Ex-Obama Staffer Admits Facebook Allowed Them To ‘Break Rules’ Because Of Political Bias

Add another log to the bonfire of Facebook controversy! A former staffer of Barack Obama’s admitted that the social media giant, Facebook, allowed the Obama campaign to break the user data rules because Facebook was “on their side.”

Yesterday, Facebook’s stock tanked after it was revealed that the social media giant gave user data to a firm, Global Science Research (GSR), via an app. This data was then given to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that was working for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But it gets even worse. Facebook has been known to censor right-leaning voices and often has been a mouthpiece for the corporate media and leftist policies.

According to Townhall, some have noted a similar mining tool used by the Obama team, but they gathered information through their website (with permission from those who engaged) and the armies of volunteers, which was then matched with voter profiles. Yes, still a bit creepy, especially since the campaign boasted that they probably knew every single one of the 67+ million voters who supported President Obama in 2012.

Many have figured out that various social media platforms and Google itself have an inherent left-wing bias ingrained in the services. Well, one former data officer for the Obama campaign, Carol Davidsen, admitted that Facebook allowed them to break the rules because they were on their side.

First, she tweeted a Time magazine piece showing what the 2012 campaign did to gather information:

In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters: half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.

For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.” –Time

Davidsen then detailed on Twitter how representatives from the social media company were surprised how much data they mined, adding that they were “very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

— Carol Davidsen (@cld276) March 19, 2018

Davidsen added that she’s 100% sure that Facebook recruits folks to handle the GOP side of things, but what is known with absolute certainty, is that the tech giant was willing to allow one campaign to break the rules because they agreed with their leftist and collectivized agenda.

What we have here is an admission from a Democratic campaign manager that the most powerful social media platform in the first world is currently lending its untold amounts of data to a specific political party’s purposes. This, folks, is what “election meddling” looks like.

The U.S.’s Hypocrisy On ‘Political Intervention’ In Elections

The United States government has interfered with more elections than any other government on the face of the earth.  But suddenly, the US is grandstanding and pretending it matters that other nations use the exact same tactics.

“Ah, the peddler propaganda!” says Joe Joseph with The Daily Sheeple while reading a headline declaring that Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems. “Say it ain’t so! A clandestine operation by a foreign government here in the United States? No. Couldn’t be!” he said sarcastically.

The overly biased and left-leaning media attempted to portray this “interference” as a big deal. But as always, propaganda is easy to break down.

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn’t talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, “We saw a targeting of 21 statesand an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.” –NBC News

Reading between the lines, all this means is pretty much nothing, other than the US government blatantly displaying their hypocrisy while interfering in the elections of other countries. Of course, the media is going to make a big story out of this. “We’re going to turn back the clock a little bit,” says Joseph.

“The US is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries. So, since we’re into this whole Russia thing and Russia’s so bad and ‘shame on you, Russia’...well, let’s take a look at all the ways that the United States has interfered.”

According to data gathered by the LA Times, the U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries. The United States government has tried to manipulate as many as 81 elections between 1946 and 2000. According to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University, that number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.

Levin defines intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” These acts, carried out in secret two-thirds of the time, include funding the election campaigns of specific parties, disseminating misinformation or propaganda, training locals of only one side in various campaigning, or get-out-the-vote techniques, helping one side design their campaign materials, making public pronouncements, or threats in favor of or against a candidate, and providing or withdrawing foreign aid.

“There’s plenty of history here to show that we’ve been involved in intervening in foreign elections. We did it more than anybody else! So, why should we be surprised when other countries do it to us,” says Joseph.  Again, keep in mind, the election interference was incredibly menial in comparison to the US’s previous manipulations.

You need to be able to “see and understand the propaganda coming from NBC and the mainstream television media.” In case you haven’t figured it out yet, most of the mainstream media is straight up propaganda with the minds of Americans and public opinion being manipulated every second. This has been admitted by the media, yet the public continues to be largely unaware that they are being controlled.  In fact, the US media tried very hard to manipulate public opinion in the 2016 election.  It’s become more than obvious unless you’re one who has been manipulated.

“It’s easier to fool people than convince them that they’ve been fooled.” -Unknown, but often attributed to Mark Twain

The U.S. Is Not A Democracy, It Never Was

Authored by Gabriel Rockhill via Counterpunch.org,

One of the most steadfast beliefs regarding the United States is that it is a democracy. Whenever this conviction waivers slightly, it is almost always to point out detrimental exceptions to core American values or foundational principles. For instance, aspiring critics frequently bemoan a “loss of democracy” due to the election of clownish autocrats, draconian measures on the part of the state, the revelation of extraordinary malfeasance or corruption, deadly foreign interventions, or other such activities that are considered undemocratic exceptions. The same is true for those whose critical framework consists in always juxtaposing the actions of the U.S. government to its founding principles, highlighting the contradiction between the two and clearly placing hope in its potential resolution.

The problem, however, is that there is no contradiction or supposed loss of democracy because the United States simply never was one. This is a difficult reality for many people to confront, and they are likely more inclined to immediately dismiss such a claim as preposterous rather than take the time to scrutinize the material historical record in order to see for themselves. Such a dismissive reaction is due in large part to what is perhaps the most successful public relations campaign in modern history.

What will be seen, however, if this record is soberly and methodically inspected, is that a country founded on elite, colonial rule based on the power of wealth—a plutocratic colonial oligarchy, in short—has succeeded not only in buying the label of “democracy” to market itself to the masses, but in having its citizenry, and many others, so socially and psychologically invested in its nationalist origin myth that they refuse to hear lucid and well-documented arguments to the contrary.

To begin to peel the scales from our eyes, let us outline in the restricted space of this article, five patent reasons why the United States has never been a democracy (a more sustained and developed argument is available in my book, Counter-History of the Present).

To begin with, British colonial expansion into the Americas did not occur in the name of the freedom and equality of the general population, or the conferral of power to the people. Those who settled on the shores of the “new world,” with few exceptions, did not respect the fact that it was a very old world indeed, and that a vast indigenous population had been living there for centuries. As soon as Columbus set foot, Europeans began robbing, enslaving and killing the native inhabitants. The trans-Atlantic slave trade commenced almost immediately thereafter, adding a countless number of Africans to the ongoing genocidal assault against the indigenous population. Moreover, it is estimated that over half of the colonists who came to North America from Europe during the colonial period were poor indentured servants, and women were generally trapped in roles of domestic servitude. Rather than the land of the free and equal, then, European colonial expansion to the Americas imposed a land of the colonizer and the colonized, the master and the slave, the rich and the poor, the free and the un-free. The former constituted, moreover, an infinitesimally small minority of the population, whereas the overwhelming majority, meaning “the people,” was subjected to death, slavery, servitude, and unremitting socio-economic oppression.

Second, when the elite colonial ruling class decided to sever ties from their homeland and establish an independent state for themselves, they did not found it as a democracy. On the contrary, they were fervently and explicitly opposed to democracy, like the vast majority of European Enlightenment thinkers. They understood it to be a dangerous and chaotic form of uneducated mob rule. For the so-called “founding fathers,” the masses were not only incapable of ruling, but they were considered a threat to the hierarchical social structures purportedly necessary for good governance. In the words of John Adams, to take but one telling example, if the majority were given real power, they would redistribute wealth and dissolve the “subordination” so necessary for politics. When the eminent members of the landowning class met in 1787 to draw up a constitution, they regularly insisted in their debates on the need to establish a republic that kept at bay vile democracy, which was judged worse than “the filth of the common sewers” by the pro-Federalist editor William Cobbett. The new constitution provided for popular elections only in the House of Representatives, but in most states the right to vote was based on being a property owner, and women, the indigenous and slaves—meaning the overwhelming majority of the population—were simply excluded from the franchise. Senators were elected by state legislators, the President by electors chosen by the state legislators, and the Supreme Court was appointed by the President. It is in this context that Patrick Henry flatly proclaimed the most lucid of judgments: “it is not a democracy.” George Mason further clarified the situation by describing the newly independent country as “a despotic aristocracy.”

When the American republic slowly came to be relabeled as a “democracy,” there were no significant institutional modifications to justify the change in name. In other words, and this is the third point, the use of the term “democracy” to refer to an oligarchic republic simply meant that a different word was being used to describe the same basic phenomenon. This began around the time of “Indian killer” Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign in the 1830s. Presenting himself as a ‘democrat,’ he put forth an image of himself as an average man of the people who was going to put a halt to the long reign of patricians from Virginia and Massachusetts. Slowly but surely, the term “democracy” came to be used as a public relations term to re-brand a plutocratic oligarchy as an electoral regime that serves the interest of the people or demos. Meanwhile, the American holocaust continued unabated, along with chattel slavery, colonial expansion and top-down class warfare.

In spite of certain minor changes over time, the U.S. republic has doggedly preserved its oligarchic structure, and this is readily apparent in the two major selling points of its contemporary “democratic” publicity campaign. The Establishment and its propagandists regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights (legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives. However, even this hollow definition dissimulates the extent to which, to begin with, the supposed equality before the law in the United States presupposes an inequality before the law by excluding major sectors of the population: those judged not to have the right to rights, and those considered to have lost their right to rights (Native Americans, African-Americans and women for most of the country’s history, and still today in certain aspects, as well as immigrants, “criminals,” minors, the “clinically insane,” political dissidents, and so forth). Regarding elections, they are run in the United States as long, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns in which the candidates and issues are pre-selected by the corporate and party elite. The general population, the majority of whom do not have the right to vote or decide not to exercise it, are given the “choice”—overseen by an undemocratic electoral college and embedded in a non-proportional representation scheme—regarding which member of the aristocratic elite they would like to have rule over and oppress them for the next four years. “Multivariate analysis indicates,” according to an important recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination […], but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy.”

To take but a final example of the myriad ways in which the U.S. is not, and has never been, a democracy, it is worth highlighting its consistent assault on movements of people power. Since WWII, it has endeavored to overthrow some 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected. It has also, according the meticulous calculations by William Blum in America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, grossly interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries, attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, dropped bombs on more than 30 countries, and attempted to suppress populist movements in 20 countries. The record on the home front is just as brutal. To take but one significant parallel example, there is ample evidence that the FBI has been invested in a covert war against democracy. Beginning at least in the 1960s, and likely continuing up to the present, the Bureau “extended its earlier clandestine operations against the Communist party, committing its resources to undermining the Puerto Rico independence movement, the Socialist Workers party, the civil rights movement, Black nationalist movements, the Ku Klux Klan, segments of the peace movement, the student movement, and the ‘New Left’ in general” (Cointelpro: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom, p. 22-23). Consider, for instance, Judi Bari’s summary of its assault on the Socialist Workers Party: “From 1943-63, the federal civil rights case Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General documents decades of illegal FBI break-ins and 10 million pages of surveillance records. The FBI paid an estimated 1,600 informants $1,680,592 and used 20,000 days of wiretaps to undermine legitimate political organizing.” In the case of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (AIM)—which were both important attempts to mobilize people power to dismantle the structural oppression of white supremacy and top-down class warfare—the FBI not only infiltrated them and launched hideous smear and destabilization campaigns against them, but they assassinated 27 Black Panthers and 69 members of AIM (and subjected countless others to the slow death of incarceration). If it be abroad or on the home front, the American secret police has been extremely proactive in beating down the movements of people rising up, thereby protecting and preserving the main pillars of white supremacist, capitalist aristocracy.

Rather than blindly believing in a golden age of democracy in order to remain at all costs within the gilded cage of an ideology produced specifically for us by the well-paid spin-doctors of a plutocratic oligarchy, we should unlock the gates of history and meticulously scrutinize the founding and evolution of the American imperial republic. This will not only allow us to take leave of its jingoist and self-congratulatory origin myths, but it will also provide us with the opportunity to resuscitate and reactivate so much of what they have sought to obliterate. In particular, there is a radical America just below the surface of these nationalist narratives, an America in which the population autonomously organizes itself in indigenous and ecological activism, black radical resistance, anti-capitalist mobilization, anti-patriarchal struggles, and so forth. It is this America that the corporate republic has sought to eradicate, while simultaneously investing in an expansive public relations campaign to cover over its crimes with the fig leaf of “democracy” (which has sometimes required integrating a few token individuals, who appear to be from below, into the elite ruling class in order to perpetuate the all-powerful myth of meritocracy). If we are astute and perspicacious enough to recognize that the U.S. is undemocratic today, let us not be so indolent or ill-informed that we let ourselves be lulled to sleep by lullabies praising its halcyon past. Indeed, if the United States is not a democracy today, it is in large part due to the fact that it never was one.

Far from being a pessimistic conclusion, however, it is precisely by cracking open the hard shell of ideological encasement that we can tap into the radical forces that have been suppressed by it. These forces—not those that have been deployed to destroy them—should be the ultimate source of our pride in the power of the people.

Midterm Elections & A Paradigm Shift (Return) to the Left

After the President was elected and inaugurated, I wrote several articles specifically stating that if he didn’t accomplish significant changes by the Midterm Congressional elections, he would not be reelected. We are seeing this on its way to fruition with the Alabama race to fill the seat of Jeff Sessions. The Democrat Doug Jones has won it, and the Republican-held majority in the Senate now shrinks by one seat.

Not that it really matters. Susan Collins was one of the three Republicans quashing the attempt to remove the provision making Obamacare mandatory. Olympia Snow was the Republican Senator from Maine that allowed Obamacare to come up on the Senate Floor in the first place. Roberts (the “conservative”) the Supreme Court justice enabled Obamacare to be kept as a law.

The parties are merely an illusion of a two-party system. All of them are Statists, elitists, and Marxist-Progressives determined to completely rend the Constitution and enslave all of the citizen-serfs while they assume the positions of “uncrowned” nobility. Will they remove the mandatory clause from Obamacare, or repeal the entire law? No.

In a pig’s eye will any of these imperial statists remove a law that has every American citizen by the throat…a law the lawmakers exempted themselves from, “stamped” with “King” Obama’s approval with the Supreme Court solidifying it.

In reality, the establishment obtained exactly what it wanted, as I reported before the election, and shortly thereafter: A President who is derailed at every effort and made to appear as a “loser.” Such will make Congress Democrat-controlled again and the President a one-termer. This is happening, before our very eyes.

The United States is one step above being a third-world country, almost ready to take the plunge into the pool of totalitarianism. Go ahead: try to leave the country without a passport if you owe any money…more than you make in a year. Go ahead: try and maintain any semblance of privacy when everything you do on the computer, every purchase you make, and every place you travel is monitored, recorded, and saved for…. for what?

Saved for the inevitable day when the country morphs into full-blown tyranny and every citizen is monitored and tracked 24 hours a day by the State. 

No need for a “mark of the beast!” Such would be counterproductive: it would be recognized and fought against. No need for that! No need: Almost everyone carries around their little chittering cell phones – personal tracking devices – all tied into the computer…and the CCTV cameras…and the fusion centers and police departments. Do you want to provide Google/Yahoo/Bing with your password, in case you forget? Can’t give your mobile cell phone number now? We’ll hit you with the term “Thanks, I’ll secure my account later.”

That is the option you have…a “choice” that forces you to indemnify…to make a pledge to do it later, and thanking them for doing it to boot!

CDs and DVDs are on their way out the door, and you’ll subscribe to music, subscribe to the movies the way you subscribe to Word and Windows, not owning the disc anymore. The way you subscribe to phone time. The manner in which you subscribe to e-newspapers and Kindle.

Hooked into everything and owning nothing…and all your habits, purchases, and proclivities continuously monitored: the perfect consumer, with all your paycheck accounted for via direct deposit…and always one paycheck away from disaster and ruin.

The “joke” of an election that changes the identity of the person in office, and nothing more. The Paradigm shift back toward the right was permitted because they knew they couldn’t get away with stealing the election for Hillary Clinton…there would have been a revolution.

The establishment gave conservatives their “champion” for now, and everyone on the conservative side of the house is taking a breather…when only the round ended, not the fight. Yes, it is just a pause as the left sets up for the next presidential election. You can bet it will be a shift back to the left this time…with the same demographics for the supporters as the two Obama elections.

The deliberate collapse of the country is being orchestrated from within. After 8 years of Obama weakening the defenses, we are goading nations into war and still pursuing a policy of imperial expansion. Van Jones: Top down, bottom up, domestically while we back North Korea, China, and Russia economically, diplomatically, and militarily.

Ben Franklin was once asked by a woman what form of government the founding fathers had created. “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it,” was his response. We lost it. We lost that Republic a long time ago, and the Alabama Senate victory for the Democrats is just the beginning. With a disapproval rating of more than 60%, it would stand to reason the President can rely on one tool to pull his ratings up and give him another term. That trump card (no pun intended) is war, and we are just a hair’s breadth away from it. The primary objective is not the welfare of the American people. The primary objective of an incumbent is reelection, at any and all costs…especially when those costs can be placed on us.

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Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne).  Mr. Johnson is also a Gunsmith, a Certified Master Herbalist, a Montana Master Food Preserver, and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape).  He lives in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with his wife and three cats. You can follow Jeremiah’s regular writings at SHTFplan.com or contact him here.

This article may be republished or excerpted with proper attribution to the author and a link to www.SHTFplan.com.

Direct Democracy: Best Bet Or Mob Rule?

Direct democracy is defined as a democratic system where citizens, not elected officials, vote on major national issues to decide what becomes law.

As Statista"s Dyfed Loesche notes, some hail it as the purest form of democracy. Others are wary because some issues are highly complex and require a minimum of expertise to make a sound decision.

Some critics argue people can be moody and swayed by demagogues to vote for the wrong thing. The Brexit referendum in Britain is one example where many observers argue that people casted their votes ill-informed and manipulated by populist campaigns. Others see it as a vote pushed by a gut feeling of resentment, with voters not so much concerned with the matter at hand but rather wanting to throw a spanner in the works of a system they feel doesn"t profit them anymore.

You will find more statistics at Statista

As the infographic above shows, the British are comparatively wary of direct democracy, compared to, for example, the Germans.

In Sweden, often lauded for her ingrained democratic tradition, just a little more people than in Britain think of direct democracy as a good or very good system.

However, in all countries depicted more than half of the citizens think this system is at least somewhat good, according to data from Pew Research Center.

The End Of The Age Of Benevolence

Authored by Francis Marion of CanadianGunBlog.com, via Jim Quinn"s Burning Platform blog,

The history of democracy, Marxism and feminism is the history of the snake, which, being hungry for more, stalks its own tail and consumes itself.

Some evenings I sit on the sofa in the family room with my teenage daughter and watch a TV program with her. I leave the choice of the show to her, it matters little to me, and when she finds something she likes she sits next to me, puts her head on my shoulder, and snuggles up for the hour it takes to watch whatever it is she’s chosen.

It’s our time.

Occasionally we’ll sneak in another twenty or thirty minutes to the objection of her mother but I like my time with her so I put up with the raised eyebrows and the, “She’s got school tomorrow,” scoldings. It’s important to me that she knows I love her, that I want to spend time with her and that she feels safe when she is with me. Someday, when she is a grown woman I want her to find a man that will take care of her and protect her like I do. I expect no less from a suitor and neither should she.

There will be women who read this who will object to my stance. They will say, “She doesn’t need a man to feel safe or validated or content,” but I would disagree. When she gets older she’ll need a good man, not just any man, and that’s as true today as much as it was ten years, twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years and even one thousand years ago. And it will become even more so as time goes on.

Indeed, we have reached peak denial in our civilization and whether we like it or not reality is about to make a come back.

The freedom that we have enjoyed in the west and the modern democracies that have sprung forth from our evolving and enlightened philosophies over the past few hundred years are not a given. Granted, they are preferable outcomes given our natural state but politically speaking they are an anomaly in the history of mankind and not the norm.

As such, democracy and the systems, social structures and institutions that have grown up around them are grossly misunderstood by the vast majority of the western world. Most of the people living in the west today have been raised to believe that democracy is a moral system of governance and that it is our gift to the rest of mankind. But democracy is not an inherently moral system nor is it a guarantor of linear, progressive political growth.

At its root democracy is quite simple. It is the exercise of political power by the majority over the minority. It is the power to choose in matters of politics. This, of course, begs the question: to choose what?

Since choices in general (and political ones are no exception) can be either good or bad, in this case, both for the individual and the body politic, then it follows that democracy is neither. It is nothing more than a tool for decision making where the majority holds the power to make decisions that affect everyone, either for better or for worse. Democracy is, therefore, a reflection of the character of the people who exercise it.

Additionally, democracy is also the use of soft force. That is, the minority bends to the will of the majority on political matters and the apparatus of the state is responsible for carrying out its demands. The minority consents, willingly or unwillingly not because violence is present but because, by the state’s presence, it is implied.

More importantly, though, democracy is a luxury that is preceded by benevolence but does not necessarily guarantee its continuance or creation if forgotten.

Societies in a state of internal turmoil, or where competing factions vie for political power, often through the use of overt physical violence, will forgo democracy because the primary component for its exercise, order, is absent.

Democracy in the western world has always followed ‘order’. ‘Order’ is a byproduct of force and, like democracy varies in severity on the scale of good and bad, its moral leanings by and large being dependent on the type of people who impose it from the top down. It can be fatherly and benevolent or it can be violent and oppressive. It is never universally both.

Thus democracy usually occurs where ‘order’ has been established and the apparatus of the state is at least somewhat benevolent.

In a political world ruled by strength, order and benevolence are precursors to suffrage. Without either suffrage would not exist, choices would be limited and brute strength would still be the order of the day.

Whether feminists are willing to admit it or not, brute, physical strength is at the root of all political power, thus feminism came into being because those who held that strength chose to exercise benevolence and reason over strength and subjugation. Their suffrage was dependent first and foremost on the benevolence of those who held political power. And like it or not, those who held political power at the time it was introduced were men.

As time progressed, at least in the West, democracy, and universal suffrage gave way to both physical and intellectual freedom for women. In the West during the twentieth century, its political structure (and the intellectual values it embodied) and the industrial revolution it spawned ushered in a new era for women, giving them choices they had not previously had, by and large, since the beginning of recorded history.

Women were finally free to choose between family, career or both. Rather than playing the role of the weaker, subservient sex women found their place beside men in society as intellectual equals. Physical strength was no longer a factor in the social structure of our civilization. An intellectual meritocracy came to be valued over a system based simply on brute force. This structure was the product of order created from benevolent strength.

But the rise of Marxism and feminism, particularly the rise of third-wave feminism has put ‘order’ at risk.

Without order, an intellectual meritocracy will once again become subservient to strength. It’s a hard pill for women and progressive liberals in general to swallow but it’s a fact.

Marxism and modern feminism work continuously towards a perfect world but ignore reality in the process. They forget an important lesson, born true repeatedly throughout history:

There is no utopia.

The best we can hope for in any civilization is for a society to be built and based on fundamental individual rights and freedoms. If we refuse this then we return to what we were before. This means rule by brute force which means the end of political and legal equality for women and the death of democracy itself.

The irony in the dilemma which the West now faces is that our demise, the continual erosion of a democratic, intellectual meritocracy, is by and large spurred on by the very people that our system was created to protect.

Feminists, both female and male, cry daily for more of the same poison which infects us.

More illegal and unscreened immigration. More tolerance of philosophies which are intolerant themselves. More invitations for an enemy created by a corrupt and immoral government to ignore our borders and live among us.

More cries for moral nihilism, the repression of speech (one of the cornerstones of their own suffrage) and the denial of fundamental biological reality.

More cries for the denial of basic math and the continuance of government-sponsored bread and circuses. More of everything which our civilization cannot sustain. More of everything which rots us from the core.

Subsequently, modern feminists decry the men of their own civilization as misogynists, racists, and intolerant while forgetting it was their own men who recognized that a society built on equal political rights for all was preferable to a society built on spoils taken by the strong.

They forget that it was the men they live among who valued justice over greed and force so much that they shed the old ways and took their place beside their women instead of in front of them. They do all of this while cheering on the invasion of their own countries by foreign men who view them as nothing more than chattel property. In doing so they have unwittingly invited the destruction of their own freedom.

While I sit next to my daughter I wonder what the future will hold for her. I have no desire to see her disenfranchised but the reality is that many of her own kind have chosen a future where reason has been rejected and instead, traded for thirty pieces of silver and whatever makes them feel good. Unfortunately, a world without reason is a world without order which is a world without choice. A world without choice is a world of brute force. And that’s a man’s world.

Ironic.

Benevolence and democracy should have ushered in an era of truth and reason but instead, they ushered in an era of denial and wishful thinking. Thus, democracy’s beginning will also be its end. What came from force will return to it.

For those of you paying attention and who can see the contradictions and the resultant decay, pray. Pray that what comes afterward will once again be benevolent.

US Presidential Election Unaffected by Russia

[image: Sasha Mordovets | Getty Images; Brian C. Frank | Reuters]

US intelligence community hypocrisy on Russian US election meddling baloney is clear for everyone paying attention to facts, not baseless accusations and shameful Russia bashing.

On the one hand, the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin are blamed for what never happened, no corroborating evidence cited after over a year of initial accusations.

On the other, the intelligence community says last year’s presidential election was unaffected by Russia.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. The CIA, NSA, FBI and Dems claim Russian meddling helped Trump defeat Hillary.

How if electoral results were unaffected by Russia? If meddling occurred, forensic analysis would have found clear evidence – no evidence, no interference, case closed.

At least it should be – not in America, not with a way to keep delegitimizing Trump for the wrong reasons, demonizing Russia at the same time.

Hillary’s whined about her loss for the past year – among other things, claiming “(t)here certainly was communication and there certainly was an understanding of some sort.”

“(T)here’s no doubt in my mind that Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win.”

“And there’s no doubt in my mind that there are a tangle of financial relationships between Trump and his operation with Russian money.”

“And there’s no doubt in my mind that the Trump campaign and other associates have worked really hard to hide their connections with Russians.”

Fact: There’s no doubt whatever that not a shred of evidence backs her sour grapes – baseless, vindictive and mean-spirited.

Her remarks, inability to accept defeat, and go quietly into the good night show a serious character flaw, among other distasteful things about her, along with her unaccountable high crimes, what’s most important of all.

Sunday on CBS News Face the Nation, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin addressed the phony Russian US election meddling issue, saying:

“…I’ve seen information. I’m not going to comment on any of the confidential information I’ve seen. We are carrying out the sanctions.”

“But let me be clear, nobody thinks this has had any impact on the election. So whatever occurred, there was no impact. So I think the American public is ready to move on to more important issues.”

Last October, CIA director Mike Pompeo said “(w)e conducted an election that had integrity. (T)he intelligence community’s assessment is that (Russia) did not affect the outcome of the election.”

Last January, in testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee members, then DNI James Clapper said “Russia did not change any vote tallies or anything of the sort.”

Senator Tom Cotton asked him “the intelligence community says, ‘(i)t would be extremely difficult for someone – including a nation-state actor to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyberattack or intrusion,’ and you say to that earlier today as well that we have no evidence that vote tallies were altered or manipulated in anyway?”

Clapper responded: “That’s correct.”

Last November post-election, NSA head Mike Rogers said leaked DNC emails had no effect on the election. “I don’t think in the end it had the (intended) effect.”

Separately, he said “I do not think that the outcome of the election was impacted by” Russia – after earlier claiming “a nation state” tried interfering in the US election.

Let’s recap. The intelligence community and undemocratic Dems blame Russia for Hillary’s defeat.

At the same time, the CIA, NSA, former DNI and Treasury secretary said last year’s presidential election was unaffected by Russia.

If so, how did Trump defeat Hillary with no Russian help? Simple! He got way more Electoral College votes than she did, trouncing her by a 304 – 227 margin.

On November 8, 2016, the presidential campaign ended. He won. She lost. Postmortems continue over a year later.

Only in America!

The post US Presidential Election Unaffected by Russia appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Meotti: The Migrant Crisis Upended Europe

Authored by Giulio Meoti via The Gatestone Institute,

• "The migrant crisis is the 9/11 of the European Union... That day in 2001, everything changed in the US. In a minute, America discovered its vulnerability. Migrants had the same effect in Europe... The migration crisis profoundly undermines the ideas of democracy, tolerance and... the liberal principles that constitute our ideological landscape." — Ivan Kratsev, Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a member of the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, Le Figaro.


• The European public now looks at EU institutions with contempt. They perceive them -- under multiculturalism and immigration -- not only as indifferent to their own problems, but as adding to them.


• "We are a cultural community, which doesn"t mean that we are better or worse -- we are simply different from the outside world... our openness and tolerance cannot mean walking away from protecting our heritage". — Donald Tusk, President of the European Council.

A few weeks after Germany opened its borders to over a million refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the migration crisis would "destabilize democracies". He was labelled a demagogue and a xenophobe.

Two years later, Orbán has been vindicated. As Politico now explains, "[M]ost EU leaders echo the Hungarian prime minister" and the Hungarian PM can now claim that "our position is slowly becoming the majority position".

Many in Europe seem to have understood what Ivan Krastev, the Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a member of the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, recently explained to Le Figaro:

"The migrant crisis is the 9/11 of the European Union... That day in 2001, everything changed in the US. In a minute, America discovered its vulnerability. Migrants had the same effect in Europe. It is not their number that destabilizes the continent... The migration crisis profoundly undermines the ideas of democracy, tolerance and progress as well as the liberal principles that constitute our ideological landscape. It is a turning point in the political dynamics of the European project".

Thousands of migrants arrive on foot at a railway station in Tovarnik, Croatia, September 17, 2015. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Migration is having a significant impact, for instance, on Europe"s public finances. Take the two countries most affected by it. Germany"s federal government spent 21.7 billion euros in 2016 to deal with it. Also reported was that Germany"s budget for security this year will grow by at least a third, from 6.1 billion to 8.3 billion euros.

In Italy, the Minister of Economy and Finance recently announced that the country will spend 4.2 billion in 2017 on migrants (one-seventh of Italy"s entire budget for 2016). Spain recently announced that in North Africa, the fence around its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which keeps migrants out of the Spanish territory, will be funded through a further infusion of 12 million euros. Everywhere in Europe, states are allocating extra resources to deal with the migrant crisis, which has also changed Europe"s political landscape.

The recent election victories of Sebastian Kurz in Austria and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic have potentially enlarged the group of Central and Eastern European countries that oppose Brussels -- countries that do not want to accept the number of migrants that the EU is demanding. The topic of immigration is fracturing Europe along ideological lines. Not only fences, but rivalry, mistrust and hate now divide the European project more deeply than ever before. The European public now looks at EU institutions with contempt. They perceive them -- under multiculturalism and immigration -- not only as indifferent to their own problems, but as adding to them.

Another political earthquake linked with the migration crisis is "the decline of social democracy in the West", as Josef Joffe, Editor and Publisher of Die Zeit, recently called it. Everywhere in Europe, the migration crisis has all but killed the social-democratic parties, long perceived as unable to cope with it. Twenty years ago, these left-liberal parties governed everywhere -- Spain, Britain, Germany, for instance -- but now they are in the opposition everywhere except Italy. From Norway to Austria, Europe is now led by conservative governments.

More than half the terror plots in Germany since the onset of the migrant crisis in 2014 have involved migrants, according to headlines as well as a study by the Heritage Foundation. In addition, ever since the Islamic State -- now defeated in Raqqa -- took advantage of the destabilization caused by Syria"s civil war to become a major driver of the migrant crisis, migration has been a major concern for Europe"s security. From the territory it conquered, ISIS launched major terror attacks on Europe.

The migration crisis has also led to the strategic strengthening in Europe of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has been blackmailing European countries by threatening that if billions of euros and certain political concessions are not given to him, he will open Turkey"s borders to let millions more migrants flood into Europe. Erdogan has not only demanded that Europe jail writers and journalists; he has also tried to influence elections in the Netherlands and Germany by appealing to his Turkish constituencies there.

A Pew Research report shows how migration is reshaping European countries. In 2016 alone, Sweden"s population grew by more than 1%. The increase is ascribed to mass migration, the second-highest in the EU. The number of immigrants rose from 16.8% to 18.3% of Sweden"s population between 2015 and 2016.

Austria and Norway, two other countries with large immigrant populations (at least 15% percent in 2016), saw a 1% rise from 2015. The newspaper Die Welt recently reported that 18.6 million German residents -- one-fifth of Germany"s total population -- now come from migrant backgrounds.

The Machiavelli Center in Italy reported in a study, "How immigration is changing Italian demographics", that an "unprecedented" shift in Italy"s demography has been taking place due to the migration crisis.

The Pandora"s box of a demographic revolution has been opened.

Two years ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the only voice in Europe speaking of the need to keep Europe "Christian". Now one of his most vocal opponents, Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, has said:

"We are a cultural community, which doesn"t mean that we are better or worse -- we are simply different from the outside world... our openness and tolerance cannot mean walking away from protecting our heritage".

In 2015, any talk about "culture" was condemned as "racism". Now it is becoming part of the mainstream.

In trying to cope with the Islamists" war on Western politics, culture and religion, and the cultural clash they created, Europe has been upended.

The Countries Most (& Least) Satisfied With 'Democracy'

Across the globe, the spread of right- and left-wing populism and authoritarian politics have shaken the very foundations of democracy.

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, a new survey from Pew Research has found that people across the globe are generally unhappy with the functionality of their political systems, though levels of satisfaction with democracy vary hugely between countries.

As can be seen from the following infographic which shows a selection of countries from the survey, people in India have tremendous faith in democracy. 79 percent of those polled said they are satisfied with the way democracy is working in India compared to 11 percent who are dissatisfied. Germany also recorded a high level (73 percent) of satisfaction with democracy.

You will find more statistics at Statista

In many other developed countries, however, faith is waning.

In the United Kingdom and Japan, 47 percent of people are not satisfied with how democracy is working in their countries while in the U.S., that rises to 51 percent. France, South Korea and Brazil all recorded dissatisfaction levels of 65 percent or higher... but Greece tops the charts with only 21% of its citizenry "satisfied" with the weay democracy is working.

Caracas Or Catalan - Nightstick Democracy At Its Finest...

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

The last several days in Venezuela have been absolutely mind-blowing.

Pretty much all the stories you’ve heard are true– countless people eating out of garbage cans, the appalling shortages of basic staples like food, medicine, and even soap… and the lines.

Oh boy, the lines.

The longest lines I saw, in fact, were not at grocery stores, but at banks.

Hundreds of people were queuing up, many of them to pull money out of their accounts to exchange cash on the black market.

Lines snaked through a bank’s cavernously large lobby, continued outside, wrapped around the entire building, and terminated at some point down the street.

Making a simple withdrawal can be an all-day affair.

Perhaps most surprising was how much Venezuela deteriorated since the last time I came here. And I’m concerned that it will continue to get worse… perhaps even much worse… until it gets better.

As I mentioned last week, long-term this place is a veritable gold mine. The natural resources, cheap hydropower production, port facilities, low-cost workforce, abundant factories, etc.

Venezuela is a manufacturer’s dream.

But none of those opportunities can come to pass until this government collapses and there’s a complete reset.

Undoubtedly the Venezuelan government will eventually run out of money, probably within the next two years. It’s nearly a mathematical certainty.

And when they’ll no longer be able to pay the scumbag police and military who shoot peaceful protesters in the face, it’ll be game over.

But until then they’re doing everything they can to strengthen their grip.

A few months ago the government held a sham election here, where citizens exercised their ‘democratic’ right to choose among a bunch of puppet candidates hand-selected by the government.

You can still see the billboards up across Caracas telling people to go vote between the choices given to them by the government. Freedom!

You’d think that such oppressive tactics to keep a population under control would only exist in brutal dictatorships like Venezuela or North Korea.

But then we witnessed the events in Spain over the weekend where millions of people in the Catalan region went out to vote on independence for their region.

Caracas? ... or Catalonia...

The Spanish government loves democracy so much that they sent tens of thousands of police around the region to confiscate ballots, shut down polling stations, and beat-up peaceful citizens.

This is ‘Nightstick Democracy’ at its finest.

And in a most Orwellian statement, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told reporters later on Sunday that “there was no referendum in Catalonia today. . .”

It was like some Jedi mind trick trying to hide the fact that more than 2 million Catalans voted for independence.

I’m reminded of that old quote, often attributed to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, that basically says “It’s not the people who vote that counts, it’s the people who count the votes.”

(According to the memoirs of Stalin’s personal secretary, the actual quote was “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this– who will count the votes, and how.”)

This is pretty pathetic: we are ‘free’, as long as we only vote when they give us permission and choose among the options that they provide us.

A few months ago when writing about Venezuela, I concluded that blockchain technology could fix this.

Think about it– in 2017, it’s pretty ridiculous that people have to go down to a polling station to stuff a paper ballot into a box, all of which will be counted by hand.

Blockchain technology would ensure that everyone registered has exactly one vote, and that every vote is counted once.

No more lost ballots. No more tampering. No more miscounts and recounts. No more voter fraud.

Plus, blockchain voting can be cryptologically hashed to ensure secrecy, as well as provide an easy way for ANY candidate to be nominated.

And compared to the cost of legions of human beings required to supervise and count votes, in addition to the logistical cost of printing and moving all that paper, a Blockchain vote is MUCH cheaper.

A blockchain vote would be a clear, independent, indisputable expression to the world that millions of Venezuelans reject their government… and that millions of Catalans desire independence from Spain.

This isn’t some far-fetched idea. These tools already exist, as do the means to implement them, including identity validation to ensure that every registrant is eligible to vote.

When the game is rigged, there are really only two choices available: stop playing. Or change the game.

And this is absolutely game-changing technology.

Do you have a Plan B?

Catalan Police Ordered To Close And Occupy Polling Stations To Stop Vote Going Ahead

The Catalan Police (Mossos) have been ordered by the Public Prosecutor"s Office to close and occupy all premises that will or might be used as polling stations in the region to prevent them from being used for Sunday"s independence referendum vote, suspended by the Constitutional Court.

The Public Prosecutor"s Office confirmed to The Spain Report on Wednesday morning that the document and the orders it contains were genuine.

Officers must close and cordon off the centres until 9 p.m. on Sunday evening and make it clear that the police cordon is not to be broken, warning people they are liable to criminal prosecution if they do so.

They have been ordered to remove anyone already in the polling stations, and seize any items being used for the vote, "especially ballot boxes, computers, ballot papers and election documents and propaganda".

 

They may repeat the removals and seizures if people try to break the police line during the day.

The cordons and closures must be in place by Saturday, September 30.

Mossos officers must report any infractions of the polling station orders, and may request local police, National Police and Civil Guard back up if they believe they need it.

The Catalan Police must also prevent people designated as polling officers from being able to access the premises designated as polling stations, which is due to happen from 7:30 a.m. on Sunday.

Finally, the Mossos have been told to prevent the vote taking place anywhere within 100 metres of the designated premises, "including on public streets".

Catalan Police chiefs are worried about the public order and manpower requirements stemming from the order, Spanish media reported.

The prosecutor says that despite efforts by the central government to disable the logistical preparation for the vote, Catalan leaders are insisting some kind of vote will take place on Sunday.

Also on Wednesday morning, the Catalan First Minister unilaterally called a meeting of the Catalan Security Council, a regional policing body. That move was rejected by the Home Office two days ago.

A meeting of senior police chiefs in the region is taking place this morning. The prosecutor"s office in Catalonia told The Spain Report that the polling station issue would likely be on the agenda.

Finally, one comment on this report caught our eye and seemed to clarify much of what is occurrring...

Why aren’t we discussing the things we agree on?

People across the political spectrum are enthusiastically fueling this destructive behavior in their varied quests to show how right they are

The political environment since Trump’s election seems to get worse and worse by the day, as much of the American public becomes increasingly divided, embittered and downright insane. People across the political spectrum are enthusiastically fueling this destructive behavior in their varied quests to show how right they are and how hopelessly wrong everyone else is. Meanwhile, those who truly wield power in our society continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

Earlier today, I came across a prescient and powerful article written by Pamela B. Paresky in Psychology Today titled, Angry About the Election?

Although the piece was composed only a few weeks after the 2016 election, the writing was already on the wall and she identified and warned about the dangerous direction we were headed in. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Peruse any Facebook page and you’re sure to find plenty of anger and disgust there, too. Some Clinton supporters are “unfriending” Trump voters. Others proclaim they are no longer speaking to friends who voted for Trump. It’s not uncommon for people to explicitly state that they have no desire or intention to “come together” with nor even “have compassion” for anyone who voted for Trump.

The hostility is not all one-sided, of course. Isolation from those with different political ideas combined with aggressive political rhetoric has created the sense in people on both sides that “hostility directed at the opposition is acceptable, even appropriate. Partisans therefore feel free to express animus and engage in discriminatory behavior toward opposing partisans,” explain political scientists Iyengar and Westwood. After so many years of feeling trampled, belittled and maligned, for angry Trump voters, one Presidential victory does not clean the slate. Across the country, anger and disgust burn with righteous fervor. But anger eventually consumes everything in its path. Angry people create angry homes, angry spouses, angry children, and eventually find it hard to maintain their relationships and careers. Contrary to Wieseltier’s advice, being angry is a fairly reliable way to become lessprincipled. We need only recall the last thing we said in anger to recognize that it is a rare instance in which principles are more likely to be upheld with anger than with equanimity.

Emotions not only impact the things we say and do, they also have a way of influencing judgment. Increasingly researchers are able to see precisely how. According to psychologists Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro, anger “seems to encourage the use of cognitive‘shortcuts’ such as stereotypes,” so especially for those committed to combatting bigotry, anger is hardly the right tool. Adding disgust to the mix is even more destructive. Psychologists Buckels and Trapnell found that disgust “appears to have the unique capacity to foster the social-cognitive dehumanization of outgroup members.”

Resentment, as Wieselteir rightly appreciates, “even when it has a basis in experience, is one of the ugliest political emotions and it has been the source of horrors.” Resentment is closely related to contempt. Contempt between married couples is the single best predictor of divorce, and is destructive in other relationships, too. In examining speeches given prior to major events by leaders of extreme political groups, psychologist David Matsumoto and his colleagues discovered that anger, contempt, and disgust work together to create devaluing of the other group, and to motivate action against and even the elimination of their members. When leaders speak using these three emotions, they can succeed in generating violence against others—in other words, anger, contempt, and disgust are a dangerous and deadly combination…

Still, we allow for only a single story, and there seem to be only two options for how we interact with people who tell a different one. We can teach them; or if they are unwilling to learn, we can oppose them. The one thing we seem unwilling to do is to listen. We have somehow come to believe that when we have strong views, listening is something we do only when a person’s perspective is one we share, or while formulating arguments to convince people they are wrong—and then we must believe they can be convinced. Otherwise, not only do we avoid conversation, more and more we seem to experience a righteous combination of anger, contempt, and disgust; a poison that propels us to perform the same kind of dehumanization we work so hard to prevent. 

Perhaps because at its core, listening is an act of love, we are unwilling to listen to the people we would rather hate. “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard,” contends international peacemaker, Gene Knudsen Hoffman. Rabbi Phillip Bentley, who spent time with Israelis and Palestinians as part of the Compassionate Listening Project founded by Hoffman, discovered, “those who have sympathy for only one side in a conflict become part of the conflict.” 

What Dr. Paresky describes above is precisely what’s been happening to a concerning number of Americans over the course of 2017. Many thinkers and writers I found meaningful and trenchant prior to last year’s election, have become dull, partisan and pandering in the era of Trump. It appears the “strategy” of many partisans is to simply dehumanize the other side in a misguided pursuit of a political “win.” This sort of zero sum game thinking when it comes to your fellow humans is a recipe for disaster and can never lead to positive change. I don’t care what those playing this deadly game claim to stand for, I know that this mindset and the tactics they employ represent a very real danger to society and human progress in general.

Moving on, if I claim the above is perverse and destructive, what’s a realistic alternative? My answer is unity, and I wonder why almost no one is talking about that option. If we take a step back and analyze the situation, it becomes undeniable that it wasn’t your average fellow Americans that created the neo-feudal, insufferably corrupt and imperialistic society we live under today. Rather, those who created this world and encourage its continuance consist of both Democrats and Republicans working in bipartisan fashion on behalf of high-powered donors, i.e., oligarchs. Again, this is pretty much undeniable, yet in the emotionally charged, hysterical post-Trump environment we inhabit, everyone seems to be focused on dehumanizing their fellow Americans, 99.9% of whom have absolutely no power over policy.

I want to argue for a completely different approach. I think we need to look at some of the vast problems plaguing our society from a far more strategic and methodical perspective. We need to ask ourselves, what are the issues that donors are united on, but go against the best interests of 99.9% of us. We then need to focus our energy on building unity movements against this predatory donor agenda.

These aren’t minor issues either. We’re talking about stuff like the two-tier justice system (the rich and powerful gets slaps on the wrist, while poor people go to jail), pointless, barbaric wars abroad, monopoly capitalism, Wall Street bailouts and more.  I’m confident we could build widespread consensus on the issues above and many others. In aggregated, these issues have a tremendous impact to society as a whole and our ability to improve our everyday lives.

We need to start reframing politics in terms of “the people” against the donors, as opposed to one half of the public against the other half. We seem to be doing much more of the latter versus the former, and if it continues, we’ll be building our own graves.

That’s not to say there aren’t very real, meaningful differences amongst the population. I’m not arguing that these must be discarded or totally ignored, I’m pointing out that we are spending almost all our energy on fighting about our differences, as opposed to talking about the stuff we agree on.

Tomorrow I’ll write about how I propose we think about some of these differences in the context of a new politics we must start to build. If we fail to unite against donors on key existential issues — and do it soon — we’ll be rapidly divided and conquered into a dust cloud of anger and violence before we realized what happened.

Via Liberty Blitzkrieg

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Featured Image: Intellihub

U.S. Has 3.5 Million More Registered Voters Than Live Adults - A Red Flag For Electoral Fraud

Via Investors.com,

American democracy has a problem - a voting problem.

According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It"s a troubling fact that puts our nation"s future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch"s Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau"s American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review"s Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, "some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America"s adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud."

Murdock counted Judicial Watch"s state-by-state tally and found that 462 U.S. counties had a registration rate exceeding 100% of all eligible voters. That"s 3.552 million people, who Murdock calls "ghost voters." And how many people is that? There are 21 states that don"t have that many people.

Nor are these tiny, rural counties or places that don"t have the wherewithal to police their voter rolls.

California, for instance, has 11 counties with more registered voters than actual voters. Perhaps not surprisingly — it is deep-Blue State California, after all — 10 of those counties voted heavily for Hillary Clinton.

Los Angeles County, whose more than 10 million people make it the nation"s most populous county, had 12% more registered voters than live ones, some 707,475 votes. That"s a huge number of possible votes in an election.

But, Murdock notes, "California"s San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138% registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters."

State by state, this is an enormous problem that needs to be dealt with seriously. Having so many bogus voters out there is a temptation to voter fraud. In California, where Hillary Clinton racked up a massive majority over Trump, it would have made little difference.

But in other states, and in smaller elections, voter fraud could easily turn elections. A hundred votes here, a hundred votes there, and things could be very different. As a Wikipedia list of close elections shows, since just 2000 there have been literally dozens of elections at the state, local and federal level decided by 100 votes or fewer.

And, in at least two nationally important elections in recent memory, the outcome was decided by a paper-thin margin:

In 2000, President Bush beat environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore by just 538 votes.

Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, won his seat by beating incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008. Coleman was initially declared the winner the day after the election, with a 726-vote lead over Franken. But after a controversial series of recounts and ballot disqualifications, Franken emerged weeks later with a 225-seat victory.

Franken"s win was enormous, since it gave Democrats filibuster-proof control of the Senate. So, yes, small vote totals matter.

We"re not saying here that Franken cheated, nor, for that matter, that Bush did. But small numbers can have an enormous impact on our nation"s governance. The 3.5 million possible fraudulent ballots that exist are a problem that deserves serious immediate attention. Nothing really hinges on it, of course, except the integrity and honesty of our democratic elections.

How to Get Saudi Women Rights, and Make Your Neighbor Paint his House

Via The Daily Bell

If you get government wrong, you get everything wrong.

New York City has a lot of wealth. There is infrastructure, skyscrapers, smart people, transportation, and so on.

But what would happen if North Korea took over the city tomorrow? Would all that wealth simply remain in place? Would everyone just go on with their lives?

Of course not. People would flee in droves, the city would crumble.

Tom Bell says that 44% of the wealth in the world is the rule of law. Clearly, there are plenty of gripes to be had with the governments of New York City, New York State, and the United States. But even governments which mix statutory and common law can provide a decent arena where businesses and individuals can flourish.

Of course, we should always want to improve our circumstances. Since 44% of the wealth of the world comes down to how good the government is, this is the most important area to improve.

We could continue voting, volunteering on political campaigns, and calling our representatives. But speaking from personal experience, this doesn’t seem to make much difference.

But we have another choice right under our noses. It is already in practice in homeowners associations. Some people choose to voluntarily submit to a neighborhood wide private governing structure.

Maybe you can’t bear the thought of living next to a neighbor with chipping paint on his house. You, therefore, agree that you will keep your home’s paint fresh, knowing that your neighbor signed the same agreement. The consequences for failing to hold up your side of the bargain are clearly stated in the contract you sign.

This same privatized rule of law is expanding beyond neighborhoods.

Improving Terrible Governments

Tom Bell is a law professor who spoke at the Startup Societies and D10e conference this past weekend in San Francisco.

Tom has a book coming out called Your Next Government? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations. Here’s what he has said in the past about what your next government might look like:

Your next government might thus resemble a city-sized corporation, with you and other residents buying shares, electing the board of directors, and so forth. Think of it as residential co-op, upgraded for the big leagues…

In double democracy, owners manage the community on a one share/vote basis while residents enjoy the power to veto select laws or officers on a one person/vote basis. Owners construct; residents correct. Double democracy provides a structural safeguard against offensive governments without opening the door to mob rule. Both shareholders’ property rights and residents’ individual rights get represented in double democracy.

By privatizing the rule of law, you can get a much better product. Remember that the rule of law accounts for 44% of the wealth of the world, according to Bell.

Even places as repressive as Saudi Arabia, therefore, have some incentive to let go, in order to create more wealth in their jurisdictions. The country set up a special economic zone called KAEC City (King Abdullah Economic City). The city is administered by a publicly traded private company called Emaar Economic City.

And if you are a woman in Saudi Arabia, this is where you want to be. The oppressive police forces of the Saudi government are not present.

The city was designed with tourists and young Saudi’s in mind. The majority of the hundreds of thousands of Saudi’s studying abroad are women. Neither they nor tourists have an appetite for the oppressive laws against women which stain the rest of the country.

So there is a continuum here on what can be accomplished by neighborhood associations and private cities. Some people want to make sure their neighbor cuts his grass, and some people want to not be whipped for driving cars and showing their face.

When governing is done by consent, this is all possible, and everything in between.

Why Would Governments Allow it?

You would think governments would feel vulnerable at the thought of private governing structures competing with their power. And surely many do. But there are also incentives to letting go of control.

Cash strapped governments are happy to let private companies pay for the infrastructure which would otherwise have to come out of the public coffer. So a government can preside over a beautiful new city or neighborhood, reap the economic benefits, and not have to pay a dime.

And then there is the proper strategy for anyone attempting to start a special economic zone or private city. To get a law passed–or repealed–across an entire country, you need to appeal to countless politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups.

It sounds less scary to politicians and voters when you can say, “Look, we don’t want to change things everywhere. We just want this one little piece of land to have different rules.”

From my perspective, this is the camel’s nose under the tent strategy. Before governments know what hit them, the whole world will be privatized. People will see the success of private governance, special economic zones, and government by consent. Then they will clamor to create their own mini society, or move to their favorite one.

That 44% of the Earth’s wealth, the rule of law, cannot be stolen. But it can be created. And under those conditions, a new world is forming.