Ron Paul Blasts Congress" Political And Personal Immorality

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Many Americans have been shocked by recent revelations of the extent of sexual harassment in Congress.

However, no one should be too surprised that those who spend their lives defending and expanding the welfare-warfare state engage in immoral personal conduct.

It is only natural that an immoral system, like the welfare-warfare state, tends to attract individuals likely to practice personal immorality.

The welfare-warfare state is built on a foundation of taxation and fiat currency controlled by a secretive central bank. While some type of taxation may be necessary to fund the few legitimate functions of government, taking people’s money to fund a redistributive welfare state at home and a global empire abroad is nothing more than theft. The Federal Reserve’s erosion of purchasing power is also a form of theft.

The welfare-warfare state relies on violence. Every law preventing us from living our lives as we choose — whether forbidding us from working for below minimum wage, preventing us from smoking marijuana or drinking raw milk, telling private business owners who can and cannot use what restroom, or requiring us to purchase government-approved health insurance — rests on the threat of force being used against those who refuse to obey.

The warfare side of the welfare-warfare state is obviously rooted in violence. War inevitably leads to deaths, including the deaths of innocents. A permanent warfare state is also the quickest way to lose our liberties. This is why the Founding Fathers counseled against standing armies and foreign entanglements.

The neocons and “humanitarian interventionists” who control our foreign policy have disregarded the wisdom of the Founders. They actually promote endless wars not to protect our security but to promote “democracy” and “universal human rights.” They are impervious to evidence of the failure of military interventions to achieve these goals and indifferent to the human and fiscal costs of endless war. They dismiss the loss of innocent lives — including the deaths of children — as unavoidable “collateral damage,” while using their influence in the media to spread pro-war propaganda. They also smear their opponents as aiding America’s enemies and sympathizing with terrorists.

No one holding political power wants to admit the system he supports is immoral and a failure. Therefore, defenders of the welfare-warfare state rely on lies and deceptions. They ignore all evidence of the failure of big government to accomplish its ends, instead pretending they can fix the system with a few reforms. They also work with allies in the media to promulgate the lie that without the welfare state the masses would remain poor and uneducated, and without the warfare state we would be overwhelmed by those who hate us for our freedoms. They never mention that many foreigners hate America because of the suffering caused by our hyper-interventionist foreign policy.

The welfare-warfare state is built on violence and deceit.

It is thus inevitable that many of those participating in this immoral system will combine their immoral politics with immoral personal conduct. Hopefully the revelations of sexual misconduct among the welfare-warfare state’s Capitol Hill and media defenders will lead more Americans to question the morality and the wisdom of allowing the federal government to run the world, run the economy, and run our lives.

No Peace In Our Times: The Inevitability Of War

Via GEFIRA,

“While people are saying, peace and safety, destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

Are you, man or woman of Christian and European heritage, aware of this prophecy or do you prefer to live in a fancy world of happy-clappy wishful thinking that the brotherhood of men is about to put an end to human conflict once and for all? Though Christmastide is a time of merrymaking, it may also be a period of reflection. The Birth that we celebrate on Christmas Day was perceived by some as such a threat as to justify the Massacre of the Innocents. Peace and good will were closely intertwined with discord and hostility. Do you think we are living in better times? Do you think we are living in Fukuyama’s end of history?

War has persisted throughout history ever since the dawn of mankind. That’s probably the best indicator that it will persist for all eternity. Why should it cease? War for the purposes of this text is not merely the outright hostilities, the firing guns and resounding battle cries. It is a constant strife that is being played out on a day-to-day basis which now and again erupts into its dramatic form of the opposing armies acting on the theatre of war. Why do we broaden the definition of war? If only because casualties – and we mean loss of lives – are not necessarily the highest during the time of the roaring guns. Those sustained during the periods of peace may be just as high or even higher. Case in point: the Yeltsin era in Russia lasting for roughly ten years. Within that decade, life expectancy plummeted from 70 down to 60, which means that the country’s loss of lives amounted to the magnitude comparable to that during any war, which is millions. This loss of life was brought about by social and economic reforms i.e. steps taken supposedly to make the living standards better and these were demanded or suggested or advised by the powers outside Russia. The result? Closed down factories, laid off employees, poverty and the attendant disease and demise of many. Were these not regular hostilities?

War has persisted throughout history in one form or another, though we are only made aware of it acutely when we can smell gunpowder, see ruined buildings and maimed bodies. Yet war is the pith and core of existence. We live by it, we draw from it, and, on a more positive note, it tests our character. The Iliad, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, Das Nibelungenlied, Jerusalem Delivered, El Cid, the Battle of Kosovo epic circle, and, and, and, to mention only European literary monuments, they are all about adversity, combat, heroic deeds or cowardly misconduct. Why haven’t our poets and bards composed works of goodness, peace and harmony? Being ones of us, they knew the human psyche and they knew that we wouldn’t feel attracted to stories of goodness and love and charity; they knew that if we had paradise on earth, peaceful coexistence and tolerance of everything, we would have nothing to write about or, to put it in modern terms, nothing to make films about.

Think about it. All literary and religious stuff is about conflict, serious and bitter conflict. Our play and entertainment are all about conflict. Look at the popularity of computer war games, at the popularity of sports which are but epitomes of battles and rivalries; look at the popularity of crime stories, at the popularity of – mind you – Star Wars movie series, as if world wars did not fully satisfy our militant fantasizing! We are hardwired for experiencing conflict in one way or another, much though nowadays we are trying to convince ourselves that the opposite is true. Medieval Christian chroniclers, who most often were Christian priests, i.e. preachers of love and charity, rebuked princes for idly staying at home rather than leading their warriors and knights on conquests. Islam was no better in this respect. The first two or so centuries from its inception were characterized by militant conquests: there were no apostles of Good News but rather mounted warriors wielding curved swords. It is only now that we are squeamish about armed conflicts and frown upon crusades or the conquest of the Americas. And yet we do it in a hypocritical way: we have removed words like war, military campaign or intervention from our polite vocabulary and we call these phenomena spreading or saving democracy, preventing humanitarian disasters, defending prosecuted minorities and what not. Nonetheless, by whatever name a rose is known, it is still a rose.

War runs in our blood. We are biologically designed for conflict, for struggle, for overcoming adversity. No globalization, no unification of nations, no removal of class, religious, racial, economic differences will ever do away with war. Conflict in general and war in particular is a result of (i) biology which manifests itself in (ii) economy and (iii) ideology.

(i) The otherwise scientifically-minded Western Man knows it very well as he firmly believes in the evolutionary mechanism i.e. the differentiation of species and struggle for existence. The animal world – and we are part of it, just an extension – is all about fight for survival, competing for females, guarding one’s breeding and hunting grounds. Genetically related individuals (individuals related by blood, as men of old would have said) form in-groups (families, clans, tribes, nations), where loyalty to its members has a top survival value. Heroic literature exploits the motif of loyalty and its moral counterpart, which is treason, to the full. That is how the biological mechanism of in-group loyalty and out-group exclusion has sublimated into ideas, and these have found reflection in works of art and, broadly, ideology, and in all this which is generally referred to as culture. Nations are a biological phenomenon. Ethnicity, not only race, can be determined by looking into genes! No wonder then that ethnic differences are the main fault lines along which conflicts arise. True, different human groups may from time to time exist as neighbours, never really merging with each other, but inevitably their coexistence must end in an eruption of hostilities.

A note here. Some say humans behave according to the dictates of the culture they live in or are born into, hence a change of cultural surroundings will result in the change of the individual’s behaviour, as if man were a piece of malleable stuff to be shaped at will. Wrong. Culture in its broadest sense is the sublimation of biology, not the other way round. Man creates culture; culture does not create man. Islam practised by white Europeans would look entirely different than Islam practised by Arabs and, similarly, Christianity practised by Arabs would not resemble that practised by Europeans.

(ii) In their daily struggle for survival human groups compete for the scarcity of resources and land. This economic competition is yet another powerful source of conflict and, eventually, war. Economy, i.e. the struggle to survive on a daily basis, brings into conflict also the interests of the members of the in-group. Some are employers, others are employees: some make a living from capital, others from labour. There arises a clash between the haves and the have-nots, ending up in violent revolutions. The dispossessed or simply less affluent members of society attempt to rid the well-to-do of their property, the latter defend themselves. A dream of a peaceful coexistence dictated creating a classless society where everybody’s income had to be levelled. That led to civil wars and ultimate impoverishment of whole nations, from Cuba to North Korea. The French revolutionaries, once they launched guillotining people, including their co-revolutionists, just could not stop doing it. Much the same was true of the Russian Bolsheviks: on one hand they started murdering themselves (Comrade Stalin had Comrade Trotsky killed in the far-flung Mexico where the latter had spent years in exile) and purging the party ranks, on the other they starved their own people, peasants and workers, on whose behalf they began the revolution in the first place. The “achievements” of the medieval notorious inquisition pale in comparison to the millions butchered, tortured and imprisoned in concentration camps in Soviet Russia. Think of it: all that was done for the happiness of future generations of a classless and nationless society.

(iii) Ideology, as said above, is the expression of biological instincts. If it takes the form of a religion, it becomes a weapon by means of which a nation’s dominance, conquest, or privileged position is most powerfully explained by the will of a god or gods. To a believer this religious reality is stronger than the physical one. Consider Muslim suicidal attacks or Christian executions of physicians in front of American abortionist clinics. The survival value of a religion may raise one race above others to the status of a chosen people with all attendant consequences; it may create social strata like a caste system in India which, as it has a blessing from a godhead, it is unthinkable to change; it can fossilize the relationship of dominance and subservience. The Western Man tends to disregard religions as superstition so much that he does not accept the facts that believers of whatever faith are ready to sacrifice their life for a cause.

Some of the systems have been advanced for the sole purpose of blessing the whole of humanity with a pretense of introducing an age of eternal peace and brotherhood. Recall the French and Bolshevik revolutions, globalism or economic and political unions of all types. They are all doomed to fail as they run counter to biological reality, which is constant differentiation and the resulting strife. A new ideology (religion) must first overcome the resistance of the followers of the old one(s), and then or even while ousting the old beliefs, it itself splits into new sub-movements of the first original one. Consider Christianity with its many denominations and the socialist or communist movements, Christianity’s archenemy, which ended up with as many heresies. The movement of whatever kind begins with conflict with ideological out-groups and ends up as a house divided against itself. And then, again, the biologically-conditioned in-group loyalty and out-group exclusion prevail: Catholic, Muslim or communist nations are very often bitter enemies. The shared faith or ideology lose to blood ties.

Is there a solution to wars? Everlasting peace? None, really.

Consider uniting the peoples of the earth in one “nation” (globalization) in the hope of achieving everlasting peace. Quite apart from the feasibility of such an idea and the fact that there will be resistance to it, one nation is no guarantee of a life without conflicts. After all, all homogeneous nations have experienced civil wars. Just one example. The English people were torn by the War of the Roses, then the Cromwellian revolution, then a part of the nation settled down in North America and rebelled against their brothers on the old continent only to wage a fratricidal war of secession among themselves. Much the same story can be told about all other nations around the globe. So, if a nation’s life is rife with conflict, how much more the life of an artificial one, like the Soviet or European Union?

Consider uniting the peoples of the earth by imposing on them one religion, ideology, or a universal lack thereof or indifference (which nowadays goes by the name of tolerance) to all beliefs. Again, we know from history such an attempt is doomed to fail. Remember the initially universal Christianity: one did not have to wait long till it produced Arianism and other heresies, then it split into Orthodox and Western branches; the Western branch gave rise to a number of heresies and split into Catholics and Protestants, who in turn gave rise to numerous denominations thereof. Much the same held good for political ideologies (a form of lay religion) where the socialist or communist movement kept dividing itself into opposing and hostile factions, like national or international socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Eurocommunism (Gramscians), liberation theology (social Christianity)… Russian Communists used military intervention to quell the aspirations of Czechoslovak communists; Comrade Tito was hated by Stalinists, and Chairman Mao was insulted by Stalin for a purpose. Any global ideology with all-encompassing tolerance is sure to follow that way. No doubt about it.

Man thought that religion would overcome national sentiment. Man thought lay ideologies would overcome national sentiment. Both failed miserably. Supposedly suppressed or eradicated national feelings all of a sudden revive as was the case at the outset of the First World War, when socialist parties previously renouncing nationalism turned out to be patriotic; when international soviet communism adopted national colouring during the Great Patriotic War and so on.

Consider uniting the peoples of the earth economically. That, too, will inevitably lead to differentiation in the level of affluence and the resulting tensions between the top and the bottom dogs, sparking social unrest, violent clashes and then revolutions. And we should not forget that also here we may have a hard time deciding whether we develop our global economy according to free market ideas of Austrian school, Keynesian economics, socialist welfare and, and, and…

Eternal peace is not only impossible but also undesirable. Eternal peace and brotherhood of men would mean stagnation, lack of development, death. Yes, there is life because there is death.

All these factors – biological, ideological and economic – are prime movers behind conflict and war. Nations or social classes, ideologies or economic interests, they all exist, keep splitting and competing with each other. When present-day democracies come to blows with regimes as they call them, they only prove that war is inevitable and do not even see that those ‘regimes’ fight against democracies with precisely the same amount of conviction of waging the righteous, if not holy, war.

The modern Western man may laugh at the medieval methods of suppressing dissent or at the fatwas issued by ayatollahs, thinking himself above such measures, but he is none wiser. He moves in the same biological treadmill of eternal – internal, ethnic, sectarian, political, religious, social and even marital! – strife. The enemy is called names – heretic, fascist, racist, imperialist, colonizer, dictator – is burnt at the stake, excluded from polite society, judged by a court or becomes anathema. His right to free speech is denied by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or political correctness or you name it. War rather than brotherhood. To feel good we all need the bad guys somewhere around. To combat the bad guys gives us a purpose in life. To think of it, only very few of us realise that we ourselves are the bad guys (kafirs, infidels, aggressors) for those whom we regard as bad guys. In a noble attempt to impose our righteous ways on others we meet with resistance. Resistance means conflict and conflict ultimately results in war. That’s the eternal circle of life and death described in The Iliad, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, Das Nibelungenlied, Jerusalem Delivered, El Cid, the Battle of Kosovo epic circle. We have not been born for a life in liberty, equality and brotherhood. These words only reflect sentimental fantasizing enshrined in the wishful thinking of human rights, but have nothing to do with reality.

To forestall Christian believers’ opposition to the observations described above, let us remind them of Christ’s words, which read: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen.” If they are true believers, they had better repeat after the psalmist: “Praise be to the Lord, my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” The realist atheists and agnostics as scientifically-minded people should not stand in need of being convinced that war is part and parcel of our earthly existence.

New Austrian Gov"t Promises "Sanctions" Against Migrants Who Don"t Integrate

Authored by Jacob Boejesson via The Daily Caller,

Austria’s incoming conservative government is taking a hard line on immigration by promising “sanctions” against those “refusing to integrate.”

Sebastian Kurz, 31, is set to become the world’s youngest leader after winning the parliamentary election in October with his People’s Party. Kurz will serve as chancellor with support from the populist Freedom Party.

A new platform unveiled Monday calls for faster deportations and a halt to illegal immigration. The main emphasis for migrants will be put on integrating to Austrian society by adopting local values.

Monthly payments to migrants will be cut to 365 euros ($432 USD) with the possibility of earning an “integration bonus” of 155 euros ($184 USD).

“We want to protect our homeland Austria as a liveable place with all its cultural assets,” the new government’s platform reads, according to The Local.

 

“This includes deciding for ourselves who can immigrate and live with us and ending illegal immigration.”

The new government has also proposed reforms that would allow authorities to access migrants’ cell phones to verify their identity and travel routes. Migrants may also be asked to hand over any cash and belongings as they enter the country to help fund their welfare.

An estimated 5,500 people marched against the new government Monday in the capital of Vienna.

Protestors shouted “Nazis out” and “Refugees welcome” in response to the Freedom Party’s role in the new administration. The protests were small compared to the last time the Freedom Party entered government in 2000, when an estimated 150,000 participated in demonstrations.

PCR: "In A Triumph For Feminism Police Say A Mistletoe Kiss Without Consent Is Rape"

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Criminalizing a bit of Christmas fun has to make you wonder...

Is there any aspect of our life left into which the police state does not intrude?

Parents are regulated as to how they discipline their children. Spankings that were the tool of choice in my day are now illegal. Spanking is considered child abuse and can result in state seizure of the child and prosecution of the parent.

The state prescribes the terms on which children can be transported in cars. The cars themselves can only be designed within safety and fuel economy parameters determined by the state.

The unsupervised children at play of my generation no longer exist outside of small towns. Not that long ago I reported on the arrest of a mother on the grounds that she permitted an underage kid to play unsupervised in the front yard of the home on a cul-de-sac. The arrest was made on the false report of a neighbor. The police seized the opportunity to arrest a mother on the basis of “failure to supervise an underage child.” The family was traumatized. The mother was put in jail, the child in Child Protective Custody, and the father rushed home from work to see if he could rescue his family from the intrusion of the American Police State. It has happened to many, and Americans sit there sucking their thumbs, hoping the lion will choose another antelope.

The parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles of my day would all have been locked up. My entire generation would have been raised in orphanages.

When the state substitutes its judgment for that of parents, it takes the job away from them. Even within the same family children differ. Parents have to find the best approach for each child. Moreover, children who are always supervised never grow up. They learn neither responsibility nor street smarts. Children are even regulated how they can play. No pointing the finger and saying “bang, bang.” Even words are policed, some words no longer being permissible.

Perhaps someone has studied the impact on culture of such intense state intrusion into private life. And there are other culture-changing factors. Consider Identity Politics. The other day I listened to a recording of Barbara Streisand singing “A Woman In Love” from 1980, and Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” from years ago. Both of these performers are gifted with beautiful and powerful voices. I wondered if they have a counterpart today.

I haven’t time to listen to much music, so I do not know. But the thought occurred to me that these are songs about love between a woman and a man. Moreover, in the official videos, the man is white.

Identity Politics is gradually delegitimizing heterosexual relationships, especially if the male is white, as Identity Politics defines the white heterosexual male as the oppressor of all other races and genders.

Having heard that in “advanced circles” women are subjected to peer pressure not to have relationships with “white, sexist, racist males,” I was wondering if today Streisand would have to have a black lover in her video and whether Dion would have to pitch her song to a lesbian lover.
Otherwise, would they be the hits they were during their time? Indeed, could Dion survive using the politically incorrect word, “lady”?

People are born into what exists. They have no experience of what previously existed. Therefore, they do not know what has been lost. This generational effect is the best ally of the police state.

People born into a country, in which unaccountable police can brutalize and murder and steal, born into a country, the government of which declares itself above both domestic and international law and the US Constitution, a country that ignores constitutional protections such as habeas corpus and due process of law, a country that based on a false claim that the country is indispensable and exceptional claims the right to destroy entire countries whose governments refuse to follow Washington’s orders, a country that claims the right to control explanations and that brands those who tell the truth to be conspiracy theorists, Russian agents, anti-semites, and enemies of the people, know no different. What to my generation is totalitarian horror is normal to them.

That country is the United States of America. It is the most shameful country on earth. The United States is a country whose rulers regard their hegemony as more important than the wellbeing of people and the life of the planet.

If the world is to survive America and if America is to survive as a country in which citizens are permitted free thought, free speech, to make their own decisions, to raise their own children and otherwise to be a free people, Americans will have to get angry at those who are destroying them and reply to the everyday violence that they experience in many different forms with violence of their own.

There are two forces in history. One is ideas. The other is violence. Karl Marx said that ideas, although sometimes effective, such as his own, can become the control mechanism of the ruling class. In contrast, Marx said that violence is the effective force in history.

In Marx’s analysis violence serves the working class, but this is no more than Marx’s assumption. Violence serves those who use it most forcefully.

Today Washington’s violence has brought America up against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Washington has outmatched itself.

US President Trump, by seeking protection from Israel against his own government, has re-ignited Arab hostility to Israel and to the US.

Today Israel is alone, defended only by Washington whose own stupidity has created powerful enemies.

Washington has proved itself incapable of leadership. Russia, China, and Iran have proven that they are capable of leadership, and they are also making it clearer by the day that they are fed up with Washington.

It is past time for Americans to get fed up with Washington, its lies and its abuse of power.

"Rotten To The Core" OSI Shares Plunge 15% After Muddy Waters Unveils Short Position

Muddy Waters" founder Carson Block unveiled his latest short play Wednesday morning. And instead of being another obviously fraudulent Chinese company, Block"s target is OSI Systems, an American firm that manufactures security equipment x-ray machines and metal detectors. The company is best known as the owner of Rapiscan Systems - a division that manufacturers scanning machines used at airports.

In a 13-minute video, Block lays out his research, explaining how he suspects OSI’s executives are guilty of multiple violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for paying kickbacks to local officials who in turn rewarded it lucrative contracts. But as if corruption weren"t enough, Block explains how roughly half of the company’s EBITDA is tied to turnkey contract in Mexico that could disappear as soon as next month.

The company is "rotten to the core" warns Block, "we have smoking gun evidence" as the importance of the contract to the company’s bottom line has been obscured by the fact that it represents only 15% of total revenues.

Tracing the threads of corruption led Block to Albania, Mexico and Puerto Rico, three locations where OSI has won lucrative concessions by offering kickbacks to local government officials - kickbacks that were readily accepted.

“I know this will sound crazy - but Albania is a pretty corrupt place," Block says, before explaining that it was practically "an open secret" that OSI benefited from bribing local officials.

For one of OSI’s concessions in Albania, the company turned over half of the contract to a local shell company for roughly $4.50, according to official documents.

As is typical when Block announces a short, OSI - which has a market cap of about $1.3 billion - was down about 15%.

In a statement provided to Zero Hedge, Block said he’s short OSI because he feels it’s “rotten to the core."

“We are short OSI Systems, Inc. because we think it is rotten to the core. We believe it obtained a major turnkey contract in Albania through corruption. It is likely that OSIS’s accounts are misstated as a result.

 

We believe the pricing of its Mexico turnkey contract does not stand up to scrutiny. This contract is up for renewal in 2018, and we estimate that it accounted for more than 50% of OSIS’s FY2017 EBITDA.

 

Non-renewal or a material reduction in pricing of the Mexico contract would seemingly have a significant impact on OSIS’s profits. Former employees’ statements support our view that OSIS is rotting from the inside."

Block’s latest bet comes on the heels of a stunning victory for his firm. Last month, Huishan Dairy entered provisional liquidation, validating Block’s call - made about 10 months earlier - that the company’s shares would go to zero.

Now, the question is: Will he do it again?
 

Don"t Just Give Thanks. Pay It Forward One Act Of Kindness At A Time

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

It’s been a hard, heart-wrenching, stomach-churning kind of year filled with violence and ill will.

It’s been a year of hotheads and blowhards and killing sprees and bloodshed and takedowns.

It’s been a year in which tyranny took a step forward and freedom got knocked down a few notches.

It’s been a year with an abundance of bad news and a shortage of good news.

It’s been a year of too much hate and too little kindness.

Now we find ourselves approaching that time of year when, as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we’re supposed to give thanks as a nation and as individuals for our safety and our freedoms.

It’s not an easy undertaking.

How do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded? How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day? How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?

It’s not going to happen overnight. Or with one turkey dinner. Or with one day of thanksgiving.

Thinking good thoughts, being grateful, counting your blessings and adopting a glass-half-full mindset are fine and good, but don’t stop there.

This world requires doers, men and women (and children) who will put those good thoughts into action.

It says a lot (and nothing good) about the state of our world and the meanness that seems to have taken center stage that we now have a day (World Kindness Day) devoted to making the world more collectively human in thoughts and actions. The idea for the day started after a college president in Japan was mugged in a public place and nobody helped him.

Unfortunately, you hear about these kinds of incidents too often.

This is how evil prevails: when good men and women do nothing.

By doing nothing, the onlookers become as guilty as the perpetrator.

It works the same whether you’re talking about kids watching bullies torment a fellow student on a playground, bystanders watching someone dying on a sidewalk, or citizens remaining silent in the face of government atrocities.

There’s a term for this phenomenon where people stand by, watch and do nothing—even when there is no risk to their safety—while some horrific act takes place (someone is mugged or raped or bullied or left to die): it’s called the bystander effect.

Historically, this bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings.

So what can you do about this bystander effect?

Be a hero, suggests psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

Be an individual. Listen to your inner voice. Take responsibility.

Recognize injustice. Don’t turn away from suffering.

Refuse to remain silent. Take a stand. Speak up. Speak out.

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation,” stated Holocaust Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1986.

 

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, too many Americans have opted to remain silent when it really matters while instead taking a stand over politics rather than human suffering.

That needs to change.

I don’t believe people are inherently monsters. We just need to be more conscientious and engaged and helpful.

The Good Samaritans of this world don’t always get recognized, but they’re out there, doing their part to push back against the darkness.

For instance, earlier this year in Florida, a group of 80 people formed a human chain in order to rescue a family of six—four adults and two young boys—who were swept out to sea by a powerful rip current in Panama City Beach. One by one, they linked hands and stretched as far as their chain would go. One by one, they rescued those in trouble and pulled each other in.

There’s a moral here for what needs to happen in this country if we only can band together and prevail against the riptides that threaten to overwhelm us.

Here’s what I suggest.

Instead of just giving thanks this holiday season with words that are too soon forgotten, why not put your gratitude into action with deeds that spread a little kindness, lighten someone’s burden, and brighten some dark corner?

I’m not just talking about volunteering at a soup kitchen or making a donation to a charity that does good work, although those are fine things, too.

What I’m suggesting is something that everyone can do no matter how tight our budgets or how crowded our schedules.

Pay your blessings forward.

Engage in acts of kindness. Smile more. Fight less.

Focus on the things that unite instead of that which divides. Be a hero, whether or not anyone ever notices.

Do your part to push back against the meanness of our culture with conscious compassion and humanity. Moods are contagious, the good and the bad. They can be passed from person to person. So can the actions associated with those moods, the good and the bad.

Even holding the door for someone or giving up your seat on a crowded train are acts of benevolence that, magnified by other such acts, can spark a movement.

Imagine a world in which we all lived in peace.

John Lennon tried to imagine such a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, no greed or hunger. He was a beautiful dreamer whose life ended with an assassin’s bullet on December 8, 1980.

Still, that doesn’t mean the dream has to die, too.

There’s something to be said for working to make that dream a reality. As Lennon reminded his listeners, “War is over, if you want it.”

The choice is ours, if we want it.

Mass Shootings, Mass Psychology, And Self-Defense

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

There is an unfortunate correlation between crises and catastrophes and mass psychology.

For those with a decent long-term memory, you may have noticed that the frequency of attacks and tragedies taking place today around the world is far above and beyond what occurred 10 years ago. So much so that many in the public have moved beyond the point of outrage and have now embraced complacency.

The mass shooting issue, for example, once inspired fevered debate over gun rights. Not so much anymore. While I am happy that the relentless attempts by leftists to exploit every shooting as a tool for their gun grabbing agenda have taken a backseat, I see a trend in another direction which is equally dangerous. That trend is a move towards acceptance that "these things happen," instead of a healthy discussion on real solutions (and no, more gun control is not one of them).

A decade ago the Vegas shooting would have inspired media and social discussion for at least a year. Now, the story disappears in two weeks and is replaced with 10 others. I will be surprised if the latest church shooting in Texas in which 26 people were killed stays on the news feeds for more than a few days.

Where does this complacency come from?

It is a complex problem, but one that I think relates to the state of decline within any particular society. In Carl Jung"s The Undiscovered Self, Jung mentions a consistent element of latent sociopathy and psychopathy within most cultures. Perhaps 10% of people within a society are latent sociopaths and psychopaths, and around 1% or less represent full blown sociopaths/psychopaths. Most of the latent people will never become truly dangerous if they are living within a culture that is healthy and morally balanced. In fact, those with inherent sociopathic traits can become very high functioning human beings who are adept at careers that many other people avoid (surgeons and career soldiers are two examples).

However, in the event that there is cultural rot and a degradation of principles, environmental influences come into play and latent sociopaths/psychopaths have the potential to mutate into something far more dangerous. Jung examines this dynamic as an explanation for the sudden and accelerated decline of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s into totalitarianism and moral relativism. When the mentally disturbed 1% turns into 10% or more, entire nations can be dragged along into the abyss.

As a litmus test I find it valuable to look at popular culture when trying to determine if a society is on the brink of collapse into a singularity of moral relativism, because popular culture often reflects these elements more honestly than the supposed "experts" will. When examining Germany before its fall, I recommend studying the films of Fritz Lang; particularly his movie "M" released in 1931, which depicts a serial killer with a penchant for children being put on trial by a group of underworld criminals, not because they abhor what he does on moral grounds, but because his activities are drawing too much unwanted attention from authorities on their own criminal enterprises. If the dark world of "M" doesn"t perfectly showcase the decline of Germany, I don"t know what does.

Today, we are constantly surrounded by popular culture which leans towards the morally relative; stories in which the heroes must become monsters in order to defeat other supposedly worse monsters.

At another level, our popular culture tells us that it is only the fantastical, the super powered and the government contracted heroes that have the ability to affect change and disrupt disaster.  Underlying all of this seems to be a narrative of defeat; the notion that there is nothing the average person can do.  And, of course, we are also bombarded with stories in which gluttony and decadence are applauded while anyone that takes a more responsible path is portrayed as unhappy or joyless in the long run.

Translate this to the developing trend of mass shootings around the world and the public reaction to them. On one end of the spectrum, in the past it was the sociopathic left that saw mass death as an opportunity to enforce political control over gun rights advocates, with the goal of eventually achieving total disarmament. These people do not care about the dead, let alone logic, they only care about furthering their agenda.  They see government power as the answer to every problem.

If you were to hold up examples like the Paris or Mumbai attacks to gun grabbers and point out that disarmament only makes mass shootings EASIER for criminals and terrorists, they would not listen. Obviously, if any of the citizens including the off-duty police officers had been armed in Paris, the attack might have been stopped much sooner.

In the case of the church shooting near San Antonio, that attack WAS interrupted by an armed neighbor of the church who used his rifle to fend off Devin Kelley, forcing him to escape in his vehicle. Had that neighbor not been armed, the massacre might have gone on much longer. Had one of the people within the church been armed, the attack might have ended in seconds, as we saw in Denver in 2007.

Now, as I said earlier, there are sociopathic members of the political left that seek to take advantage of these scenarios, but these people have fallen by the wayside recently.

On the political right, sadly, I have seen another brand of sociopathy rising, with some arguing that all the people within the San Antonio church that were unarmed "deserved to die." This is just as dangerous a mentality as the exploitations of the left. If the liberty movement itself sets aside empathy and resorts to sensationalist or morally relative methods to drive forward a political agenda, then we are only hastening the fall of our culture, not protecting it. And, we become no better that the leftist disarmament thugs we abhor.

In between these two extremes sits a coagulated mass of people who simply don"t care much as long as a particular disaster doesn"t involve them. These are the folks who are uninterested in solutions and don"t really want to hear anything about it. It is these people who tend to become wreckage floating on the tides of history; their lack of concern eventually comes back to haunt them in the future.

So, if these are the wrong ways to approach the mass shooting problem, then what are the right ways?

I think it is vital that Americans in particular maintain our care and concern for the victims of these events. The solution to mass shootings is clearly a responsibly armed populace.  According to all the stats on active shooters, defense by citizens is the only factor that seems to make much difference. But to convince more and more people of this requires a level of conscience and empathy that inspires confidence, and perhaps brotherhood. When people know that you give a damn and aren;t simply pursuing an agenda like the political left does, it is more likely that they will listen to what you have to say.

As I noted in my article How To Stop All Future Mass Shootings, the Vegas attack was organized by someone who was smart enough to avoid a point-blank engagement in a city and state in which concealed-carry firearms are more common. Point-blank attacks are by far the most common because they are generally attempted by people who have minimal training or because the attackers are relatively certain that their victims will be disarmed in the area they have chosen (gun free zones).

The Vegas attacker (or attackers) chose to use sniper-like tactics to prolong the massacre. However, what this shows is that an armed citizenry is a factor or barrier in how an attack is planned. With properly trained and armed security overwatching major events along with an armed population, there may never be another mass shooting again.

This is what Americans should be talking about, yet, there is no practical discussion on solving the problem. Is this a symptom of impending collapse within our society? Possibly. If there was ever an honorable task for the liberty movement today, it is to inspire solutions and to maintain moral balance. These shootings and other crisis events should not be forgotten within a week. They should at the very least be a learning process, a means by which we evolve our way of life and become more self reliant and by extension more safe.

If you are not a conceal- or open-carry proponent, then you should be. If you understand that the majority of shooting events that are stopped are stopped by average citizens that are armed, then it should only follow that you should become one of those armed citizens. In the meantime, it is not for us who are consistently armed to admonish disarmed victims as if they "deserve what they got." Their failure is our failure as well. For if we are not working diligently to convince others of the importance of citizen self defense, then we have contributed to the conditions that led to these massacres taking place.

There are methods of stemming the tide of social collapse. There are in fact solutions. They begin with each individual acting in small ways and big ways everyday. Complacency and zealotry are the enemy, as well as those that would encourage such mentalities.

Scientists Look For A Cure For Politically Undesirable Behavior

Via GEFIRA,

The ‘Free World’ has taken on where the Soviet scientists and psychiatrists left off.

German and American scientists of renowned Universities in Bonn and Lübeck do research on treatment for politically undesirable behaviour like their Soviet colleagues from the infamous Serbsky Central Research Institute in Moscow. In the Soviet Union people who protested the system had to undergo psychiatric treatment.

Vladimir Bukovsky, a world-known dissident survived one and described it.The same will be the fate of the so called Free World’s citizens if they fail to conform to the idea of a multi-cultural society. The powers that be have given a signal, and obliging, complaisant scientists are already busy working on bettering our collective and individual psyche. Apart from homophobia and Islamophobia, xenophobia is another psychiatric condition that needs to undergo therapy...hormonal therapy.

Throughout history, the world has been torn by two opposing factors that face each other with daggers drawn. These are natural biological, and unnatural forces, or reality and dystopia. It is natural for a human being to want to possess things and work as little as possible; to counter it, dystopian socialists, communists or Christian heretics came up with an idea of a society governed by the principle: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

It was supposed to work. And it failed miserably everywhere it was installed and implemented, from Cuba to East Germany, to the Soviet Union, to North Korea. 

The human being, an evolutionary extension of the animal world, is endowed with certain indelible features at the genetic level. Group loyalty and fear of aliens are among them. Man cannot survive alone. Mankind is not a biologically monolithic, homogeneous family. Rather, it is made up of human groups (clans, tribes, nations, races) that as a result of their long development are moving apart from each other. Biology is the basis on which human communities create culture and ultimately civilization, not the other way round.

Human groups, which have come into being as a result of living separately from each other for ages and so have developed incompatible cultures and religions, compete for resources i.e. for survival. Since man cannot make it through life on his own, he is a part of a group (clan, tribe, nation). In order for the group to function well and safeguard its (and simultaneously its members’ survival success), each group member is equipped with two psychological mechanisms (i) in-group loyalty and (ii) out-group enmity.

Group members collaborate, and support each other even to the point of sacrificing themselves for the whole. That’s the origin of altruism. Defection to another group means weakening one’s own group and strengthening the alien group, which has always been regarded as the gravest mortal sin: treason. (Dante’s hell has Judas Iscariot in its centre, which is the severest punishment for it).Altruism towards members of the out-group is something between in-group loyalty and defection. Its exuberant instances are technically referred to as pathological altruism.

The phenomenon can be compared to the rivalry among soccer teams. The team’s (survival) objective is to win the cup. The prize will be shared by all team members. In order to achieve it, each one of them has to cooperate with the others: no cooperation with members of any other, opposing, team is thinkable. A team’s player may want to sacrifice his personal career for another player from the same team by helping him to score as many goals as possible and thus becoming the team’s star, or by fouling the opposite team’s player and thus risk being sent out of the playground (death), thus enhancing the chances of his team’s win, but the same will not make things easier on the playground for any member of the opposing team. Helping members of the other team means lessening the chances for winning the cup (survival) of one’s own team and, ultimately one’s own chances.

If my well-being and survival depends on that of the group that I am a member of, and, conversely, if my group’s survival is contingent on the cooperation, altruism and self-sacrifice of its members, including me, then in-group loyalty is in high demand whereas out-group (pathological) altruism is detrimental. That’s evolutionary mechanism. That’s game theory. That’s common sense. Everybody knows it. So do social engineers.

Since social engineers have come up with the idea of building new, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-religious, multi-cultural societies, they have encountered the natural barrier: xenophobia, which is another name for in-group loyalty and out-group avoidance. Xenophobia is a biological mechanism imprinted at the genetic level that carries a survival advantage. It tells an individual to create bonds with members of the same group and be on his guard against aliens.To put it in plain language: xenophobia is practised at the very basic personal level each time parents warn their offspring to be wary of strangers: not to open the door to them, not to trust them. So modern social engineers have a problem. They need to overcome this deeply rooted biological barrier.

A sign has been given, most probably followed by substantial grants and other financial incentives, and so scientists got down to work to find a cure for xenophobia. One of the research teams included psychologists and psychiatrists from Bonn, Tulsa, and Lübeck scientific institutions. Urged by the increasing globalization and the mass migration of peoples, as they say, the mentioned scientists, who otherwise dutifully recognize the evolutionary advantage of the in-group loyalty/out-group exclusion, nevertheless set themselves a task of demonstrating whether oxytocin can enforce the acceptance of aliens and reduce xenophobic out-group rejection. To this end they devised experiments in which subjects were asked to donate a certain amount of money to people in need, either compatriots or refugees. Before the experiment the subjects were screened for the level of xenophobia. During the experiment the subjects were either allowed to act on their own, or were exposed to peer pressure or were administered oxytocin intranasally. It turned out that (i) refugee-directed donation among the subjects scoring low on xenophobia were significantly increased by oxytocin, whereas (ii) oxytocin alone was not enough in the case of the subjects scoring high on xenophobia: their out-group avoidance (or parochial, as it is patronizingly named, altruism) could only be overcome by the orchestrated operation of oxytocin and peer pressure.

The conclusions are obvious.

Citizens of host countries must be forced to accept the influx of aliens whether they like it or not. If they do not comply then, in the name of high-flown ideals of universal brotherhood of men, they will be forced either by peer pressure or by oxytocin or by both.

Oxytocin suits this purpose very well as this hormone raises the emotional well-being, it so to say oh-so humane. Like Aldous Huxley’s soma in his book Brave New World. The human being with his biologically-driven likes and dislikes is not to be tolerated, he must be changed. By ideological interaction or by chemistry. He must not be left alone. He must accept what he does not like not merely passively. He must be made to like what he previously disliked.

There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. The ‘Free World’ has taken on where the Soviet ‘scientists’ left off.

Mass Shootings: The Military-Entertainment Complex's Culture Of Violence Turns Deadly

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

This latest mass shooting in Las Vegas that left more than 50 people dead and more than 500 injured is as obscure as they come: a 64-year-old retiree with no apparent criminal history, no military training, and no obvious axe to grind opens fire on a country music concert crowd from a hotel room 32 floors up using a semi-automatic gun that may have been rigged to fire up to 700 rounds a minute, then kills himself.

We’re left with more questions than answers, none of them a flattering reflection of the nation’s values, political priorities, or the manner in which the military-industrial complex continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

For starters, why do these mass shootings keep happening? Mass shootings have taken place at churches, in nightclubs, on college campuses, on military bases, in elementary schools, in government offices, and at concerts. This shooting is the deadliest to date.

What is it about America that makes violence our nation’s calling card?

Is it because America is a gun culture?

Is it because guns are so readily available? After all, the U.S. is home to more firearms than adults. Curiously enough, the majority of gun-related deaths in the U.S. are suicides, not homicides.

Is it because entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office?

Is it because the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games) - what professor Roger Stahl refers to as “militainment” - that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire?

Is it because the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world? America spends more money on war than other countries. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. And the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military - a standing army.

Or is the Second Amendment to blame, as many continue to suggest? Would there be fewer mass shootings if tighter gun control laws were enacted?

Then again, could it be, as some have speculated, that these shootings are all part of an elaborate plan to incite fear and chaos, heighten national tensions and shift us that much closer to a complete lockdown? After all, the military and our militarized police forces have been predicting and preparing for exactly this kind of scenario for years now.

Perhaps there’s no single one factor to blame for this gun violence. However, there is a common denominator, and that is a war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex that has invaded almost every aspect of our lives.

Ask yourself: Who are these shooters modelling themselves after? Where are they finding the inspiration for their weaponry and tactics? Whose stance and techniques are they mirroring?

In almost every instance, you can connect the dots back to the military.

We are a military culture.

We have been a nation at war for most of our existence.

We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

In order to sustain the nation’s appetite for war over the long haul in spite of the costs of war in lives lost and dollars spent—and little else to show for it—the military has had to work overtime to churn out pro-war, pro-military propaganda. It’s exactly what President Eisenhower warned against (“the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”) in his 1961 farewell address.

We didn’t listen then and we’re still not listening now.

All the while, the government’s war propaganda machine has grown more sophisticated and entrenched in American culture.

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies such as X-Men and Transformers is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots aimed at indoctrinating the American populace into believing that patriotism means throwing their support behind the military wholeheartedly and unquestioningly.

Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since.

Remember, just before this Vegas shooting gave the media, the politicians and the easily distracted public something new to obsess over, the headlines were dominated by President Trump’s feud with the NFL over players kneeling during the national anthem.

That, too, was yet another example of how much the military entertainment complex - which paid $53 million of taxpayer money between 2012 and 2015 to pro sports teams for military tributes—has infiltrated American culture.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

When you talk about the Las Vegas mass shooting, you’re not dealing with a single shooter scenario. Rather, you’re dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

You want to stop the gun violence?

Stop the worship of violence that permeates our culture.

Stop glorifying the military industrial complex with flyovers and salutes during sports spectacles.

Stop acting as if there is anything patriotic about military exercises and occupations that bomb hospitals and schools.

Stop treating guns and war as entertainment fodder in movies, music, video games, toys, amusement parks, reality TV and more.

Stop distributing weapons of war to the local police and turning them into extensions of the military—weapons that have no business being anywhere but on a battlefield.

Most of all, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, stop falling for the military industrial complex’s psychological war games.

An Act of Pure Evil

An Act of Pure Evil

By

Cognitive Dissonance

When I selected the name of my avatar here on Zero Hedge and began posting comments, then articles when I became a contributing editor, there was deliberate and conscious intent on my part to disturb the cognitive dissonance of the herd. Rarely do we personally grow unless sufficiently prodded with a poker. 

My intent with this article is NOT to stick a finger in the wound and cause more pain. Not in the least. But "We the People" have an extremely complex, some might say insane, relationship with murder/death/kill. To put it bluntly, we have been deeply conditioned to believe certain "types" of killing are just and righteous, therefore "legal". More importantly, we believe that just about the only righteous killing can, and must, be conducted by the state and its duly appointed apparatchiks.

To be even more blunt....that"s screwed up. This article illuminates both the state"s, and our, hypocrisy.

WARNING!! Trigger alert. Do NOT read this if you wish to remain comfortable with your belief systems.

This is being written the day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas and it in no way diminishes the horror and suffering experienced by all involved. I cannot imagine what it was like to be watching an outdoor concert and suddenly find myself under fire with nowhere to run and no place to hide.

It was truly horrific, senseless and so very sad. Or as President Trump declared in his morning after address to the nation, this was “an act of pure evil”.

There is no doubt over the ensuing days, weeks and months millions of words will be spoken and written about this singular act of violence perpetrated upon an unaware and unprepared crowd of dessert revelers. From arm chair psychologists such as this author to so called ‘experts’, we will be bombarded with one part insight to every hundred parts nonsense.

No doubt the nonsense will prevail.

I suspect some readers will not take kindly to me going off script so soon after what is being billed as a national tragedy. In my defense, the difference between me and your average sociopath politician is I am attempting to empower the reader by expanding our minds while they are trying to dis-empower the reader via carefully crafted propaganda and cognitive manipulation.

They want you to refasten your blinders while I wish to tear them off.

I absolutely guarantee you nearly every single political leader and wannabe is thinking only one thought at this precise moment. How can I use this situation to my political advantage? You cannot participate in modern day politics and not think in this manner, regardless of how good and honest you might claim to be.

When you swim in the swamp, you employ the same techniques and thought processes as all the other swamp dwellers. At best it is an occupational hazard, at worst an all consuming disease. Unfortunately very few escape with their morals and dignity intact and none succeed in draining, or even changing the flow of the fetid swamp waters.

But this isn’t the purpose of this screed at all. Either we fully recognize, and are repulsed by, the nature of the swamp and those who dwell within while taking concrete and purposeful steps to distance ourselves as much as possible from all that the swamp encompasses. Or we have learned to mostly ignore it, live with it, benefit from it or directly participate in it.

I tell myself I’m somewhere in-between, but that just might be my ego talking.

There are no innocents, only collaterally damaged individuals. But there are plenty who declare ourselves innocent, claiming the Sergeant Schultz defense of “I see nothing, I know nothing and I wasn’t even (t)here”.

I do not dispute the fact that planning and preparing for, and then carrying out, an act of mass murder and mayhem is indefensible and inexcusable. I assume the reader feels the same way I do, that the person who perpetuated this bloodshed with forethought and malice was mentally deranged and possibly even ‘evil’, regardless of the details of motive and method.

Where we might depart the same path is in how we characterize mentally deranged as defined by a nearly equally mentally deranged society. What, exactly, is the difference between a ‘crazy’ individual shooting from the 32^nd floor of a hotel into a large crowd of people with conscious intent to kill and a nation’s military lobbing cruise missiles or dropping bombs onto an opposing nation’s population centers, occupied hospitals or upon other so called ‘innocents’ with the same conscious intent to kill?

Now I am absolutely positive the reader’s mind is racing through the thousand and one excuses, reasons and rationalizations we have been programmed with, and conditioned to believe and repeat, in order to justify homicide, murder really, to ourselves and to our peers in the name of ‘war’.

I get it. I understand. I am the product of the same conditioning and propaganda everyone else has been exposed to. But the question remains entirely reasonable and relevant. How is homicide by the state any different than homicide by an individual, whether on a mass or individual basis?

Once we begin to delve into this thorny issue, the next question is why do “We the People” support one homicidal entity while vigorously condemning the other?

Ever notice how violence conducted in an ‘offensive’ manner is decried as wrong and ‘illegal’, evil even, while violence employed purely in defense of yourself and those around you is accepted as reasonable and justified? After all, civilized people know there are rules to follow when conducting war. You can’t have people just killing and maiming each other willy-nilly with no rules, now can you?

This is precisely why all nations frame war, before, during and after, as unavoidable and defensive in nature. And it’s also the reason why nations routinely engage in false flag operations in order to create plausible deniability and justification for homicide in order to gain, consolidate or hold on to power, wealth and control.

I can drop 1,000 pound bombs on your head or direct a cruise missile through your kitchen window, but I can’t use poison gas, exploding bullets or other such ‘illegal’ methods of particularly gruesome homicide. As if being blown into bits and pieces by a bomb or missile isn’t particularly gruesome or horrifying.

The fact remains we can rationalize away anything we wish to justify, first as individuals and then as a herd, by simply framing the discussion in ways that fit already programmed terms and conditions that justify our actions. Helpfully (thankfully, for we as ‘moral’ individuals might balk at doing so) the programming is already determined, then promoted and placed via state sponsored education and later via the deeply influenced, if not outright controlled, state propaganda arm called mainstream media.

All that remains is for us to not only accept it, but endlessly repeat it back to others, the ultimate positive feedback loop of group-think that reinforces both our conditioning and the continuing acceptance of our conditioning. The base message is usually not that sophisticated, enabling infinite modification by each individual so that state sponsored homicide is not only acceptable, but in many situations desirable and even necessary.

Once we are able to shoehorn distasteful nonconforming tidbits into our internal narrative, we sleep better at night. Never underestimate the lengths to which we will go to believe precisely what we want to believe.

So there you have it. One ‘madman’ with several automatics and lots of ammo randomly, and rapidly, shooting at human fish in a barrel is bad, very bad. Of this there is no argument from me. But college educated chisel jaw all American hero pilots dropping 1,000 pound bombs on hospitals or strafing wedding parties is acceptable as long as he or she is following ‘legal’ orders and plays by the rules of war a la legal murder/homicide.

And if there is some unfortunate targeting snafu or human error that leads to collateral damage, well…that"s just the price others pay for our gloriously righteous war against the evil madmen enemy.

I can’t wait to not only hear what the state will cook up to justify the next large scale war, but how it will be framed so you and I can swallow it hook, line and sinker, then order up pizza and beer just in time to watch the fireworks live on CNN.

A spoon full of sugary rationalization helps the ugly murder and mayhem go down. After all we do have to live with ourselves, now don’t we?

10/02/2017

Cognitive Dissonance

"Are They Really Out To Get Me?"

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

Libertarians and others who seek to be left alone to run their own lives habitually ask themselves the above question regarding their government.

So, what’s the answer? Are they out to get you? Well, unfortunately, the answer isn’t a simple “yes” or “no.” In fact, it’s “yes” and “no.”

The secret to understanding a government’s intentions is that there’s no unified overall objective, sentiment, or approach to dealing with the private sector.

Quite the opposite. With any government, it couldn’t be more fragmented or dysfunctional.

At the very lowest level of any government is the civil service, which is, in any country, a catch-all for all those people who are so lacking in ability and imagination that they’d be unlikely to hold down a job in the private sector. Moreover, their level of motivation is likely to be so low that their dysfunction tends to coincide with extreme inefficiency.

To test this out, one only has to visit the local Department of Motor Vehicles, or a similar agency that does little except charge fees and waste time in order to provide you with a permit, which, were it not required, you could happily do without.

Most anyone, in observing the individual behind the counter, would observe the glassy stare and recognize that, even though this person spends each working day behind this counter and may have been doing so for years, he or she takes virtually no interest in your personal concerns and, if you have questions, tends to find them a nuisance and an interruption in the endless drudgery of issuing paperwork.

Hence the image above. Here we have a pilot in Canada who, when being presented with a computer-driven list of tail letters that were authorized for him to choose from, immediately laughed when he saw the above letters on the list. He then went up to the counter, having circled the ones he chose, and the clerk processed the application brainlessly, without it even registering in his head what the letters suggested.

Later, when the pilot had had the letters emblazoned on his fuselage, it might not have been unlikely that an airport supervisor, seeing them 10 inches high on the side of the plane, raised an objection, at which time the pilot proudly produced his paperwork.

As most anyone in the private sector can attest, as soon as paperwork is presented, the civil servant in question simply says, “Oh,” then nods and lets you go on your way.

But, looking at this more deeply, what we’re witnessing is that that percentage of the population who are (once again) lacking in ability and imagination are easy to programme by the government to become automatons - that even if something strikes them as being somehow incorrect, as long as it has the State stamp of approval, it’s just fine.

And, so, at the lower level of government, we have those who are not “out to get us”; they are merely borderline useless and have ended up with jobs in which that deficiency will not get them fired. They are, therefore, merely “in the way.”

As we go up the chain, however, where those in government are somewhat more ambitious, we find a greater desire to control.

The closer we get to the higher echelons, the more they truly are “out to get you.”

Why should this be? And why should it be that those the higher-ups tend to hate the most are those who are self-motivated, responsible, self-reliant, and imaginative?

Well, unfortunately, the answer is simple. It’s because those are the character traits that they lack. I’m sorry to have to say that in my many years of working directly with politicians and heads of governments, virtually all of them were highly evolved civil-servant types. They had more drive, more guile, and larger egos than the lower-level bureaucrats but were just as parasitical and just as lacking in character traits that would make them productive people.

With these individuals, yes, they are out to get you.

First, if they recognize that you possess the traits that would make you productive, they will be highly jealous and suspicious of you.

Second, they will understand that since you are productive and they are not, they must find a means by which they can use you as a cash cow, to be milked as much as possible and as often as possible.

Their purpose, therefore, is to regulate, control, and tax you in every way possible, and in this they are, quite simply, predators. They may be Tory or Labour, Republican or Democrat, but they are predators nonetheless and, as such, are a genuine threat to both your freedom and your well-being.

Of course, all politicians play the game of party politics, doing all in their power to convince the electorate that they and their party are dramatically different from the opposing party, presenting their own party as “the good guys,” and the opposing party as “the bad guys.”

However, they are, as Judge Andrew Napolitano has repeatedly stated, merely “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Significantly, as both the bottom level and top level are separated by many other layers of bureaucracy, and as their common character traits are inability, dysfunction, etc., there is no cohesive set of principles upon which a government operates. Its purposes are control and usurpation, and they’re backed by an imbroglio of confused and self-contradictory legislation and an increasingly large body of enforcement agencies.

Although the individuals within these agencies tend to be incompetent and dysfunctional, they do tend to remain loyal to the whole. They may not get along with each other, or work toward a unified set of goals, or even have the same beliefs. They do, however, tend to do as they’re told and blindly support the State, above all else.

Once all the above is understood, the individual may do as this pilot has done. He has grasped the dysfunction and parasitical nature of his government and has used their own computer-generated registration code to express his reaction to “authority.”

More to the point, he has used their laws, their bureaucracy to express it legally.

This is an important point. Each individual, essentially, has three choices.

He can either go along with those lesser beings who seek to control his life,

...or he can rebel and possibly be incarcerated for his efforts,

...or he can become creative and recognize that the laws and regulations of his country are a confused mess, written by incompetent people, and do all he can to assert his independence, legally.

He can and should do everything in his power to operate his life as though he’s not owned by the government of his home country, or any other government, for that matter.

Wherever a government tries to control the ownership of his real estate through taxation, he might seek out a jurisdiction that has no property tax. If they try to tax his income, he might seek out a country that has no income tax. If they try to restrict his migration, he might seek a second citizenship that does not restrict him.

Freedom is not merely a vague historical idea, or an excuse to celebrate with firecrackers once a year; it’s a lifetime pursuit and should be taken on as such. The pilot in question has made an initial stab at it. Hopefully he, along with you, the reader, will make it a central facet of his life’s work.

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Ending the Golden Age of Nothingness

Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Well, Ike knew a thing or two; for it is indubitable that he would never have had the necessary foundation of knowledge to whip up the law of universal gravitation without the works of Euclid or Copernicus before him. If not for Bach - and his father"s strict hand - perhaps Beethoven would have been a bricklayer. Without Langton and Magna Carta, the Founding Fathers never write the Constitution.

Those giants of Western Civilization were once of a sort that served mankind with wisdom, guiding their antecedents to look towards a future of beauty, freedom, and existential meaning. One Golden Age developed after another as great men were inspired to outdo the other or even to reach for the heavens in art, architecture, music, and literature.

Lately, though, it seems we"ve decided to perch instead on postmodern beings who, while great in technological stature, are cultural ogres. 

When we peer through the looking glass today, all we see, both immediately surrounding and far afield, is a desolation of ugliness and mediocrity:

• Soulless architecture that betokens our standing as utilitarian drones.


• Popular music sung (or mumbled, rather) in the gutter-mouthed patois of degenerate gang members.


• Pointless films - often written by committee and informed by focus groups - that wallow for two banal hours in quick-cut action scenes without dramatic tension; one-dimensional characters as performed by two-dimensional celebrities in third-rate productions.


• An educational system that replaces the canon of Dante, Donne, and Mallory with The Red Wheelbarrow.

Modern art affirms nothing except for mindless consumerism and appealing to our basest instincts. For all our advanced tools and broad access to them, mankind should be practically minting new artistic genius. Yet nothing today can top the achievements of those of ages gone by.

So why then does Nature no longer, to paraphrase Forster, "throw out a god" to stand out as divine amongst the "thin-hammed mediocrities", than when there were billions fewer in the world?

Because when it comes to art, profit motive suborns beauty and invites the average.

This wasteland came about when the best and most talented minds - those who could have been the next Shakespeare or Michelangelo - departed the land of the arts in favor of a life serving as cogs in a corrupted, increasingly statist machine that separates individuality and spits out utility.

When potentially great creators go where the money is, the fields of cultural endeavor are left to be tended by fools.

Soon after the best and brightest left for semi-lucrative STEM careers, the lands became fallow and our current Cultural Dark Age is the result; this abandonment has left the arts securely in the hands of green-haired Gender Studies majors and Nietzsche"s Last Man in skinny jeans.

Each passing generation then subsists off this degraded fare which nourishes neither the intellect nor the soul. Eventually, there will be no one left who can remember tasting anything better and thus the negative feedback loop is in full motion.

It will only worsen until conservatives realize that those who pump the imagery of art into the minds of the young wield infinitely more power than any engineer or writer of computer code could ever dream. That is why the left won the propaganda wars of the past few generations so completely. The cycle only breaks when the political right starts grooming their children to Make Culture Great Again.

One is constantly reading well-meaning advice in the columns and comments sections of alternative media stressing that parents should continue to nudge their children towards the hard sciences, because that"s the sector where they can procure the best livelihoods.

This is sound on the surface, especially for young adults whose gifts are geared for such work. But if you do push them towards those disciplines, make sure they are on the path to self-employment or starting their own companies. Because even in the STEM fields, conservatives hold little power.

Those kids will eventually be forced to toil for the leftists of Silicon Valley who grew up immersed in, and proudly adhere to, subversive culture.  Or the budding scientist must supplicate to those in Washington who dispense the science grants. Kiss advancement goodbye if you hold the wrong opinions.

They"ll be employed by a corsortium of elitists whose ultimate goals are not only antithetical to tradition and morality, but will hasten its extinction.

These are the oligarchs whose philosophical ends are to bring about the Singularity, to silence dissent, or level humanity under one-world governance where cultural greatness, or even humble simplicity, will be made impossible. Better that your kid become a blue-collar laborer or even a NEET with a free mind than to be servants to a wicked system.

But for those of you with children of a creative bent, consider home-schooling them (or enrolling them in carefully-selected private schools) so you can bypass an educational system that is actively airbrushing Western Man"s achievements out of the history books; a system that has perverted the traditional liberal arts beyond recognition and almost out of remembrance.

Once a sufficient number are again steeped in what is the best of mankind, they will be back on the shoulders of proper giants.

They will then write the great novels, paint the sublime portraits, and direct the spiritually fortifying films that can make the fields of culture fertile once more. In so doing, the mediocrities will be banished to their romper rooms where they can frame each other"s finger paintings in deserved obscurity.

By reclaiming education and the arts from the left, we can end our current Golden Age of Nothingness and maybe even repair capitalism in the process.

A new Renaissance - moored to beauty, truth, and ethics - will ennoble the Man of the West, restoring him back to a balanced, fuller humanity. It will be as a torch to burn off the fraud and moral hazard that has attached itself like a leech to our increasingly globalist going concerns. Where virtue exists in abundance, such shady and mercenary practices are reviled.

Economic patriotism and handshake deals will be back in vogue. Instead of capitalism making utility of man, man will make utility of capitalism as originally conceived.

Lord Feverstone of Dystopia USA