The Terrifying Case of Natalie Strecker

Comment: Full blown tyranny, Orwellian style is here. It was bad before, but it's a whole new slice of totalitarianism now descending... We resist this now or the there will be no freedom left to do so. The window is closing...

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Craig Murray

I am confident that over 2 million people in the UK have shared thoughts on the Genocide in Gaza that are stronger than anything Natalie Strecker has expressed

I am quite certain that I am one of those 2 million.

Yet Natalie Strecker, an avowed pacifist, today faces up to ten years in prison under the Terrorism Act when the verdict in her case comes in.

Strecker is charged with eliciting support for Hamas and Hezbollah, based on 8 tweets, cherry-picked by police and prosecutors from an astounding 51,000 tweets she sent, mainly from the Jersey Palestine Solidarity Committee account.

The tweets were rather rattled off in court and referred to occasionally again in whole and in part. There may be minor inaccuracies not affecting sense, but this is the best reconstruction of those tweets that I can make (they were not displayed to the public):

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Five Years In Prison For Offending Someone Online...

Simon Black
Sovereign Man

Let the weekly absurdity begin!

New SAT scoring will combat Asian privilege

 

The infamous SAT has been used since 1926 as a sort of university entrance exam to objectively test high school students’ scholastic aptitude. Until now.

Test administrators announced plans this week to include an ‘adversity score’ for every student taking the SAT.

This score will excuse poor test results if the student lives in a high crime neighborhood, went to a poor high school, is living in a single parent or low income household, and so on.

And this should really put a dent in Asian privilege. Yes you read that right. With an average SAT score of 1223, Asians achieve the highest marks among all the ethnic groups tracked by SAT administrators.

But these same Asian test takers also typically come from dual-parent, higher-income households. So they’ll be penalized because of their parents’ success.

This is truly amazing thing to be teaching young people.

Universities and the SAT administrators don’t want high school students to identify as strong, self-reliant, independent individuals who seek to solve problems and overcome adversity.

Instead they’re encouraging young people to make their socioeconomic circumstances the strongest part of their identities. And, based on those socioeconomic circumstances, cultivate a guilt or victim mentality, and expect penalties or handouts for the rest of their lives.

Click here for the full story.

Harvard lynch-mob runs professor off campus

 

Harvard Professor Ronald Sullivan has spent his career as a lawyer defending some of the poorest people in the country.

He was previously the public defender in Washington DC and personally overturned dozens of wrongful convictions.

Professor Sullivan also represented Michael Brown’s family after the teen was shot to death by police. Huffington Post even called him the “man who dealt the biggest blow to mass incarceration.”

But now he and his wife– the first black student housing deans in Harvard history– have been run off campus by an angry mob of #metoo zealots.

His crime: joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team.

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William Lind looks beneath the global warming narrative

Watts Up With That?

Summary: William Lind takes a sharp and accurate look at the politics of climate change. In modern America, always look beneath the glossy surface of narratives in the news.

A March 15 article by Larry Kummer at the Fabius Maximus website discusses how global warming advocates have misused a worst-case scenario to generate panic. Titled “About the corruption of climate science”, Kummer’s article details how politicians are misrepresenting climate projections, especially one called RCP 8.5. That their goal is to create fear should not surprise us: from the government’s perspective, fear is a growth industry.

Russell Kirk called conservatism “Politics Of Prudence" and prudence suggests we should pay some attention to climate change, or, to be more precise, increasing volatility in weather. That is something we can observe happening. Conservatives’ belief in stewardship means we owe it to future generations to hand them a planet in at least as good condition as we received from our forefathers. Reducing our own consumption, including of fossil fuels, is desirable.

But the Left seeks far more. In fact, its goal is nothing less than total control of every aspect of human life, which we call “totalitarianism”, justified by fear of climate change. Since everything a person does, including breathing, affects the climate, if climate change is a huge threat, someone needs to control everything. That “someone” should obviously be whoever is most concerned about the climate, i.e., the extreme environmentalists and the larger coalition of which they are part, the culturally Marxist Left.

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Jordan Peterson warns against liberalism's 'totalitarian tilt': 'The left has gone too far'

"I think that any attempt to pursue equality of outcome is doomed to a totalitarian tilt, because it's technically impossible to equalize outcomes across all possible identity groups". 

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RT

Controversial academic Jordan Peterson told RT's Afshin Rattansi that the left's obsession with equality of outcome is doomed to failure, advocating instead for individuals to assume greater personal responsibility.

"It seems to be very difficult for people on the left to draw a line between what's acceptable and what's unacceptable," Peterson told the host of RT's Going Underground when asked to comment on the rise in popularity of socialism-friendly politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

While acknowledging that the moderate left has ushered in labor laws and other reforms which have benefited society, the Canadian professor argued that the emphasis on "diversity, inclusivity and equity is a sign that the left has gone far too far."

Calls for equality of outcome, as opposed to equality of opportunity, particularly worry Peterson, who has become a pariah among liberals after he spoke out against gender-neutral pronoun legislation being proposed in Canada - an intellectual rebellion which launched 
 him into the limelight. 

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The Rise Of Totalitarian Technology

 Is there such a thing as too much technology?

Nei Howe
Forbes.com

Is technological progress bad for human autonomy? That’s the question posed by Shoshana Zuboff in “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” a book that recounts the ways in which corporations and governments are using technology to influence our behavior. Zuboff is just the latest to chime in on “totalitarian technology” (or “total tech”), a term that describes devices and algorithms by which individuals forfeit their privacy and autonomy for the benefit of either themselves or some third party.

In the United States, total tech can be sorted into three different categories, or “spheres” of life: consumer services, the workplace, and government and politics.

Total tech is pervasive in the increasingly data-driven world of retail. Many shopping apps tap into your phone’s GPS to access your location, allowing retailers to send you advertisements the moment you’re walking past their storefront. Personalized pricing enables retailers to charge you the exact maximum that you would be willing to pay for a given product. Your personal data isn’t safe at home, either: Digital assistants like Amazon Alexa store your query history, meaning they know everything from your unique shopping history to your travel patterns to your music preferences.

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The banal evil of Isis Davis-Marks: 'I'm watching you white boy'

Melissa Mackenzie
The American Spectator

"Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another." - Hannah Arendt

Mama's don't let your babies grow up to be Yalies. They're the worst. And, as it turns out, evil. Isis Davis-Marks, a staff columnist for the Yale Daily News wrote a piece titled, "Evil is banal." Indeed. Ms. Davis-Marks then proceeded to unintentionally illustrate that fact.

Her first sentence is a tip-off, "Everyone knows a white boy with shiny brown hair and a saccharine smile that conceals his great ambitions." The word "saccharine" is used multiple times throughout her piece. There is no such thing a sweet smile from a white boy.

She fleshes out her argument:

When I'm watching the white boy - who is now a white man by this point - on CNN, I'll remember a racist remark that he said, an unintentional utterance that he made when he had one drink too many at a frat party during sophomore year. I'll recall a message that he accidentally left open on a computer when he forgot to log out of iMessage, where he likened a woman's body to a particularly large animal. I'll kick myself for forgetting to screenshot the evidence. And, when I'm watching him smile that smile, I'll think that I could have stopped it.

She wonders at the solution to stop this evil and comes to this conclusion:

To be honest, I'm not sure what the solution is. This expands beyond vocalizing problems about sexual assault: The core of this problem has to do with our values. The problem isn't just the Yale administration; it's Yale students. We allow things to skate by. We forget. We say, "No, he couldn't have done that," or, "But he's so nice." No questions are asked when our friends accept job offers from companies that manufacture weapons or contribute to gentrification in cities. We merely smile at them and wave as we walk across our residential college courtyards and do nothing. Thirty years later, we kick ourselves when it's too late. But I can't do that anymore - I can't let things slip by. I'm watching you, white boy. And this time, I'm taking the screenshot.

It's worthwhile to note her standards here.

1. Judge someone based on his skin color.
2. Judge the whole group based on the individual.
3. Note any "offense" - this seems broad as offenses change.
4. Ruin the reputation of said "evil" white boy in real-time if possible "boldly and publicly".
5. Hold onto evidence of "evil" for the white boy's later success.
6. Ruin the "white boy" at some later date with screenshots.

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Four Kinds of Dystopia

Darren Allen

The twentieth century saw four basic visions of hell on earth, or dystopia. These were:
Orwellian. Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed through violent control of sexual impulse. Constant surveillance and constant censorship. Control of bodies by enclosure, fear, explicit, violent, repression of dissent and forced obedience to ‘the party line’ (orwellian fanaticism: All must submit). Control of minds by explicitly policing, limiting and punishing subversive language (orwellian newspeak: state-controlled reduction of vocabulary to limit range of thought). Truth cannot be known (aka hyper-relativism or postmodernism); and therefore we need an external authority to decide what the truth is (kings and priests) and to protect society from chaos and madness (the orwellian them: commies, anarchists, extremists, radicals, infidels, plebs, proles, freaks, criminals, etc.).

Huxleyan Rule by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, technocratic systems. Super-excess of choice. Limitation of access to speech platforms. Assimilation of minorities (via tokenism), foundational belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and ‘flexibility’. Control by desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent (system selects for system-friendly voices and unconscious self-censorship). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality, promiscuity and dissolution. Control of bodies through pleasure and addiction to pleasure. Control of minds by proliferating information and enclosing language within professional boundaries (Illichian Newspeak, or Uniquack). Truth can be intellectually known (the religion of scientism) and is obvious when understood (huxleyan fanaticism: only the wicked can refuse it) and learnt in the process of setting up an internal authority (aka morality or conscience) called ‘education’. 
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Varlam Shalamov: 45 things I learned in the Gulag

Varlam Shalamov
The Paris Review

For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities.” He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

5. I realized that Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent—an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

6. I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North. 

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Totalitarian Thinker David Suzuki

Donna LaFramboise
No Frakking Consensus

SPOTLIGHT: If you value free thought and open debate, David Suzuki is no role model.

BIG PICTURE: Amnesty International calls them ‘prisoners of conscience:’ people jailed not for violence, but for expressing the wrong opinions. This term was coined by Amnesty founder Peter Benenson back in 1961, who cited the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought…Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion…

Canadian broadcaster David Suzuki, 82, doesn’t believe in freedom of thought. He thinks people should go to jail if they think the wrong way about climate change.

Ten years ago, he urged a Montreal audience to find “a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.” In Suzuki’s universe, climate change is a compelling problem (although not compelling enough for him to reduce his own air travel). Politicians who fail to take certain measures should therefore lose their liberty.

The difficulty, of course, is that there are diverse perspectives regarding the source, magnitude, and significance of recent climate change. The climate on this planet is always changing, and many smart people consider its recent fluctuations to be trivial. Those who hold such views – whether they be scientists or democratically elected leaders – have a right to behave according to their conscience.

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Fake History. How The Money Power Controls Our Future By Controlling Our Past

ICH
Jim Macgregor
Gerry Docherty

The ‘Fake History’ and ‘Fake News’ pejoratives (like ‘Conspiracy Theory’ before them) have only recently entered common parlance, but the falsification of history and news reporting is as old as history itself. For many a long year television news channels and newspapers owned or controlled by the Money Power (including the British Broadcasting Corporation), have been feeding us a daily diet of fake information. But in a black is white Orwellian reversal of truth it is the very people spreading falsehood who hurl the ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ pejoratives at truth tellers. To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.

Orwell famously added: ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Fake history is a weapon wielded by ruling elites to exert control over us, for it is knowledge about the past that has the power to shape us as people and develop our comprehension of reality. True history reveals to those who care to learn that democracy is a sham; that we the people are akin to Orwellian proles in Oceania watched over by Big Brother and accepting of anything he cares to tell us or throw at us. Money Power control of the received history is crucially important (more so than control of fake news) because it enables them to keep us in the dark and ensure our ongoing subservience. After almost seventy years Orwell’s observation may appear somewhat clichéd, but it is now more relevant than ever. The highly perceptive author added: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

George Orwell was correct and if humankind is to stand any chance of determining a future without oligarchic totalitarian control, the lies and mythology of our past must be challenged by honest history, hard but necessary truths and historical revision. ‘Revisionism’, according to Joseph Stromberg in an article he wrote about Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘refers to any efforts to revise a faulty exiting historical record or interpretation.’ [1] Professor Barnes, himself one of the greatest revisionists of the 20th century, wrote that revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because ‘truth is always the first war casualty.’ [2] Hold that important statement close. The emotional abuses and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. Consequently, both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.

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Prof Jordan Peterson speaks at University of Toronto protest

YouTube Channel: genuinewitty

Professor Jordan Peterson set social justice activists on fire when he started publishing his series on the dangers of political correctness. After a protest against him last week, he held his own counter-protest today.

See also: Compelled speech comes to Canada: Citizens using the 'wrong' gender pronoun could be accused of hate crimes

Europe Proposes "Restrictions On Payments In Cash"

Zero Hedge

Having discontinued its production of EUR500 banknotes, it appears Europe is charging towards the utopian dream of a cashless society. Just days after Davos' elites discussed why the world needs to "get rid of currency," the European Commission has introduced a proposal enforcing "restrictions on payments in cash."

With Rogoff, Stiglitz, Summers et al. all calling for the end of cash - because only terrorists and drug-dealers need cash (nothing at all to do with totalitarian control over a nation's wealth) - we are not surprised that this proposal from the European Commission (sanctuary of statism) would appear...

The Commission published on 2 February 2016 a Communication to the Council and the Parliament on an Action Plan to further step up the fight against the financing of terrorism (COM (2016) 50). The Action Plan builds on existing EU rules to adapt to new threats and aims at updating EU policies in line with international standards. In the context of the Commission's action to extent the scope of the Regulation on the controls of cash entering or leaving the Community, reference is made to the appropriateness to explore the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments.

The Action Plan states that "Payments in cash are widely used in the financing of terrorist activities… In this context, the relevance of potential upper limits to cash payments could also be explored. Several Member States have in place prohibitions for cash payments above a specific threshold."

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Oliver Stone: Pokemon Go is a New Stage in “Totalitarism” and “Surveillance Capitalism

Vigilant Citizen 
 
Film director Oliver Stone believes that Pokemon Go is a tool capable of collecting massive amounts of data about its users and represents a step towards “robot society”.

The director of Platoon, Wallstreet and JFK was at Comic-Con 2016 in San Diego to discuss his new movie Snowden. Considering the topic of the movie, the panel were discussing the NSA, online privacy and government surveillance. A question from a fan lead Oliver Stone to lash out against today’s newest worldwide phenomenon: Pokemon Go.

“It’s a new level of invasion,” Stone said of the game. “Nobody has ever seen, in the history of the world, something like Google, ever. It’s the fastest-growing business ever, and they have invested huge amounts of money into what surveillance is, which is data-mining. They’re data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behavior.”
-CBS News, Oliver Stone: Pokemon Go is “totalitarianism”

Oliver Stone claims that Pokemon Go is yet another step towards “surveillance capitalism”.

“Pokemon Go kicks into that. It’s everywhere. It’s what some people call surveillance capitalism. It’s the newest stage,” he said. “You’ll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave and they will make the mockup that matches how you behave and feed you. It’s what they call totalitarianism.”

– Ibid.

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Europe To Send Conspiracy Theorists To ‘Reeducation Camps’

Comment: Orwellian and Huxleyian totalitarianism is well and truly here...Free speech? Democracy? And they have the painful irony to actually mention "totalitarianism" in the same paragraph. These Eurocrats are officially as insane as their American counterparts. 

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Your News Wire 

Citizens in Europe who break new “hate speech” rules on the internet, including those who spread conspiracy theories online, will be forced to attend ‘reeducation camps’.

According to section 7 of the European Framework National Statute For The Promotion Of Tolerance:

Juveniles convicted of committing crimes listed in paragraph (a) will be required to undergo a rehabilitation programme designed to instill in them a culture of tolerance.

The full section reads:

Section 7. Penal Sanctions

(a) The following acts will be regarded as criminal offences punishable as aggravated crimes:
(i)   Hate crimes as defined in Section 1(c).
(ii)  Incitement to violence against a group as defined in Section 1(a).
(iii) Group libel as defined in Section 1(b).
(iv) Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism.
(v)  Public approval or denial of the Holocaust.
(vi) Public approval or denial of any other act of genocide the existence of which has been determined by an international criminal court or tribunal.
(b)  Juveniles convicted of committing crimes listed in paragraph (a) will be required to undergo a rehabilitation programme designed to instill in them a culture of tolerance.
(iv) Overt approval of a totalitarian ideology, xenophobia or anti-Semitism.
(v)  Public approval or denial of the Holocaust.

News of the reeducation camps comes after U.S. internet giants Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft promised to tackle online counter-narratives and hate speech as part of a joint commitment with the EU Commission.

Bloomberg.com reports:

Beyond national laws that criminalize hate speech, there is a need to ensure such activity by Internet users is “expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms, upon receipt of a valid notification, in an appropriate time-frame,” the companies and the European Commission said in a joint statement on Tuesday.

A French Jewish youth group, UEJF, sued Twitter, Facebook and Google in Paris this month over how they monitor hate speech on the web.

In the course of about six weeks in April and May, members of French anti-discrimination groups flagged unambiguous hate speech that they said promoted racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism.

More than 90 percent of the posts pointed out to Twitter and YouTube remained online within 15 days on average following requests for removal, according to the study by UEJF, SOS Racism and SOS Homophobia.

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Comment: More likely that this "Jewish youth groups" were part of Hasbara, Israel's extensive and brainwashed army of propaganda footsoldiers sent out across the internet to counter criticism of Israel's geopolitical position and their continuing human rights abuses of the Palestinian people. 

 

Mass protests across France: Resistance against the global Orwellian nightmare

Corey Schink
Sott.net

"Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
~ George Orwell, 1984

Turmoil everywhere as an Orwellian nightmare unfolds around the globe

In just the last couple of months, we've seen what is effectively a 'legal coup' against the democratically-elected president of Brazil, continued and relentless pressure to remove al-Assad from power in Syria, economic warfare in Venezuela threatening to bring 'Chavismo' to an ignominious end, and the so-called 'Panama Papers' forcing the resignation of Iceland's prime minister, once the world's youngest, and who oversaw the country's unique resolution to banksters' private debt.

If they have their way, the 'Secret Elite' ruling the West will replace these formerly democratic governments with the same power-hungry system in place everywhere else in the West - entrenched oligarchy that consumes everything it can get its hands on, including human resources.

Ordinary folks in Europe have been feeling this relentless drive for total power in the form of 'austerity' imposed from above. Some populations pretty much rolled over, displaying relatively muted protest in the face of egregious pillage and plunder. But the French, like the Greeks, have not been taking it lying down. The French are resisting, en masse, to challenge the pathological boot aimed squarely at their necks.

Over the last several months, mass protests - increasing in scale with each passing week - against government 'reforms' have seen tens and even hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in cities across France. And not just now and then; almost daily. At times, crowds of over 300,000 have been protesting. For current Western civilization, as demoralized and apathetic as it has become, that is a rather large number.

Of course you may not have even heard about this because, like most mass protests taking place across the Western world these days, the French backlash against austerity diktats are barely being covered in Western media. 

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Israel's war of attrition in Gaza: Thinly veiled code for genocide

Rob Urie
Counter Punch

Following World War II U.S. General Curtis LeMay, the reported inspiration for the psychotic General Jack Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy Dr. Strangelove, was said to have remarked that had the Allies lost the war he would likely have been hanged as a war criminal for the bombing of Tokyo. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians perished under American bombs in a series of raids on the Japanese city. Separately, the Japanese leadership was widely reported to have been ready to surrender before atomic bombs were dropped on primarily civilian populations in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With this history it seems difficult to remember that upon entering World War I aerial bombardment of a civilian population was widely understood to be a war crime.
 
As it was applied to the U.S. war on Southeast Asia (Vietnam) the term 'war of attrition' was barely veiled code for a racist slaughter, the 'kill ratio' of 58,000 U.S. soldiers to 3,500,000 Vietnamese and likely millions more in Cambodia and Laos is evidence of a degree of military mismatch perhaps better called genocide. The theory behind the term is that causing an 'appropriate' level of death and destruction against one's enemies produces two outcomes: it turns people against 'their own' governments causing a loss of internal political support for them and it kills so many potential adversaries that there is no 'will' (no one) left to fight. The dim socio-pathology of the U.S. strategy in Vietnam can be found in the utter implausibility of the largely agrarian-peasant population having any geopolitical 'vision' at all, let alone on the side of 'their' enemies for preceding millennia, the Chinese.

When Ronald Reagan launched his war of terror against the people of Nicaragua in the early 1980s the articulated view in his administration was that if U.S. / CIA proxies (Contras) murdered enough people and blew up enough bridges and schools those who had supported the Nicaraguan Revolution just a few years earlier would turn against the revolutionary government (FSLN). Events in Nicaragua came on the heels of the Iranian Revolution that saw the overthrow of the CIA / MI5 installed 'Shah' whose brutal 'rule' served as a front for Western expropriation of Iranian oil. In the name of 'freedom' the Contras carried out a campaign of terror against the people of Nicaragua that included torturing and murdering tens of thousands of civilians, including slaughtering entire villages. The strategy appeared to 'work' when in 1990 the terrorized population of Nicaragua voted out the Revolutionary government in favor of one more advantageous to U.S. 'interests.' However, once the murders and destruction ended the Sandanistas were voted back into power. Apparently state terrorism can create a stopping point but not an end.  

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The Most Destructive Presidencies in U.S. History: George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama

Charles Hugh-Smith 
Of Two Minds
June 16, 2014 


Powers once granted are almost impossible to take back.

After 13.5 years, there is more than enough evidence for reasonable people to conclude that the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are easily the most destructive in U.S. history.

When historians speak of failed presidencies or weak presidencies, they are typically referring to presidencies characterized by uneven leadership, petty corruption by self-serving cronies or in extreme cases such as the Nixon presidency, abuses of executive power.

But weak or failed presidencies are not destructive to the rule of law and the foundations of the nation. The failed president leaves office and the basic structure of the nation continues: the rule of law, the balance of powers and a free-market economy.

A destructive president weakens or corrupts these core structures in favor of executive-branch powers, and passes these unconstitutional powers to the next executive for further expansion.

The Bush and Obama presidencies have effectively dismantled the rule of law and the Constitution by invoking essentially unlimited executive powers in the name of "national security:" we the citizens of the U.S. can now be accused of violating secret laws, be indicted in secret, tried in secret and sentenced to life in prison based on evidence fabricated in secret, i.e. declaring unclassified documents classified after the fact to incriminate and imprison whistleblowers.

How is this any different from totalitarian fascist regimes?

This is absolutely contrary to basic civil liberties defined by the Constitution. Who benefits from this destruction of fundamental civil liberties? (Always start by asking cui bono--to whose benefit?)

The Big Lie is that this destruction of the foundations of the rule of law and civil liberties is for our own good: if the President and the National Security State don't grab all these powers and deprive you of your constitutional rights, bad guys will destroy the nation.

This is of course the same old tired justification used by dictators and despots everywhere, and it is always a lie. The truth that must be hidden is that this wholesale expansion of executive powers at the expense of civil liberties, democracy, the rule of law and the balance of powers benefits the executive branch.

Every abuse of the law is now declared legal by executive order. Anyone questioning the legality of extra-legal abuses of power is told "this is legal because it was authorized by the President." In other words, executive power is now unquestioned and cannot be challenged.

For a variety of unsavory reasons, the Supreme Court has enabled this expansion of essentially unlimited executive power. Congress has also rubber-stamped it as part of The Global War on Terror (GWOT), the unlimited war that justifies unlimited executive powers, unlimited secrecy and unlimited expansion of the National Security State, the Deep State that is impervious to changes in electoral government.

Presidents Bush and Obama have directed this expansion of the National Security State because it greatly enhances the power of the Presidency. This is how we get a president who is delighted to discover that he's good at killing people remotely with drone strikes.

The expansion of secret programs and secret wars has engorged the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., not just with funding but more importantly, with new powers granted by the executive branch and rubber-stamped by an impotent Congress and supine Supreme Court.

The president's power is greatly enhanced by this expansion of the National Security State, and the self-serving "patriots" empowered by the essentially unlimited secrecy are free to do whatever they please under the umbrella of executive privilege.

True patriots attempting to defend basic constitutional rights are labeled terrorists by the phony patriots busy destroying the foundations of the nation. The Orwellian doublespeak is as unlimited as executive power: a citizen who releases unclassified material about the secret abuse of power can be accused of treason on the Kafkaesque basis that unclassified material can be considered classified if it exposes the abuse of executive power.

All of this is well-documented and has been in the public realm for years. There is nothing mysterious about the destruction of basic rights or the abrogation of the balance or power or the rule of law. It's visible and painfully obvious to anyone who cares to read or watch a few interviews of whistleblowers who have been hounded and harassed by the Obama Administration.

For two examples of hundreds of articles and interviews, please read:

Senior NSA Executive: NSA Started Spying On Journalists in 2002... In Order to Make Sure They Didn’t Report On Mass Surveillance (washingtonsblog.com; I recommend the entire series of interviews) "To me, there’s a psychology that’s not often written about: What happens when you have this much reach and power, and constraints of law and even policy simply fade into the woodwork."

PBS Frontline Interview - Thomas Drake.

This destruction of the fundamental building blocks of the nation has been rubber-stamped by gutless Republicans and Democrats alike. Cowed by the threat of appearing "soft on terrorism," left and right alike have scrambled to appear "tough on terrorism" by approving the wholesale transfer of power to the National Security State and the executive branch.

Of the dozens of books published on the abuses of executive power and the uncontrolled expansion of the National Security State, here are two worthy starting points:

The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

This destruction of the fundamental building blocks of the nation has been rubber-stamped by gutless Republicans and Democrats alike. Cowed by the threat of appearing "soft on terrorism," left and right alike have scrambled to appear "tough on terrorism" by approving the wholesale transfer of power to the National Security State and the executive branch.

It is laughable to see so-called liberals and conservatives alike in Congress kow-tow to the National Security State while claiming they have effective oversight, even as the revelations of whistleblowers reveals them as clueless toadies with no real grasp of what is being done in the name of the American people they claim to represent.

Those abusing executive power in the Nixon administration knew they were breaking the law. Those abusing power in the Bush and Obama administrations simply declare their actions legal. In effect, any action taken by the president or the National Security State is legal in name if not in principle.

Powers once granted are almost impossible to take back. What president will give away essentially unlimited executive powers established as "law" by previous presidents? We don't elect saints as presidents, we elect infinitely ambitious people desiring power. We should not be surprised that such people not only consolidate the power they inherit but actively seek more.

We should also not be surprised that all these power grabs by the executive branch and the National Security State are cloaked in secrecy, and that anyone who dares to reveal the power grabs and abuses of power to the public is declared a traitor and crucified.

A traitor to what? It's a question every citizen should ask and answer for themselves.

The Totalitarian Crusade Against Second-Hand Smoke

reason.com

If there really were such a thing as a bullshit detector, a machine that bleeped upon encountering nonsense, it would probably go into meltdown whenever someone talked about second-hand smoke.

In the modern public sphere, there are few issues that are as riddled with myth, misinformation, contradictory claims and outright claptrap as the scare about what smokers' foggy puffing is doing to us innocent non-smokers.

In recent years we've been told that second-hand smoke, or passive smoking, as some people call it, is as bad as smoking itself and can give you lung cancer. And apparently if you are surrounded by it in a car that has its windows closed that is like being in the most smoky, nicotine-stained bar you could ever imagine (if such bars still existed, which of course they don't).

Yet it turns out that these claims about the toxicity and cancer-causing powers of other people's smoke are either untrue or unproven. So how do prissy anti-smoking campaigners and health-freaky politicians continue to get away with churning out tall tales about second-hand smoke? Why won't this panic die under the boot of actual facts? What gives it its Michael Myers-like ability to keep coming back, in a crazier form every time, wagging its warning finger at humankind?

The evidence-light nature of the second-hand smoke scare was on full display during British politicians' recent mean-spirited attempt to outlaw smoking in cars in which children are present.

Last week, the House of Lords, our unelected second chamber, gave its nod of approval to a new Bill that would make it an offense to smoke in a car with kids, even if the windows are open. The Bill is now working its way back to the House of Commons, and if a majority of the members there agree that coppers should have the right to stop and threaten with arrest any motorist who has that apparently deadly combination of a lit ciggie and a child in his vehicle, then the Bill will become law and another bit of Brits' everyday freedom will be stubbed out.

Smoking in a car with minors is already banned in Australia, Canada, South Africa and in some American states, including California, Maine and Oregon. These bans capture superbly the zealous miserabilism of the modern-day nannying'n'nudging set. They expose the new authoritarians' casual disregard for the notion of privacy, so that even our privately owned vehicles come to be seen as fair game for petty laws to curb and control what was once perfectly legal behavior; they reveal the nannying lobby's powerful distrust of everyday men and women, who are now viewed as so bone-headed and bereft of decency that new laws are required to prevent them from polluting their own children, both physically and morally; and they show what shockingly low esteem the ideal of autonomy is held in these days, so that anyone who stands up and says "I think adults should be free to choose what vices to indulge in and pleasures to pursue" is either laughed at for being naive or branded a wicked stooge for Big Tobacco.

So what evidence have British politicians cited for their desire to ban smoking in cars? Well, it's not really clear. Peruse British media coverage of the second-hand smoke issue and I guarantee you will end up bamboozled.

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The New Dark Age

Comment: Actually, there were many of us who were also arguing and "railing" that such "lurking" had been present for quite sometime. You had to connect the dots by going back to the 1960s and 70s reports and the evolution of ECHELON,  not least MAIN CORE and the evidence from Danny Casolaro But hey, let's not quibble.

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Antiwar

For years, this space has been arguing – railing, really – that the ideological and legal currents unleashed by America’s response to the 9/11 attacks have been leading us down the road to dictatorship: see here, here, here, and here. Back in those halcyon days, circa 2007 and much earlier, it was easy to dismiss such charges as the mental effluvia of the somewhat overwrought libertarian imagination: after all, if we’re headed for an authoritarian order of Orwellian proportions, then where are the Thought Police?

What we didn’t know was that they were lurking in the woodwork all along – spying on us, recording our phone calls, scooping up our emails, and tracking our every move. We didn’t know about the National Security Agency’s data dragnet: we hadn’t heard of PRISM, or any of the other programs that allow government snoops to sniff out dissidents and other "subversives" who might be "linked" to "terrorism."

Don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

I take very cold comfort in having been right about this, because, for one, it’s actually much worse than I thought it would be. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, and the government’s reaction, we have an ominous new development in the works, one I never foresaw: the criminalization of journalism.

The Washington Post reported, the other day, on an exchange between FBI Director James Comey and his Republican interlocutor, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, reproducing the relevant and most striking part in full. The occasion was Tuesday’s session of a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee on "Worldwide Threats," with Rogers questioning Comey on the Snowden documents:

"REP. ROGERS: You – there have been discussions about selling of access to this material to both newspaper outlets and other places. Mr. Comey, to the best of your knowledge, is fencing stolen material – is that a crime?

DIRECTOR COMEY: Yes, it is.

ROGERS: And would be selling the access of classified material that is stolen from the United States government – would that be a crime?

COMEY: It would be. It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a news-gathering and news promulgation function, but in general, fencing or selling stolen property is a crime.

ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for – fill in the blank – and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter?

COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper report[er] and you’re hocking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime."
You can see where this is going, but let’s stop for a moment and check Comey’s premises: who has stolen what from whom? This is the real question at the heart of the debate over the Snowden revelations, and as usual the inhabitants of that Bizarro World known as Washington, D.C., have turned reality on its head. It was Snowden who blew the whistle on the real thieves: the NSA and the government officials who presided over the wholesale hijacking of our privacy in brazen violation of the Fourth Amendment. If anyone is "hocking" "stolen property" it is the government, which has contracted out its illegal surveillance programs to private vendors who profit from Washington’s crimes against the American people. 

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What is really happening in France ?

APOCALYPSE FRANCE