The Danger Of Patriotism

Authored by Bob Livingston via Personal Liberty blog,

My friends, it is frightening how simple we are and how easily we are manipulated simply because we are intellectually lazy.

The U.S. establishment has confused cause and effect by and through a flag-waving mania in America. "Patriotism" throughout history has covered a multitude of mischief. We are seeing it now!

Phony patriotism is strong leverage against a population ignorant of the ways of treason by its own government. I also have no doubt that U.S. history is full of wars "for democracy" killing millions under the propaganda of patriotism with the majority support of the people and the full support of all but a small cadre of "elected representatives" — who are paid by the federal government, incidentally. In addition the millions of foreign dead, these wars have left hundreds of thousands of American military members dead or maimed physically and/or emotionally.

The whole world knows about the U.S. military industrial complex war machine and its pursuit of profits. But Americans tend to turn a blind eye.

When George Washington said "government is force," he meant that government is force against its own people.

Since by definition government is force, then it follows that government will use any ruse imaginable to increase its power. Increased use of government force or power could backfire unless skillfully handled and justified in the public mind. Therefore governments rarely take action unless accompanied by skillful propaganda.

The brouhaha over certain NFL players" refusal to stand for the playing of the Star Spangled Banner has erupted anew. The reaction of most Americans — who claim to believe in the Constitution and Bill of Rights — is that this expression cannot be tolerated... it is un-American... it is "unpatriotic."

But is it? Or is it not the most American of all things to resist and rebel against what we perceive as tyranny and its symbols?

If we deny one — whether through intimidation and threats, monetary sanctions or government force — his rights, are we not creating a situation where rights are just privileges that can be denied on a whim? If we support police power to invade our homes and wallets and steal our property just because government has made it "legal," are we not again conceding that rights are merely privileges?

You cannot say, "I believe in the 1st Amendment, but...; I believe in the 2nd Amendment, but...; I believe in the 4th Amendment, but..." There is no but.

And if that government making "legal" the assaults on our liberty is represented by a symbol, shouldn"t we conclude that that symbol is a symbol of tyranny? I wrote about the phony patriotism of flag worship when the Colin Kaepernick stir occurred last year.

In light of the new kerfuffle over NFL players refusing to stand, and comments to some of our columns on preserving liberty of late, I felt it was time to run it again. Here it is:

The American golden calf

As a young boy, I enjoyed my family"s bantam chickens that laid very small eggs and hatched very small chicks. Theirs was a small and miniature world.

One day one of my bantams started sitting on eggs to hatch its chicks. Something happened to her eggs but she continued to sit, so I decided to put a duck egg under her. Duck eggs are at least three times bigger than bantam eggs and take a few days longer to hatch, but she dutifully sat on the egg several days longer. She hatched the duckling and, as you can imagine, it thought that his world was normal and that the bantam hen was his mother.

The duckling eventually grew into a full sized mallard duck, probably five or six times the size of its bantam mother. The full-grown duck would follow its hen mother around as would normal chicks. It was a funny sight to watch.

But I remember thinking, even as a small boy, that the duck"s entire reality was that the bantam hen was his mother and that was the way the world worked. He had no need to consider anything else.

This is the world of the American people today. Their perceptions of reality control them and they who control their perceptions control the American people.

Our perception of America has always been that she is the mother country and ordained by God, good and just and a beacon of freedom. This is hammered into our psyches from our early days.

From pre-school up, we are taught to worship the state. I don"t know if it is still done, but in the public (non)education system, for many years, schoolchildren across the South — and elsewhere, I suppose — recited the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. Political rallies and government meetings are still often begun with a recitation of the pledge.

People say it with patriotic fervor, with their hands placed dutifully on their hearts.

Sporting events, political rallies and other public venues are often kicked off with the playing and/or singing of the Star Spangled Banner. Before the song begins, people are instructed to rise, men to remove their hats,and people place their hands over their hearts. They don"t realize its value as a propaganda tool.

We have come to equate the flag, the pledge and the national anthem with patriotism, and patriotism with government, country and support for government, support for foreign wars and veterans. Anything less is "un-American."

Beyond its patriot fervor is the almost religious fervor and religious symbolism of the American people"s actions when the pledge and the national anthem begin: the ritual standing, removal of hats, placing of hands and rote recitation. In the book of Daniel, Israelites Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) refused to worship the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar contrary to the king"s decree. The king ordered them to be thrown into the furnace after it was turned up to seven times its normal temperature.

NFL player Colin Kaepernick created a stir last week when he refused to stand for the national anthem. He was not subsequently ordered into the furnace by the king, but he was burned symbolically by many football fans who torched their jerseys. Americans fumed that he should "leave" America if he can"t support the flag and that he had disrespected the flag, the nation and veterans.

What are we saying when we say that someone "disrespected the flag,"  "disrespected the country," "disrespected the veterans" if he chooses to not stand for the national anthem? What is the flag but a piece of cloth? By the reaction to Kaepernick, it seems it has become more of a golden calf to represent mother country or the god of government.

Our mother has become a witch. Yes, same symbols, same flag, same pledge of allegiance, but a decadent spirit controlling the perceptions of the American people, keeping them on the animal farm (controlling their perceptions) long enough to impoverish and enslave them.

Time and gradualism can change a system all the way from human liberty to slavery (the animal farm) over a few generations without anyone being aware except a very few, those who ask questions.

"America, love it or leave it," is a tired canard. One cannot leave it except at great cost. Recall that in 1860-1861 11 states attempted to "leave it" in order to preserve their liberty and rights as sovereign states. They were branded as "insurrectionists" and attacked by the War Party and the result was their economic and social destruction, subjugation and the deaths of some 850,000 people (the equivalent of about 8.5 million people today). When one talks of secession today he"s branded as a racist, crazy or a radical and told secession is "illegal."

One can love his country but hate his government and its actions. I love America but not the people who control America and its government. I love America, but its rulers are alien to individual freedom, its government now anathema to liberty.

If the flag is symbolic of government and that government lies at every turn, enslaves its people, steals from their labor, passes laws that are an execration to their Christian faith, takes from them their liberty, mandates the murder of 1 million babies a year, imports tens of thousands of immigrants to replace American workers and drive down wages, and that makes war on other countries that have not threatened us, why should any acknowledge its presence with more than a sneer?

Wars are not for patriotism and "democracy," as we are propagandized. And our freedom has not been threatened by outside forces in 200 years. Wars are to kill; i.e., mass ritual murder. Additionally, big business and globalist banksters in league with Satan reap massive profits for the killing and sacrifice of young men (lambs) on all sides of combat.

If the flag is symbolic of the Constitution, that Constitution died long ago — destroyed by a crony railroad lawyer and mercantilist who made war on a sovereign people to benefit monied interests.

If the flag is symbolic of freedom, that freedom no longer exists — stolen long ago by crony corporations and globalist banksters and unaccountable oligarchical black-robed satanists and idol worshippers who usurped their authority created laws out of thin air under the guise of "interpreting the Constitution" a dictate not granted them under the original document.

The phony form of patriotism instilled within the population is strong leverage against independent thinking, keeping people ignorant of the treason by our own government.

America today is a more advanced state of fascism than World War II Germany and Italy. Fascism never identifies itself as totalitarianism. It always calls itself democracy.

Democracy is the politically correct word and cover term for modern American fascism.

American fascism has all the attributes and trappings of benevolent totalitarianism. No, benevolent totalitarianism is not an oxymoron.

The word benevolent in this instance means that the general perception of the population of the American system is that it is benevolent. This is only to say that modern America is full-blown fascism with a pretty face. It is every bit as deadly to human liberty as any tyranny in history and I would add far more sinister because of its propaganda sophistication.

Any regime that can spin tons of fiat paper money with printing presses or electronically is a slave system regardless of what it calls itself or regardless of the general population"s perception of it.

Our mother has been transformed into a witch no matter how much we love her.

Germany: The Rise Of Islam

Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

• Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany and feels free to say that a "liberal mosque" in Germany is "incompatible" with Islam.


• Can you imagine Germany offering Iraq, Syria and Egypt to build "200 new churches" to reconstruct the derelict and dispossessed Christian communities there? No, because in the Middle East, Christians have been eradicated in a forced de-Christianization.


• Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt.


• We risk losing not only our churches, but more importantly, our cultural strength and even confidence in the values of our own civilization.

Jan Fleischhauer, a journalist of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, coined an expression to define the free fall of German Christianity: Selbstsäkularisierung ("self-secularization"). Is the Church being liquidated?

The German Bishops" Conference just released the data on the decline of Catholicism in Germany for 2016. In one year, the German Catholic Church lost 162,093 faithful and closed 537 parishes. From 1996 to today, one quarter of the Catholic communities have been closed. "The faith has evaporated," said Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1982 to 2007.

Christians in Germany will become a minority in the next 20 years, according to Die Welt. Around 60% of the country is currently Christian, with 24 million Catholics and 23 million Protestants. But that number is falling by 500,000 a year through deaths alone. "Those statistics are embodied by what visitors observe in German cities on Sunday: largely empty churches", the Catholic theologian George Weigel wrote.

German Protestantism is facing the same crisis. Die Zeit revealed that in 2016, 340,000 Protestants passed away, and there were just 180,000 baptisms. Some 190,000 people left the church and just 25,000 people chose to join it.

In his most famous lecture, Pope Benedict XVI famously said that the West, including those who do not accept transcendence, should act "etsi Deus daretur", as if God does exist. The old-fashioned Christian society will never come back, but it is critical for even a secular West to stay based on -- and profoundly inspired by -- its Judeo-Christian values.

The next stage seems to be a German cultural and religious landscape dominated by atheists and two minority religions: Islam and Christianity. If the secularists do not take Western Christian heritage -- or at least the Judeo-Christian values from which it sprang -- more seriously and start defending it, both atheists and Christians will soon be dominated by the rising political and supremacist religion, Islam. A prominent Muslim fundamentalist organization in Germany, banned by the federal government, calls itself "The True Religion" ("Die Wahre Religion"). They apparently think they are overtaking Judeo-Christian values.

There are dramatic instances of Christian decay in Germany. In the diocese of Trier, for example, site of the oldest Catholic community and the birthplace of Karl Marx, the number of parishes will drop from 903 to 35 by 2020, according to bishop Stephan Ackermann -- a decrease of more than 90%. In the diocese of Essen, more than 200 parishes have been closed; their number has fallen from 259 to 43.

A demographic decline is also involved in this religious crisis. "Christianity is literally dying in Europe," said Conrad Hackett, head of the researchers who drafted a Pew Forum report a few months ago. In Europe, between 2010 and 2015, Christian deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million. In Germany alone, there were about 1.4 million more Christian deaths.

This decline also apparent from the recruitment crisis for the priesthood. The official website of the German Catholic Church, noted in May that the dioceses of Osnabrück and Mainz did not receive any new priests this year. The archdiocese of Munich last year drew only one candidate. Throughout the Archdiocese of Munich today, there are only 37 seminarians in the various training stages, for about 1.7 million Catholics. In comparison, the American diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, currently has 49 seminarians for about 96,000 Catholics. In the U.S., Christianity is strong; in Germany it is literally dying.

A German architect, Joaquim Reinig, told Die Tageszeitung that to integrate Muslim immigrants better, churches should be demolished and replaced with "highly visible mosques". It might sound a bit crazy, but it contains a dramatic truth. In his book The Last Days of Europe, the historian Walter Laqueur wrote that "Germany had some 700 little mosques and prayer rooms in the 1980s, but there are more than 2,500 at the present time". If, in Germany, Christianity is evaporating, Islam is proliferating.

The Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) just opened a new mega-mosque for worship in the German city of Cologne. The new German mega-mosque has a 1,200-person capacity and the tallest minaret of Europe. According to Deutsche Welle, "Christian leaders bristled at the idea of Cologne"s famed Dom cathedral sharing the skyline with minarets". When the mosque was planned in 2007, a citizens" initiative was launched to say that "we want the cathedral here, not minarets". The Muslim authorities then announced the plan to "double" the number of mosques.

The new mega-mosque in Cologne, Germany has a 1,200-person capacity and the tallest minaret of Europe. (Image source: Raimond Spekking/Wikimedia Commons)

The Turkish authorities not only wanted to build a mega-mosque in the city hosting the largest cathedral of Germany, but these also had the sense of irony to commission architect Paul Böhm to design the mosque. Böhm"s father and grandfather were in fact the two most radical and admired church architects of their generations. In the "new Germany", nobody had asked Böhm to design a new cathedral.

Since he took power in Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has built 17,000 Islamic prayer sites there. The Turkish president is committed to the construction of mosques in European capitals as well. Turkey controls 900 mosques in Germany and feels free to say that a "liberal mosque" in Germany is "incompatible" with Islam, according to the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. That is why the 57 percent of Germans fear the rise of Islam in their country.

When Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country to mass migration in 2014, she apparently did not see any cultural problem in accepting more than another million Muslims.

In the words of Erdogan, however, "Our minarets are our bayonets, our domes are our helmets, our mosques are our barracks". Islamic regimes are, in fact, offering to fill the empty spaces in Germany"s religious landscape. Saudi Arabia proposed building 200 new mosques in Germany, "one for every 100 refugees".

Can you imagine Germany offering Iraq, Syria and Egypt to build "200 new churches" to reconstruct the derelict and dispossessed Christian communities there? No, because in the Middle East, Christians have been eradicated in a forced de-Christianization. In Europe, Christians are also becoming extinct by a process of "self-secularization". We risk losing not only our churches, but more importantly, our cultural strength and even confidence in the values of our own civilization.

Baltimore's Homeless Erect Modern Day 'Hooverville' Tent City On Front Lawn Of City Hall

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

Baltimore’s homeless have erected a modern day ‘Hooverville’, or better yet a ‘Trumpville’ on the front lawn of Baltimore’s City Hall. 

The tent city demands are the following:

• Economics: 21st Century Jobs Guarantee Program


• Criminal & Social Justice: Support for Power Consulting to become DOJ consent decree monitor


• Housing: City Wide Housing First Program Changes in Homeless Shelter Policy

Organizers of the tent city explained to me that the ACLU is carefully monitoring the situation, and says less than 30 tents are perfectly legal. As long as there is order in the tent city, this temporary town of the homeless can stay erected…

Hooverville 1932 verse Trumpville 2017. Same shit different decade……

This is all comes at a time where 50-years of democratic controlled leadership in Baltimore, along with decades of deindustrialization have completely destroyed the city’s economy and the middle class. The city is now left with violent crime some of the highest in the United States and a public health crisis of opioids destroying the citizens from with-in. Nearly 1/3 of black households have a net worth of zero and an unemployment rate 3x higher than whites. The wealth inequality gap in Baltimore serves as a warning of where this country is headed.

Earlier this year, Trump said there are 96 million people out of the labor force. This summer the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the unemployment data at an ultra low level of 4.3%. Again something doesn’t smell right.. ShadowStats.com on the other hand offers a different unemployment rate of 22.1%.

We should now understand US productivity peaked in 1972. Ever since then, the trend has been in a terminal decline with short lived booms in the 1990’s. For instance in Baltimore, democratic leadership coupled with decades of deindustrialization have gutted the city of it’s wealth instilling chaos and death on city streets. Baltimore is not an anomaly, but is a trend that is seen in Detroit, St. Louis, ect…. Restoring America’s inner cities is the key to slowing the momentum of declining productivity in our nation.. If not, the glide path will continue signaling the decline of an empire.

What I’m about to share with you is an inside view of the Baltimore’s homeless erecting a modern day ‘Hooverville’ tent city on the front lawn of city hall. The mainstream media is not allowed to show you this because it destroys the narrative the everything is awesome in Baltimore. In the second half of the video, I interview ‘Kenneth’, the organizer of the tent city. He offers his view on Baltimore’s economy…. Spoiler alert it’s not good.

****************

Bonus: PT 2: What an interview...

"That's The Wrong Way To Go" - Robert Shiller Slams America's "Excessive Lust For Wealth"

Authored by Robert Shiller, originally posted op-ed at The New York Times,

The Transformation of the ‘American Dream’

“The American Dream is back.” President Trump made that claim in a speech in January.

They are ringing words, but what do they mean? Language is important, but it can be slippery. Consider that the phrase, the American Dream, has changed radically through the years.

Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, have suggested it involves owning a beautiful home and a roaring business, but it wasn’t always so.

Instead, in the 1930s, it meant freedom, mutual respect and equality of opportunity.

It had more to do with morality than material success.

This drift in meaning is significant, because the American Dream - and international variants like the Australian Dream, Le Rêve Français and others - represents core values. In the United States, these values affect major government decisions on housing, regulation and mortgage guarantees, and millions of private choices regarding whether to start a business, buy an ostentatious home or rent an apartment.

Conflating the American dream with expensive housing has had dangerous consequences: It may have even contributed to the last housing bubble, the one that led to the financial crisis of 2008-9.

These days, Mr. Trump is using the hallowed phrase in pointed ways. In his January speech, he framed the slogan as though it were an entrepreneurial aspiration.

“We are going to create an environment for small business like we haven’t seen in many many decades,” he said, adding, “So, essentially, we are getting rid of regulations to a massive extent, could be as much as 75 percent.”

Mr. Carson has explicitly said that homeownership is a central part of the Dream. In a speech at the National Housing Conference on June 9, he said, “I worry that millennials may become a lost generation for homeownership, excluded from the American Dream.”

But that wasn’t what the American Dream entailed when the writer James Truslow Adams popularized it in 1931, in his book “The Epic of America.”

Mr. Adams emphasized ideals rather than material goods, a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” And he clarified,

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are.”

His achievement was an innovation in language that largely replaced the older terms “American character” and “American principles” with a forward-looking phrase that implied modesty about current success in giving respect and equal opportunity to all people. The American dream was a trajectory to a promising future, a model for the United States and for the whole world.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the term appeared occasionally in advertisements for intellectual products: plays, books and church sermons, book reviews and high-minded articles. During these years, it rarely, if ever, referred to business success or homeownership.

By 1950, shortly after World War II and the triumph against fascism, it was still about freedom and equality. In a book published in 1954, Peter Marshall, former chaplain of the United States Senate, defined the American Dream with spiritually resounding words: “Religious liberty to worship God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience and equal opportunity for all men,” he said, “are the twin pillars of the American Dream.”

The term began to be used extensively in the 1960s. It may have owed its growing power to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, in which he spoke of a vision that was “deeply rooted in the American Dream.” He said he dreamed of the disappearance of prejudice and a rise in community spirit, and certainly made no mention of deregulation or mortgage subsidies.

But as the term became more commonplace, its connection with notions of equality and community weakened.

In the 1970s and ’80s, home builders used it extensively in advertisements, perhaps to make conspicuous consumption seem patriotic.

Thanks in part to the deluge of advertisements, many people came to associate the American Dream with homeownership, with some unfortunate results. Increasing home sales became public policy.

In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act, subsidizing home purchases during a period in which a housing bubble — the one that would lead to the 2008-9 financial crisis — was already growing at a 10 percent annual rate, according to the S.&P. Corelogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price index (which I helped to create).

This year, Forbes Magazine started what it calls the “American Dream Index.” It is based on seven statistical measures of material prosperity: bankruptcies, building permits, entrepreneurship, goods-producing employment, labor participation rate, layoffs and unemployment claims. This kind of characterization is commonplace today, and very different from the original spirit of the American dream.

One thing is clear: Bringing back the fevered housing dream of a decade ago would not be in the public interest. In “House Lust: America’s Obsession With Our Homes,” published in 2008, Daniel McGinn marveled at the craving for housing in that era: “In many neighborhoods, if you’d judged the nation’s interests by its backyard-barbecue conversation — settings where subjects like war, death, and politics are risky conversational gambits — a lot of people find homes to be more compelling than any geopolitical struggle.”

This is not to say that homes have no appropriate place in our dreams or our consciousness. To the contrary, in a 2015 book “Home: How Habitat Made Us Human,” the neuroanthropologist John S. Allen wrote, “We humans are a species of homebodies.” Ever since humans began making stone tools and pottery, they have needed a place to store them, he says, and the potential for intense feelings about our homes has evolved.

But the last decade has shown that with a little encouragement, many can easily become excessively lustful about homeownership and wealth, to the detriment of our economy and society.

That’s the wrong way to go. Instead, we need to bring back the American Dream of a just society, where everyone has an opportunity to reach “the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.”

200 Years Of Immigration - Who Came To America, And When?

The United States has a long-standing history of being a “nation of immigrants”, and today the country is home to roughly 46.6 million residents that were born outside of the country. Courtesy of Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins, here are three maps and data visualizations that give us some history of who came to America, and when it all happened.

200 YEARS OF IMMIGRATION

To begin, this video from Metrocosm shows immigration to the U.S. starting from 1820. Each dot represents 10,000 people.

At first, immigration is coming almost exclusively from Europe.

But by around 1900, immigration from Russia, China, Canada, Turkey and Japan picks up – but then WWII devastates global mobility, and immigration to the U.S. grinds to a halt.

After WWII, it is the Cold War era, but the rate of arrivals slowly picks up again. Immigration eventually peaks between 1990-2000 after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Asian and Mexican immigration is also particularly strong around this time.

ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Here’s another look – this time, it’s a data visualization from Insightful Interaction using data from the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics from 1820 to 2015.

Similar peaks in immigration near 1900 and 2000 can be seen. The dip from WWII is even more pronounced when visualizing the data this way.

The boom in newcomers from Mexico is also evident in the 1990s, though it has tapered off significantly in recent years.

MADE IN AMERICA

Over time, more people start feeling like their roots are tied to America, rather than having ancestry from somewhere else.

This final visualization from Overflow Data that shows the percentage of people in each state that claim to have American ancestry:

People in the country’s heartland and southern states are more likely to identify as having American ancestry, while folks along the coasts and northern states tend to see themselves as having ancestry from other parts of the world.

The highest rates of self-identification happen in Kentucky (17.6%), Tennessee (16.0%), and Alabama (16.4%). The lowest can be found in Hawaii (1.5%), D.C. (2.0%), and California (3.1%).

Parents Fearing Deportation Make Guardianship Plans "In Case Mommy Doesn't Come Home"

As the world eagerly awaits new details on Trump"s future immigration policies, organizations around the country like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) are being flooded with requests from illegal immigrants for legal assistance in drafting temporary guardianship papers just in case ICE officials raid their places of work.  According to CHIRLA officials, they"ve seen a 100x spike in requests for legal assistance compared to last year. Per Reuters:

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) advocacy group has been receiving about 10 requests a day from parents who want to put in place temporary guardianships for their children, said spokesman Jorge-Mario Cabrera. Last year, the group said it received about two requests a month for guardianship letters and notarization services.

At the request of a nonprofit organization, the National Lawyers Guild in Washington D.C. put out a call this week for volunteer attorneys to help immigrants fill out forms granting friends or relatives the right to make legal and financial decisions in their absence.

In New Jersey, immigration attorney Helen Ramirez said she is getting about six phone calls a day from parents. Last year, she said, she had no such calls.

"Their biggest fear is that their kids will end up in foster care," Ramirez said.

Meanwhile, the alleged "panic" comes as ICE and other immigration officials say that families, consistent with policies under the Obama administration, will be granted access to lawyers and consular officials to help parents execute powers of attorney for their children to the extent it become necessary. 

For parents of U.S. citizens who are ordered removed, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency "accommodates, to the extent practicable, the parents" efforts to make provisions" for their children, said ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez. She said that might include access to a lawyer, consular officials and relatives for detained parents to execute powers of attorney or apply for passports and buy airline tickets if the parents decide whether or not to take the children with them.

During the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, the likelihood of both parents being deported was slim, Capps said.

He doubts there will be a huge shift under Republican Trump toward deporting both parents.

"The odds are still very low but not as low as they were – and this is just the beginning of the administration," he said.

About five million children under the age of 18 are living with at least one parent who is in the country illegally, according to a 2016 study by MPI. Most of the children, 79 percent, were U.S. citizens, the study found.

Of course, in today"s era of "fake news" it"s often difficult to decipher fact from fiction.  Just a couple of weeks ago the media was simply beside themselves after news surfaced that Trump had allegedly, and quite suddenly, launched a "crackdown" on illegal immigrants that resulted in 680 detentions in a matter of a week. 

That said, any one of the media outlets covering the story could have easily looked at "removal" statistics published by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and within seconds realized that Obama removed, on average, 4,620 illegal immigrants per week during his last year in office, or roughly 580% more than the 680 detentions that caused much of the progressive left to suffer a nervous breakdown in mid-February. 

So was the media just too lazy to check the facts or just too willing to ignore the facts in an effort to push the latest "fake news" narrative?  Bit of both, maybe?  As always, we leave it to readers to decide.

Justice And "Social Justice" Are Two Very Different Things

Recently, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen wrote in the Washington Post of “The most important phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance” — “with liberty and justice for all.”

Allen recognized that justice required “equality before the law” and that freedom exists “only when it is for everyone.” But she confused democracy — defined as progressives “build[ing] a distributed majority across the country, as is needed for electoral college victory” — with liberty, which is very different. Similarly, she replaced the traditional meaning of justice (“giving each his own,” according to Cicero) with a version of “social justice” inconsistent with it. And her two primary examples of rights — “rights” to education and health care — were inconsistent with both liberty for all and justice for all.

Americans cannot have both liberty and this type of social justice — under whose aegis one can assert rights to be provided education and health care, not to mention food, housing, etc. Positive rights to receive such things, absent an obligation to earn them, must violate others’ liberty, because a government must take citizens’ resources without their consent to fund them. Providing such government benefits for some forcibly violates others’ rights to themselves and their property.

The only justice that can be “for all” involves defending negative rights — prohibitions laid out against others, especially the government, to prevent unwanted intrusions — not rights to be given things. Further, only such justice can be reconciled with liberty “for all.” That is why negative rights are what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, were intended to protect. But those foundational freedoms continue to be eroded by the ongoing search to invent ever-more positive rights.

Echoing John Locke, The Declaration of Independence asserts that all have unalienable rights, including liberty, and that government’s central purpose is to defend those negative rights. Each citizen can enjoy them without infringing on anyone else’s rights, because they impose on others only the obligation not to invade or interfere. But when the government creates new positive rights — which require extracting resources from others — these new “rights” violate others’ true unalienable rights. In other words, people recognize these positive rights as theft except when the government does it.

Almost all of Americans’ rights laid out in the Constitution are protections against government abuse. The preamble makes that clear, as does the enumeration of the limited powers granted to the federal government. That is reinforced by explicit descriptions of some powers not given, particularly in the Bill of Rights, whose negative rights Justice Hugo Black called the “Thou Shalt Nots.” Even the Bill of Rights’ central positive right — to a jury trial — is largely to defend innocent citizens’ negative rights against being railroaded by government. And the 9th and 10th Amendments leave no doubt that all rights not expressly delegated to the federal government (including health care and education) are retained by the states or the people.

Liberty means I rule myself, protected by my negative rights, and voluntary agreements are the means of resolving conflict. In contrast, assigning positive rights to others means someone else rules over the choices and resources taken from me. But since no one has the right to rob me, they cannot delegate such a right to the government to force me to provide resources it wishes to give to others, even if by majority vote. For our government to remain within its delegated authority, reflecting the consent of the governed expressed in “the highest law of the land,” it can only enforce negative rights.

Our country was founded on unalienable rights, not rights granted by Washington. That means government has no legitimate power to take them away. However, as people have discovered ever-more things they want others to pay for, and manipulated the language of rights to create popular support, our government has increasingly turned to violating the rights it was instituted to defend. And there is no way to square such coercive “social justice” with “liberty and justice for all.”

Reality Check: "Immigration Can Never Be An Effective Way To Deal With The Suffering People Of The World"

Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,

The most oft cited reason by opponents of President Trump’s immigration policies for why America should open its borders to the millions of impoverished and persecuted individuals around the world often center around humanitarian reasons. As a rich country with plenty of land mass, we should be able to take in anyone and everyone who may be in need, right?

While that notion, like Marx-Engels’ ideas for taking from those who have the ability and giving to those who need, may seem great on paper, successfully implementing such policies in the real world is starkly different.

According to Census Bureau statistics, some 1.3 million foreign-born individuals legally immigrated to the United States in 2014. That figure doesn’t include the nearly one million immigrants that enter the country illegally each year. Those who support open border immigration have said that we need to take in even more people.

But according to journalist Roy Beck, taking in one million people per year makes almost no difference in the grand scheme of things because for every million we bring into the United States, another 80 million people yearly are born into countries with extreme levels of poverty, violence or war. According to Beck, even opening our borders to five million more people per year would do nothing to stem the the real problems.

In what is one of the most viewed immigration policy videos on the internet from Numbers USA, Beck ingeniously utilizes gumballs to demonstrate why open borders simply will not work. As well, he provides a seemingly novel solution that has for decades fallen on deaf ears:

We never get ahead of what’s happening in these countries… Don’t you see? Immigration can never be an effective or significant way to deal with the suffering people of the world… they have to be helped where they live…

99.9% of them will never be able to immigrate to a rich country… there is no hope for that… they have to bloom where they’re planted… the only place that 99.9% of these people can be helped is where they live… let’s help them there.

In short: taking in millions of immigrants doesn’t even make a dent.

So for those utilizing immigration as justification for violent protests and kinetic civil war, or for those who follow such narratives blindly based strictly on emotions that are devoid of any rational thought, we encourage you to consider the reality of bringing in millions of immigrants from impoverished countries.

And don’t just consider the non-effect of such policies as they relate to the global humanitarian situation, but consider the implications this has on America’s resources, as well as our citizens, who will be burdened with heavy taxation to cover the costs.

Even if we went by the most radical proposals in Washington, which are to actually double our immigration to two million year… which would totally overwhelm our physical, natural and social infrastructures, we couldn’t even make a visible difference.

How Musicians Die

The passing of George Michael this week reminded many of the seemingly short life expectancy of musicians (and performers in general). In fact, as on study found, while blues, jazz, and country singers typically live as long as the average American; rock, techno, punk, metal, rap, and hip hop stars die significantly sooner.

“I hope I die before I get old,” The Who’s Roger Daltrey sang in “My Generation” in 1965. This didn’t happen for Daltrey, who is now a ripe 71, but it did to many other musicians.

Dianna Theadora Kenny, a professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney, has conducted a statistical study of premature death among musicians.

As The Washington Post notes,  she found that musicians from older genres – including blues, jazz, country and gospel – have similar lifespans to American people their own age. The life expectancy for R&B musicians is slightly lower, while the life expectancy for newer genres like rock, techno, punk, metal, rap and hip hop is significantly shorter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kenny finds that accidents – including car crashes and drug overdoses – are a huge cause of premature death for musicians, accounting for almost 20 percent of all deaths across genres. But accidents are much more likely to kill rock, metal and punk musicians. Punk and metal musicians also appear susceptible to suicide, while gospel musicians had the lowest suicide rate of all genres.

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The bottom line is, stay away from rappers and hip hop stars and make sure your favorite blues singer eats well and exercises.