Fans of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire may recall how the
series opened with protagonist Nucky Thompson fervently denouncing demon
alcohol before the Ladies Temperance League.
In the very next scene the same Nucky Thompson schemes with his cronies to
make millions by subverting the new Prohibition laws and keeping AC awash in
hooch.
If he did not get it, surely some of his Tinseltown
toadies must have caught the joke. Only days before, this same president did an
end run around Congress to impose Net Neutrality by dubious administrative
fiat.
The Prez berated Beijing for forcing “all foreign
companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government
mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those
services,"
Like Nucky before the temperance league, Obama was
playing for Silicon Valley. Like all
statists he sells the illusion of protection while stabbing constituents in the back.
Like the U.S., the Chinese government justifies its
excesses by blaming terrorists and the need to protect “state secrets”.
The very fact that People’s Republic or the USA has “state secrets” flat out
contradicts the claim that either is a “government of the people, for the
people and by the people”.
Can state secrets by justified by the same logic as
the national debt? Apologists for
government debt tells us not to worry, we owe the money to ourselves. Does that mean that we keep secrets from
ourselves too?
No one keeps secrets from themselves unless they in
pathological denial. This means that the
keepers of state secrets are either hiding bad things from us or they are
deranged. I vote for a combination of
the two.
A couple of weeks ago, both guests on the OnFire Radio Show, referred
to the high level government officials as psychopaths. They may be on to something. Perhaps like Norman Bates, the men at the helm
of states lose touch with who and what they are. The lose sight of right and wrong as we most
people understand it by kindergarten.
Thus Enoch Malachi Thompson and Barack Hussein Obama
share something else besides intriguing Middle Eastern names. Both share the uncanny ability to charm and
appear reasonable, even loveable, while coolly presiding over murder, plunder
and fraud.
"Half the people
are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong
direction."
-Paul Simon
Gamaliel was, perhaps, Jerusalem’s most respected
Rabbi circa 35 A.D. When asked how the
Sanhedrin should deal with the alarming and seemingly heretical Jesus movement,
he counseled restraint and patience advising that:
“if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy
itself. But if it comes from God, you will not
be able to destroy them.”(Acts 5 33-39)
In support of his case, he cited earlier popular
“messiahs” that had come and gone of their own accord.
Today, when the West is challenged by radical Islam,
Gamaliel’s sage advice rings true.
Leaving the Islamic Middle East alone to work out its issues may be the
most prudent and productive response.
A thumbnail portrait of Middle Eastern history and
quick peek into the probable future will provide useful perspective.
From ancient times up until the 16th
Century, the legendary Silk Road and associated spice trading routes were the commercial arteries through
which Europe obtained precious silks, spices and even opiates. These routes passed through
Persia and the Arabic lands. The Middle
East was prime real estate and its inhabitants prosperous traders.
Fortunes plummeted when Columbus returned from his voyage
to the New World. With the Age of
Discovery, oceanic shipping displaced land based commerce, Thus the Atlantic facing nations including
England, France, Spain and the Netherlands rose to world dominance while the
Middle East and Italy, then the commercial hub of Europe, withered into irrelevance.
However, the invention of the internal combustion
engine coupled with the discovery of Middle Eastern petroleum made the Islamic
desert wastelands a hot commodity again.
Following the First World War, the Western imperial powers assured
themselves of access to Mid-East oil by divvying up the region into client
states ruled by compliant war lords.
From that time onward, imperialist meddling in
Mid-East by Europeans and the U.S. has never ceased. A century of political,
economic and military intervention by Christian, Jewish and secular Westerners has
stoked nationalist and religious resentments alike. This is manifested in the violent “blowback” that Ron Paul and our own CIA has documented.
A look forward validates the Gamaliel strategy. The fracking boom combined with new energy efficient
technologies have broken the Mid-East stranglehold on energy. The world is awash in petroleum and prices
have tanked. Experts estimate that we
have a supply of over 200 years of crude in the ground. My guess is that way before the supply runs out,
the human race will have moved onto new energy technologies and Mid-East
oil will as relevant as Silk Road trade routes in a jet plane world.
As oil income wanes in importance, the region’s
people will seek other livelihoods. This
will require innovation and investment which demands economic and social liberalization. At that point you can kiss radical Islam goodbye unless, it is “from
God” as Gamaliel hedged 2,000 years back.
If it is from God, so be it. But I don’t think so. Meanwhile, Islamists use political, cultural
and emotional
Jujutsu. Jihadists turn the force of Western incursions back upon
their opponents. The harder that America strikes at them, the more foolish we
look.
A half century ago, The United States faced a far
more formidable threat from the Soviet Union, a true military super power. At that time Princeton scholar, George Kennan,
recommended a policy of “containment”, diplomatic and economic initiatives to
hem in Stalinist – Soviet expansionism. This
formed the basis of U.S. foreign policy for the next 40 years.
The Marshall plan to rebuild war torn Europe and
Asia was the type of program that he envisioned. This was s patient Gamaliel
approach. Unfortunately, America’s militarists misrepresented Kennan’s intent. They exploited it to justify a massive
military buildup, nuclear proliferation and unceasing armed intervention the
world over.
President Eisenhower, the diplomat/warrior hero of
World War II, perceived the folly of continual proxy wars and runaway military
expansion. He withdrew from the Korean
War and warned his countrymen of the
dangers of the “military industrial” complex in
his presidential farewell speech:
“In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ultimately, America prevailed in its showdown with
the Soviet Union, because of Gamaliel theory, not armed confrontation. Because Soviet Communism was oppositional to
human nature, it collapsed under its own weight. It was of man, not of God.
Thus the true danger from the Islamist movement
comes not from wild eyed terrorists.
The true danger is how it frightens Americans to surrender their essential
liberties to the military and surveillance state. Long before Ike, America’s
first warrior president foresaw danger of a militarized government:
“a large standing
Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a
Country…it could not be done
without great oppression of the people.”
America’s enormous warfare establishment
makes us unsafe by intervening in intractable international conflicts that are
beyond our control and in which we have no moral standing or compelling
interest. Americans are best served by
the Gamaliel strategy of allowing the will of God or nature to take its course,
"Half the people
are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong
direction."
-Paul Simon
To this day, the jokesters remain anonymous and no one was bilked out of
billions of dollars. The worst that can
be said is that the worldwide scientific community got punked and ate a healthy
slice of humble pie.
Scientific shenanigans are afoot again in new millennium. This time the tables are turned. Scientists are pulling the wool over our eyes
with the climate change scam. In a February
7 Telegraph article, Christopher
Booker reports on how global temperature data has been fudged upward at
monitoring stations throughout the world.
The article is based upon the investigations of Paul Homewood. Booker writes:
“When
future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years,
nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature
records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically
“adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data
justified.”
But what about those poor polar bears whose icy home is melting away? Homewood demonstrates that is not global warning
that is causing the thaw.Rather the diminished
ice is the result of:
“cyclical
shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years
ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.”
And why would scientists throughout the world be party to such as scam? The reason is that “Big Science” is
underwritten by “Big Government”. Just
as Big Government handsomely paid Big Science to create weapons of mass destruction
and disruption, they are now in cahoots to shake taxpayers down with the warming
scare.
Another present day “scientific” canard comes courtesy of those who
practice economics as if it were particle physics. Econometricians would have us think they can
pull a few levers and people will respond predictably as if they were rats
in a Skinner Box.
Thus central bankers adjust the flow of legal tender intent upon
modifying our behavior, supposedly for our own wellbeing. Here is what happens:
1.Elite
bankers and financiers get newly created money first to invest or spend it as
they see fit.
2.This new
money makes it way downstream in the economy, thereby devaluing the currency
that Joe and Jane Sixpack hold. This
drives up the nominal cash prices of the things that Joe and Jane must
buy. Meanwhile the elites were able to
buy things at lower prices before inflationary pricing kicked in.
3.The U.S.
Fed seems pleased with itself that the Consumer Price Index is increasing at a “modest”
and “steady” 2% per year.
4.This means
that if Joe and Jane just hold on to their money, it decreases in worth by 2%
each year.
5.Since The
Fed is also suppressing interest rates at near 0%, Joe and Jane will still lose
purchasing power by putting money in a savings account – formerly a time honored way of
building up middle class wealth in America.
6.So it
order to break even, Joe and Jane must move their savings into risky
investments like securities and commodities.
7.This
again benefits the elite Wall Street crowd by artificially pumping up the value
of the stocks and bonds that they hold.
The schemes
of Charles Ponzi fleeced a handful of greedy investors who should have known
better. The
policies of The Fed and
world’s central bankers rob unsuspecting millions of their savings. They encourage malinvestment and inflate
financial bubbles that create hardship and misery on a global scale.
The real question is, “why do people keep falling for the empty promises
of the ruling elites?” I suspect it that
people have lost faith in themselves and in any other higher power. Therefore, like captives under the spell of a
worldwide Stockholm Syndrome, they wish to believe that their captors have
their best interests at heart.
The moral at the end of Steve Goodman’s con man saga, Turnpike
Tom, is this:
“Remember
that you only fall for
Lies and stories when you really want to”
"Half the people
are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong
direction."
-Paul Simon
bullet to the head in his
Buenos Aires home on Sunday, just before he was set to go before a
congressional hearing to accuse (President) Kirchner and Foreign Minister
Hector Timerman of shielding Iranian officials implicated in the 1994 bombing
of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people.”
With spin moves worthy of the Bolshoi Ballet, Argentine
President Christina Kirchner has proclaimed Nisman’s death first to be a
suicide and then a murder staged by a rival party to in order to
make it appear as if she is trying to cover her tracks.
The narrative leading up to Nisman’s demise
this past weekend is as follows:
2.In 2013 Argentina agreed to cease investigation
of this crime and cancel all Interpol warrants for the Iranian suspects. The
investigation would be turned over to an Iranian “truth commission”.
3.The flip side of this deal was that Iran would
exchange its oil for Argentine wheat, thereby easing Argentina’s energy crisis
while boosting exports.
4.Prosecutor Nisman asserted that this murder
cover up was orchestrated by President Kirchner and through illegal
non-diplomatic back-channels.
5.Nisman was prepared to go before Argentine
lawmakers on Monday (1/26) with a detailed 300 page indictment before death changed
the plan.
For those readers of the” it-can’t-happen-here”
persuasion, let’s take a stroll 22 years down memory lane.
Vince Foster was a White House attorney and
former law partner at the Rose Law Firm with then-First Lady, Hilary Clinton
back in Little Rock. Foster had first-hand
knowledge and provided direct linkage between the Clintons and their nefarious business
dealings in that murky Arkansas backwater.
Muckraking vultures were circling
and Foster was panicked. He had drafted
his resignation note and was scheduled to tender it to President Bill Clinton on
the morning of July 21, 1993.
Conveniently for the Clintons, that meeting
never happened. Foster turned up dead,
also with a bullet in his head, in Fort Marcy Park in suburban Virginia. Foster spent the morning of July 20 at the
White House and was in attendance at a ceremony announcing Louis
Freeh as the new head of the FBI.
“The White House is the most secure private
residence in the world, equipped with a sophisticated entry control system and
video surveillance system installed by the Mitre Corporation. Yet no record
exists that Vincent Foster left the White House under his own power on July
20th, 1993. No video of him exiting the building exists. No logbook entry shows
he checked out of the White House.
Several
hours after he was last seen inside the White House, Vincent Foster was found dead
in Fort Marcy Park”.
No records or video indicate that he left work in the most
secure building in the world. To this
day, the official accounts of Foster’s death do not add up. They are are inconsistent and rife with
contradictions..
What’s the lesson here?
When collectivists accuse capitalists of “cutthroat competition” they
are speaking metaphorically. Businesses
compete via improved efficiency, price cutting, innovation and clever
marketing. Political players, on the
other hand, are the literal cutthroats.
A bit Later in his administration, when he was embroiled in
the Monica Lewinsky fiasco, Prescient Clinton launched highly publicized air
and missile strikes on a little known Islamist named Osama bin-Laden. Strangely enough, as this was happening, the
Hollywood spoof, Wag the Dog, was
hitting the theaters. The film’s premise
was that a sitting President stages a war to distract the country form his own
child-sex scandal.
In the movie, the “war” was a hoax, a staged media
event. President Clinton actually bombed
human beings. The Film
& History website reports:
…on August 20, 1998 (President Clinton) stated
that “Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden
[terrorist] network. The factory was involved in the production of materials
for chemical weapons.” Initially, the media accepted this statement as fact. In
an August 22nd Gallup Poll, Clinton’s action was applauded by two thirds of the
respondents.
The facts, as they gradually emerged, tell a far
different story. Key evidence for this ‘nerve gas’ accusation was a soil sample
taken in December, 1997 across an access road about 60 feet from the
factory. A private lab (why tests were not conducted in
a federal facility is unclear) concluded that this indicated the presence of a
critical component in the making of nerve gas. According to less-than-reliable
clandestine sources (the American Embassy in Khartoum was closed in January,
1996), this factory was under tight security and, thus, was not available for
personal inspection.
Scientists observed that this sample may well
have been contaminated by sloppy collection procedures. Moreover, scientists
questioned whether this component was related to any ‘nerve gas’ process.
The purported ‘nerve gas’ factory had, with
private U. S. engineering assistance, been constructed as a pharmaceutical
plant supplying about half of the Sudan’s medical needs. On August 26, 1998 a
British technician, who had been a technical supervisor in the 1992-1996
construction of this factory, said that he had gone into every corner of the
plant and that there was no ‘high security.’
This “secret plant” was officially opened by the
British ambassador. A World Health Organization inspected the plant in
December, 1997. Other recent visitors included an American delegation, which
had inspected this medical facility.
There had been serious doubts within the U. S.
government about this purported ‘nerve gas’ facility. At the State Department,
analysts in the office of Intelligence & Research published a paper that
challenged the alleged nature of this facility. Major doubts were also raised
by the head of the CIA Directorate of Operations, the CIA African division
chief, and the chief of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. CIA “Slam Dunk” Tenet,
though he stated that the link between bin Laden and the factory could only be
drawn by inference, expressed greater certainty of the plant’s involvement with
chemical weapons.
The reality is that governments will not stop at
murder to protect and defend the interests of officeholders. The only difference is that that when the
killing is done on the group plan, we call it “defense” and “war”.
Meanwhile, back in Argentina voters are nonplussed. Fox
reports that: “Death of
prosecutor shakes faith in president, government institutions in Argentina”. The story relates how:
“Many
Argentines say the mysterious death has underscored an erosion of faith in the
country's institutions and in (Kirchner) at a time when her administration is
struggling to fight economic ills and rising street crime.
"I'm
depressed," said Manuela Luis Dia, a 54-year-old maid who supported (Kirchner)
in the last elections. "We don't know who to trust anymore."
Do ya’ think?
Maybe if anything good is to come from Mr. Nisman’s death, it will be to open
eyes as to what government is really all about.
Don’t cry for Christina Kirchner, Argentina.Pray for yourselves and for your children,
"Half the people
are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong
direction."
-Paul Simon
