Media Says You’re to Blame for Shootings Unless You Report Odd Behavior

Via The Daily Bell

“How do we fit the latest tragedy into our political agenda?” The media wondered. “Gun control is so cliché. And even though the tragedies get bigger and bigger, we still have little luck!”

“I have an idea!” Exclaimed one outlet, “We can convince people that if they don’t report their neighbors and family members to authorities for acting subjectively crazy, then they are to blame for crazy people’s actions!”

“Yes!” Agreed another, “And we can tell them that ‘micro-aggressions’, criticism of the government, and just getting a bad feeling from someone are all worthy of reporting to the authorities!”

And just like that, the media was able to turn their frowns upside down. They exploited the good crisis in the name of the progressive dream. It’s easy to keep citizens under strict watch when fellow citizens do the policing for you! And they all lived happily ever after, sewing fear and mistrust into the fabric of society. The End.

Snitch to Absolve Yourself of Guilt

You may think these events are engineered, or rather that real tragedy will be used to push political agendas. Either way, perhaps the old gun control push is out of style.

A possibly more sinister attempt is underfoot to get Americans to turn on each other. Be suspicious of anyone that makes you feel icky. Rat out your neighbor. Being politically incorrect is just one step shy of a shooting rampage. That is the message.

And if you don’t call the police to report suspicious behavior, you are just as guilty as a mass murderer. That is the story the media is selling.

Instead of ignoring, mocking or laughing off the people in our society who seem disgruntled, angry or somehow “off” we must report them. We need to take a more active role in not just paying attention to the people who give us an uneasy feeling, but in taking the next step by alerting law enforcement when we have uneasy feelings or are worried about a person’s potential for violence.

That’s right, the true problem is that we haven’t been proper social spies.

But if the problem is mental health, this will only exacerbate it. When people feel restricted, they literally go crazy. If someone seems angry and disgruntled now, imagine how they will feel after you report them as a suspected terrorist.

How many people on the edge might be pushed to violence when they find out that their neighbors alerted the authorities to their “potential”, whatever that means, for violence?

Coercion is linked to mental illness. When people feel trapped, a small minority will act out violently.

Imagine if you feel that your neighbors are constantly judging your quarks, and calling you crazy. This could easily move more people on the continuum towards violence. This would just be yet another injustice they feel they have suffered at the hands of an oppressive society.

What kind of person does the mainstream media consider a potential candidate to be the next mass shooter?

Let’s take snippets of information about the last mass shooter. Let’s generalize those behaviors to assume anyone guilty of such acts is a potential killer.

“He was the king of microaggression,” his brother, Eric, said…

The other thing that set Paddock apart was his “irreverence toward authority,” Mr Alarcon said.

If you hate political correctness or are anti-authority, you might be a terrorist.

Other suspicious behaviors: not being sociable with neighbors, and not being talkative at bars. The media wants to make sure people are all together, keeping an eye on each other. Don’t let someone be a loner, don’t let anyone keep to themselves. You must probe and prod. The desire for privacy is suspicious. What are they hiding?

There are always clues. Threats posted online, angry or violent sentiments conveyed in conversations, guns purchased, and ammunition stockpiled are among them.

Do you know anyone who has posted rants on Facebook, seems angry sometimes, or is just a little too into guns? Probably a terrorist. Report them.

For More Snitching to be Effective, Criminalize More Behaviours

So you snitch on someone for acting suspiciously. The police interview him, he hates society a little bit more, and then the police let him go. They can’t charge him with anything because he hasn’t done anything illegal.

The media thinks the solution is to simply criminalize behaviors which they think could lead to later crimes.

Should we criminalize stockpiling ammo? Should acting crazy be a crime? Should we start locking people up on suspicion, or for being disgruntled at the government?

The whole mental health thing is a terrifying possibility. What if they start locking people up based on some arbitrary definition of what constitutes crazy? Of course, we know exactly what will constitute crazy. Saying anything critical of the government.

We also must take a hard look at our laws and consider much more stringent penalties for making terrorist threats. Given the crisis we face, perhaps we should abandon the mentality that mass murderers and terrorists are innocent until proven guilty. Threats alone should be as intolerable as actions. Promising to commit these abhorrent acts should be grounds enough to bring them to swift and harsh justice before they act.

The laws against making terrorist threats are a joke. There are people in prison for posting violent rap lyrics on social media.

It is already illegal to make threats. But what is the media suggesting? Locking people up and throwing away the key?

That’s what we need, to do away with innocent until proven guilty. Everyone is guilty according to the media.

Why not just skip the extra steps, and arrest anyone who doesn’t fit the media/ government definition of normal? Citizens will be properly assimilated, or citizens will be reeducated.

Violent July Leaves Chicago Murders On Pace To Exceed 2016, The Bloodiest Year In Two Decades

One month ago, President Trump vowed to "send in the Feds" after Chicago"s murder rate continued to track roughly in-line with 2016, the most violent year for the city in nearly two decades.

Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help. 1714 shootings in Chicago this year!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

Alas, with the month of July now over, the "Feds" don"t seem to be helping.

With 77 people killed in July alone, murders are up 4% year-over-year despite the federal assistance.  Moreover, those killed as the result of gun violence is up 9%.

Meanwhile, the month of July also recorded one of the city"s most violent Fourth of July holidays in history, with more than 100 people shot over the four-day weekend. That"s compared to 66 people shot over the holiday in 2016.

According to Chicago police, there have been 417 murders in the city so far this year on a total of 2,202 shootings.

Data Source: HeyJackAss!

As NBC points out, the soaring violence in 2017 comes despite the fact that 5,000 guns have been taken off the streets and gun arrests are up 30% YoY.

Chicago police reported last month that they have removed more than 5,000 guns this year off Chicago streets. The department has also rolled out several initiatives this year, including a high-tech ballistics van that was sent as part of the partnership with the ATF. That same partnership also sent 20 permanent ATF agents to the city, along with federal prosecutors, with the purpose of "prioritizing prosecutions to reduce gun violence, and working with our law enforcement partners to stop the lawlessness.”

"One of the things that I think people miss about this whole violence reduction is the fact that CPD - we’ve recovered over 5,000 guns this year, we’re up 30 percent in overall gun arrests - but the communities being affected, I don’t think they recognize the power that they have in the communities, their voices, to reduce this gun violence," Johnson said.

Not surprisingly, the majority of the violence remains concentrated in a few South and West side neighborhoods.

And, with 7 months of 2017 officially in the record books, here is how Chicago"s 2017 murders are stacking up against recent years.

Of course, it"s not just Chicago where violent crime is surging as the Midwestern neighbors of Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cleveland have also experienced a 68%, 18% and 33% increase in murders, respectively, compared to 2014.

"As Ye Sow..."

Submitted by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Our deranged world is a product of deranged minds.

Philosophy begins with invariably difficult questions. Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Is there a god or gods? What is right and what is wrong? How should groups of people be organized and function together? Ironically, when such questions are infrequently asked, when philosophy is generally ignored or disparaged, as it is now, is when it’s needed the most.

Political philosophy is the branch that addresses the question of how coercive power is to be distributed in a society. It’s a knotty issue, but one question provides clarification, enabling further analysis and leading to useful conclusions. Who owns a political unit’s resources? This question differentiates between governments that protect individual rights and property and those that don’t. It also highlights a key problem: on planet earth, every government falls into the latter category.

The United States’ founding documents pay tribute to individual rights and private properly. Some of the founders may have thought they were establishing a government subordinated to protection of individual rights, which would have been an historical first. However, none thought such a government would be easy to maintain, and their fears were borne out. The US government places prominently on the inglorious list of governments claiming ownership over everything within their dominion, defined as any place where they can exercise their coercive power.

To those who say the institution of inviolate private property still exists in the US, what asset can the US government not seize? The income tax gives it first claim on income. No real estate is exempt from eminent domain. Intellectual property claims are at the sufferance of the patent, trademark, and copyright authorities. Financial assets held within the banking system can be “bailed in,” and plans are afoot to ban cash. The already extensive range of assets subjected to civil asset forfeiture continues to expand. More ominously, assets can be seized from parties never adjudicated guilty. Conscription grants to the government the lives of the conscripted. The US government is no exception to the general rule, nothing is inviolate expect perhaps a person’s thoughts, and undoubtedly it’s working on that.

Individuals who assert the right to initiate aggression against whomever they choose are philosophically unhinged, candidates for an asylum or a penitentiary. Rejecting the first principle that must guide human interaction—that no one may rightfully initiate force against another person—such individuals have no rational foundation for their thoughts or actions. The “garbage in” of their philosophical premises produces “garbage out” emotional states, mental processes, and ultimately, lives. Having abandoned reason for coercion and violence, reality becomes a chaotic, incomprehensible void.

Governments’ coercive power allow them to take: might makes right. A philosophy that recognized a right of some individuals to steal from others fails on first principles; there is no logical distinction possible between the privileged and the subjugated. Does the aggregation of individuals into a unit which calling itself a government give them a right which none of them have individually? One could say that the aggregate was for the protection of its constituents’ persons, property, and rights, but a government so limited is acting as their constituents’ subordinate agent, exercising and enhancing their right of self-defense. Efforts have been made, notably the American experiment, but no government has ever been restricted in this manner.

No matter its guiding “ism,” every government has granted itself the power to initiate violence against its citizens. Just because the ruling agglomerate asserts this privilege doesn’t render it philosophically valid. What it does is legitimate the initiation of violence for any and all causes—domestic and foreign—the government deems proper.

Having violated the first principle of nonaggression, nothing can stop that philosophical default from trickling down to the subject population. The ragged thief who holds up a liquor store lacks the polish and articulation of the politician who asserts the government’s first claim on a nation’s production, the central banker who depreciates its currency, or the general bent on global dominance who wages offensive wars, but philosophically they’re soul mates. In fact, the thief has a moral one up on the others: he doesn’t claim to be protecting the values he destroys.

Millions have decried the violence that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley, just as millions on the other side decried mostly illusory violence among Trump supporters during the campaign. However, not one in a thousand of those denouncing the violence as violations of fundamental civil liberties denounce the daily violations of fundamental liberties visited upon them by their own government. America’s corruption is so complete that those who insist that they are not fodder for the government, that their lives are their own, and that the only proper government is one subordinated to the protection of their individual rights—and maintain positions consistent with those principles—could hold a convention and not fill a high-school gym.

This small group is the victim of a terrifying pincer movement from above and below. When a society abandons itself to violence, “legal” and otherwise, it abandons itself to mindless irrationality driven by hate and antipathy towards every positive value. Violence is not a means to any end other than destruction and death; violence itself is the end. Humanity has been fed the same tripe for centuries: noble ends justify evil means. Violation of the first principle—the stricture against initiated aggression—bars consideration of the purported ends. A “discussion” with a gun is no discussion. Violence exercised in self-defense protects positive values, but when violence is initiated, destruction, death, and the depraved pleasure of loathsome minds are its only ends.

An individual who claims by word or deed the right to initiate violence - and the consequent rights to subjugate, injure, and kill - is a rabid, deranged, and dangerous animal. A government that asserts that right is a pack. In self-defense, the virtuous, if they are to protect their liberty, rights, and lives, must quarantine or kill the rabid. A necessary corollary of the stricture against initiated aggression is that we have the right to use all means necessary to defend ourselves from it—with pity, perhaps, but no remorse.

The chaos, the terror, of our deteriorating world is a true and faithful reflection of souls abandoned to hate. The free mind and its methods—intrepid curiosity, truth, and logic—stand as their ultimate enemy. If those who would oppose this destruction and death abandon their souls, they become the mindless evil they opposed. Those who defend their rights, values, and lives without surrendering their morality will rebuild from the rubble the kind of world in which they deserve to live. They will do so unobstructed—hate inevitably leads to its own destruction.

Abolish The CIA

Submitted by Michael Rozeff via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Every American who looks at the CIA objectively or in a balanced way and judges it by any number of criteria, such as moral, legal and pragmatic, should reach the conclusion that the CIA should be abolished. JFK wanted to break it into a million pieces. Trump is right to dismiss its intelligence reports about DNC hacking. The CIA war on Trump shows us immediately that the CIA is a rogue organization within the U.S. government and a severe threat to America.

The CIA is an internal threat to the rule of law and to the government that it supposedly serves. Senator Schumer acknowledges the CIA’s unbridled power, its subversive power, its power to undermine even a president, especially one that wishes to control or alter the organization, when he says:

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. For a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Schumer is saying that the CIA is so powerful that a president should not attempt to control it or else! The CIA is so powerful that elections do not matter when it comes to the CIA. The CIA stands alone. The Constitution that empowers the president as the Executive, the boss of government operations, does not matter. Basic American institutions and laws must bow before the threats that the CIA possesses. This is the assessment of a Senator beginning his 4th term and who is the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate in his post as minority leader.

The CIA is an organization that perpetually undermines traditional American values and moral values. It consistently kills innocent people. It continually causes instability and wars. It undermines other societies and our own. It interferes constantly in foreign nations, to the detriment of them and us. It is an unelected power that challenges elected officials. It favors abuses of power, including torture. Its actual value at generating usable intelligence is minimal, often wrong, often misleading, inaccurate and harmful as in the WMD that were never found in Iraq.

“The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

This quote and a detailed timeline of CIA atrocities is available.

William Blum has listed CIA interventions for us.

All that needs to be done to understand the enormity of CIA crimes against humanity is to associate each of these interventions with the deaths, injuries, disruption of lives and destruction that they have caused. The most recent of these are

• Afghanistan 1980s *


• Somalia 1993


• Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *


• Ecuador 2000 *


• Afghanistan 2001 *


• Venezuela 2002 *


• Iraq 2003 *


• Haiti 2004 *


• Somalia 2007 to present


• Honduras 2009


• Libya 2011 *


• Syria 2012


• Ukraine 2014 *

The asterisks indicate a case where the CIA overthrew a government.

 As long as Trump is at war with the CIA, a war that the CIA launched against him, not that this matters much because Trump has every right to change the CIA and the CIA has no right to disobey or blacken his name, he should attack the CIA much more completely and thoroughly. It deserves to be attacked. He should abolish it altogether. For a bone to those who have fears that the republic will fall without the CIA, whatever small amount of residual value that is present in its intelligence operations can easily be retained or transferred to other agencies. The latter are already in profuse abundance in Washington. The fact is, however, that the republic is more likely to fall further than it already has in the presence of the CIA than in its absence.