, to the Junker or the farm-owner, into the business office. Everywhere the employer sees to it that no time is wasted, no material squandered, that good, efficient work is done.  In a Socialist state of society the capitalist with his whip disappears. Here all workingmen are free and on an equal footing, working for benefit and enjoyment, tolerating no waste of social wealth, rendering honest and punctual service. To be sure, every Socialist plant needs its technical superintendents who understand its workings, who are able to supervise production so that everything runs smoothly, to assure an output commensurate with the labour power expended by organizing the process of manufacture according to most efficient methods. To insure successful production the individual workingman must follow his instructions entirely and willingly, must maintain discipline and order, cause no friction or confusion.  In a word: the workingman in a Socialist industrial state must show that he can work decently and diligently, without capitalists and slavedrivers behind his back: that of his own volition he can maintain discipline and do his best. This demands mental discipline, moral stamina, it demands a feeling of self-respect and responsibility, a spiritual rebirth of the workingman.  Socialism cannot be realized with lazy, careless, egotistic, thoughtless and shiftless men and women. A Socialist state of society needs people everyone of whom is full of enthusiasm and fervor for the general welfare, full of a spirit of self-sacrifice and sympathy for his fellow men, full of courage and tenacity and the willingness to dare even against the greatest odds.  But we need not wait centuries or decades until such a race of human beings shall grow up. The struggle, the Revolution will teach the proletarian masses idealism, has given them mental ripeness, courage and perseverance, clearness of purpose and a self-sacrificing spirit, if it is to lead to victory. While we are enlisting fighters for the revolution, we are creating Socialist workers for the future, workers who can become the basis of a new social state.  The young people of the proletariat are obtained to carry out this great work as the true foundation of the Socialist state. They must show, even now, that they are equal to the great task of bearing the future of the human race upon their shoulders. There is still an old world to be overthrown. A new world must be built!  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.


globalresearch--2019-05-01--Predator Cops Guilty of Sex Crimes Against Women and Children Are a Menace to Society

Predator Cops, Guilty of Sex Crimes Against Women and Children, Are a Menace to Society

“Sexual predation by police officers happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit.”—Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper  How could this be happening right under our noses?  That’s what readers wanted to know after my column went viral about the extent to which young children are being bought and sold for sex in America.  Where are the police when these children—some as young as 9 years old—are being raped repeatedly?  For that matter, what is the Trump Administration doing about the fact that adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in suburbs, cities and towns across this nation?  I’ll tell you what the government is doing: little to nothing.  While America’s children are being menaced by sexual predators, the Trump Administration and its congressional cohorts continue to wage endless wars, run up the national debt, and distract the populace with vitriol and kabuki political theater.  The police are not much better.  In too many instances, the cops are worse.  Indeed, while there are certainly many good cops in this country—and I’ve had the honor of working with a number of them—the bad cops have become symptomatic of a criminal justice system that is deeply rotten through and through.  We can no longer count on police to save us from the worst in our society.  In many cases, rather than being part of the solution, America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—have largely become part of the problem. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”  In a number of cases, victims of sex trafficking report that police are among those “buying” young girls and women for sex.  In other words, as a recent study by the State Commission on the Status of Women and Arizona State University makes clear, “victims are being exploited by the very people who are supposed to protect them: police officers.”  In New York, seven NYPD cops—three sergeants, two detectives and two officers—were accused of running brothels that sold 15-minute sexual encounters, raking in more than $2 million over the course of 13 months. Two of the cops, brothers, were charged with holding a bachelor party at one of the brothels where “they got the place for nothing and they used the prostitutes.”  In California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.  A week-long sting in Florida ended with 277 arrests of individuals accused of sex trafficking, including doctors, pharmacists and police officers.  Sex trafficking victims in Hawaii described “cops asking for sexual favors to more coercive situations like I’ll let you go if you do X, Y, or Z for me.”  One study found that “over 14 percent of sex workers said that they had been threatened with arrest unless they had sex with a police officer.” In many states, it’s actually legal for police to have sex with prostitutes during the course of sting operations.  While the problem of cops engaged in sex trafficking is part of the American police state’s seedy underbelly that doesn’t get addressed enough, equally alarming is the number of cops who commit sex crimes against those they encounter as part of their job duties, a largely underreported number given the “blue wall of silence” that shields police misconduct.  Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper describes cases in which cops fondled prisoners, made false traffic stops of attractive women, traded sexual favors for freedom, had sex with teenagers and raped children.  Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.  Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen.  According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens. One young woman was assaulted during a “ride along” with an officer, who said in a taped confession: “The badge gets you the p—y and the p—y gets your badge, you know?”  For example, a Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.  In 2017, two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.  The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”  One young girl, J.E., was kidnapped by a Border Patrol agent when she was 14 years old, taken to his apartment and raped.  Two teenage girls accused a Customs and Border Protection officer of forcing them to strip, fondling them, then trying to get them to stop crying by offering chocolates, potato chips and a blanket. The government settled the case for $125,000.  Mind you, this is the same government that has been separating immigrant children from their parents and locking them up in detention centers, where they are easy prey for sexual predators. So far, the government has received more than 4500 complaints about sexual abuse at those child detention facilities.  This is also the same government that “lost” almost 1500 migrant children. Who knows how many of those children ended up in the hands of traffickers?  The police state’s sexual assaults of children are sickening enough, but when you add sex crimes against grown women into the mix, the picture becomes even more sordid.  According to The Washington Post, “research on ‘police sexual misconduct’—a term used to describe actions from sexual harassment and extortion to forcible rape by officers—overwhelmingly concludes that it is a systemic problem.”  Investigative journalist Andrea Ritchie has tracked national patterns of sexual violence by police officers during traffic stops, in addition to heightened risk from minor offenses, drug arrests and police interactions with teenagers.  Victims of domestic abuse, women of color, transgender women, women who use drugs or alcohol, and women involved in the sex trade are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by police.  One Oklahoma City police officer allegedly sexually assaulted at least seven women while on duty over the course of four months, including a 57-year-old grandmother who says she was forced to give the cop oral sex after he pulled her over.  A Philadelphia state trooper, eventually convicted of assaulting six women and teenagers, once visited the hospital bedside of a pregnant woman who had attempted suicide, and groped her breasts and masturbated.  According to research from Bowling Green State University, police officers in the U.S. were charged with more than 400 rapes over a 9-year period. During that same time period, 600 police officers were arrested for forcible fondling; 219 were charged with forcible sodomy; 186 were arrested for statutory rape; 58 for sexual assault with an object; and 98 with indecent exposure.  Sexual assault is believed to be the second-most reported form of misconduct against police officers after the use of excessive force, making up more than 9% of all complaints.  Even so, these crimes are believed to be largely underreported so much so that sex crimes may in fact be the number one form of misconduct among police officers.  So why are the numbers underreported?  One Philadelphia cop threatened to arrest a teenager for carjacking unless she had sex with him.  This is the danger of a police state that invests its henchmen with so much power that they don’t even need to use handcuffs or a gun to get what they want.  Making matters worse, most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them.  Unfortunately, this is a problem that is hiding in plain sight, covered up by government agencies that are failing in their constitutional duties to serve and protect “we the people.”  That thin blue line of knee-jerk adulation and absolute loyalty to police above and beyond what the law requires—a line frequently pushed by President Trump—is creating a menace to society that cannot be ignored.  An investigative report into police misconduct illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem when police go rogue. According to USA Today:  Hyped up on the power of the badge and their weaponry, protected from charges of wrongdoing by police unions and government agencies, and empowered by rapidly advancing tools—technological and otherwise—that make it all too easy to identify, track and take advantage of vulnerable members of society, predators on the nation’s police forces are growing in number.  So where does this leave us?  The courts, by allowing the government’s desire for unregulated, unaccountable, expansive power to trump justice and the rule of law, have turned away from this menace. Politicians, eager for the support of the powerful police unions, have turned away from this menace. Religious leaders who should know better but instead have silenced their moral conscience in order to cozy up to political power have turned away from this menace.  Distracted by political theater, divided by politics, disenfranchised by a legislative and judicial system that renders us powerless in the face of the police state’s many abuses, “we the people” have also turned a blind eye to this menace.  We must stop turning away from this menace in our midst.  For starters, police should not be expected—or allowed—to police themselves.  Misconduct by local police has become a national problem. Therefore, the response to this national problem must start at the local level.  This is no longer a matter of a few bad apples.  The entire system has become corrupted and must be reformed.  Greater oversight is needed, yes, but also greater accountability and more significant consequences for assaults.  Andrea Ritchie’s piece in The Washington Post provides some practical suggestions for reform ranging from small steps to structural changes (greater surveillance of police movements, heightened scrutiny of police interactions and traffic stops, and more civilian oversight boards), but as she acknowledges, these efforts still don’t strike at the root of the problem: a criminal justice system that protects abusers and encourages abuse.  It’s difficult to say whether modern-day policing with its deep-seated corruption, immunity from accountability, and authoritarian approach to law enforcement attracts this kind of deviant behavior or cultivates it, but empowering police to view themselves as the best, or even the only, solution to the public’s problems, while failing to hold them accountable for misconduct, will only deepen the policing crisis that grows deadlier and more menacing by the day.  Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  This article was originally published on the author’s website: The Rutherford Institute.  Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of  . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at . Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].