And I refer to leftists or to the Left rather than using the common term “liberals,” because they are not liberal. For me, “liberal” describes someone who advocates liberating people, someone who believes in freedom.

The Left consists of people who believe otherwise, even the opposite of genuine liberalism and liberation. They want laws and regulations which tie people down and chain them up and restrain their freedom.

With their degenerate social agenda, economic edicts, mandates and diktats, the Left have made the people prisoners of society’s meddlers, control freaks, social misfits, nanny-government bureaucrats and their armed enforcers.

And what else but a police state could describe the Left’s desired situation of a State armed to the teeth with a totally disarmed and defenseless civilian population?

In my view, deep down, many people on the Left delight in seeing S.W.A.T. teams invade a small business to “crack down” on people who do their bankingwith “suspiciously” small amounts of cash, or those who apparently didn’t send the IRS enough of their earnings.

And leftist unions seem to love seeing the S.W.A.T. teams invading and harassing a business and arresting a “rogue businessman” for hiring undocumented workers who are “stealing Americans’ jobs.”

I guess things haven’t changed much since the days of the anti-immigrant, warmongering interventionist Samuel Gompers, have they?

And the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who wants to fine restaurants who provide large-sized sugary drinks, is the same mayor who very strongly supports the power of police to stop and frisk innocent people without any suspicion or probable cause.

So, the people on the Left are not really “liberal,” are they?

During the Blizzard of 2013, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick ordered everyone in Massachusetts off the roads, or they’d be fined $500 or receive up to a year in jail. That applied even to those parts of the state not harshly affected by the blizzard but were nevertheless located under Patrick’s jurisdiction. A true dyed-in-the-wool central planner, this guy.

However, the real liberal would believe that if we are forced by law to be dependent on government-controlled roads and highways, then each and every one of us has a right to use them when we need to, blizzard or not.

In contrast to the Massachusetts governor’s mandatory travel ban, Maggie Hassan, the governor of New Hampshire — the Live Free or Die state — gave avoluntary advisory to stay off the roads. No fine, no jail time for those who continued to drive.

Another unconstitutional act of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick was inflicted 2 months later on the people of Watertown: the post-Boston Marathon bombings warrantless door-to-door searches which occurred under Patrick’s authority. While police lacked the constitutionally required probable cause and written warrants signed by a judge in order to search private homes, they did so anyway.

And the sheeple of Watertown overwhelmingly approved of this police state martial law action supervised by “liberal” Gov. Patrick.

Gov. Patrick used the term, “shelter in place” on that day for over a million people in the greater Boston area, and it supposedly was a “request.” However, public schools and courthouses were all closed down, public transportation was suspended, vehicular traffic was not allowed in or out of Watertown, over which a “no-fly zone” was imposed.

Hmmm. This sounds like a “voluntary shelter in place request,” most definitely.

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC propagandized on behalf of this police state in Watertown imposed by a leftist governor.

And knowing New Hampshire — the Live Free or Die state — if there were a dangerous person on the loose, they probably would not have had a thousand police goons invading one small town and putting it under martial law. Why? Because the attitude of security in New Hampshire is not one of dependence on government, but one of independence and self-protection — that is why among the U.S. states New Hampshire’s gun laws are some of the most respectful to the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment.

Remember, the 2nd Amendment refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” not the “right of the government to keep and bear arms.”

Sadly, given their love for the State, the people on the Left seem to have that backwards.

In contrast to the fascists in Massachusetts, had accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev been running loose in New Hampshire, officials there probably would have had police out on patrol at high alert, but not hysterically so, as they were in Watertown.

But would the people of New Hampshire have allowed or tolerated warrantless door-to-door searches? I could be wrong, but I would guess that officials would have given residents an advisory to be on the lookout.

By inflicting door-to-door searches in Watertown, officials were really telling people that all residents themselves were suspects in harboring an escaped suspect, and they needed to be ordered out of their homes and the homes searched to prove their innocence.

In contrast, given an advisory in New Hampshire, residents would have had their weapons available, ready and waiting. Had Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attempted to invade or break into someone’s home there, the resident more likely would have fought back, or at least brandished a weapon in defense and/or shot the home invader.

Unlike in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and other strict gun control states, people in New Hampshire know that it’s much more risky to break into a New Hampshirite’s home than in those other states in which the people have been forcibly disarmed and made defenseless and vulnerable to the predations of thugs and killers by ignorant bureaucrats.

Which brings me to the dreaded gun control issue. Following the Sandy Hook School shooting, in which 20 children and 7 adults were murdered by a deranged psychopath, the push to further disarm the people in the already fifth strictest anti-gun state went into overdrive.

No matter how hard rational people attempt to get it through numbskulls — that violent criminals don’t care about gun laws just as they don’t care about laws against murder — the people on the Left continue on their legislative rampages to further disarm law-abiding people and make them defenseless.

And the gun control issue also made its way into the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “ObamaCare”), as per Obama Executive Order, in which doctors are being encouraged to ask patients about gun possession. And the government’s encouragement of doctors to report on patients’ probability of being “threats” (as they are now encouraged to do in the U.K.)  is part of the statists’ mission to encroach into the age-old tradition of doctor-patient confidentiality, in the name of enhancing government power-grabs and further diminishing the people’s liberty and security.

The atrocious ObamaCare is the “thrill up the legs” for those passionate police statists on the Left. We already can see the excitement in the faces of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, just the thought of thousands new IRS agents and their S.W.A.T. teams going out and harassing and terrorizing innocent Americans in enforcing the tax-fine-thefts of ObamaCare’s dictatorial mandates and restrictions.

And with ObamaCare it isn’t just the bureaucratic intrusions into people’s private lives in the name of control over the people. But the police state threats against honest doctors will drive the good doctors out of the business and attract those who like the idea of being Dr. Bureaucrat.

In fact, according Dr. Elaina George, who spoke to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in 2011, part of the framework for draconian ObamaCare measures was already set up first through Executive Order – a Bush Executive Order in 2004, believe it or not – and then legislatively enacted aspart of the 2009 Obama “stimulus” bill. As Dr. George warned in this article,

A second board created by the stimulus bill called The National Coordinator for Health Information Technology “will determine treatment at the time and place of care”. They are charged with deciding the course of treatment for the diagnosis given by the doctor. Now it becomes obvious why there has been a big push towards the implementation of universal electronic medical record use. It becomes a tool to completely control the physician and the patient. Those physicians and hospitals that choose to practice individualized patient care in consultation with their patients will be punished because they are not “meaningful users of the system over time.” Beginning January 1, 2013 penalties for doing the right thing for a patient will cost the doctor $100,000 for the first offense and jail for the second offense. This will have a chilling effect and may be the straw that completely breaks the foundation of good medicine – the doctor patient relationship.

After ObamaCare implodes as it was obviously intended to do, Dictator Obama will get the masses to beg him to get his desired “Single Payer” plan through, which will lead to what he and others on the Left really dream of, their beloved SovietCare.

But as Yuri Maltsev and Anna Ebeling have noted, in this kind of complete government control over everybody’s private medical matters the two-tier system will be GoodCare for the Ruling elites and BadCare for the rest of us schmucks.

But the enforcements of all these draconian rules will be as police state as they could be.

Alas, too many of today’s “liberals” are not really liberal. They oppose freedom and choice in medical care, they support the State’s power to invade private property without suspicion or probable cause, and just too many people now wholeheartedly condemn the thought of cutting the chains of enslavement by bureaucrats and liberating the people from the imprisonment of the State.

There are plenty other police state policies pushed by the Left, such as NDAA indefinite detention and Common Core, but I think I’ve made my point.

And Obama has the nerve to say that the opposing Party’s not wanting to do the President’s bidding by irresponsibly raising the debt ceiling is “extorting” the President. He claims that it is extortion when some of the people’s representatives tell the Dear Leader to stop stealing from our grandchildren!

This Obama person is just as bad as the Bush that preceded him. And the power-grabbers of the Federal Reserve and the banksters are just as dishonest and irresponsible.

But they are merely reflecting the general population now, the selfish, impatient and id-oriented population of America.

And some people are speculating that Janet Yellen, Vice Chairman of the Fed’s Board of Governors, will be picked to be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, replacing Ben Bernanke.

Like Bernanke, Ms. Yellen apparently believes in using the apparatus of government intervention to control economic matters. And she certainly favors Keynesian policies, “easy money” and continuing with the self-indulgent spending habits.

The Economic Collapse Blog’s Michael Snyder notes how Ms. Yellen was totally clueless in 2007, really believing that those artificial housing and other stimulus would be “still likely to achieve a relatively smooth adjustment path.” And then in 2010 she testified that she did not see the meltdown and collapse coming, as the current Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, also did not see it coming.

However, those of the Austrian school way of thinking, such as Ron Paul, did see it coming, as I have noted before.

And in response to The Bernank’s recent “no taper” announcement, Ron Paul asked (Preview) , morally what right does Bernanke have “to take away 2% of our purchasing power deliberately? What right does he have to punish the elderly who save money?”

Dr. Paul warned against further destruction of the dollar and malinvestment caused by artificial interest rates.

Actually, as long as any kind of economic activity is artificial, or artificially “stimulated” by monopolistic and unaccountable governmental intrusions, there’s a good chance that that will cause malinvestment.

And the other part of that is the intrusions are coming from some central planner, such as the Fed and its high-and-mighty Chairman or from an act of Congress, for that matter. What you will then have is “planned chaos,” as Ludwig von Mises pointed out.

In contrast, with freedom and free markets consumers and producers are left free to plan their own economic matters. In a system of more freedom and randomness, you have less chaos because such a system is freed from the destructive intrusions of those bureaucratic buffoons and parasites and their “fatal conceit” that guides them.

But sadly, the majority of people in America do not appreciate that freedom, independence and responsibility, in our modern age of decadence and covetousness.

America has become a society in which irresponsibility and immediate gratification are institutionalized, praised and rewarded. And that is exactly what the Keynesian economics of Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and millions of others promotes.

The truth is, those folks of the Keynesian way of thinking don’t even practice economics — their love is for politics and in strengthening the political class.

You see, at some point private economic matters in America became politicized. And it was the politicians who exploited crises, panics and economic downturns and they then sold a bunch of snake oil to the desperate masses as a means of the politicians grabbing more and more political and police power over the people.

And, coinciding with the decline of critical thinking in America, the politicians’ minions in academia and the Press supported the ideas of deficit spending and promoting debts as a way to get out of recessions and depressions.

Reflecting the mental laziness reinforced by government schooling, it makes the unthinking academics and pundits feel good when they are relieved of having to make any effort in solving the problems that caused those recessions and depressions in the first place, and instead they can just get their monetary meds right away. (Hmmm. Can we get Big Pharma in on this?)

But these kinds of irresponsible, immediate gratification habits are like drug addictions, and like drug addicts the spending addicts put their entire family into the poor house. And this is what the power-grabbing politicians want, encouraging the people to then beg them for  more “easy money” and other wealth-redistribution schemes to bail them out.

As long as they are further enriched and empowered over others, the politicians and bureaucrats get what they crave with each new power-grabbing vote in Congress, just as the Fed’s manipulations empower the banksters to get new money to fund their bonuses while the politicians’ Fed-stimulated inflation steals even more from the people.

However, America’s immediate gratification society can be seen in other areas now. For example, the cops and prosecutors, and “national security” bureaucrats who get away with warrantless searches and stopping and frisking innocent people. Why wait for a judge to sign a warrant? That takes too long. They crave to do their searches immediately. And even when there’s no suspicion of specific individuals they want to search anyway. And why go through the trouble of coming across some actual individual who is suspicious to then do searches of his emails or phone records? Instead let’s search through and collect and keep a database of all Americans’ emails and phone records, and that way we can then find our needle in the haystack.

So that is a current example of the kind of immediate gratification mindset that Americans have developed in many areas of life — not just economic — over the past century, especially since the implementation of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.

But such behaviors are those of irresponsibility, and only promote the satisfying of one’s immediate desires with total disregard for ethics and for the future (or for the rights of innocent people in the case of the “security” fanatics).

People want “easy money,” and they want it now. (Especially the banksters.) Don’t wait until you have enough money saved or have enough of an income to afford to buy a house — get a loan NOW and get a mortgage now anyway, and get that house. And spend as much as you can on your credit card, and put yourself in debt. Who cares about your family’s future, as long as you get that stuff you want now.

And the banksters want easy money and bailouts, because they know that regardless how irresponsible their lending practices and their investments are (with their customers‘ money, just as Congress is with taxpayers’ money), they are guaranteed by the government to be free from bankruptcy. And they will keep their jobs (while you lose yours).

You see, such a Keynesian mindset is especially thriving in those who want to have some central authority, the Fed or Congress, to act as “stimulator” of the population’s prosperity, and to dish out food stamps and other goodies, as well as artificially-stimulated interest rates and “easy money” (for the banksters).

Sadly, the masses are being fed the false belief that they are benefiting from these government bureaucrats and those monetary central planners like Helicopters Ben and Janet who hand out the easy money like candy.

But, as Lew Rockwell recently noted, it is the State and its agents who are enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, while the advocates of freedom and independence, such as Ron Paul, are the ones who want the people liberated from the State’s tentacles and from its exploitation of the people’s labor and livelihoods.

It would be easier to get more people to see that, if only they could overcome their long-ingrained habits of short-sightedness, and their blind faith in the State as a savior.

And each election cycle new people get into office to “fix” the problems that were caused by the previous office holders. Or the reelected ones “really will get it right this time.”

But currently in Congress, the short-sighted Republicans are afraid to impeach Obama, charge James Clapper with perjury, and do other responsible and morally necessary things, out of fear of losing their Party’s control in the House in 2014.

You see, reforming government with government is a fool’s errand, and a waste of time. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has discussed, bureaucrats resist reform.

Has there ever been a time in which the Rulers were willing to let go of power already accumulated?

Thanks to the nature of democracy and the State, America is becoming a police state.

And now with a secrecy-obsessed federal Leviathan run amok, we have un-American secret warrants, secret courts, and secret court opinions.

This police state is only getting worse by the day, with an increasing number of judges who naïvely sign these secret warrants and carry out secret proceedings.

Do you really think these judges and court flunkies can be convinced by people outside the national security state to go against the already-powerful NSA, CIA, FBI and so forth?

And while Lavabit and Silent Circle have closed down rather than willfully act with complicity to the government’s crimes against the provider’s customers, do you really believe that the email providers such as Verizon will decide to protect their customers’ privacy and security by going against the monster Leviathan?

The truth is, there is plenty of information now to show that the U.S. government’s spying on Americans is for mainly criminal purposes.

And with bureaucrats’ secrecy obsession, their Soviet-like crackdown on the Press shows that those who are above the law obviously don’t want their illicit and unlawful acts to be revealed.

In the Michael Hastings case, for example, local police and firefighters were told not to talk to the news media regarding his car crash, just as there was a gag order in the case of Christopher Dorner, the rogue L.A. cop who allegedly killed several other cops. That gag order was in the name of “officer safety.”

However, the Press’s duty is to the people and to the truth. They do not exist to serve the police. If officers are so frightened and concerned for their safety in those situations, then perhaps that line of work is not for them.

But it was that Dorner had allegedly killed cops which was why the police went on to shoot up innocent people’s cars and then go on to burn Dorner to a crisp.

Would the cops have been so hysterical had Dorner only killed a mere civilian?

That seems to be how narcissistic government police are now. “Officer safety” and all that.

But that is just what a government’s monopolizing of security services breeds. It becomes a self-serving enterprise.

The same police hysteria occurred after the Boston Marathon bombings. The police had their unconstitutional door-to-door searches in Watertown, looking for one suspect who, besides being a Marathon bombing suspect, was alleged to kill a cop.

Many times throughout American history there had been prison escapes of hard-core killers. But the police did not do door-to-door searches at those times, because those previous generations understood the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

But times are different now, with the decaying of American society and culture in general.

If you believe that the Watertown siege would still have occurred had Dzhokhar Tsarnaev been alleged to kill only mere civilians, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Meanwhile, it was never clear as to whether the Tsarnaev brothers were the real killers of the MIT police officer. And subsequent to that incident, several witnesses had stated that the other officer, of the transit police, who was shot and wounded but not killed was probably shot by fellow officers, “friendly fire.” And following the police shootout at the boat where a private civilian found the younger Tsarnaev brother, apparently no weapon was found with that suspect. The shootout had involved just police. That is how hysterical they were. And there have been further inconsistencies with that case.

And then there was the case of Troy Davis, who had been on death row in Georgia after having been falsely convicted of killing a cop. Even though witnesses had recanted their testimony after claiming it was coerced by police, even though there had been no actual evidence to prove Davis’s guilt in the killing, he was murdered by the state of Georgia anyway.

In my view, had Davis been falsely convicted of killing a mere civilian (and not a cop), the governor, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court would not have knowingly let an innocent and wrongfully convicted man be put to death.

That is how slavish to uniformed authority many people are now.

But with government monopolization of security, the monopolists are not accountable and they do not obey the law as imposed on the rest of us.

It is doomed to become – and has become – a cult of self-serving State authority vs. the rest of the population.

Likewise, the U.S. government’s monopoly of security for the entire territory has done nothing but empower the Rulers to provoke foreigners and to convince the naïve public to accept a bigger and more criminally intrusive Leviathan.

In more recent years, there have been the NSA and IRS scandals, constant FBI and other federal S.W.A.T. raids on the wrong house, the FBI thwarting terrorist plots that the FBI themselves cook up, FBI entrapments, and so on.

My, how the Fulbright Hearings, the Watergate Hearings, the Church Committee, the Tower Commission and other similar efforts at reform certainly have succeeded!

Let’s have more reform!

And now Army PFC Bradley Manning, a.k.a. Chelsea Manning – who was given a kangaroo trial administered by an extremely biased judge – has been railroaded into a 35-year sentence on top of time already served in a tortured solitary confinement.

But Manning didn’t “betray his country” or commit actual espionage on behalf of any foreign enemy. Military and security experts had testified that none of the information Manning gave to WikiLeaks had posed any danger to any American or U.S. soldier overseas.

Another military whistleblower, retired USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has pointed out that there have been actual spies, Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, James Hall, and George Trofimoff, who actually did sell secrets to foreign regimes such as Russia but who had been treated much more humanely by the U.S. government than Manning was treated.

You see, Manning felt it was important to inform the American people of the war crimes and diplomatic buffoonery committed by our own government.

Manning’s “crime” was of having a moral conscience, and of embarrassing and angering our corrupt and criminal Rulers who didn’t like their criminality and incompetence exposed for all the world to see.

That is part of the cult of self-serving State authority that we have now.

It is amazing how the campaign to mislead and propagandize – led by U.S. government officials and repeated by their Press stenographers – has turned actual government whistleblowers into “bad guys” in the eyes of many misinformed and gullible people, from the very beginning of the WikiLeaks documents releases and the Manning witch hunt.

At the very beginning of the Manning witch hunt, in June 2010, Glenn Greenwald wrote about the FBI informant who had turned Manning in to the government, Adrian Lamo, and on Lamo’s relationship with Wired senior editor Kevin Poulsen. At that time, Wired had published only a partial version of the chat logs between Manning and Lamo.

Greenwald wrote a subsequent update to that, in which it turned out there had been quite some relationship between Wired’s Poulsen and informant Lamo, that Lamo had been the government’s one and only source against Manning, and Greenwald noted the “journalistic disgrace” in Wired’s withholding of key information from other news reporters on the Manning case.

And Greenwald wrote a further update after Wired had published the full Manning-Lamo chat logs.

We must ask: Were Poulsen and Wired withholding information from other journalists to help the government project a false narrative of why Bradley Manning released documents to WikiLeaks? You can read those articles and make your own conclusions.

Similar to Wired’s intentionally withholding of the rest of the Manning-Lamo chat logs was the New York Times’s withholding the truth that a murderous CIA officer (and former Blackwater employee) Obama had referred to as “our diplomat in Pakistan” was really a CIA officer, because the U.S. government apparently told the Times to conceal the truth.

And it was disappointing to read in a periodical as prestigious as the New York Times its Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent resorting to tabloid-like, gossip page material on Julian Assange’s personal life and character.

Greenwald also documented how other news journalists such as Wolf Blitzer reacted more angrily toward WikiLeaks’ revelations than toward the U.S. government’s crimes which were revealed.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald has written many times now of our modern day State-Press enmeshment.

Sadly, as the Press have tended to lose their “watchdog” status (and their objectivity) in the name of retaining favored status with preferred government insiders for sources, many members of the media have allowed themselves to serve merely as government spokesmen.

In further examples, Greenwald has pointed out CBS News fossil Bob Schieffer’s excruciating lack of objectivity in Schieffer’s recent softball interview of former Bush NSA director Michael Hayden on Edward Snowden, as well as Schieffer’s dishonest interview of Ron Paul, and the media’s attacks on the late investigative journalist Michael Hastings. (And see even more similar criticisms of the news media by Greenwald here.)

So given that the hypocrites of the Press now act as government press releases, the people depend more on alternative media to learn the truth about what’s going on.

For instance, the obedient State stenographers have not informed Americans of the possibility that the chemical weapons used in Syria may have been a part of a false flag attack as directed by the U.S. government, but Yahoo! News and reporter Anthony Gucciardi have reported on that.

And Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh have reported that rebels and others interviewed have stated that rebels were responsible for the chemical attacks, provided to them by the Saudi government. But have MSM outlets reported these assertions?

(Actually, the central planners seemed to want to attack Syria for years. But that’s for a different discussion.)

So, the more the State grows, the more an oppressive Leviathan needs a sycophantic Press to keep the corroding State propped up. And the Establishment Press needs the State as well.

Actually, the subservient and slavish Press mainly reflect America’s modern day general population.

And the truth is, just as with local police departments as noted above, with the U.S. government it’s not about “national security,” safety or justice – it’s all about the bureaucrats keeping their illicit schemes and criminality swept under the rug, it’s about their power trips and their egos. And the State.

So in my opinion, each election cycle is a mere rearranging of deck chairs on a sinking ship.

Sorry to sound like such a gloomy Gus, but it really is important to get people to wake up and learn the truth about the State and the evils of central planning.

Toward that goal, the new Ron Paul Channel should be instructive, in addition to the Voluntaryist, Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom, LRC and other similar sources of information.

Perhaps some day the people will be better able to open their minds to the truly radical, alternative approach of uncompromising libertarianism, as discussed recently at the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Now, I don’t mean to be harsh, but it really is the statists and reformers who are “utopian” in their unrealistic hope that government employees will leave their human flaws out the door and won’t exploit the privilege of being above the law granted to them by the powers of the State.

In fact, given history as well as the direction in which America is currently heading, one could argue that the right of the people to bear arms and voluntaryist resistance would be far more effective toward securing one’s community and repelling invasion by foreigners or crimes by one’s own Rulers.

Well, I am here to tell you that it just isn’t true!

America already has gone to Hell in a handbasket, and it’s only getting worse by the day.

Most Americans are in denial about how totalitarian and self-servingly corporatist this whole society is becoming.

But, if you just look around you, and consider the everyday assaults on innocents by government police, the federal bureaucrats’ illicit “war on terror” and the drug war, the bureaucratization of just about everything, the Obama-Pelosi-John Roberts Unaffordable Careless Act … it’s a never ending Hell, and worse.

Yes, America has decayed into a third world banana republic, and the military’s internment camps are ready, especially for those disobedient individualists who actually believe in morality.

Even economic historian Robert Higgs – during his appearance at the 2013 Mises University – suggested that people ought to leave the country if they can. In that speech Higgs clearly tells us about the destructiveness of the State.

Dr. Higgs is the author of the 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan. The post-9/11 surge in hysteria and totalitarianism is proof that Higgs knew exactly what he was talking about.

So some call it pessimism, some call it realism. I’m a realist. 

However, there are some people in the Liberty movement, such as another economic historian, Tom Woods, who seem more optimistic. Woods travels extensively, giving speeches and he has many YouTube videos promoting liberty. Here is Woods’s speech at the 2013 Mises University.

Dr. Woods’s book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21^st Century, shows that perhaps there really are ways to push Leviathan back.

And there really have been some positive developments toward liberty. (Sort of…)

Just the fact that the House of Representatives’ vote against Congressman Justin Amash’s amendment to defund the NSA’s warrantless bulk-spying program was such a close vote, is an encouraging prospect.

But it kind of gets a little less encouraging.

While it is good that the vote was close, we saw that the Pelosi-Democrat Establishment twisted arms to get people to vote to preserve the government’s criminal spying.

And would you believe that the majority of those congresspeople who voted against the Amash amendment had actually received twice as much as the Yes-voters in campaign donations from the very defense and intelligence contractors who profit from that program? Yup.

So how’s that “We the People” thing working out for you?

Apparently, military contractors and others benefit from these invasive and unconstitutional programs. Who knew?

And besides the Military-Security-Corporatist Complex, there are examples of government-corporate conniving in other areas. And it’s not a good sign of “progress,” in my opinion.

For example, a recent CDC study attempted to show that HPV vaccines not only reduced cases of HPV, but can also prevent cervical cancer. Even in boys. Now, that’s quite an achievement.

(I’m sure that GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, whose vaccines were used in the study, were quite pleased with the skewed results.)

As I have noted previously, hardly anyone in the MSM challenged the CDC or brought up the many deaths or injuries that were caused by the HPV vaccines. And this simpatico PBS interview with one of the CDC’s senior flunkies is just one example.

It takes LRC bloggers and Freedom of Information Act requests by Judicial Watch to get actual information on the harm that such vaccines have caused.

Oh, don’t get me started on the vaccine stuff, like this latest item about a deadly 5-in-1 vaccine pushed by Bill Gates on babies in mainly developing countries.

And only a handful of people pointed out those Merck-funding California legislators who voted to force the HPV vaccine on kids. (Perhaps Nancy Lugosi twisted their arms, too.)

Why, even the flu vaccine has its controversies. But one might think that when NPR spends an hour discussing the importance of the flu vaccine, they might also mention the importance of nutritional support and vitamins as better and healthier means of prevention.

But no, not only did they not include a nutrition expert or alternative medicine practitioner on the panel that day, they did include someone from GlaxoSmithKline.

So, if a government bureau like the CDC says something, if the bureaucrats make assertions and cite their studies, and if the doctors say so, I guess the people will largely believe them. Even the stenographers of the MSM.

But getting back to the faux “security” schemes that are turning America into Nazi Germany as we speak, a U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that police do not need warrants to track people via their cell phones. I guess that implies that they don’t need suspicion either.

So when government goons know when you are away from your home for certain periods of time, might that not make your home, you know, vulnerable? (Ya think?)

The court is saying that the phone service providers are businesses, so their records do not have the same Fourth Amendment protections that private citizens have. (Or used to have, to put it more accurately.)

That court ruling gives the government the power to demand any records of any company with which you do business, no matter how private that information might be, and for any reason.

So how could this newest encroachment not be used by bureaucrats or their minions against critics of the regime, political dissidents, journalists who ask tough questions, or whistleblowers?

Oh wait, they already are doing that!

Can you believe there are still people who scoff at the “Hell in a handbasket” remark? 

And after his many months in solitary confinement and torture, the kangaroo court has found Bradley Manning guilty of “espionage.”

“Espionage” is the government’s view of a military or government employee with a conscience who believes that the American people have a right to know when their government and military bureaucrats and soldiers commit criminal acts, as well as the utter incompetence and corruption of U.S. diplomats.

Those disclosures are “espionage” to the bureaucrats of the State.

I think that Bradley Manning’s kangaroo judge belongs to the same country club as Chief Kangaroo John Roberts. (But don’t tell them I said that.)

With the crimes of the State and its cracking down on truth-tellers, this article shows the extreme extent to which the U.S. government will go to propagandize the American people to not question the government’s frauds, corruption, waste, and criminality.

The Rulers are desperately clinging on to their power as more and more people are waking up to the truth. That more people are waking up is reason for optimism.

But there are still many people who just don’t want to hear the truth, such as regarding their own Presidents’ war criminality, or that their government would pass a massive health care “overhaul” without most of the legislators actually having read the bill, or that the bill was written largely by the Big Insurance and Big Pharmaceutical companies at our expense.

And they would rather not hear that their own government bureaucrats are listening in on their private phone calls or reading their emails, or collecting “nearly everything a user does on the Internet,” as part of colossal fishing expeditions to find the slightest indication of “terrorism” that will be impossible to find in such a way.

That reminds me – recently a guy who innocently searched “pressure cookers” and “backpacks” at his work computer while with his former employer, was turned in to the police by someone at the former workplace, a la “If You See Something, Say Something” crapola.

The government goons who came to his house had said, according to Justin Raimondo, that they do those things about 100 times a week, and that 99 of those intrusions turn out to be totally unnecessary.

Bureaucrats!

Soon the goons’ visits will not be because of “pressure cookers” or “bombs,” but because of “anti-war,” “freedom,” or noting the U.S. government’s culpability in 9/11, and other Regime-criticizing searches or expressions.

Oh wait, they already are doing that!

Most Americans would not want to hear that the history of such government spying on its own people and neighbors spying on one another is mainly used to weed out political dissent and critics of the Rulers.

Sadly, many of our fellow Americans are pathologically misinformed, as Thomas DiLorenzo has described.

But, as Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it seems to be difficult for the average individual to consider other points of view or facts which refute what people already believe to be true. And that goes for even the most seasoned news media analysts, scientists, and academics.

And even in 2013, many people actually believe the government when it says that “keeping us safe” requires fascist criminality against the government’s own people.

The truth is, while there is very little chance that an Islamic terrorist will ever have any effect on your life, there is a much greater chance that your life will be abused, molested, robbed, assaulted, terrorized or murdered by an American government official.

And you “progressives” out there are just as responsible for turning America into the current police state as are the conservatives and neocons, by the way.

But the truth is still difficult for many people to handle.

So, as America has reached Hell in a handbasket, people still would rather believe the myth that government is a “necessary evil,” or that when it gets very, very bad, it can be “reformed.” (Nope.)

So no, the government is not “We the People.” (Another myth.)

Does that handbasket have a round-trip option?

Two different emailers commented on my view that George Zimmerman was “stalking” Trayvon Martin and that his stalking provoked Martin. Both emailers brought up Florida law regarding the definition of “stalking.”

Frankly, I couldn’t care less what a state government’s statutes define as “stalking,” because it doesn’t matter what those laws are, because they are not real laws. Those laws are what some legislators say they are. But who the hell are those legislators, and what the hell do they know?

Those laws that these politicians make up are not real laws – they are not natural law, which is basic and consists of the non-aggression principle and common sense, in my opinion.

As far as responsibility and culpability are concerned,, George Zimmerman saw some guy leaving a store, and because the guy wore a “hoodie,” therefore that’s “suspicious.” Martin gave no indication that he was engaged in any kind of criminality (such as if he had just robbed the store he was leaving, of which there was no such indication), or threatening behavior, as far as I can assess, based on all the information I have heard thus far.

Yet Zimmerman chose to pursue by following Martin rather than merely identifying himself as a neighborhood watch volunteer, and asking who Martin was or if he lived in that “gated community.”

So yes, Zimmerman “started it” with his stalking. And I mean stalking in the practical sense, because “legal” definitions mean nothing. “Legal” definitions come from State-employed parasites, many of whom are law school graduates but who know nothing about The Law, and who do not understand aggression vs. non-aggression, and whose loyalties are mainly to the State and not to justice or freedom and peace.

Unfortunately, America is a country with many zombies now, many people wandering along, holding and staring down at their cell phones, constantly having to check for email or texting nonsense to people who couldn’t care less.

And a population of ignoramuses who don’t pay attention to the actual details in the news but unthinkingly believe what their President or congressfelons tell them.

So, because of all this, there may be rioting if George Zimmerman is found “not guilty.” Paul Huebl expresses concern about possible rioting in the streets of the cities, and I am concerned, too. The fact that I am white and live in a city area doesn’t help relieve anxiety.

The police state isn’t helpful either. What we saw in Watertown a few months ago was quite distressing. That was a good example of when the police themselves become the criminals. They criminally and unconstitutionally ordered people from their homes at gunpoint, searched homes without warrants and left doors wide open, terrifying residents and leaving their homes vulnerable. It was a thoroughly criminal operation, and they didn’t even catch the suspect they were looking for – some private citizen found him hiding in a boat.

Alas, most of the sheeple there approved of what was done to them, obediently believing what their armed and badged enforcers and marauders told them, in the name of “keeping them safe.” It was “for their own good,” after all.

Possible Zimmerman-related rioting would likely be mainly by black people committing acts of violence against white people simply for being white. This has been happening a lot in recent years.

Or otherwise minority or city youths feeling angry and desperate because of what the white liberal politicians have done to destroy their opportunities and their futures.

Can you imagine AG Eric Holster being in charge of quelling such rioting?

But why would it be necessary for police to shut off cell phone service in such times of rioting, as Huebl suggests might happen? To make it difficult for the rioters to organize and to relay where police cars might be situated and so on, supposedly.

But what about the other people who want to protect themselves from rioters? Don’t they have a right to organize? Of course they do.

So police shutting off everybody’s cell phone service would be a crime against those who need communications to protect themselves. The police in this instance would be aiding and abetting the violent rioters!

And Huebl mentioned the possibility of shutting off utilities as well. Huh? What the hell is the point of THAT? But then, we are talking about government bureaucrats, after all.

Yet another reason why even utilities services need to be decentralized and privatized.

Well, I have stated before that I’m just as terrified of the out-of-control police now, as much as violent rioters, white or black.

Salon.com recently published an excerpt from Radley Balko’s book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. But it’s not just the crazed militarizing of the police that is frightening. As Balko mentions, the police are arresting and assaulting and murdering people merely for gambling on football games, and they are violently enforcing licensure laws, and enforcing medical marijuana laws.

In other words, non-crimes. The police are committing actual crimes against innocent civilians to enforce laws against non-crimes! That is what “The Law” means now in Amerika. Another reason why statutes and legislated “laws” are not law, but nothing but a bunch of crap. Just an excuse to give power-hungry neanderthals the power to commit acts of aggression against innocent human beings and get away with it.

I think that Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s work on distinguishing between artificial State law and private law needs to be seriously considered. More in-depth analysis can be found in Hoppe’s book, Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order.

In my opinion, the natural law against aggression doesn’t take into account what a State-employed politician says, or what some State-employed crony judge says. Natural law against aggression is based on common sense, private property and self-ownership. You own your life, your person, your papers and effects, and you have an absolute right to protect yourself against ANY aggressor.

In fact, Gary North recently wrote about the moral and practical way to deal with aggressors and invaders:

In Houston on Sunday afternoon, three armed men entered a home and demanded payment. They got payment. The owner of the home grabbed his gun, shot two of them dead, and scared off the third, who ran.

This is the kind of welcome that should greet all such intruders in America, every time. It should greet all such intruders, all over the world, every time. If there were more greetings like this, there would be fewer intruders like this.

The case will automatically be referred to the grand jury, but authorities will tell the grand jury that this force was justified. In Houston, the voters believe that armed resistance to armed intruders is the proper response. This opinion has filtered down through the political system. In Houston, people are armed. Intruders may be armed, but they know that they may meet others who are even better armed inside the homes which they invade.

The two dead intruders will not be arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to jail for several years at the public’s expense. They will simply be buried. From a a tax-efficiency standpoint, this is surely the way to handle armed intruders.

In Houston and in Texas generally, this is the prevailing opinion. Intruders in Texas take their lives in their hands. This is where intruders should take their lives. Briefly. Then, the remains of the intruders can be taken to the appropriate resting place.

In some parts of America, this opinion would be regarded as barbaric. Especially among intruders. Illinois, New York State, and Connecticut side with the intruders. The third intruder, assuming he remains in the same line of work, would be wise to move to Illinois, New York State, or Connecticut. He should move out of Houston.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist,visit his blog .

Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

To begin, I think that George Zimmerman should have been charged with manslaughter, not murder, in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Some people believe that Zimmerman shouldn’t have been charged with anything, as his shooting supposedly was in “self-defense.” But in my view, if Zimmerman initiated the act of stalking and provoking Martin, then Zimmerman is responsible for the ultimate consequences of his choice to stalk and threaten Martin, especially when Martin was not acting suspiciously.

I know, a lot of people disagree with me on that, especially many conservatives. Many conservatives don’t believe in personal responsibility, and they disagree with my belief that individuals should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Perhaps Zimmerman should have instead considered buying one of those private drones for surveillance, if he felt that the unfamiliar Martin seemed suspicious. That way, Zimmerman wouldn’t be physically stalking Martin, and would have avoided being a threatening presence and the ultimate confrontation could have been prevented.

Now, now. Don’t get upset. There is nothing wrong with using privately-owned surveillance drones for one’s own private property or for a “gated community.”

And there would then be nothing wrong with private counter-surveillance drones if need be.

But being a police-wannabe or a government agent-wannabe as Zimmerman apparently is, nevertheless stalking people is just not a good idea.

But when Zimmerman is found “not guilty,” there will be race riots (regardless of Zimmerman’s Hispanic heritage).

This is because of collectivism, of course. If one white guy is perceived to be guilty of murdering a black guy, then all white people have his guilt, just as, in the minds of many, all white people have the guilt of the slaveholders in the past.

But, as the individualist Ron Paul has pointed out, those people who can only think in terms of racial groups are racists.

And Fred Reed noted, despite what the white-dominated U.S. Congress and state governments have done for black Americans, with the ending of segregation, with State-controlled charity and affirmative action, “Whitey” is still responsible for the severe problems which black people continue to endure.

Obviously not all people of color think those things. But those who have that kind of mentality do not appear able to see themselves as racists.

Sadly, many of the central planners’ collectivistic programs to benefit black Americans have gone against such intended beneficiaries, and against their liberty. So, the “antidote to racism is liberty,” as Dr. Paul put it.

But when the economic collapse and “civil unrest” occur, as a result of the collectivists’ central planning run amok, and the EBT cards and ATMs stop working and there are food shortages, well, perhaps you might want to consider getting out of the city ahead of time, that’s all (especially if you are white).

Speaking of “Whitey,” the trial of Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger is still ongoing, and it’s really a barrel of laughs. Last week, for example, one witness was asked to identify Bulger. So, as described by the Boston Herald’s Laurel Sweet on Howie Carr’s radio show, the witness looked around the courtroom like he was on To Tell the Truth, and finally pointed at Bulger, “How you doing Jim?” Heh.

Who needs a laugh-track when you have the Whitey Bulger trial?

Though the George Zimmerman trial may need some laugh-tracks, after those bad “knock-knock” jokes. But I digress.

Seriously, just what is it with these zealous government prosecutors who have this compulsion to overcharge defendants, as with George Zimmerman? Is it mainly to further their own careers? But the prosecutor must have known that there was no evidence to support an actual murder conviction. Hmmm. The cynic in me wants to suggest that TPTB may have urged the prosecutor to overcharge, to intentionally get a “not guilty” verdict, for the purpose of…who knows.

But the prosecutors these days are really getting away with real crimes just as many cops are, including knowingly pursuing the convictions (or worse) of innocent people.

And what was it with that sick pursuit of some Internet geek kid like Aaron Swartz, as prosecutors harassed and hounded him to the point of suicide, in the name of what? His “victims” didn’t even care to press charges.

And the corrupt lawyers and judicial apparatchiks all stick up for each other, too. It’s a sick culture now.

For instance, the Oklahoma Supreme Court recently refused to disbar a bad prosecutor, as requested by the OK Bar Association. Their reasons were that because many prosecutors were corrupt and abusive in those “old days” (way back in the 1990s!), this one should be excused.

Well, I think that state Supreme Court justices such as those in Oklahoma who defend the “bad apples” should themselves be impeached! They are not “OK.”

And I don’t understand why so many cops are out of control now. Some people view them as “heroes,” and many of them may very well have been – in the past, but now not so much.

To me, a “hero cop” is one who has courage. A “hero cop” is one who turns in a bad cop. That takes courage.

But in today’s criminal police state, even the good apples are sticking up for the criminal cops. The good cops who act as whistleblowers are being fired from their jobs, or otherwise demoted, transferred, or ostracized.

And to me, a “hero cop” refuses to enforce bad laws. A law is bad if it has nothing to do with protecting the people from the aggression or fraud of others. That is to say, most laws.

A law enforcement officer – local, state or federal – who refuses to enforce drug laws is a “hero,” and those who refuse to enforce criminally invasive regulations of otherwise peaceful trade and commerce are “heroes,” in my view.

Supposedly, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is either a “hero” or a “traitor.” Well, he certainly isn’t a traitor – it’s the other way around. The government agents who are breaking into and trespassing innocent Americans’ communications – those government criminals are the real traitors.

But I don’t think Snowden is a “hero,” as many of these invasive and criminal spy programs had already been revealed years before. And also because Snowden’s release of information to Glenn Greenwald and the U.K. Guardian seems to have been too controlled, too unnecessarily redacted, as though it is still to protect the State.

That monster Leviathan State. The good little helpers out there still need to protect the damn State, and they can’t see that it is just something not worth protecting!

And I share The Daily Bell, Naomi Wolf and Robert Wenzel’s skepticism as well. Wolf points out how “super-organized” Snowden was in his PowerPoint presentations and in arranging his interview with Greenwald, in which “he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling.”

Am I too cynical?

Now, if any whistleblower is an actual “hero,” it is Bradley Manning. So many documents Manning released to WikiLeaks were not at all redacted, and the American people were able to get a real glimpse of the war crimes by the military, and the incompetence and corruption of our diplomats.

But I’m sure that James Claptrapper would disagree with me on that.

Related: Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger asks, Has Edward Snowden been added to Obama’s Kill List?

And former CIA officer Philip Giraldi very well sums up what our buffoonish Rulers have done to America, and to our freedom.

That reminds me, do you think that Rolling Stone investigative journalist Michael Hastings was assassinated? How about Andrew Breitbart?

Unlike Snowden and Manning, those two now-dead ones were journalists. Hmmm.

Well, whether those deaths were of foul play or not, I must say that government’s criminality is so in-your-face now.

And now, our incompetent and/or corrupt judges are allowing the NSA to make use of private communications “inadvertently” collected sans warrants.

So why don’t they just go into people’s homes and search everything there, hoping to find some indication of crime or “terrorism,” or whatever? (Oh, wait, they already did that in Watertown.)

The feds can not only “inadvertently” grab encrypted info but keep it indefinitely, and for the purpose of attempting to ultimately decrypt it in order to invasively and criminally pry into your private communications with others.

But there are other reasons why we should be concerned with this criminal behavior by government, besides the invasion of American’s privacy and security. Such compromised private communications could involve those with someone’s business associates.

One can easily predict that the bureaucrats will make use of all this criminal spying, and expand it to non-national security-related policies, such as enforcing patent laws or “insider trading” laws.

You see, one reason for encryption is to protect private business information, such as from one’s competitors, which one has a right to do, after all.

Some government bureaucrats, however, could be using the surveillance to steal private information for the purpose of cahoots with victims’ competitors. Such government spying and information-stealing could be a much more invasive and criminal means of the bureaucrats’ own illicit version of “insider trading,” if you know what I mean.

So besides the abuse of average Americans’ private information, this surveillance criminality can also compromise the people’s right to protect their honest ways of making a living (something which most government bureaucrats know nothing about!).

So Whitey Bulger isn’t the only gangster who should be prosecuted, if you ask me.

Now, in Edward Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald, Snowden made it clear that this surveillance state will only get worse, and warned of possible “turnkey tyranny,” especially with future administrations in Washington (i.e. those who may not be as favorable to civil liberties as the Obama Administration has been).

Some further causes for concern include the IRS scandal and the wiretapping and persecuting of journalists. Obviously, these government crimes have nothing to do with “national security,” but with silencing critics of the Regime and cracking down on dissent. And bureaucrats might also get carried away and attempt to snuff out those who probe too intensely into the Rulers’ shenanigans.

But how carried away will these Washington commissars get? Will they use such powers to pursue political correctness and anti-discrimination laws as well? Will they send drones after those who make politically-incorrect comments?

So, even though Premier Obama doesn’t seem to understand things like, I don’t know, the U.S. Constitution, or due process, and the fact that he has never allowed his college transcripts to be made public, and the fact that many white people voted for his teleprompter him mainly because he’s black, I better not refer to him as an “affirmative action president,” or I might be indefinitely detained or worse. (And I shouldn’t mention that he referred to his white grandmother as a “typical white person” either, not that that would mean anything.)

But we’re not allowed to point certain things out, no matter how true they might be. As Dr. Thomas Sowell observed, even news “journalists” censor the racial aspects of riots and mob violence. People are more sensitive now to certain verbal subject matter, but actual violence is excused. Oh, well.

As Edward Snowden mentioned, it’s only going to get worse, all this stuff. Or is it?

Perhaps we can just be risky and do and say what we think is right (and hope for the best).

Recent events are enough to make anyone express “vitriolic rhetoric.”

First there was the IRS scandal, in which various IRS flunkies have been targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny, and attempting to interfere with the groups’ First Amendment-protected rights of dissent from the Regime.

My article, Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon was on LewRockwell.com in 2010. The article didn’t mention the IRS targeting the Tea Party, but I did note that the unconstitutional George W. Bush policies that many amongst the Tea Party and conservative wing supported – policies which remove due process and presumption of innocence – may very well come back to haunt those very Tea Partiers.

And now the U.K. Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and former NSA worker Edward Snowdenhave revealed, albeit in a somewhat coordinated and controlled manner, the National Security Agency’s spying on all Americans’ phone calls, emails and other methods of private communications regardless of actual suspicion, probable cause or warrants.

Yeah, NOW some of the conservatives are waking up to the dangers of these George W. Bush policies they supported for many years, as I hear them yapping on the radio. But that’s mainly because the current dictator is Barack Obama. If these revelations came out while Bush was still President, the conservatives would be defending it.

Oh wait a minute, this did come out while Bush was President, in December, 2005 when the New York Times revealed that Bush authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and emails without warrants and that in fact some of the eavesdropping involved U.S.-only calls. But the hysterical conservative dupes such as Malkin and Coulter wanted to hang the Times for such a treason as reporting the government’s criminal activity.

But now that Obama is in charge, Rush Limbaugh et al. have finally heard of the “Fourth Amendment.”

Alas, there are still goofballs and degenerates in the U.S. Senate who have no problem with the NSA spying program. In fact, the senior U.S. Senator from South Carolina says he has Verizon and he wants the NSA to spy on him, on customers of Verizon and other telecom providers’ customers.

Apparently, South Carolina’s senior ignoramus doesn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Is there a psychiatrist out there who is not on the State payroll who can explain these people?

Apparently those gullible sheeple of the U.S. Senate aren’t concerned that such government eavesdropping and spying on Americans’ private communications could get in the wrong hands or be used for devious purposes.

Oh wait a minute, such government eavesdropping and spying actually has been used for devious purposes, as reported in 2008 by Brian Ross and ABC News in this “Exclusive” story.

Well, it may not have been that exclusive, given that Warisacrime.org’s David Swanson had reported on the same story a year earlier. But we can’t expect ABC to cite such alternative sources who are not sufficiently State-licking propagandists. (As they apparently are at ABC and its ilk. But I digress.).

According to the ABC “Exclusive” story, two U.S. military linguists and some of their “fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.”

“‘Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,’” explained the former Navy linguist in that ABC story. And some of the conversations being intruded on were of a very personal nature, including “phone sex,” according to this McClatchy story.

But we should believe government bureaucrats when they say that the illegal snooping only involves the phone records and “metadata.”

They aren’t really ”listening in.”

However, in his interview with the U.K. Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, NSA spy story leaker Edward Snowden stated, “If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

If you have seen the 2010 Washington Post series on the overreaching extent of this National Security Gestapo that very questionable characters in Congress continue to support, you would know that a lot of private military- and security-related government contractors themselves have access to the same kind of private information on Americans that government workers have, including NSA and others. (See the Washington Post series here, in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Much as I don’t want to spoil the Andrew McCarthy-Charles Krauthammer fantasyland that this Bush-Obama police state is “keeping us safe” and that anti-NSA spy complainers are “overreacting,” the truth is that the U.S. government’s police state isn’t keeping us safe.

As Marcy Wheeler and Jason Ditz have detailed, despite the massive, unconstitutional surveillance methods already in place for years, the government bureaucrats’ gloating over “thwarted attacks” has been widely exaggerated. And many, many crimes of all sorts continue to be committed throughout America despite such close government scrutiny of web searches, phone calls, and emails.

So this constantly growing police state really isn’t about protecting the American people from terrorism. It’s really about “thwarting” political opposition to the Rulers and suppressing dissent. The IRS scandal and the Justice Department’s surveillance of AP and Fox News reporters are indications of the same thing.

As Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, has pointed out, quoting former Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman,

(Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) had let the bureau “be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes” and engaged in “subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.”…

And, quoting the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under Sen. Frank Church in 1976, Gene Healy continues,

Under “Project Minaret,” from the early 1960s until 1973, the NSA compiled watch lists of potentially subversive Americans, monitored their overseas calls and telegrams, sharing the results with other federal agencies.

Watch-listed Americans “ranged from members of radical political groups, to celebrities, to ordinary citizens involved in protests.” Under Project Shamrock, the NSA collected all telegraphic data entering or leaving the United States, “probably the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken.”

(And see this related commentary by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.)

So, it was happening then, but it isn’t happening now? (As Nancy Mussolini might say, Are you serious?)

So some of the so-called representatives of the American people, such as Sen. Diane Feinstein and Speaker John Boehner, have referred to NSA leaker Edward Snowden as having committed “treason” and that he is a “traitor.” These people obviously haven’t studied their history, such as how the German people supported their own criminal State during the Nazi period. Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation explains here the similarities of that era’s Germans and today’s American sheeple.

Now, I wonder if Sen. Feinstein, someone who is also known to be a compulsive leaker herself, has ever considered the possibility of her own phone calls, emails, web searches etc. being snooped on by the NSA and could information obtained from such communications possibly get into the wrong hands?

Has she discussed campaign strategies with consultants which she wished would remain private? How about private phone calls with campaign contributors or military contractors?

What if a political opponent had obtained such information? Or a Democrat primary opponent?

Perhaps she doesn’t care. As the Guardian’s Glenn Greewald noted, Feinstein’s husband himself has benefited from the National Security Stasi that “DiFi” defends so dearly.

That just shows how all this Amerikan Gestapo stuff – besides being as un-American as it possibly could be – really is a protection racket.

But can you imagine just how paranoid those NSA workers (and FBI, etc.) must be at their offices, wondering whether their co-workers may have accessed their private communications, and what the co-workers might know about them? (“Why are you looking at me that way?” “OMG, she knows about my seeing the psychiatrist!” etc.)

Eventually, one hopes that the bureaucrats will overwhelm each other with paranoia, suspicion and self-destruction. Perhaps Gary North was right: In the end, the police state is doomed.

And I think it is quite commendable that Sen. Rand Paul wants to take this NSA spying issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But what, exactly, will that accomplish? The Supreme Court has shown itself to be a group of nine ignoramuses, authoritarians and government apparatchiks. They are employed by the State – of course they will side with the State in most cases. Duh.

After all, the high court’s most recent bad decision was their allowing police to take arrestees’ DNA alongside fingerprinting. Dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia predicted that anyone arrested, “rightly or wrongly,” can have one’s DNA submitted into a “national DNA database.”

And that decision is especially disturbing given that DNA used as evidence is not as foolproof as many people think it is.

Rush Limbaugh’s new pal, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, clearly recognizes the right of the people to be “secure in their persons” from these intrusions by the State when it lacks probable cause.

Many government police have been arresting people for the most frivolous of reasons, and for acts which are non-arrestable “offenses,” includingfailure to use a turn signal or walking the dog without a leash. And the “high” court also approved the sicko strip-searches that such arrestees would also have to endure.

And the Fourth Amendment refers to our right to be secure in our “persons,” but also our “houses, papers, and effects.”

Now, just how secure is an individual whose phone calls and emails are being eavesdropped on by government employees and private contractors, especially given the likelihood that such personal information will get in the wrong hands and be used for devious purposes?

This whole thing is nuts! It’s beyond “Orwellian.”

Whether it’s the TSA, DHS or NSA and FBI, the U.S. government’s treating an entire population as criminal suspects will not protect them from terrorists, from foreign invasions, bombings, or shootings.

And we are not “secure” when political power-grabbers are intruding their way into the most intimate daily aspects of our private lives, our homes, and our businesses.

And all this is for no good reason as well!

As I tried to explain in my article, The 22 Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq, it was our own government that started this long war and other aggressions overseas, well before 9/11.

So as Glenn Greenwald, author of How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok, pointed out in this article with reference to the 2004 Donald Rumsfeld-commissioned task force, and in this article (and as Laurence Vance has observed as well), the Islamists, jihadists, or otherwise inhabitants of those invaded Middle-Eastern and Asian territories have expressed not their hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” but their anger and retaliation against the U.S. government’s violence, occupations, and criminality on their lands and against their people.

In other words, not only are we less safe because of our own government’s criminal spying intrusions and predations against us, but we are less safe because our stupid government bureaucrats keep starting wars of aggression for no good reason against foreigners who will obviously retaliate!

So, if you really want to prevent terrorism, then stop invading countries that were of no threat to us, stop drone bombing and murdering innocent civilians on a daily basis, and stop occupying foreign lands that are not U.S. territories, with U.S. government apparatus and military bases.

And stop believing government bureaucrats and their little helpers who say that these bureaucrats aren’t illegally eavesdropping on your private life.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Have you ever thought about the morality or legitimacy of politicians forbidding you to have a vegetable garden in your own front yard, or buying or selling raw milk, or merely having a lemonade stand without a local bureaucrat’s permission?

You see, when the armed bureaucrat is arresting the peaceful raw milk seller, the harmless vegetable gardener or the little lemonade proprietor, those arrestees are not the criminals here.

Those otherwise peaceful people have harmed no one, but they are the victims of the actualcriminal, the one who is violating their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. He is the aggressor and the criminal, he is the one who should be thrown in jail!

Much of what the State does now is largely criminal in nature: the violent enforcement of “victimless crimes,” the warrantless spying and searches, the prosecutorial misconduct and assetforfeiture, and the drone bombings and murders of innocent civilians overseas, just to name a few.

Even the President and Congressmen – rubber-stamped by the Chief Comrade Roberts – ordering every individual to buy health insurance, are giving an unlawful order, in my opinion.

And the people in a supposedly free country have an inherent right to resist these government crimes and unlawful orders!

So besides the dictates of loathsome bureaucrats, Americans are also enslaved by the government-protected banking cartel and legal tender laws, and the sadistic impulses of the “law enforcers” who actually enforce – and often with malice aforethought – all those Soviet-like rules, orders, and prohibitions of the loathsome bureaucrats.

But millions of people still cling to this horrifying, increasingly-totalitarian State – the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, state legislatures, local police, etc. – as their Savior, voluntarily choosing to be slaves to these bureaucratic worst of the worst in society.

And the faithful cling to their Rulers, despite how contemptuously those Rulers view the people whose hard labor funds the Rulers’ paychecks.

Unfortunately, most people tend to go into denial about what’s really happening to America, even though they see the growing totalitarianism right before their very eyes.

So here is a very well done video by Larken Rose which not only refutes the assertion that “it can’t happen here,” but describes how totalitarianism ishappening here, and only getting worse.

As part of our enslavement, the State demands involuntary payments for nothing, while simultaneously locking out entrepreneurs, laborers and immigrants alike.

The current IRS scandal, for example, as Robert Murphy points out, is that those complainers amongst our fellow hoi polloi want to be exempt from the same criminal wealth-seizures the State inflicts on everyone else.

But the complaint should be that everyone should be exempt from any transaction that is involuntary, coerced, compelled, or accompanied by threats from the taker.

“But we must pay for government’s services,” some people cry.

Yes, we must pay for huge bureaucracies such as the FDA and HHS so they can take care of the fat cats of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. That sounds fair.

And we must pay for DEA, FBI and local police S.W.A.T. raids to make sure that innocent, peaceful civilians who have harmed no one have their homes broken into and even be murdered for no good reason. Check.

And we must pay for more wars and false flags to provoke more foreigners and take care of the fat cats of the military industrial complex. (Except we can’t actually say that out loud. Shhh.)

But the enslaved State-faithful live their lives with rationalization, knowing full well that their labor and livelihoods are being raped by genuine shysters.

I wish more people could understand the inherent immorality and undermining of the rule of law caused by any form of compulsory State taxation, including sales taxes, for example.

You see, when you have a transaction you then have a contract, which is presumably voluntary. However, the transaction is supposed to be between the two traders, neither of whom voluntarily consented to a third-party intruder coming along and seizing part of the trade.

But if third parties (such as government bureaucrats) were allowed to intrude into other people’s lives, contracts and property, then what’s the point of having any laws against trespass, theft, or harassment?

And the government’s thuggish restrictions on employment, entrepreneurs and immigration lock out those who want to start a business here but can’t. That is because of the government’s union protectionism, costly red tape or, because of minimum wage laws prospective entrepreneurs can’t afford to employ enough laborers including entry-level workers.

You see, in the current collectivist slavery, the U.S. government assumes ownership of the capital and labor of both American and immigrant entrepreneurs and workers. Just as Americans are slaves of their government bureaucrats’ restrictions, mandates and other intrusive trespasses, so are prospective businesspeople and immigrants.

I’ll never understand the collectivist anti-foreigner crowd, those who believe in some sort of communal ownership of the whole territory with total disregard for private property and freedom of trade. (Are they closet communists? Who knows.)

And now we have ObamaCare, which is now compulsory, just like the dysfunctional government-run retirement scheme.

I can’t believe that Americans would bow to their government’s demand to report their private medical or insurance status, and allowing such private information to be entered into government databases. Absolutely shameful!

And similar to the Nazi-like ”If You See Something Say Something” campaign, doctors will be obliged to report patients’ gun ownership, and report on patients’ “abnormal” behaviors or their criticism toward the government, etc.

The deniers don’t think this is a big deal, but this really is right out of Nazi Germany.

Both doctor and patient are made to follow orders like prisoners, and any mistake one makes in various payment matters or reporting matters could cause one or both of them to be heavily fined (i.e. robbed) by the State, or even jailed.

Following the Boston Marathon bombings, there was a completely unconstitutional police siege, door-to-door searches mainly in nearby Watertown. Heavily militarized government police ordered residents to leave their homes while the homes were searched, without warrants, without probable cause. Some media propagandists even denied that such illegal behavior even occurred.

Will the “authorities” be knocking on the doors of those reported by doctors to have criticized government-run medical care? Or a patient who mentioned that he and his wife had an “argument”?

In contrast, in a free society the people would never allow government police ”authorities” to harass innocent people who are not suspected of having committed actual crimes, or order innocent people out of their homes as happened in Watertown. Such a suggestion would be absolutely absurd to freedom-loving people.

Frankly, a government monopoly on policing and security shouldn’t exist anyway, and can easily and more economically be replaced with private providers. Boston was a great example of why market law is morally and practically better than martial law.

And when we have freedom (as opposed to the current slavery and government disarmament of the people) there would be no records of which private civilians have what weapons and who doesn’t.

For some reason, the ignoramuses and chicken littles don’t understand that such an atmosphere would discourage would-be muggers, rapists, burglars, murderers, mass shooters, and government thugs from committing their crimes.

But sadly, most Americans, hypnotized by hours of television watching and constantly staring at their cell phones like zombies, defend the criminality of the State.

And economically, a real free market (sans slavery) would be this: the workers, producers, and salespeople voluntarily contract with other employers, clients, customers, laborers, shoppers, for some kind of goods, labor or services, in exchange for some kind of monetary compensation and/or other goodies. And any third-party such as a government bureaucrat who intrudes into such associations or contracts demanding reporting or receiving a take from the laborer’s compensation or traders’ income is nothing but a criminal and will be treated as such.

With freedom, American business owners can hire whomever the employers feel are the best-qualified and who can best serve their customers, the treasured consumers. And such employers would have the freedom to pay workers whatever the employer decides the workers’ labor is of value, regardless of what government bureaucrats or union meddlers have to say about it. And yes, the workers actually benefit from a real free market.

The consumers are much better served as well, when there is freedom than under the current slavery.

And in the much preferable scenario of medical freedom, because there will be no government regulations, red tape, mandates, restrictions, protectionist patent laws, taxes, licensure or other governmental intrusions, the prices for medical care, medical equipment, insurance, pharmaceuticals or supplements will be much, much lower and more affordable to most people.

With freedom, the medical patient sees a doctor of one’s own choosing, or doesn’t see a doctor at all. It’s the individual’s choice. No government involvement here.

And one contracts with a third party insurer if one wants to, and doesn’t do so if one doesn’t want to.

No bureaucrats involved here. No fascist Nazi-like orders from non-productive apparatchiks like Nancy Lugosi and Chief Comrade Roberts.

And the patient’s payment is between doctor and patient, including whether the patient wants to pay with cash or use a third-party insurer, or can receive services for free, for that matter.

Also, the conversation between the doctor and patient is between doctor and patient only – there is a confidentiality and trust which will not be broken into by the bureaucratic burglars of Leviathan.

If it’s none of the neighbors’ business, then it’s none of the government’s business, I always say.

And no ObamaCare-Patriot Act-Complex tyranny. No government databases. No billion-dollar boondoggle NSA domestic spying centers in Utah.

And with guns, regarding background checks and databases, as mentioned, a free society would have no records of civilian arms ownership (or have any other government-run databases of any information on innocent private people!).

However, if government agents such as local police or the feds must be armed, there should be privately-run civilians’ databases of government employees’ weapons possessions, and other matters as well.

A database on the Internet into which all government employees or prospective employees, armed or not, must enter their complete personal background information including school records, criminal records, gun ownership, etc. And if you don’t like that, then don’t work for the government!

Besides making it uncomfortable for anyone to work for the government, free people must shun government employees, as Jim Davies noted.

Then, we would hope to have fewer and fewer government employees to enslave us, and harass, extort, expropriate, burglarize, mug, rob, search, abuse, assault, unlawfully detain, unlawfully arrest or jail, taser, shoot, or murder the people.

In a society of real freedom, all relationships, associations and contracts are to be voluntary. Restoring private property rights, the individual’s right of self-ownership, and the non-aggression principle is just common sense, after all.

With freedom rather than slavery, no more compulsory government Social Security, tax-thefts, land-thefts, IRS, the Fed, or any other such illicit monopolies and criminal rackets in Washington.

The people really have to decide, and soon, whether they want to continue being slaves, or whether they want to live in a land of real freedom.

You know, some people who are afraid of the necessary decentralization process will bring up the collapse and decentralization of the old Soviet Union, and how millions of people just couldn’t handle such sudden freedom. But that was because the government bureaucrats who had been in control made the process gradual and painful.

Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, Perestroika and Glasnost schemes were “only expedient measures to preserve the centrality of the Soviet Communist Party and to salvage what was left of the socialist system,” according to Russian-born economist Yuri Maltzev, author of Requiem for Marx.

Those Soviet bureaucrats were the real “bitter clingers” there, the power addicts who couldn’t let go of their little fiefdoms.

And that is exactly what we will experience here in America, by decentralizing gradually, as the bureaucrats attempt to preserve their central planningcrimes.

As Murray Rothbard wrote,

Holding back, freeing only a few areas at a time, will only impose continuous distortions that will cripple the workings of the market and discredit it in the eyes of an already fearful and suspicious public …

To achieve genuine freedom, the role of government and its advisers must be confined to setting their subjects free, as fast and as completely as it takes to unlock their shackles. After that, the proper role of government and its advisers is to get and keep out of the subjects’ way.

So, now it is time for a “Requiem for Soviet Amerika,” that’s for sure.

We must resist the evils of collectivism, socialism, and compromise, as Rothbard observed.

There is no other way out of the Rulers’ Soviet-style legislative trespasses, and their constantly provoking foreigners to justify their parasitic warbureaucracies, but to dismantle that Leviathan apparatus.

It is finally time to undo the slavery of central planning, the shackles of State monopoly, and the lawlessness of authoritarianism, root and branch.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Scott Pelley recently confessed that he and others in the news media have been “getting the big stories wrong, over and over again.” He then goes on to blame the alternative media for that, and web news, bloggers and tweeters lacking “editors,” i.e. censors, and states that alternative news gatherers and distributors are not “real journalists.”

Pelley, who replaced “real journalist” Dan Rather via Cutesy Katie, is admitting to getting the big stories wrong, yet he is totally clueless as to why that is.

For example, Pelley cites his inaccurate reporting on the Sandy Hook story. And he referred to merely getting a few details wrong, such as stating that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at that school when she was not.

But Pelley, as with most of the reporters, anchors and editors of the mainstream news media, did not seem to explore whether the alleged shooter Adam Lanza may have been taking psychiatric drugs which may have contributed to his alleged violent behaviors.

However, Pelley did do a story on 60 Minutes in which he interviewed some people who knew the Lanzas who, as with some other close Lanza family associates, had said that Adam was “on medication” to treat his Asperger’s Syndrome. But Pelley did not follow up on the medication angle.

We just have not been hearing from mainstream news providers that most of the recent mass shootings have been by perpetrators on psychiatric drugs, especially SSRI antidepressants, including alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes. It has been asserted but not yet verified that the Sandy Hook shooter was also on psychiatric medication.

Have the media largely omitted any mention of the recent mass shooters’ use of psychiatric drugs because the media just want to help Premier Obama and Frau Feinstein implement their gun-grabbing fetishes? (Or is it because the news networks make a lot in ads from the Big Pharma drug dealers?)

It’s not just a matter of getting facts wrong, it’s a matter of obvious omission.

But this isn’t really about the mainstream news “journalists” getting things wrong, over and over again.

This is, once again, a matter of State-aggrandizing propagandists pushing a particular agenda. In this case, it’s the gun control agenda, along with the push for a police state.

Incidentally, was it on purpose that CBS Evening News hire an anchor who sounds like Richard Nixon? But I digress.

Because the facts do not support their cause, the gun-grabbers have been using emotional appeals, including exploiting the Sandy Hook tragedy, to disarm their victims while aiding and abetting the violent criminals out there who don’t obey the law including gun laws.

And Lawrence O’Donnell’s recent misinformation and dishonesty in defense of the police in Watertown illegally ordering people from their homes while police searched without warrants or probable cause was disgraceful. Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

It seems like we may be seeing more of that kind of criminal, thoroughly unconstitutional behavior committed by police, and maybe even military as well, mainly to satisfy the Rulers’ gun-control agenda, their need to disarm the civilian population so there will be no resistance against their further Soviet criminality.

Now, you “liberals” out there: Do you really believe that if the people amongst the civilian population were armed, openly or concealed, that more people would just go shooting wantonly and recklessly?

According to John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, the cities with more gun restrictions (e.g. Chicago) have very high violent gun-related crimes and deaths, and those with fewer restrictions have lower rates of gun-related violence.

Here is Scott Pelley’s interview of the gun-grabbing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just days after the Sandy Hook shooting. Once again, they emotionalize the gun issue by bringing up the families of the victims of gun-related violence, with Bloomberg asking Pelley, “Do you really want to call them up and say, ‘oh it’s hopeless, we’re just going to keep killing more and more people’”?

But they never discuss the valid points made by John Lott and others and the statistics which back up their assertions, including the many lives saved by someone who possessed a firearm and used it in self-defense.

Unfortunately, the “progressives” seem to want only police to be the ones with weapons, but not private civilians. In contrast, a much freer and safer society would have it the other way around.

So like good little sheeple, the “liberals” do not seem to be concerned with why police do not keep statistics on police-perpetrated gun-related deaths.

But why does the Left want a police state?

And I can see why the conservatives refer to the liberals as “criminal-coddlers,” in the Left’s constant defense of violent criminals. The Left’s gun-grabbing agenda is a part of their “criminal-coddling” in their intentionally disarming innocent people by government force and by law. When the Left’s adored State disarms innocent people, they are ipso facto arming the criminals.

But doesn’t this go with the larger picture of why the Left love confiscatory taxes, fascist regulations and welfare redistribution schemes and Big Government bureaucracies? They want the power (via the armed State) to steal from other people and tell them what to do, and they don’t want their victims to have the right or the means to defend themselves!

So just what is it about the State, its apparatchiks, and its propagandists in the media who help to push the agenda of the State’s criminals? In my view, there is some sort of power trip involved in aiding and abetting the State’s crimes against innocent human beings’ persons and property.

One grandiose example of the Left and the biased media’s “criminal-coddling” was their propagandist push for the George W. Bush Iraq War ten years ago.

Talk about “getting it wrong, over and over and over again.”

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

As I have already mentioned, in their ordering people from their homes while the homes are illegally searched, the police compromised the people’s “right to be secure,” as the Fourth Amendment describes it. For how “secure” are people while strangers go through their homes without those homeowners or residents being there to supervise those cops? Government bureaucrats are NOT trustworthy, and they prove themselves as such day after day. As I have mentioned before, all you have to do is read William Grigg’s articles, Radley Balko or Cop Block and even the Cato Institute to understand this.

As seen in the video posted above, an even further example of these addicted-to-overkill police compromising of the people’s right to be secure is that after police searched homes, they left doors open and unlocked. Absolutely disgusting.

And as far as searching private property goes, the police need to have a specific reason to suspect that there is something or someone of a criminal nature in or on a specific property, they need to have probable cause and a warrant signed by a judge. For a judge to sign the warrant, there needs to be probable cause. In Watertown, the police needed to show that the wanted suspect was likely to be hiding in a specific house to which the specific warrant (that they didn’t have) applied. If a judge signs a search warrant without being shown probable cause, that judge is illegally signing a warrant. Police who use illegally obtained warrants are criminals. You can’t just do wide, sweeping fishing expeditions of entire neighborhoods. (Maybe in Nazi Germany or North Korea perhaps, but not in America in which the government must follow and obey the rule of law.)

As we can see from the video, the people of this Watertown neighborhood were frightened and intimidated by out-of-control, over-zealous cops high on adrenaline. It would take a lot of guts to actually stand up to them, to not open the door, and to demand that these armed government bureaucrats state their specific reason to believe that a specific suspect is hiding in their specific home. And the people need to demand that police have a legally-obtained warrant. It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone with some courage had done that.

Such demands by the people should also apply if police are searching for drugs, weapons or other items they believe to be “illegal.”

As Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote recently, the criminal British government bureaucrats of the time of the American Revolution wrote their own warrants and lacked suspicion and probable cause, and the criminal government bureaucrats of the post-9/11 hysteria are also illegally writing their own warrants. This is shameful, and thoroughly un-American.

And if these armed government bureaucrats actually broke into such a home in Watertown or elsewhere, would the owner or resident have a moral and legal right to defend oneself and one’s family? This, by the way, is one of the most important reasons why the Second Amendment was written into the Bill of Rights.

These points and criticisms are especially relevant now, given that the police all across America have been knowingly and criminally falsely arresting and detaining, falsely charging and prosecuting totally innocent individuals, including planting evidence and lying. (Here is the latest update on that.)

And we have cops who do those things in order to meet their arrest quotas. It’s absolutely sickening. See this and this by Radley Balko, William Grigg, and the Young Turks on the arrest quotas, and Roger Roots on the prosecution quotas, and more from William Anderson recently on the corruption of the prosecutors.

And there is the immoral and counter-productive drug war.  Now that the precedent has been set in Watertown, and given how dishonest police and prosecutors are now, we will have warrantless, suspicionless, random sweeping searches of buildings and neighborhoods, without probable cause, based on baseless “tips” and the “If You See Something Say Something” campaign. And that will be mainly to do with the drug war, in which people consuming, buying or selling, or possessing drugs, are NOT committing any crime, and have a right to their freedom to do such things. I am sure this Nazi-like policy will also spread to other areas of life, in which just about everything, every little innocent and harmless act, has been made into a felony, or at least a misdemeanor. Just read Harvey Silverglate’s book Three Felonies a Day to understand that.

In my opinion, all this Nazi police-state crap is why we must abolish the government’s monopoly in community policing and security, and also give the government’s self-serving monopoly in ultimate judicial decision-making the heave-ho.

But as James Bovard, author of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, wrote,

One of the best ways to reduce police brutality is to greatly reduce the number of laws that police have to enforce. “Order” is something different from keeping people subdued through sheer fear of violent government agents.

To some people, referring to “sheeple” sounds demeaning. However, when we have an entire population of millions in the greater Boston area not going out of their homes, and an entire community under siege because of one lone criminal, I will say, “Sheeple.”

Americans seem so dependent on the government for everything, and are so hypnotized now by the government’s fear-mongering and rationalizations for its abuse.

The people really seem to be saying, “Sock it to me!” like on the 1960s TV series, Laugh-In. The star would say, “Sock it to me,” which would be followed by the star getting hit over the head by a giant club, a wall caving in on the chump, or a huge amount of water being splashed on the dupe’s person.

Well, I think that each time we have an election, like last November, the American people say, “Sock it to me, baby!”

And then they get socked. And then they act surprised. “Wha happen?”

What reminded me of this was one of the U.S. senate’s latest turncoats, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who attempted to pass a gun control compromise bill, which failed.

This was the “conservative” that Tea Partiers were swooning over in his failed bid to defeat Sen. Arlene Specter, but later did get elected to the senate. So, with Toomey’s latest gun control compromise, I was saying, “Sock it Toomey, baby.”

In fact, one conservative Boston Herald columnist felt very betrayed by former Republican Sen. Scott Brown in his switch to the anti-2^nd Amendment side, and his votes for Dodd-Frank, raising payroll taxes and the Obama “jobs” bill. She compared such a betrayal to “leaving a bride at the altar.”

But this pattern of the American people getting bamboozled by these professional pols never seems to stop. Americans continue to have faith in their Rulers, despite the betrayals, the squandering of the loot they steal, and their growing police state Leviathan that threatens each and every one of us.

And to get an idea of what masochistic sheeple the people of Massachusetts are, in 2008 they voted by 70%-30% against repealing the state income tax. (Who in his right mind would vote against being able to keep more of his own earnings?)

And now Gov. Deval Patrick and the legislature want to raise taxes even more!

So, like the people of Massachusetts, the American people continue to beg, “Sock it to us, government.”

As H.L. Mencken wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

And with that, Attention Deficit Democracy author James Bovard observed, “We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers.”

And this is also how Americans tend to respond to crises, whether they be natural disasters, a mass shooter, or being attacked by terrorists. When these crises happen, the extremely naïve and gullible people plead with their Rulers – government bureaucrats – to increase the intrusions, their wealth confiscations, their police state, and so forth. “Anything to keep us safe. Please. Sock it to me – good and hard!”

And the government Rulers really do sock it to the people – good and hard.

So, this past week there was a “lockdown” situation in the Boston area to find one lone alleged killer, a 19-year-old “pothead” who played soccer and who most of his acquaintances couldn’t believe could be involved in the Boston Marathon bombings.

Outside of Police State Watertown, the entire Boston area was literally a ghost town, all day. Millions of people “advised” by the fascist government police to stay at home and don’t go out. And the martial law police state didn’t even achieve its goal of catching the suspect!

But how much of an added risk would it have been to people’s lives to just go about their business that day, go to work, do their shopping, or go to school, regardless of whether one lone criminal was on the loose?

Well, life is full of risks, but the sheeple of America have become phobic of any risk in life whatsoever, unfortunately.

In contrast to the fascists’ tyrannizing and terrorizing of the obedient sheeple, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger had this more sensible alternative to the police state lockdown in Boston:

What should be the response is that every American who lives in that area should go about their business while openly carrying a pistol, rifle or both.

Go ahead – try that terrorist crap with the proper response to such an event and see how long you live.  That would instantly be the end of those terrorists and the economic disruption would be zero.  It would also send a strong message – pull that crap and we the people will do our duty as citizens to the common defense.

Unfortunately, such a scenario is too frightening to the sheeple who would rather be kept in their martial law prisons.

But while Toomey’s compromise gun-grabbing bill was voted down this week, Premier Obama has been hinting at yet another executive power grab. On the senate’s vote against the Toomey-Manchin compromise, Obama whined, “They blocked common-sense gun reforms…”

You mean “communist” sense reforms, don’t you, Herr Obama?

Anyway, it is truly a disgusting act of exploitation the way Obama paraded the survivors of the Sandy Hook massacre around to get votes for his fascist gun-grabbing.

While they continue to be emotionally manipulated by the simple-minded rationale that making them defenseless will “reduce gun violence,” the sheeple do not see that they are making themselves more vulnerable to government’s gun violence.

As Judge Napolitano wrote,

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

And Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes passionately wrote a Pledge of Resistance against the government’s disarmament agenda.

Now, before readers panic and conclude that I am promoting any kind of “anti-government militia movement,” no, I am not doing that.

I am merely pointing out the primary reason the writers of the Bill of Rights included the 2^nd Amendment: to protect the people’s right to defend themselves against government tyrants.

As we have seen with the Amerikan police state, Leviathan’s growing tyranny and recent Presidents’ starting of wars for no good reason, the early Americans had many reasons to oppose even the existence of a national standing army, as Jacob Hornberger wrote here and here.

However, the “conservative” Tea Partiers seem just as ignorant as many progressives, as seen by the Tea Partiers’ level of authoritarianism and deference to Washington’s central planners.

The conservatives, nationalists and collectivists of the right also say, “Sock it to me” in their love of men in uniforms, their worship of all things police and military, and their demonizing of anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of government police and military.

These authoritarians will have a very hard time understanding the possibility of tyranny happening here in Good ol’ US of A, as voluntaryist Larken Rose pointed out.

So, even if the “Law and Order conservatives” read William Grigg, Cop Block, Radley Balko, and Rick Horowitz every day, they still wouldn’t understand how like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany America is now.

And the people around here in Boston cheered all the militarized police in their fascist security theater. Most of the obedient sheeple would never believe the possibility of FBI or private agents involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings prior to the event itself. And nationally conservative and liberal statists tend to believe what government bureaucrats and the media propagandists will tell them. (Whether the “lockdown” and siege of Watertown was because of “sequestration” threats and needing to justify an overly-bloated federal agency budget, or the local police attempting to justify more federal handouts, or just because many of these “cops-n-robbers” neanderthals just get off on these situations, who knows. But I digress.)

Now, there have been many arguments over what exactly the phrases “promote the general welfare” and “provide for” the general welfare mean in the U.S. Constitution. My own interpretation is that “promote” means to advance and “welfare” means the general well-being of the people within the territory over which the federal government has jurisdiction.

Clearly, the federal government has gone against the promoting of our general welfare in the extreme, as have state and local governments. The terribly destructive consequences of government gun-grabbing, the Federal Reserve’s monetary central planning, the non-productive U.S. Congress’s stealing more and more private wealth from the actual workers and producers, and the executive branch’s continued lawlessness, provoking of foreigners and domestic overreach have all made us less prosperous, less safe, and less secure.

And in the past I have compared the federal government to an occupying foreign government in Washington, inflicting its criminality against the American people, and that is a more accurate way to view those buffoons and crooks: they are invaders.

How could we not view the federal government as an occupying foreign regime when its own military personnel are engaging in psy-ops of U.S. senators? Psychological operations are mainly used by governments against enemies in order to manipulate the enemies’ emotions, behavior and decisions toward one’s own advantage. But given that U.S. senators supposedly represent the American people (and given all the other threats against us such as the feds purchasing a billion rounds of ammunition for domestic use, and the IRS, the FBI and NSA criminally spying on innocent Americans), one would have to conclude that either the military or the feds in general view the American people as the enemy.

The feds have not only been AWOL in their abandonment of their duty to “promote the general welfare,” but, with psy-ops, false flag ops, and intrusions run amok such as ObamaCare, they obviously do not have the American people’s interests at heart.

“But that’s what elections are for,” cry the naïve and gullible.

U.S. elections are repeatedly just rearranging of deck chairs, as I have noted before. For conservatives and Tea Partiers, nothing has changed for the better since the elections of 1980, 1994 or 2000.

One can easily predict that in 2014 the conservatives will elect the same old slithering snakes and sleazebags dressed in Tea Party outfits, the same old turncoats who will promise to repeal ObamaCare and oppose gun control but then go on to vote for more socialized medicine and gun registration.

Before there is to be a real economic collapse, and civil unrest and martial law (which is obviously the direction in which America is heading), the people need to pry themselves from the grasp of government’s control and its tyranny.

Sooner or later, people will have to realize that as an institution of monopoly, compulsion and coercion the government is thus inherently an organization of criminality. The people need to stop being its willing victims.

So, rather than being sheeple saying “Sock it to me!” to the abusive Big Daddy Government, the people need to realize that what America needs is notreforming (which is impossible), but a complete dismantling of the federal government, because it should never have existed in the first place. Its existence has provided for nothing but a place for traitors, shysters and violent psychopaths, and it just gets worse and worse.

Decentralization, nullification, localism and secession are clearly in order, before it’s too late.

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on two same-sex marriage cases: California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which changed the state constitution to eliminate the state-recognized ‘right’ (i.e. state-granted privilege) of same-sex couples to marry; and regarding the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as only between one man and one woman, and which restricted federal benefits and inter-state marriage recognition to only opposite-sex marriages.

The arguments and Justices’ questions in these cases showed that the laws that legislators (and voters) make are more and more confusing, intrusive and nonsensical, in my view.

In these arguments, the Supremes expressed doubts as to the high court even having jurisdiction, as well as whether the cases had legal standing for review.

In arguments involving the California case this week, the Justices seemed to express doubts as to whether they even wanted to bear the burden of deciding the equality of homosexual couples.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley commented, “Indeed, they looked like so many elderly drivers in Florida driving slowly on the highway with their turn signal on, looking desperately for an off-ramp.”

Sadly, our society, state legislatures and Congress are filled with many slow drivers with their turn signals forever on and never turning. Turley is correct in observing that the clueless court clucks seem disoriented, as these cases shouldn’t be too difficult to decide, in my view.

Perhaps the overpaid highly-paid Justices have more important things on their minds, such as what temperature at which to set their bubble baths later on, and so forth.

However, in the past Turley has suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court should be expanded to perhaps 19 Justices.

Hmmm. Will that really solve the conflicts which arise in our society? (No, I think that perhaps 49 or 149 Justices might be better. Or even 535, if you get my drift.)

So just recently, Nullification author Thomas Woods has been taking some jabs at how some people in America view the U.S. Supreme Court as the Ultimate Decider:

If the peoples of the states created the federal government and its subdivisions as their agent, how do they permanently lose the ability to stop their own creation from destroying them? Since when does the agent tell the principals what its powers are?

To say that the Supreme Court must decide constitutionality in the last resort is to beg all the relevant questions. To say that the Supreme Court has itself decided that it must be this arbiter is to take question-begging to quite an extreme. How can the Supreme Court, part of an agent of the states, have the absolutely final say, even above the sovereign entities that created it? As Madison explained in 1800, the courts have their role, but the parties to the Constitution naturally have to have some kind of defense mechanism in the last resort.

Actually, marriage was essentially a private matter until around the 18^th Century.

As LRC columnist Ryan McMaken wrote, the State got into the marriage business because the statists couldn’t bear the thought of contracts being transferred without the State’s intrusions and thefts. And it also has to do with control. The bureaucrats of the State love control.

So besides whether these same-sex marriage cases have legal standing before the high court, some of the Justices had expressed concern as to whether these issues should really be left to the states to decide.

But when the high court refers to “the states,” they really mean the states’ governments, the state legislatures and state courts should decide the outcomes of these cases. Really, we’re talking about politicians, bureaucrats, and government-appointed state court judges.

Sorry. But our liberty and the rights of the individual should not be dependent upon the whims of politically-appointed bureaucrats on courts, or even elected representatives in legislatures. Then, you are not talking about rights or liberty, you are talking about state-granted privileges.

And the Supremes often decide cases on the bases of the conflicts between the rights of the individual and “compelling State interest.” Or “balancing the rights of society as a collective against the rights of the individual.” Again, in this case we are then not talking about “rights,” but state-granted privileges.

But society or the collective does not have “rights,” only individuals have rights, and they are inherent rights which pre-exist any governments. There is no compromise that can be made here. If there is a compromise, then the individual really doesn’t have rights.

And when there is compromise of the individual’s rights, there is no liberty.

But, alas, America has degenerated from a liberty-loving population following the Revolution to one in which the political process is used for some people to impose their will and way of life onto others.

So it’s always something, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say. Either the voters of California do not believe in the rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or the U.S. Congress wants to define how certain private relationships and contracts must be by law.

And as more amongst the population are increasingly confused about liberty and rights, so are these “Supreme” Justices in Washington.

Now, were I a Supreme Court Justice (and obviously I am not, nor will I ever be, nor would I ever want to be, nor do I think that such a body of Ultimate Deciders has any real legitimacy or moral standing in a free and just society, but I digress…), I would say that it doesn’t matter whether the California Proposition 8 case has legal standing – of course not. And if I had to adhere to the extremely flawed and unjust U.S. Constitution, I would say that the First Amendment protects the individual’s right of freedom of association, and the Ninth Amendment – something which the late Judge Robert Bork compared to an “inkblot” – protects the rights of the individual not enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

I would then give examples of rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, including the right to establish voluntary contracts with others, contracts the terms of which are really the matters of those parties involved, and not the business of any third parties, be they one’s neighbors, the majority of voters of Commie California, Moral Majority hacks activists, state legislators, or court judges. And those contracts include in matters both personal and economic. (Why in the alleged 21^st Century are we even debating these issues?!)

And, regarding the Defense of Marriage Act case, of course that’s “unconstitutional,” because no where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to define or interfere with the personal relationships and contracts of the people of the United States.

I know, I know, there are those out there who desperately search the U.S. Constitution in its every detail, hoping to find some word or phrase they can use to justify their own selfish impositions of their way of life onto others, but whatever.

If homosexuals want to be married and have a legally-binding contract, then that is their right as human beings. The Defense of Marriage Act and the California voter-approved law violate those fundamental human rights.

So, it comes down to this: We really have to decide as an evolved, civilized society who owns the life of the individual.

There is collective ownership of the individual, or there is self-ownership.

There cannot be anything in between. No “shared” ownership of the individual’s life between the individual and the society in which one lives. That’s nutso.

And you really can’t have liberty without the society’s recognition of the individual’s right to self-ownership. In fact, the entire rule of law and the idea of civilized society is based on this, in my view, and self-ownership’s pal, the non-aggression principle. At least, that’s how I see it.

The anti-same-sex marriage advocates are really saying that they as a majority of society (and as enforced by the almighty State) own the life of each individual, as well as other people’s private contracts. Otherwise, even if they disagree with the kinds of private, voluntary contracts which other individuals want to have, the majority of meddlers and intruders are really obligated to buzz off, or “MYOB!” (which is a phrase we no longer hear in the People’s Republic of Amerika now).

And to complicate matters, many of these cases are to do with government benefits, such as in the case of death of spouses, divorces, etc.

But there should be no such thing as “government benefits,” which are redistributed from other members of society whose earnings and wealth are seized from them involuntarily, through coercion or threats of violence. Once again, how can the society call itself “civilized” while simultaneously implementing such dishonest and immoral schemes?

And people are worried about the children whose parents are homosexuals. But what about the many, many children for generations and centuries, raised by heterosexual parents, who were beaten, humiliated and brutalized as part of their upbringing? Such cases are still widespread in our society. Things haven’t changed much there. What about them? (And no, I’m not saying that the heterosexuality of those abusive parents had anything to do with their abuse!)

And I can’t believe the ignorance I am hearing on talk radio. People are actually concerned that, “if we allow gays to marry, then more and more people will be gay and marry one another, there will be no more heterosexuals to reproduce the human race!”

Well, the many surveys which have been done on the percentage of homosexuals in society have ranged from 1 to 20%, so it probably has always been around 10% or so.

Despite the Left’s encouraging homosexuality in the government school curriculum and pop culture for decades, I don’t think that that or the legalization of same-sex marriage in some states has changed that general percentage, or ever will.

But it is sad that so-called conservatives and traditionalists feel this compulsion to immorally use the armed power of the State as a means of social engineering (what are they, leftists?) to force their way of life onto others. A healthy society – which ours isn’t, not by a long shot – really values procreation without State-enforced social engineering and legal compulsion to do it.

So to conclude, it really is a mistake to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court for answers to any issue, certainly not the same-sex marriage issue.

I really thought that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo eminent domain ruling was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as the Court’s legitimacy as Ultimate Decider was concerned.

Then, last year the Supremes decided in favor of the ObamaCare mandate, with Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts declaring that the mandate was a “tax,” even though its proponents weren’t even arguing that it was a tax.

The Court’s self-delegitimizing was at that point a matter of settled law, in my book.

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq

This past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on two same-sex marriage cases: California's voter-approved Proposition 8, which changed the state constitution to eliminate the state-recognized u2018right' (i.e. state-granted privilege) of same-sex couples to marry; and regarding the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as only between one man and one woman, and which restricted federal benefits and inter-state marriage recognition to only opposite-sex marriages.

The arguments and Justices' questions in these cases showed that the laws that legislators (and voters) make are more and more confusing, intrusive and nonsensical, in my view.

In these arguments, the Supremes expressed doubts as to the high court even having jurisdiction, as well as whether the cases had legal standing for review.

In arguments involving the California case this week, the Justices seemed to express doubts as to whether they even wanted to bear the burden of deciding the equality of homosexual couples.

As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley commented, "Indeed, they looked like so many elderly drivers in Florida driving slowly on the highway with their turn signal on, looking desperately for an off-ramp."

Sadly, our society, state legislatures and Congress are filled with many slow drivers with their turn signals forever on and never turning. Turley is correct in observing that the clueless court clucks seem disoriented, as these cases shouldn't be too difficult to decide, in my view.

Perhaps the overpaid highly-paid Justices have more important things on their minds, such as what temperature at which to set their bubble baths later on, and so forth.

However, in the past Turley has suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court should be expanded to perhaps 19 Justices.

Hmmm. Will that really solve the conflicts which arise in our society? (No, I think that perhaps 49 or 149 Justices might be better. Or even 535, if you get my drift.)

So just recently, Nullification author Thomas Woods has been taking some jabs at how some people in America view the U.S. Supreme Court as the Ultimate Decider:

If the peoples of the states created the federal government and its subdivisions as their agent, how do they permanently lose the ability to stop their own creation from destroying them? Since when does the agent tell the principals what its powers are?

To say that the Supreme Court must decide constitutionality in the last resort is to beg all the relevant questions. To say that the Supreme Court has itself decided that it must be this arbiter is to take question-begging to quite an extreme. How can the Supreme Court, part of an agent of the states, have the absolutely final say, even above the sovereign entities that created it? As Madison explained in 1800, the courts have their role, but the parties to the Constitution naturally have to have some kind of defense mechanism in the last resort.

But what ever happened to freedom in America? Has that ever existed here? Why is it that a population of supposedly free people must seek the guidance of government-appointed bureaucrats to decide whether or not certain relationships or contracts are officially recognized by the State? Or approved by some government bureaucrat? And who the hell are the State and its bureaucrats to give their recognition or approval of private relationships and contracts?

Actually, marriage was essentially a private matter until around the 18th Century.

As LRC columnist Ryan McMaken wrote, the State got into the marriage business because the statists couldn't bear the thought of contracts being transferred without the State's intrusions and thefts. And it also has to do with control. The bureaucrats of the State love control.

So besides whether these same-sex marriage cases have legal standing before the high court, some of the Justices had expressed concern as to whether these issues should really be left to the states to decide.

But when the high court refers to "the states," they really mean the states' governments, the state legislatures and state courts should decide the outcomes of these cases. Really, we're talking about politicians, bureaucrats, and government-appointed state court judges.

Sorry. But our liberty and the rights of the individual should not be dependent upon the whims of politically-appointed bureaucrats on courts, or even elected representatives in legislatures. Then, you are not talking about rights or liberty, you are talking about state-granted privileges.

And the Supremes often decide cases on the bases of the conflicts between the rights of the individual and "compelling State interest." Or "balancing the rights of society as a collective against the rights of the individual." Again, in this case we are then not talking about "rights," but state-granted privileges.

But society or the collective does not have "rights," only individuals have rights, and they are inherent rights which pre-exist any governments. There is no compromise that can be made here. If there is a compromise, then the individual really doesn't have rights.

And when there is compromise of the individual's rights, there is no liberty.

But, alas, America has degenerated from a liberty-loving population following the Revolution to one in which the political process is used for some people to impose their will and way of life onto others.

So it's always something, as Roseanne Rosanadana used to say. Either the voters of California do not believe in the rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or the U.S. Congress wants to define how certain private relationships and contracts must be by law.

And as more amongst the population are increasingly confused about liberty and rights, so are these "Supreme" Justices in Washington.

Now, were I a Supreme Court Justice (and obviously I am not, nor will I ever be, nor would I ever want to be, nor do I think that such a body of Ultimate Deciders has any real legitimacy or moral standing in a free and just society, but I digress…), I would say that it doesn't matter whether the California Proposition 8 case has legal standing — of course not. And if I had to adhere to the extremely flawed and unjust U.S. Constitution, I would say that the First Amendment protects the individual's right of freedom of association, and the Ninth Amendment — something which the late Judge Robert Bork compared to an "inkblot" — protects the rights of the individual not enumerated in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.

I would then give examples of rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, including the right to establish voluntary contracts with others, contracts the terms of which are really the matters of those parties involved, and not the business of any third parties, be they one's neighbors, the majority of voters of Commie California, Moral Majority hacks activists, state legislators, or court judges. And those contracts include in matters both personal and economic. (Why in the alleged 21st Century are we even debating these issues?!)

And, regarding the Defense of Marriage Act case, of course that's "unconstitutional," because no where in the Constitution does it authorize Congress to define or interfere with the personal relationships and contracts of the people of the United States.

I know, I know, there are those out there who desperately search the U.S. Constitution in its every detail, hoping to find some word or phrase they can use to justify their own selfish impositions of their way of life onto others, but whatever.

If homosexuals want to be married and have a legally-binding contract, then that is their right as human beings. The Defense of Marriage Act and the California voter-approved law violate those fundamental human rights.

So, it comes down to this: We really have to decide as an evolved, civilized society who owns the life of the individual.

There is collective ownership of the individual, or there is self-ownership.

There cannot be anything in between. No "shared" ownership of the individual's life between the individual and the society in which one lives. That's nutso.

And you really can't have liberty without the society's recognition of the individual's right to self-ownership. In fact, the entire rule of law and the idea of civilized society is based on this, in my view, and self-ownership's pal, the non-aggression principle. At least, that's how I see it.

The anti-same-sex marriage advocates are really saying that they as a majority of society (and as enforced by the almighty State) own the life of each individual, as well as other people's private contracts. Otherwise, even if they disagree with the kinds of private, voluntary contracts which other individuals want to have, the majority of meddlers and intruders are really obligated to buzz off, or "MYOB!" (which is a phrase we no longer hear in the People's Republic of Amerika now).

And to complicate matters, many of these cases are to do with government benefits, such as in the case of death of spouses, divorces, etc.

But there should be no such thing as "government benefits," which are redistributed from other members of society whose earnings and wealth are seized from them involuntarily, through coercion or threats of violence. Once again, how can the society call itself "civilized" while simultaneously implementing such dishonest and immoral schemes?

And people are worried about the children whose parents are homosexuals. But what about the many, many children for generations and centuries, raised by heterosexual parents, who were beaten, humiliated and brutalized as part of their upbringing? Such cases are still widespread in our society. Things haven't changed much there. What about them? (And no, I'm not saying that the heterosexuality of those abusive parents had anything to do with their abuse!)

And I can't believe the ignorance I am hearing on talk radio. People are actually concerned that, "if we allow gays to marry, then more and more people will be gay and marry one another, there will be no more heterosexuals to reproduce the human race!"

Well, the many surveys which have been done on the percentage of homosexuals in society have ranged from 1 to 20%, so it probably has always been around 10% or so.

Despite the Left's encouraging homosexuality in the government school curriculum and pop culture for decades, I don't think that that or the legalization of same-sex marriage in some states has changed that general percentage, or ever will.

But it is sad that so-called conservatives and traditionalists feel this compulsion to immorally use the armed power of the State as a means of social engineering (what are they, leftists?) to force their way of life onto others. A healthy society — which ours isn't, not by a long shot — really values procreation without State-enforced social engineering and legal compulsion to do it.

So to conclude, it really is a mistake to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court for answers to any issue, certainly not the same-sex marriage issue.

I really thought that the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo eminent domain ruling was the straw that broke the camel's back as far as the Court's legitimacy as Ultimate Decider was concerned.

Then, last year the Supremes decided in favor of the ObamaCare mandate, with Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts declaring that the mandate was a "tax," even though its proponents weren't even arguing that it was a tax.

The Court's self-delegitimizing was at that point a matter of settled law, in my book.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Several commentators have been observing the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, but really the U.S. government’s war on Iraq began over 22 years ago.

In January 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush started the war on Iraq, and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, which were continued by President Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. By 2001, hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths were wrought by the U.S. government and the UN, and there was widespread anti-American anger felt by many in the Middle East.

Here is a brief review of what led up to the elder President Bush’s 1991 war on Iraq:

In 1990, Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were engaged in disputes with Kuwait. Iraq believed that Kuwait was siphoning Iraq’s oil via horizontal drilling, and Iraq also believed that Kuwait’s own oil production was above OPEC quotas which allegedly effected in lower oil profits for Iraq.

Saddam Hussein had been the U.S. government’s favorite during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam had started with his invasion of Iran. The U.S. government’s arming and providing tactical battle planning to Iraq, despite U.S. officials knowing that Iraq was using chemical weaponsduring that conflict, were well documented.

When Saddam considered invading Kuwait, he met with then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and asked her what kind of response the U.S. would have to such an invasion.

In their discussion, according to the New York Times, Glaspie stated, “…we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. (Sec. of State) James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (More here.)

Apparently, Saddam Hussein took those words as a green light to invade Kuwait.

However, George Bush the elder then did a bait-and-switch, and began preparing for his war on Iraq. But the biggest task for Bush was to convince the American people that the war on behalf of Kuwait, an extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian monarchy, was not for oil but for “liberating” Kuwait from Saddam.

To sell this war to the American people, the government of Kuwait hired as many as 20 PR and lobbying firms. One PR firm in particular, Hill and Knowlton, was apparently the “mastermind” of the PR campaign, according to PR industry experts John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You provides the details of the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign, as excerpted by PR Watch.

Both Bush presidents were skilled salesmen in their demonizing those who would be on the receiving end of their own wars of aggression. Philip Knightley, author of the book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, in an October 2001 article described the repeated stratagem of warmongers’ use of propaganda to demonize the enemy to rationalize a new war for the warmongers’ own people to support it.

The most effective PR ploy was the congressional testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl who stated, emotionally, that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of hospital incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die.” The girl later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. And not only was that fact suppressed until after Bush’s war began, but the information she gave was false, and the girl had been coached by an executive of Hill and Knowlton. (Video)

Murray Rothbard gives quite a few further details regarding the whole 1990-91 Bush-Iraq-Kuwait wheeling-and-dealing here and here.

During the elder President Bush’s 1991 Gulf War, one of the most egregious acts that the U.S. military committed against the Iraqis was to intentionally destroy civilian water and sewage treatment centers and electrical facilities.

According to researcher James Bovard, U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden published an article in Airpower Journal, titled, “The Enemy as a System,” in which Warden told of the U.S. military’s intentional targeting of the civilian infrastructure as a means to undermine Iraqi “civilian morale.” Bovard also cites a June 23, 1991 Washington Post analysis, which quoted a Pentagon official as stating, “People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”

By the mid-1990s, diseases such as cholera, measles, and typhoid had led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, with many more deaths by the year 2000. This campaign of cruelty was advanced further by the U.S. government and the UN through sanctions and no-fly zones, which prevented medical treatments and the means of repairing damaged infrastructure from being imported into Iraq. Clearly, such a controversial campaign of bombing civilian water and sewage treatment centers must have been approved beforehand by then-President George H.W. Bush and his Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney.

Justifiably, there was widespread anger amongst the inhabitants of the Middle East by 2001. In fact, one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists was the Gulf War’s subsequent sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population.

Besides the sanctions throughout the 1990s as continued by President Bill Clinton, Clinton himself inflicted more bombing of Iraq.

Some people have now been comparing George Bush Jr.’s 2003 revival of the long war on Iraq with the extended war in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, especially combined with the younger Bush’s war of aggression in Afghanistan and Obama’s continuation of those wars and starting new ones.

The younger George Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq was really a continuation of what his father had started in 1991. Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, asserts that Bush Jr. was planning to invade Iraq as early as 1999 to take advantage of the “political capital” his father had built up earlier in Iraq.

(Can you imagine a President Jeb Bush in 2016? But I digress.)

In the elder President George Bush’s January 16, 1991 speech from the Oval Office, when he claimed that his 1991 war “will not be another Vietnam” (approx. 6:45), he also spoke of the “New World Order” (7:30).

The neoconservatives and progressive interventionists have been implementing their plans for global hegemony for decades, and using the force of the U.S. government to do it. But there is a frightening love of government that connects these interventionists, far outweighing any actual love forfreedom and peace they could possibly have.

And now, after all these 22 years of Bush war quagmires and trillions of dollars in debt, and with warnings regarding the warmongers’ plans for Iran (which was part of the neocons’ plans all along), can the American people ever wake up to the truth about all this?

Now, the elder George Bush was elected President in 1988. But given how entrenched the Establishment’s interventionist policies were by that time, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered whether Bush or Democrat Michael Dukakis was elected in 1988. Given the myth of the “progressive peacenik,” a hypothetical Dukakis administration of 1989-1993 would most probably have been similar to the current one of Barack Obama. And with similar militarist reactions to Iraq as Bush in the name of furthering the obsession for hegemony that statists of both left and right have (and to keep the military-industrial-complex happy, too).

However, during the 1988 presidential campaign, had the media given Libertarian Party nominee Ron Paul the same free advertising they gave both Bush and Dukakis, the American people would have seen the clear alternative from the Bush-Dukakis statist quo.

And how would a President Ron Paul have handled the collapse of the Soviet Union? Given that any threats or perceived threats from overseas had vanished overnight, Ron Paul would have closed all the overseas U.S. military bases that existed then, including all the European and Asian bases and other foreign U.S. governmental apparatus. He would have brought all U.S. troops home, and many of them would have gone into the private sector to become productive workers, business owners and employers.

A President Paul would have shrunk the federal government by eliminating many useless departments, bureaus and programs, which Ronald Reagan promised to do but didn’t. And Paul would have abolished the fascist income tax. The economic boom of the 1990s would have been magnified by many times, for sure.

And a President Ron Paul would have educated the American people on the actual ideas of liberty. He would have informed the people of what a realfree market is – something that the Heritage Foundation, Glenn Beck, and, ugh, Willard Romney wouldn’t know if they fell over it.

There also wouldn’t have been a U.S. government invasion of Iraq in 1991, bombing of civilian infrastructure, sanctions and no-fly zones, and provocations of foreigners becoming determined to retaliate. There may not (or probably not) have been a 9/11, and the police state in America that was already growing by the early 1990s would have been put to a stop. (And the younger George W. Bush probably wouldn’t have even been elected governor of Texas, let alone President of the U.S.) And there wouldn’t have been any U.S.-initiated wars in Afghanistan and other countries as well.

But, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is just not realistic, and what happened, happened. The misery, destruction, collapse of the American economy in addition to all these wars – it happened, thanks to neocons and progressive interventionists.

The central planners in charge must have very serious clinically pathological delusions of grandeur and a hunger for power and control in their attempts to “remake the Middle East in America’s image” or “make the world safe for democracy” (but not freedom and peace), while coveting those foreign territories’ natural resources and slaughtering innocents.

So, call me old-fashioned, but it takes a really sick, criminal mind to intentionally destroy the water and sewage treatments of an entire civilian population, and forcibly withhold their medical treatments and repairs. And it takes a very demented person to view entire populations and cultures in other parts of the world as sub-human and whose lives are not worthy of any “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and peace.

As I have stated in the past, America’s culture has declined over the past century. The greater power we have allowed governments to usurp, the further “third world” America has become.

The Bush wars of the past 22 years have not been helpful to human progress, that’s for sure.

In January 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush started the war on Iraq, and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, which were continued by President Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. By 2001, hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths were wrought by the U.S. government and the UN, and there was widespread anti-American anger felt by many in the Middle East.

Here is a brief review of what led up to the elder President Bush’s 1991 war on Iraq:

In 1990, Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were engaged in disputes with Kuwait. Iraq believed that Kuwait was siphoning Iraq’s oil via horizontal drilling, and Iraq also believed that Kuwait’s own oil production was above OPEC quotas which allegedly effected in lower oil profits for Iraq.

Saddam Hussein had been the U.S. government’s favorite during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam had started with his invasion of Iran. The U.S. government’s arming and providing tactical battle planning to Iraq, despite U.S. officials knowing that Iraq was using chemical weapons during that conflict, were well documented.

When Saddam considered invading Kuwait, he met with then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and asked her what kind of response the U.S. would have to such an invasion.

In their discussion, according to the New York Times, Glaspie stated, “…we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. (Sec. of State) James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (More here.)

Apparently, Saddam Hussein took those words as a green light to invade Kuwait.

However, George Bush the elder then did a bait-and-switch, and began preparing for his war on Iraq. But the biggest task for Bush was to convince the American people that the war on behalf of Kuwait, an extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian monarchy, was not for oil but for “liberating” Kuwait from Saddam.

To sell this war to the American people, the government of Kuwait hired as many as 20 PR and lobbying firms. One PR firm in particular, Hill and Knowlton, was apparently the “mastermind” of the PR campaign, according to PR industry experts John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You provides the details of the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign, as excerpted by PR Watch.

Both Bush presidents were skilled salesmen in their demonizing those who would be on the receiving end of their own wars of aggression. Philip Knightley, author of the book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, in an October 2001 article described the repeated stratagem of warmongers’ use of propaganda to demonize the enemy to rationalize a new war for the warmongers’ own people to support it.

The most effective PR ploy was the congressional testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl who stated, emotionally, that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of hospital incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die.” The girl later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. And not only was that fact suppressed until after Bush’s war began, but the information she gave was false, and the girl had been coached by an executive of Hill and Knowlton. (Video)

Murray Rothbard gives quite a few further details regarding the whole 1990-91 Bush-Iraq-Kuwait wheeling-and-dealing here and here.

During the elder President Bush’s 1991 Gulf War, one of the most egregious acts that the U.S. military committed against the Iraqis was to intentionally destroy civilian water and sewage treatment centers and electrical facilities.

According to researcher James Bovard, U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden published an article in Airpower Journal, titled, “The Enemy as a System,” in which Warden told of the U.S. military’s intentional targeting of the civilian infrastructure as a means to undermine Iraqi “civilian morale.” Bovard also cites a June 23, 1991 Washington Post analysis, which quoted a Pentagon official as stating, “People say, u2018You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions u2014 help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”

By the mid-1990s, diseases such as cholera, measles, and typhoid had led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, with many more deaths by the year 2000. This campaign of cruelty was advanced further by the U.S. government and the UN through sanctions and no-fly zones, which prevented medical treatments and the means of repairing damaged infrastructure from being imported into Iraq. Clearly, such a controversial campaign of bombing civilian water and sewage treatment centers must have been approved beforehand by then-President George H.W. Bush and his Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney.

Justifiably, there was widespread anger amongst the inhabitants of the Middle East by 2001. In fact, one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists was the Gulf War’s subsequent sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population.

Besides the sanctions throughout the 1990s as continued by President Bill Clinton, Clinton himself inflicted more bombing of Iraq.

Some people have now been comparing George Bush Jr.’s 2003 revival of the long war on Iraq with the extended war in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, especially combined with the younger Bush’s war of aggression in Afghanistan and Obama’s continuation of those wars and starting new ones.

The younger George Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq was really a continuation of what his father had started in 1991. Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, asserts that Bush Jr. was planning to invade Iraq as early as 1999 to take advantage of the “political capital” his father had built up earlier in Iraq.

(Can you imagine a President Jeb Bush in 2016? But I digress.)

In the elder President George Bush’s January 16, 1991 speech from the Oval Office, when he claimed that his 1991 war “will not be another Vietnam” (approx. 6:45), he also spoke of the “New World Order” (7:30).

The neoconservatives and progressive interventionists have been implementing their plans for global hegemony for decades, and using the force of the U.S. government to do it. But there is a frightening love of government that connects these interventionists, far outweighing any actual love for freedom and peace they could possibly have.

And now, after all these 22 years of Bush war quagmires and trillions of dollars in debt, and with warnings regarding the warmongers’ plans for Iran (which was part of the neocons’ plans all along), can the American people ever wake up to the truth about all this?

Now, the elder George Bush was elected President in 1988. But given how entrenched the Establishment’s interventionist policies were by that time, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered whether Bush or Democrat Michael Dukakis was elected in 1988. Given the myth of the “progressive peacenik,” a hypothetical Dukakis administration of 1989-1993 would most probably have been similar to the current one of Barack Obama. And with similar militarist reactions to Iraq as Bush in the name of furthering the obsession for hegemony that statists of both left and right have (and to keep the military-industrial-complex happy, too).

However, during the 1988 presidential campaign, had the media given Libertarian Party nominee Ron Paul the same free advertising they gave both Bush and Dukakis, the American people would have seen the clear alternative from the Bush-Dukakis statist quo.

And how would a President Ron Paul have handled the collapse of the Soviet Union? Given that any threats or perceived threats from overseas had vanished overnight, Ron Paul would have closed all the overseas U.S. military bases that existed then, including all the European and Asian bases and other foreign U.S. governmental apparatus. He would have brought all U.S. troops home, and many of them would have gone into the private sector to become productive workers, business owners and employers.

A President Paul would have shrunk the federal government by eliminating many useless departments, bureaus and programs, which Ronald Reagan promised to do but didn’t. And Paul would have abolished the fascist income tax. The economic boom of the 1990s would have been magnified by many times, for sure.

And a President Ron Paul would have educated the American people on the actual ideas of liberty. He would have informed the people of what a real free market is – something that the Heritage Foundation, Glenn Beck, and, ugh, Willard Romney wouldn’t know if they fell over it.

There also wouldn’t have been a U.S. government invasion of Iraq in 1991, bombing of civilian infrastructure, sanctions and no-fly zones, and provocations of foreigners becoming determined to retaliate. There may not (or probably not) have been a 9/11, and the police state in America that was already growing by the early 1990s would have been put to a stop. (And the younger George W. Bush probably wouldn’t have even been elected governor of Texas, let alone President of the U.S.) And there wouldn’t have been any U.S.-initiated wars in Afghanistan and other countries as well.

But, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is just not realistic, and what happened, happened. The misery, destruction, collapse of the American economy in addition to all these wars – it happened, thanks to neocons and progressive interventionists.

The central planners in charge must have very serious clinically pathological delusions of grandeur and a hunger for power and control in their attempts to “remake the Middle East in America’s image” or “make the world safe for democracy” (but not freedom and peace), while coveting those foreign territories’ natural resources and slaughtering innocents.

So, call me old-fashioned, but it takes a really sick, criminal mind to intentionally destroy the water and sewage treatments of an entire civilian population, and forcibly withhold their medical treatments and repairs. And it takes a very demented person to view entire populations and cultures in other parts of the world as sub-human and whose lives are not worthy of any “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and peace.

As I have stated in the past, America’s culture has declined over the past century. The greater power we have allowed governments to usurp, the further “third world” America has become.

The Bush wars of the past 22 years have not been helpful to human progress, that’s for sure.

This is really a follow-up from my previous article on the government-media complex’s continuingwar propaganda. To clarify, my bringing up Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was not a defense of him but a defense of due process and the rule of law.

I happen to believe that all people must act under the rule of law with no exceptions, including government bureaucrats.

And in my previous article, I referred to “war” as an artificial concept. There’s really no such thing as war – only criminal aggression, which is what “war” is. You are either behaving aggressively in society, or you are peaceful and respectful of the lives and property of others. There’s no middle ground there.

However, there are those who believe that “9/11 changed everything,” and that “we’re at war with al Qaeda.” They believe those things because they had been bamboozled by government bureaucrats and their apparatchiks who already had questionable plans in place for wars – inAfghanistan and Iraq – and for a police state for America well before 9/11.

And our rulers say we are “at war with al-Qaeda,” even though our own government has been supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, supported its rise inLibya, and in fact supported Osama bin Laden early on (similar to the Israeli government’s own dippy central planners helping to create Hamas).

Do people know these things?

So I personally find the corrupt buffoons of the U.S. government terrifying. We are not “at war with al-Qaeda”; the U.S. government has been at waragainst the American people.

But some people want to suggest that my wanting to tell the truth about our government’s shenanigans, or my defending the right of all people to due process, or suggest that a Bradley Manning exposing government crimes, could possibly be “aiding and abetting” the enemy, or being an “enemy combatant.”

So given our dangerous government’s absurdly broad and ambiguous definition of “enemy combatant,” you can see why I find these U.S. officials terrifying.

And it isn’t just the President’s unconstitutional power to kill an innocent human being sans due process, it’s also the NDAA’s indefinite detention of Americans without due process, the FISA or otherwise searches and seizures without due process, all these thoroughly un-American police state policies now.

For instance, U.S. government agents had paid villagers in Pakistan to drop spy transmitter chips in areas that would lead to innocents being captured for torture or innocents being murdered by drones. And many of the Guantanamo detainees who were taken by U.S. forces from abroad had beenfound to be totally innocent, having been turned in by local villagers being paid by U.S. government officials, or in which no evidence against them existed or whose capture had been a result of informants giving false confessions (which is the real purpose of torture, by the way).

Can you imagine combining those imbecilic central planner-type policies with the more recent “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign? Can you imagine being the victim of some Nazi-brownshirt neighbor falsely turning you in for no good reason, and government agents treating you like a “terrorist”?

Now, occasionally I hear Mark Levin on the radio. Sometimes he can go on and on and on about how great the Constitution and Bill of Rights are, and criticizing the Obama socialist agenda with point after point on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, etc., and lately he has even been criticizing theEstablishment Republicans in Congress. Good so far.

But then, he starts talking about U.S. government foreign policy, and pulls a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on us – totally turning against the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law, and spewing the ignorance and moral relativism of the neo-conned chickenhawks who have been starting the wars and occupations that have caused terrorist blowback against America.

Sadly, the neocons have unwittingly turned Thomas Jefferson’s America into a Stalin-like America. The neocons brought their deranged collectivist and globalist vision to America, and the conservatives and “constitutionalists” such as Levin bought it, hook, line and sinker.

One issue that Mark Levin was discussing late last week (on 3/8/13) was the decision of the Obama Administration to bring a terrorism suspect into a civilian court for trial, rather than bring him to Guantanamo or some other torture regime. Of course, the cognitively dissonant Levin was against the idea of a civilian trial.

Levin and other neocons actually believe that we’re really at war, as our central planning rulers have been telling us since 9/11, and that “war is different.”

“War is an exception, and therefore the Bill of Rights needs to be suspended,” seems to be what the zombie neocons have been saying.

Well, Levin – supposedly a big fan of the “Founding Fathers” – doesn’t seem to understand that the Bill of Rights includes inalienable rights that all human beings have, pre-existing any government. And these rights, such as the right to due process, the right to require your accuser to present evidence against you in a court of law, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, the right to be secure in your person, papers, property and effects, apply to all human beings, everywhere.

The Bill of Rights doesn’t say “These rights only apply to Americans, or to people who happen to be within the borders of the United States.”

So, if some government bureaucrat, the President, a military general or soldier, or one’s next-door neighbors want to accuse someone of something, then one has a natural, inherent right to require the accuser to present evidence against the accused or otherwise they must leave him alone. That’s theAmerican way. (It might not be the Nazi Germany way, but it is the American way.)

And it doesn’t matter what crimes others or the government accuses someone of, terrorism, murder, rape, doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter who is being accused, foreigner or American, “over there” or “over here.”

But due to the widespread cognitive dissonance of today’s Americans (and generations afflicted with government-controlled schooling), one type of crime is now different from all others. Terrorism is different. Because of terrorism, we must remove what used to be seen as inalienable rights from all people domestic or foreign, and we must blindly and obediently trust the judgment of politicians and militarists.

This kind of trust in politicians is quite misplaced, to say the least, as Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger observed just recently.

The fact is, a crime of aggression is a crime of aggression, whether a suicide bomber blows up a marketplace, whether a drugged-up psychopath shoots innocents at a school, or whether a government ruler takes an organized military overseas and invades a country that was of no threat to his people, and occupies those foreign lands by force and destroys those entire societies. Those are all crimes of aggression.

You see, in 1991 when the U.S. government initiated a criminal act of military aggression against Iraq, intentionally destroyed Iraq’s civilian water and sewage treatments and electrical centers, imposed sanctions and no-fly zones and prevented materials from being imported to repair the damage and prevented medical supplies from being imported, and the rates of cancer and cholera and other illnesses amongst the Iraqi civilian population skyrocketed as a result during the 1990s, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, those acts are all crimes, regardless of the propaganda government bureaucrats disseminated.

During the 1990s, Ron Paul actually warned us several times that, if the U.S. government continued with those aggressions against people on foreign lands, there could very well be a terrorist attack within the U.S.

But there are a lot of people now in America who actually think it’s absurd to bring up the actions of our own government which preceded 9/11. They think it’s absurd for someone to suggest we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. government foreign policy. “How dare you suggest that our government shouldn’t “do unto others what we would not want others to do unto us”!

That denial of human rights in others, the same inalienable rights that one claims for oneself, is incredibly selfish and shows how self-centered and anti-social the philosophy of “Exceptionalism” really is.

So the American Exceptionalists believe in our government’s right to invade and occupy other countries, but that the people in those countries do not have the same kind of right to self-defense that we Americans have, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

For example, while many of the conservatives, the “moral values” crowd and self-proclaimed “patriotic Americans” now fear the Left and the feds’ gun control agenda because “patriots” believe in the 2^nd Amendment, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, they nevertheless supported U.S. troops confiscating arms from innocent civilians in Iraq, making Iraqis totally defenseless.

Meanwhile, the obsessive bureaucrats and their flunkies fail to see the big picture – they fail to understand the causes and effects regarding terrorism.

And so Bradley Manning has been referred to by ignoramuses as a “traitor,” because he released so-called classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks. As I mentioned in my previous article, Manning wanted the American people – not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people – to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers.

But the real traitors here are our central planners who have been intentionally starting wars and provoking foreigners to justify the always-expanding, tax-eating central planning and military bureaucracy.

The treasonous central planners had a duty is to “protect the peace,” to keep Americans safe and secure from foreign aggression. But what they have been doing – starting wars and provoking foreigners – has made Americans less safe and less secure.

The central planners are derelicts of duty who have not been “promoting the general welfare” or well-being of America and instead have diminished it.

But the Exceptionalists still don’t see it that way. The zombies continue to stare at their iPhones and their TVs, and let the propagandists hypnotize them.

And then we have a well-meaning filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, but the real rulers still seem to be the ignorant Sens. Graham and McCain, and the dangerous Obama and John Brennan, to our detriment.

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: The War Propaganda Continues

This is really a follow-up from my previous article on the government-media complex's continuing war propaganda. To clarify, my bringing up Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was not a defense of him but a defense of due process and the rule of law.

I happen to believe that all people must act under the rule of law with no exceptions, including government bureaucrats.

And in my previous article, I referred to "war" as an artificial concept. There's really no such thing as war — only criminal aggression, which is what "war" is. You are either behaving aggressively in society, or you are peaceful and respectful of the lives and property of others. There's no middle ground there.

However, there are those who believe that "9/11 changed everything," and that "we're at war with al Qaeda." They believe those things because they had been bamboozled by government bureaucrats and their apparatchiks who already had questionable plans in place for wars — in Afghanistan and Iraq — and for a police state for America well before 9/11.

And our rulers say we are "at war with al-Qaeda," even though our own government has been supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, supported its rise in Libya, and in fact supported Osama bin Laden early on (similar to the Israeli government's own dippy central planners helping to create Hamas).

Do people know these things?

So I personally find the corrupt buffoons of the U.S. government terrifying. We are not "at war with al-Qaeda"; the U.S. government has been at war against the American people.

But some people want to suggest that my wanting to tell the truth about our government's shenanigans, or my defending the right of all people to due process, or suggest that a Bradley Manning exposing government crimes, could possibly be "aiding and abetting" the enemy, or being an "enemy combatant."

So given our dangerous government's absurdly broad and ambiguous definition of "enemy combatant," you can see why I find these U.S. officials terrifying.

And it isn't just the President's unconstitutional power to kill an innocent human being sans due process, it's also the NDAA's indefinite detention of Americans without due process, the FISA or otherwise searches and seizures without due process, all these thoroughly un-American police state policies now.

For instance, U.S. government agents had paid villagers in Pakistan to drop spy transmitter chips in areas that would lead to innocents being captured for torture or innocents being murdered by drones. And many of the Guantanamo detainees who were taken by U.S. forces from abroad had been found to be totally innocent, having been turned in by local villagers being paid by U.S. government officials, or in which no evidence against them existed or whose capture had been a result of informants giving false confessions (which is the real purpose of torture, by the way).

Can you imagine combining those imbecilic central planner-type policies with the more recent "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign? Can you imagine being the victim of some Nazi-brownshirt neighbor falsely turning you in for no good reason, and government agents treating you like a "terrorist"?

Now, occasionally I hear Mark Levin on the radio. Sometimes he can go on and on and on about how great the Constitution and Bill of Rights are, and criticizing the Obama socialist agenda with point after point on ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, etc., and lately he has even been criticizing the Establishment Republicans in Congress. Good so far.

But then, he starts talking about U.S. government foreign policy, and pulls a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on us — totally turning against the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law, and spewing the ignorance and moral relativism of the neo-conned chickenhawks who have been starting the wars and occupations that have caused terrorist blowback against America.

Sadly, the neocons have unwittingly turned Thomas Jefferson's America into a Stalin-like America. The neocons brought their deranged collectivist and globalist vision to America, and the conservatives and "constitutionalists" such as Levin bought it, hook, line and sinker.

One issue that Mark Levin was discussing late last week (on 3/8/13) was the decision of the Obama Administration to bring a terrorism suspect into a civilian court for trial, rather than bring him to Guantanamo or some other torture regime. Of course, the cognitively dissonant Levin was against the idea of a civilian trial.

Levin and other neocons actually believe that we're really at war, as our central planning rulers have been telling us since 9/11, and that "war is different."

"War is an exception, and therefore the Bill of Rights needs to be suspended," seems to be what the zombie neocons have been saying.

Well, Levin — supposedly a big fan of the "Founding Fathers" — doesn't seem to understand that the Bill of Rights includes inalienable rights that all human beings have, pre-existing any government. And these rights, such as the right to due process, the right to require your accuser to present evidence against you in a court of law, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, the right to be secure in your person, papers, property and effects, apply to all human beings, everywhere.

The Bill of Rights doesn't say "These rights only apply to Americans, or to people who happen to be within the borders of the United States."

So, if some government bureaucrat, the President, a military general or soldier, or one's next-door neighbors want to accuse someone of something, then one has a natural, inherent right to require the accuser to present evidence against the accused or otherwise they must leave him alone. That's the American way. (It might not be the Nazi Germany way, but it is the American way.)

And it doesn't matter what crimes others or the government accuses someone of, terrorism, murder, rape, doesn't matter. Nor does it matter who is being accused, foreigner or American, "over there" or "over here."

But due to the widespread cognitive dissonance of today's Americans (and generations afflicted with government-controlled schooling), one type of crime is now different from all others. Terrorism is different. Because of terrorism, we must remove what used to be seen as inalienable rights from all people domestic or foreign, and we must blindly and obediently trust the judgment of politicians and militarists.

This kind of trust in politicians is quite misplaced, to say the least, as Future of Freedom President Jacob Hornberger observed just recently.

The fact is, a crime of aggression is a crime of aggression, whether a suicide bomber blows up a marketplace, whether a drugged-up psychopath shoots innocents at a school, or whether a government ruler takes an organized military overseas and invades a country that was of no threat to his people, and occupies those foreign lands by force and destroys those entire societies. Those are all crimes of aggression.

You see, in 1991 when the U.S. government initiated a criminal act of military aggression against Iraq, intentionally destroyed Iraq's civilian water and sewage treatments and electrical centers, imposed sanctions and no-fly zones and prevented materials from being imported to repair the damage and prevented medical supplies from being imported, and the rates of cancer and cholera and other illnesses amongst the Iraqi civilian population skyrocketed as a result during the 1990s, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, those acts are all crimes, regardless of the propaganda government bureaucrats disseminated.

During the 1990s, Ron Paul actually warned us several times that, if the U.S. government continued with those aggressions against people on foreign lands, there could very well be a terrorist attack within the U.S.

But there are a lot of people now in America who actually think it's absurd to bring up the actions of our own government which preceded 9/11. They think it's absurd for someone to suggest we apply the Golden Rule to U.S. government foreign policy. "How dare you suggest that our government shouldn't "do unto others what we would not want others to do unto us"!

That denial of human rights in others, the same inalienable rights that one claims for oneself, is incredibly selfish and shows how self-centered and anti-social the philosophy of "Exceptionalism" really is.

So the American Exceptionalists believe in our government's right to invade and occupy other countries, but that the people in those countries do not have the same kind of right to self-defense that we Americans have, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

For example, while many of the conservatives, the "moral values" crowd and self-proclaimed "patriotic Americans" now fear the Left and the feds' gun control agenda because "patriots" believe in the 2nd Amendment, the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms, they nevertheless supported U.S. troops confiscating arms from innocent civilians in Iraq, making Iraqis totally defenseless.

Meanwhile, the obsessive bureaucrats and their flunkies fail to see the big picture — they fail to understand the causes and effects regarding terrorism.

And so Bradley Manning has been referred to by ignoramuses as a "traitor," because he released so-called classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks. As I mentioned in my previous article, Manning wanted the American people — not jihadists or al-Qaeda, mind you, but the American people — to know about the crimes, incompetence and corruption of our rulers.

But the real traitors here are our central planners who have been intentionally starting wars and provoking foreigners to justify the always-expanding, tax-eating central planning and military bureaucracy.

The treasonous central planners had a duty is to "protect the peace," to keep Americans safe and secure from foreign aggression. But what they have been doing — starting wars and provoking foreigners — has made Americans less safe and less secure.

The central planners are derelicts of duty who have not been "promoting the general welfare" or well-being of America and instead have diminished it.

But the Exceptionalists still don't see it that way. The zombies continue to stare at their iPhones and their TVs, and let the propagandists hypnotize them.

And then we have a well-meaning filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul, but the real rulers still seem to be the ignorant Sens. Graham and McCain, and the dangerous Obama and John Brennan, to our detriment.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Some people believe that Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster to delay the vote to confirm the barbaric John Brennan as CIA Director was effective. However, there are skeptics, and I am one of them. We still seem to be ruled by government officials who are clueless about how to maintain a civilized society and are clueless about human rights.

And Americans seem to depend on a mainstream media for information but are getting government propaganda instead.

For instance, during a PBS discussion about Sen. Paul’s filibuster and the drone program controversy, New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane incorrectly asserted that U.S. officials “have in one case, in September of 2011, killed one American overseas. And that was Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined the al-Qaida branch in Yemen and was actively plotting terrorism against the United States.”

Now, either Shane really believes what he is saying – in which case he is not a very good reporter – or he knows these items of information are not true and is merely “parroting the party line,” as the old saying goes.

First, U.S. government drones bombed and murdered at least three Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was not even accused of any crimes or of terrorism.

And secondly, Shane also stated – falsely – that Anwar al-Awlaki was “actively plotting terrorism against the United States.” The Obama Administration never presented any evidence against al-Awlaki. And, as analysts have demonstrated, any evidence against al-Awlaki that may have existed was weak and its use in an actual trial probably couldn’t have convicted him.

This case was very similar to the Osama bin Laden case, in which neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations had any evidence to prove bin Laden’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. As George W. Bush stated regarding the Taliban’s requiring the Bush Administration to present evidence against bin Laden, “There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

Obama’s technique was similar, in that his refusal to present evidence against al-Awlaki was based on secrecy, an important part of totalitarian regimes. But “We know he’s guilty, and we don’t have to prove it to you” is basically what the Obama Regime implied in its refusal to disclose its alleged evidence.

The main problem that the U.S. government had with Anwar al-Awlaki, however, was with his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy which he included in his religious sermons, speech entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in this very important article on this subject, the First Amendment protects the advocating of violence as a means of defending oneself against violent and tyrannical governments. Greenwald pointed to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, its reversal of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which separated the difference between forms of speech which “‘advocate or teach the duty, necessity, or propriety’ of violence ‘as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform’” and forms of speech which are an “incitement to imminent lawless action.”

You see, from the point of view of the millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and other foreigners who have been the victims of the U.S. government’s wanton socialist violence and destruction not just since 9/11 but especially since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991, they actually view the U.S. government as a tyrannical foreign invader and occupier (which it has been).

But especially since 9/11 many in the mainstream news media have been obediently and subserviently repeating what government bureaucrats and their spokesflunkies have been dictating to them, rather than actually engaging in real investigating or research. They certainly do not seem to have beenquestioning the assertions of government officials, that’s for sure.

And we also have some of the most ignorant and short-sighted congressmen and senators in Washington as well. In response to Sen. Paul’s example of Vietnam and the possibility of drone murdering Jane Fonda in her cavorting with the North Vietnamese in Hanoi, rather than arresting her and charging and trying her for treason, Sen. John McCain replied, “To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous.” Yet, that is exactly what Obama did to Anwar al-Awlaki and why he did it.

Sadly, most of the American people do not know these important facts, as the mainstream news media seem to have been merely copying and pasting the latest White House press releases, and passing them off as “news,” especially since 9/11.

In fact, part of our problem, and which is why some true patriots are concerned for Americans’ future as a free society and not just another banana republic dictatorship, is that we have actual powerful U.S. senators who do not understand the uniquely American ideas of due process and presumption of innocence.

In my article, Senators Who Love the Government But Hate America, I referred to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s outburst, “If you’re an American citizen and you betray your country, you’re not going to be given a lawyer.” And my reply was: Who will determine whether or not one has “betrayed” one’s country?

Graham and others seem to want the President or military generals to make such a determination. But those who actually know their history know how empowering the President to be judge, jury and executioner ends up. (Not good.)

However, it seems to me that these rulers are more concerned with whether someone has betrayed the government, not the country.

In betrayal of certain bureaucrats’ policies, not in betrayal of their fellow people. Graham even suggested that political speech could be curtailed during times of “war.”

And as more information has come out about Army Private Bradley Manning’s release of overly-classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, andwhy he would do that, we have seen that Manning’s motivations were out of a duty not to government bureaucrats but out of a duty to the American people. (We cannot say the same about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however.)

Manning saw that crimes were being committed against foreign people, and in America’s name, and he believed that the American people had a right to know about them.

So there are now many examples of government censorship of political speech since 9/11. But these senators who want to label someone as an “enemy combatant” merely for questioning or criticizing short-sighted, counter-productive and dangerous government policies, such as the “war on terror” itself and its legitimacy, are really acting to protect the government and its minions.

And thanks to the propagandists, the Orwellian story of 9/11 suggests that these conflicts all began on 9/11. To this day, the propagandists still refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. government’s disastrous foreign interventions, and especially its 1991 first war of aggression on Iraq and subsequent sanctions were major provocations against the people of that region of the world. But, true to their diehard socialist agenda, the rulers went ahead after 9/11 to increase the interventions, wars, and crimes of renditions, indefinite detentions of innocents, tortures and murders of foreigners.

But all this war stuff is a crock, as I mentioned here. War is really an artificial concept used by collectivists, statists, racists and power-grabbers to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it. This is the whole point of American Exceptionalism, by the way.

Perhaps some of the people will finally see the illegitimacy of these wars when the Washington regime begins to target the American people more directly (after disarming them and making them totally defenseless, of course), which is where we seem to be heading, as I noted in my 2010 article,Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon.

And, as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger pointed out recently, the early Americans and Revolutionaries also warned us over 200 years ago against an armed federal government run amok.

I think our government has run amok.

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: How the State Has Ravaged Our Inalienable Rights

Some people believe that Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster to delay the vote to confirm the barbaric John Brennan as CIA Director was effective. However, there are skeptics, and I am one of them. We still seem to be ruled by government officials who are clueless about how to maintain a civilized society and are clueless about human rights.

And Americans seem to depend on a mainstream media for information but are getting government propaganda instead.

For instance, during a PBS discussion about Sen. Paul's filibuster and the drone program controversy, New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane incorrectly asserted that U.S. officials "have in one case, in September of 2011, killed one American overseas. And that was Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined the al-Qaida branch in Yemen and was actively plotting terrorism against the United States."

Now, either Shane really believes what he is saying — in which case he is not a very good reporter — or he knows these items of information are not true and is merely "parroting the party line," as the old saying goes.

First, U.S. government drones bombed and murdered at least three Americans, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was not even accused of any crimes or of terrorism.

And secondly, Shane also stated — falsely — that Anwar al-Awlaki was "actively plotting terrorism against the United States." The Obama Administration never presented any evidence against al-Awlaki. And, as analysts have demonstrated, any evidence against al-Awlaki that may have existed was weak and its use in an actual trial probably couldn't have convicted him.

This case was very similar to the Osama bin Laden case, in which neither the Bush nor Obama Administrations had any evidence to prove bin Laden's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. As George W. Bush stated regarding the Taliban's requiring the Bush Administration to present evidence against bin Laden, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty."

Obama's technique was similar, in that his refusal to present evidence against al-Awlaki was based on secrecy, an important part of totalitarian regimes. But "We know he's guilty, and we don't have to prove it to you" is basically what the Obama Regime implied in its refusal to disclose its alleged evidence.

The main problem that the U.S. government had with Anwar al-Awlaki, however, was with his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy which he included in his religious sermons, speech entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in this very important article on this subject, the First Amendment protects the advocating of violence as a means of defending oneself against violent and tyrannical governments. Greenwald pointed to a 1969 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, its reversal of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which separated the difference between forms of speech which "u2018advocate or teach the duty, necessity, or propriety' of violence u2018as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform'" and forms of speech which are an "incitement to imminent lawless action."

You see, from the point of view of the millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis and other foreigners who have been the victims of the U.S. government's wanton socialist violence and destruction not just since 9/11 but especially since the first U.S. government war on Iraq in 1991, they actually view the U.S. government as a tyrannical foreign invader and occupier (which it has been).

But especially since 9/11 many in the mainstream news media have been obediently and subserviently repeating what government bureaucrats and their spokesflunkies have been dictating to them, rather than actually engaging in real investigating or research. They certainly do not seem to have been questioning the assertions of government officials, that's for sure.

And we also have some of the most ignorant and short-sighted congressmen and senators in Washington as well. In response to Sen. Paul's example of Vietnam and the possibility of drone murdering Jane Fonda in her cavorting with the North Vietnamese in Hanoi, rather than arresting her and charging and trying her for treason, Sen. John McCain replied, "To somehow allege or infer that the president of the United States is going to kill somebody like Jane Fonda or somebody who disagrees with the policies is a stretch of imagination which is, frankly, ridiculous." Yet, that is exactly what Obama did to Anwar al-Awlaki and why he did it.

Sadly, most of the American people do not know these important facts, as the mainstream news media seem to have been merely copying and pasting the latest White House press releases, and passing them off as "news," especially since 9/11.

In fact, part of our problem, and which is why some true patriots are concerned for Americans' future as a free society and not just another banana republic dictatorship, is that we have actual powerful U.S. senators who do not understand the uniquely American ideas of due process and presumption of innocence.

In my article, Senators Who Love the Government But Hate America, I referred to Sen. Lindsey Graham's outburst, "If you're an American citizen and you betray your country, you're not going to be given a lawyer." And my reply was: Who will determine whether or not one has "betrayed" one's country?

Graham and others seem to want the President or military generals to make such a determination. But those who actually know their history know how empowering the President to be judge, jury and executioner ends up. (Not good.)

However, it seems to me that these rulers are more concerned with whether someone has betrayed the government, not the country.

In betrayal of certain bureaucrats' policies, not in betrayal of their fellow people. Graham even suggested that political speech could be curtailed during times of "war."

And as more information has come out about Army Private Bradley Manning's release of overly-classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks, and why he would do that, we have seen that Manning's motivations were out of a duty not to government bureaucrats but out of a duty to the American people. (We cannot say the same about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however.)

Manning saw that crimes were being committed against foreign people, and in America's name, and he believed that the American people had a right to know about them.

So there are now many examples of government censorship of political speech since 9/11. But these senators who want to label someone as an "enemy combatant" merely for questioning or criticizing short-sighted, counter-productive and dangerous government policies, such as the "war on terror" itself and its legitimacy, are really acting to protect the government and its minions.

And thanks to the propagandists, the Orwellian story of 9/11 suggests that these conflicts all began on 9/11. To this day, the propagandists still refuse to acknowledge that the U.S. government's disastrous foreign interventions, and especially its 1991 first war of aggression on Iraq and subsequent sanctions were major provocations against the people of that region of the world. But, true to their diehard socialist agenda, the rulers went ahead after 9/11 to increase the interventions, wars, and crimes of renditions, indefinite detentions of innocents, tortures and murders of foreigners.

But all this war stuff is a crock, as I mentioned here. War is really an artificial concept used by collectivists, statists, racists and power-grabbers to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it. This is the whole point of American Exceptionalism, by the way.

Perhaps some of the people will finally see the illegitimacy of these wars when the Washington regime begins to target the American people more directly (after disarming them and making them totally defenseless, of course), which is where we seem to be heading, as I noted in my 2010 article, Tea Partiers May Need the ACLU Soon.

And, as Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger pointed out recently, the early Americans and Revolutionaries also warned us over 200 years ago against an armed federal government run amok.

I think our government has run amok.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: No More Police Socialism

It is unfortunate that the American people have allowed their country to degrade so deeply into a vast state of decadence and turmoil, coinciding with their century-long growth of government intrusions and criminality.

As Albert Jay Nock, Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner have all observed, the State is itself an inherently criminal organization. The early Americans recognized that all human beings have inalienable rights, but their maintaining a centralized State ran contrary to their adherence to the principles of liberty.

Sadly, the implementation of compulsory government has effected in the virtual cancellation of what were our inalienable rights.

Now, there are some people, some theorists, who do not believe that human beings have "natural rights," or inherent, inalienable rights, but I believe that we do.

The Declaration of Independence states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That is, each individual has a natural, inalienable right to self-ownership, to make use of one's own life, person, labor, contracts and property as one sees fit, as long as one does not interfere with any other individual's same right. (For those who think there's a difference between inalienable and unalienable, please see this.)

But the problem is that statists, communitarians, collectivists, political conservatives and progressives, and even some libertarians, don't believe that rights are inalienable. Whether they would ever state it directly or not, they believe that the community in which one lives has collective ownership rights over each individual and one's life, labor and property, and that the community has the right to make use of each individual as the community sees fit.

That's really it, this conflict between the power of the group versus the inalienable, natural rights of the individual. And it really is an "either-or" situation. There is no "the individual has some inalienable rights to one's life and liberty, but it's up to the others to decide" kind of stuff. Because once you share in ownership of your life, your labor, your contracts and your property with the rest of the group, you have really forfeited any rights of self-ownership and liberty, mainly because the rest of the community outnumbers you.

So, those natural rights which are inalienable are absolute rights. You as an individual have an absolute, exclusive right to own your life, person, honestly-acquired property, and have an absolute right to be free from aggression being initiated against you by others or the threat of such aggression.

Not that I'm a big fan of the U.S. Constitution, but its Fourth Amendment does state that the people have a right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects." But it also goes on by stating that such a right is "against unreasonable searches and seizures." That word "unreasonable" gives the State and its agents the power to subjectively decide what is or is not unreasonable.

So given that the State's very existence is based not on the voluntarily-agreed upon consent by all those over whom the State rules, but by compulsory fiat rule without alternative choices or self-governance allowed, therefore entrusting the State's agents with deciding the reasonableness of intrusions inherently makes the people less secure. Ultimately, the scheme of the State's monopolizing of various functions becomes a criminal enterprise, as I observed recently.

For example, when the State orders the people to participate in and fund the State's own government-run schemes, such as Social Security, Medicare and the new Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, then those are also illegitimate compulsory schemes.

The reason those State-imposed schemes are illegitimate is because each individual in society has an inherent, inalienable right to self-ownership, a right to control one's own personal matters, and a right to establish contracts with others, without any third-party intrusions.

Therefore, government bureaucrats who order an individual to participate in any government-run scheme — or to purchase any product or service privately, for that matter — are criminally violating that individual's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and one's pursuit of happiness, as well as the individual's right to be secure in one's person, property and effects.

And government bureaucrats who demand that an individual report on one's private matters, such as employment or employee details, pay schedules, one's income or private assets — information which most people would not voluntarily provide to one's neighbors, because it's none of their damn business — then such bureaucrats are criminally trespassing into the private lives of individuals.

Regarding the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") specifically, the relationship and association between the doctor and patient is a private relationship, and it's none of the government's business. Some people consider the doctor and patient as provider and consumer, but Ayn Rand called them traders.

The contract between the two traders and the terms of the contract are between them. Such a contract does not include anyone else, unless the doctor and patient both agree to have some third-party involvement. And the contract between an individual and an insurer is also no one else's business.

So for third parties to forcibly intrude themselves into these private contracts and associations really is an act of aggression.

However, the freedom of choice and free enterprise of the original America as the early Americans envisioned is one that not only discourages but forbids those acts of aggression, including or especially committed by the State. Those acts of aggression are crimes, literally.

Compulsory Social Security, Medicare, Affordable Care Act et al. all imply that the government bureaucrats — the Rulers — own your life and have a right to order you into some scheme that your own commonsense noggin tells you is not good for you and that limits your freedom.

And when any third party intruder steps in between you and others with whom you have established voluntary contracts, or orders you to participate in some scheme, that third party is automatically seizing ownership of your life and labor, and in a criminal way, in my opinion.

And that is exactly what Supreme Court Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts has rubber-stamped in his Orwellian approving of the Obama health insurance mandate, and cynically and almost facetiously calling it a "tax."

America has now become a State-controlled prison in which petty non-productive bureaucrats have ownership rights of the rest of the population, unfortunately.

Also, these healthcare and retirement policies which require reporting one's private matters to government bureaucrats are intrusions no different from police searches of one's home.

And like these government healthcare and retirement intrusions, laws regarding regulation of property or businesses are also before-the-fact, presumption-of-guilt laws and policies.

In fact, the Dodd-Frank law is presumption-of-guilt writ large. (Or presumption-of-guilt on stilts, as Walter Block might say.)

The business or property owner must report private information to Mr. Bureaucrat that is none of his business, especially without any reason for Mr. Bureaucrat to suspect someone of anything. This violates the individual's right to be secure and one's right to presumption of innocence, and becomes an act of aggression or coercion on Bureaucrat's part. Here, Mr. Bureaucrat is the criminal, not the business or property owner.

A more recent example of the government's criminally eviscerating one's right to be secure was the Supreme Bureaucrats' dismissing a lawsuit by Amnesty International against the feds' Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA warrantless eavesdropping policy.

The illegal and unconstitutional policy was supported by the five Republican appointees, including the aforementioned turncoat Roberts.

As Glenn Greenwald noted, this is a policy that is held in secret, and therefore there are no checks on these government powers.

The Bush and Obama administrations have maintained that the secrecy is necessary to thwart terrorism. (Then why does their FBI intentionally create terrorists? But I digress.)

But in reality, such illegally intrusive kinds of powers have been used by governments throughout history — including the U.S. government — against their own people, mainly to suppress political dissent and silence critics and victims of government tyrants.

But don't these Republican Supreme defenders of government intrusions know their history? Apparently not.

So, the Supremes seemed to wave their hands as if to shoo away an annoying pest, in their further strengthening the power of the State's rulers and their minions to use such criminal intrusions as a means to crush dissent.

Besides the government FISA snooping, drones are also being employed to engage in domestic spying and tracking of people, and the Rulers now want to track innocent, law-abiding gun owners.

Most people who understand history know that the real reason for government bureaucrats to track gun owners is to inevitably confiscate the guns from the civilian population. Given that Leviathan is now totally out of control, that is what the Rulers will do. And the government bureaucrats will use the reporting requirements of the Affordable Care Act to aid and abet their suppression of dissent, and in their crimes against the people. How can I say that? We're talking about government bureaucrats, that's how I can say that. The American Revolutionaries really did understand the true nature of the State, as did Rothbard, Nock and Spooner. Alas, most modern Americans do not.

But, as discussed above, each individual has an inalienable right to one's life and liberty, and the right to be secure in one's person, home and effects, and the right to protect oneself from intruders, regardless who the intruders are or what their occupation is or whom they work for. Just as the people have the inalienable right to be free of government-controlled healthcare or retirement schemes being shoved down their throats, so too do the people have the right to resist tyranny.

Is there any hope for us at this late stage of the game?

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Dismantle the Totalitarian Monster and Take Control Over Your Own Lives

Murray Rothbard's book, Power and Market, contains a section that promotes a free-market in defense and is republished on LRC, titled, No More Military Socialism.

I'm no Murray Rothbard of course, but I would like to submit a variation on that theme: No More Police Socialism. It is increasingly frustrating that our society continues to support such a scheme, despite its incompetence, its criminality and its horrors.

As I have stated here several times now, there really is no legitimate need to allow a government to monopolize community policing and security.

For those who want a thorough overview of what police socialism is, please check out this terrific article by Anthony Gregory.

But my article here is not intended to provide economic differences between police socialism and free markets, just to present a general case for abolishing the self-serving government police monopoly.

So the way I see it, theoretically, police or "law enforcement" socialism is when government bureaucrats possess the ownership of the means of production and provision of community policing and security while outlawing (at least implicitly) any competing agencies to do the same.

But a more honest assessment of police socialism is this: The people of a community already possess or could possess the means of providing their own security themselves. Those interested in doing so already have the natural right to establish private policing firms or voluntary groups and have a right to possess whatever armaments they wish to carry out such endeavors.

But in the current situation of police socialism, government bureaucrats have stolen from the people their ability to provide their own security, by making such attempts artificially unlawful and through disarmament schemes weakening the people's abilities to physically defend and protect themselves when their lives and property are threatened.

The government bureaucrats have usurped and forcibly monopolized the means of production in security provision at the people's expense. That, in a nutshell, is what police socialism is.

So what do these bureaucrats and monopolists do with their monopoly power, enforce the law?

Well, they enforce the thousands and thousands of made-up laws on the books which make artificial criminals of totally innocent human beings, that's for sure.

Okay, but is such a government-monopolized system efficient? I'll bet Murray Rothbard would answer in the negative.

Do the government police protect people from the aggressions of others? (Hmmm. I hear snickering out there.)

As CopBlock's Peter Eyre noted recently, the government police have no legal obligation to protect anyone.

So why the hell do they exist?

Does anyone have a good answer to that question?

And this police socialism is coinciding with the outright fascism that our Rulers are shoving down our throats, with their gun registration/confiscations/banning, and other State intrusions and violations of the people's rights.

For thorough discussions on socialism and fascism, please see Ludwig von Mises (or read the book here) and Ben O'Neill respectively.

As I wrote recently, the hysterical Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick presented his new gun control measures in January, and signed into law the mandatory collection of fingerprints of school teachers and others who might directly deal with children, including prospective adoptive parents.

Then, during the recent Blizzard of 2013, the fascist Gov. Patrick gave an executive order outlawing driving on all roads in Massachusetts, or risk a heavy fine and/or one year in jail! Can you believe these "liberals"?

During the 1980s, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Stanley Dukakis had many photo-ops while standing around with his loyal police storm troopers. Dukakis and his fellow socialist/fascists were obsessed with ordering people to wear their seatbelt or face heavy fines.

The truth is, a lot of these police-state driving laws such as mandatory seatbelts are nothing more than revenue-enhancements for the State. It's never enough revenue for them, and never enough bureaucrats and administrators to feed off the fees, fines and taxes.

And it's never enough artificial power and authority to give to uniformed, badged and armed goons.

However, contrary to what the fascists and socialists believe, all human beings have an inalienable right to freedom of movement and to travel freely, and a right to self-defense. This is part of our more general right to life and liberty, to self-ownership, and to be free from the initiation of aggression by others.

Never mind all that, our Rulers say. They own the rest of us. And the Rulers seem to have this pathological compulsion to control our every movement now, with tracking and monitoring and surveillance cameras, and mandatory seatbelts or banning driving altogether, fingerprinting, registering firearms, and so on and so forth.

Alas, these "liberal" politicians just love to have control, they love the police state, for that is what socialism is all about. Our current socialist system of government monopoly in community policing and security naturally develops into a police state, and that is what we have now.

In California recently, out-of-control, "we're really looking out for ourselves, not you lowly commoners" police goons were in a frantic search and destroy of an alleged "cop killer."

In their hysterical fear that "one of their own" had turned against them and may be giving them a taste of their own medicine — of what government police all across America have been criminally dishing out to innocent people on a daily basis — these possibly steroid-laden Barney Fifes and Rambos shot up two different vehicles and injured innocent people, without having the patience to actually confirm whether or not their victims were the actual suspect.

William Grigg very articulately and thoroughly described in this interview the whole story of the cops' criminally self-centered craziness, and how their actions were similar to Janet Reno's Waco fiasco.

Another example of what police socialism gives us was last year when the Aurora, Colorado police ordered many people out of their cars stopped at an intersection, handcuffed all of them and searched their cars, based on a tip that a robbery suspect was among them.

Sadly, the general intelligence level of our "men in blue" has not been up to snuff in recent years. (Of course, when police forces are intentionally hiring applicants with lower IQs, then we might be asking for trouble. And the government schools are no help, as most of us already know.)

So God forbid we should require government police officers to read and understand the ideas of presumption of innocence and due process.

And God forbid we should require prudence, patience and rationality. Instead, rather than think things through when the times call for that, the unthinking short-sightedness inherent in socialism rules the day, and we get disaster and criminality.

Our short-sighted, immediate-gratification society of unthinking self-centeredness also pervades the category of public office-holders. The rise to the top of our Rulers is based not on moral character, intelligence or understanding of the rule of law, but based on rhetorical and demagogical abilities. Obviously, this trend has gotten much worse since Hayek wrote his Road to Serfdom nearly 70 years ago.

Some of the reasons why today's "liberal" intellectuals defend the socialist police state and our criminal rulers such as the Drone-Murderer-in-Chief can be found in Hans-Hermann Hoppe's article, Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State.

So we see the collectivism, extreme self-centeredness and pathological camaraderie of those California goons, as their blind obsession to find the "cop-killer" probably wouldn't have been such an obsession had the suspect been just an ordinary civilian-killer.

Just as the ruling bureaucrats become addicted to their non-accountable monopoly powers, their controls over the population and their tax-funded free money and free stuff, so too do the government police become addicted to the power, control and artificial authority to stop, search, arrest and detain, bully and order around innocent civilians.

This increasing violence — institutionalized by the ruling bureaucrats — against innocent civilians, taxpayers, businesspeople, travelers, drivers, students or protesters, breeds the very kind of criminal behaviors which L.A. ex-cop Christopher Dorner was trying to expose, before he allegedly killed four people.

For decades, as the American culture has continually degraded, the socialist monopoly schemes have also degraded, which I believe is inherent in socialism, and the socialist government police scheme has also developed into a sick culture of violence.

But the government police have also fallen victim to a largely self-imposed dangerousness to their jobs, by willingly becoming a part of enforcing stupid and counter-productive laws such as those of the Establishment's drug war, and acting as tax/fine robbers collectors for the State.

So, while the non-government individual civilian should stand up for oneself and one's rights, so should these government police stand up for themselves, stand up to the dumb government bureaucrats who are making all these laws, not just drug-related, but thousands of other useless and intrusive laws, that these government cops are made to enforce.

Such fascism combined with the overall socialist system has turned America into a very undesirable, authoritarian and dangerous society. Uniformed, badged and armed government police order the people around, intimidate and threaten, unlawfully arrest and detain, taser and murder innocent civilians, and they get away with it with impunity.

This outright criminality is institutionalized by socialism. When you let a government monopolize the community's policing and security and restrict the people's rights to self-protection and defense, and when you do not require the armed agents of the State to act under the rule of law, what do you think this will lead to? A peaceful society? A secure civilian population?

And those "law-and-order" conservatives out there — those "anti-socialism" conservatives — this is the socialism they love, because most of them seem to be brainwashed their whole lives to love and worship armed, uniformed authority, no matter how bad it is or how criminally its agents act.

Speaking of our culture of violence, PBS recently did a story on violent video games and their effects on people, especially the younger generation.

Violent video games, movies and TV shows can contribute to the desensitizing of the humanity of others, of the victims of violence. What is worrisome is that many of the younger government police agents may be influenced by the kind of aggression that is promoted in those games.

But along with the increasing militarization of America's government police forces, the federal Department of Homeland Security's purchases of hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, and Obama and Congress's campaign to disarm the American people, also worrisome is that the DHS and Department of Defense have been engaging in desensitization exercises. And worse, the police bureaucracy has been preparing to desensitize their goons toward firing upon civilians who attempt to defend themselves!

Unfortunately, many people actually believe that it is treasonous to disobey the authority of government bureaucrats and their minions (or who promote state secession from the United States).

But the opposite is true: Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution states that "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort…" This is also referring to the agents of the federal government who would wage a war against the states or against the people of the states.

Yes, Obama martial law criminality and "civil unrest" may be coming to Amerika.

So, in such circumstances, I wonder if the officers of local government police would aid and abet such federal criminality and treason, or would such government police take the side of the people?

In either case, these circumstances are the very reason why the early Americans wrote the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Conclusion: Abolishing the socialist government police (and national security socialism, too) and promoting a natural order rule of law would make America a much safer and more civilized society, that's for sure.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Irrational America

In recent months some people have said that my writing has seemed "depressing," "angry," "sarcastic," "vitriolic," etc. I know. But I'm a realist, and it's not easy for me to just look the other way when I see trouble, sense danger, or smell a rat.

Unfortunately in today's modern, supposedly advanced society, there are just too many rats to keep track of.

But mostly, a lot of my writing is out of fear, and that's because of the direction our society has taken in recent decades.

Each day the police state, the surveillance state, and the bankrupting trough-gorging and selfishness among government bureaucrats escalates. How can you look the other way?

Actually, a lot of people are in denial of the gradual breakdown and collapse of society, because it really is horrifying, and I don't blame them.

We have the selfish private-wealth coveters in Washington — Republican and Democrat, conservatives and liberals, socialists and libertarians — conjuring up schemes on a daily basis on how to steal more from the people, how to further benefit from the public trough. The most selfish, covetous people in our society are located in Washington, D.C. and surrounding suburbs, in my opinion.

Many people are in denial of this, of what kinds of people those with government-tentacles really are.

And the people are also in denial of the inherent recklessness and ruination of government-monopoly, centralization and central planning.

It doesn't work. That is, our current system of central planning was doomed to failure from the get-go.

I have tried in many past articles to explain this, but it seems that the only response is … crickets.

The system of government centralization and monopoly can't and won't work. When you give bureaucrats the power to order you to only use the one government-issued currency (legal tender laws), and give monetary central planners control over a centralized monetary system and banking cartel, you are giving these people the message: "Please, please cause inflation and unemployment, please put people out of work, please take my hard-earned money and my savings, please enslave me, I beg of you!"

Okay, enough of that.

But we did have Ron Paul, who tried to get the word out, and I know he continues to do so. Unfortunately his suggestions to abolish the Fed, the SEC, DEA, the FBI and CIA, DHS and TSA, the Departments of Education and Energy (and, one hopes, the FDA and HHS as well) and others, fell on deaf ears. More crickets.

Most people just do not want to know the truth about those central planning revolving-door crony schemers and shysters, and the agencies and bureaus they have been given with which to trespass into the lives, homes, businesses and bodies of innocent people.

And the gullible population really believes these fiefdoms-for-non-productive-busybodies are necessary — or, a "necessary evil."

Barf. Me. Out.

Sorry. And now we see that in the U.K. doctors are being forced to report to the government their patients' private information such as drinking habits, waist size, weight, cholesterol, and other data that are none of the government's damn business. Obviously, this is yet another overreach that will probably be adopted by the U.S. government, and for the purposes of more intrusions, more police S.W.A.T. team raids of innocents.

And it will not end with "waist sizes, weight, and drinking habits," in the U.K. or in Amerika. With the DHS "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign, and the prospects that the further-dumbed down population combined with ObamaCare/Soviet medicine and the decline in quality of doctors, Dr. Brownshirt will be glad to report your political beliefs to government bureaucrats, especially if you express "anti-government" views.

Yes, it will come to that, especially given how the whole government-controlled education system indoctrinates the youngins to be obedient to government and to view with suspicion those who dare express independent thoughts.

If we really lived in a land of freedom, the doctors would refuse to be doctorcrats, and would most assuredly declare to those government bureaucrats: "No, I will NOT report my patients' private matters, their weight, their habits, or anything else that is none of your business!"

In a truly free and civilized society, the doctors would protect their patients' privacy and security from bureaucratic intruders, pure and simple.

From the medical police state to national security nonsense:

I'm hearing on the radio these auditions for the part of Secretary of Defense. All those spineless weasels on both sides, the questioners from the Senate Foreign Belligerence Committee, and the applicant.

So we have the one trying out for the part, Chuck Hagel, totally backing down from defending his earlier statements and positions previous to these auditions, those statements and positions which he was just recently defending. Talk about a gutless wonder.

That means he is perfect for the role! (Perfectly mealy-mouthed, that is.)

And his auditioners, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and the rest of them. Are they really, sincerely concerned for Israel and the Israelis? Please. They are concerned for themselves and their own reelections, getting the campaign donations from AIPAC and other lobbying organizations, and maintaining their grasp on power in the senate, and accumulating as much of a government pension for whenever they are finally dragged into retirement.

Oooh, anyone who dares to criticize Israel and the Israeli government is run out of town these days in modern "advanced" America. But I won't go there. Not here. It's very upsetting to see how in 21st Century America the most presumably intelligent and open-minded people become the most intolerant when it comes to Israel and any criticisms of it. Even Alan Dershowitz — the supposed defender of the First Amendment — has become part of that crowd of intolerance. But I digress.

Obviously, especially since the end of the Cold War, the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have not been concerned for the defense of the United States as much as they have been concerned for expanding the size and powers of the U.S. government, and the size and powers of their own fiefdoms, and that's it.

So, unless this huge population of over 300 million — spanning over 3 million square miles — finally understands the inevitably disastrous results of centralizing government power into the hands of a few, and the impossibility of central planners in Washington to administer any service or function for such a vast territory and a huge population, then yes, the whole system is doomed to finally collapse on its own weight, and chaos will result.

Statism is a sickness, and Americans have some healing to do, that's for sure.

(See Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed for more info.)

So, I admit that some of my recent articles have contained some "vitriol" and may have sounded "depressing" or "bitter." But each day there is one new frightening news item after another, one new "Oy vey" moment. Oh, well.

Do I still hear those crickets?

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Another Obama Inauguration as Amerika's Fascism Continues To Escalate

My previous article — on our society's growing fascism — may have had a bit much "vitriolic rhetoric." But sometimes I am extremely frustrated with the irrationality and cognitive dissonance which pervade America.

There are many examples of such irrationality, from the Sandy Hook story and gun control to the Aaron Swartz persecution to foreign policy. It's everywhere.

For instance, the government's stenographers of the news media are mirroring the gun grabbers' zeal to steal innocent people's means of self-defense away, based on the emotionalism surrounding the Sandy Hook school shootings.

But only on non-mainstream outlets or alternative websites do we hear about the prescription drugs that many of these recent mass shooters had been taking leading up to their rampage.

Are so many people now so unthinkingly submissive to their government bureaucrats' disarm-the-public campaign that they refuse to see what really may have caused someone to lose control and shoot innocent people?

Why is no one in the mainstream news media asking whether the Sandy Hook shooter(s) had been taking prescription meds?

I just can't believe that Big Pharma's influence on the general population and the media could be that strong. Is it really that bad?

I really believe that we are living in a very real, modern Twilight Zone.

The late Rod Serling would find a wealth of material just in today's news stories for his scripts.

Unfortunately, tragedies such as Sandy Hook are exploited by those who believe in the two-tier society of armed government police and government military, and a disarmed civilian population.

The more serious irrationality in America is that some of the gun-grabbers' supporters are in denial of the possibility that their own government could turn against them.

But many Americans may finally begin to question their support of the current government monopoly of armed local policing and "national security" when Obama calls for a martial law in the case of economic collapse and civil unrest.

Now in America, it is beyond just denial and irrationality, but pure gullibility, especially since 9/11. The Bush and Obama administrations have started or continued two illegal and counter-productive wars, and domestically have instituted policies which have blatantly violated the rights of innocent Americans.

But why do so many Americans — in a society as advanced and developed as America supposedly is — so gullibly believe and accept what government bureaucrats tell them, no matter how illogical, impractical, far-fetched or implausible?

The government claims to have the legal and moral authority to arrest and detain indefinitely — even kill — anyone these government bureaucrats assert is an "enemy combatant" or a "terrorist," without showing any evidence against the accused, and the people just trust these government officials with such powers!

Really? You trust Obama to have those powers? Barack Obama? (In a Twilight Zone episode, maybe.)

Removing your right to due process and presumption of innocence — only those who are really loony-tunes could approve of this. Unfortunately, America has many of them now.

And many of the well-fed and well-paid apparatchiks of the courts have been rubber-stamping these crimes committed by our governments, federal, state and local.

There are some exceptions, however, such as Judge Katherine Forrest who struck down Obama's indefinite detention provision of the NDAA. But after the Obama Administration appealed the decision, sure enough a crony three-judge panel — all Obama appointees — came along to reinstate it.

It was really important to Obama to have the power to arrest and indefinitely detain innocent Americans without due process.

And people approve of the current system in which government whistleblowers are persecuted in order to protect the real criminals in power.

The overclassifying of documents is a means of protecting secrecy and an excuse for pursuing the whistleblowers.

And the modern police brotherhood punishes the good cops who defend the victims of the bad cops' violence.

But many people today are still brainwashed to believe that all police are good and right and if there was a search of someone's home then it must be because he did something wrong, or if there was a S.W.A.T. team raid in someone's home then it must be because the residents were criminals.

Radley Balko is featuring a "Raid of the Day" on his blog between now and June, when his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, will be released. Most of those raids featured were botched or at the wrong house. But some of them went "right" (whatever that means).

Also, Will Grigg's many articles now on LewRockwell.com and the website CopBlock detail one story after another of government police criminality.

The government police are the one group in America, in my opinion, who now get away with committing many serious crimes against innocent people.

But despite the rise in the ranks of punks and bullies, and the assaults and murders committed on a daily basis by today's police, and despite the thousands and thousands of federal, state and local laws and ordinances that cops loyally and unthinkingly enforce, and the abuse of authority by government police, most people nevertheless support them and hold them in high esteem. That, to me, is very irrational.

Yet whenever I mention the idea of de-monopolizing community policing and security away from the government and toward market or voluntary organizations, people think I'm nuts.

But empowering this one group of people — government police — to have the authority of the law and the State, and for themselves to be above the law, and for only them to be armed but not the rest of the community, is irrational. That's nuts!

The current growing police state is a result of such irrationality.

So it is too bad that so many people don't understand that the 2nd Amendment was written into the U.S. Constitution to protect individuals' and a civilian population's inherent right of defense from the rulers and their armed goons.

The craziness just goes on in America as legislators continue to invent "crimes," and police and prosecutors waste time and public funds to enforce them.

Our crazy society has bred many zealous prosecutors now such as those persecuting the late Aaron Swartz in order to make "an example" of an innocent man whose actions harmed no one.

The Aaron Swartz prosecutor, by the way, is the same one who was attempting to steal the Motel Caswell from its owner because there had been some drug-related arrests there.

But despite the Judge's recent ruling in favor of the owner Russell Caswell, the prosecutor has stated that she may appeal the decision. Can you believe this? She wants to "send a message."

This whole case had to do with the criminal drug war being waged by very stupid or corrupt (or both) people, especially the feds. Yet the hypocrites don't go after drunks or prescription drug addicts — not that they should. (Oh, but they do go after those cold medicine junkies out there, of course!)

According to WBUR,

The idea to go after the Motel Caswell sprung from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the trial revealed. The DEA has an agent who testified his job is to seek out targets for forfeiture by watching television news and reading newspapers. When he finds a property where drug crimes occur he goes to the Registry of Deeds. Finding the Motel Caswell had no mortgage and was worth almost $1.5 million, the DEA teamed up with the Tewksbury Police, who were offered 80 percent of the taking, the agent testified.

I ask you, is this America, or the Twilight Zone? Just the craziness of that one prosecutor's office would also be a good script for Rod Serling. A whole season's worth, in fact.

It is amazing to me how the American people can support this kind of outright criminal activity, and this irrational drug war!

Are Americans just a bunch of unthinking, clueless sheeple who actually believe that the State owns our bodies and should have the power to determine what people may or may not put into their own bodies?

Alas, most Americans do not believe that people have a right to self-ownership, the right to own their own lives and bodies, the right to be the initial owners of their own labor, to establish voluntary contracts with employers or customers and sell their labor as they see fit.

Americans do believe that they have a right to use the armed force of government to covet and take wealth from their neighbors via tax-theft redistribution schemes, unions and labor laws, corporate lobbying, criminal "forfeiture" seizure-theft laws etc.

And Americans do believe in this "exceptionalism" thing, in which we Americans are superior to foreigners and that our government has some divine right to trespass and occupy foreign lands and covet the natural resources of foreigners. But how dare any foreign government attempt to occupy our lands and covet our natural resources!

And despite NATO's history of criminality, many people actually still view NATO with respect (and the awful UN as well).

And I wonder what Rod Serling would think of the many modern Americans who hold in high esteem the opinions of globalist crackpots like Zbignorant Brzezinski and the Council on Foreign Relations. Yech!

Sorry to sound like I'm down on America or Americans, it's just the hypocrisy and irrationality that gets me.

But we're talking about a culture in which a substantial number of people are deeply bothered by someone burning an American flag, yet have no problem with dehumanizing an entire population (such as the Iraqis) to rationalize the slaughter of a million innocents, or have no problem with the aforementioned government police and S.W.A.T. teams getting away with murdering many innocent Americans every day for no good reason.

We now have a police state in which 5-year-old children are being suspended for making harmless toy guns, while other kids in government schools are literally being tortured by the Amerikan Nazis and psychopaths who run these damn schools!

Oh, we're "exceptional," all right.

And ours is a society with a Supreme Court Chief Justice who bends over backwards to rubber stamp a clearly unconstitutional and invasive order by Congress and call it a "tax."

So when Obama completely disarms the population and then declares martial law, I'm sure the Chief Justice will rubber stamp that, too.

And don't forget the phenomenon of the American texting zombies. They're out there. Everywhere.

The texting zombies will bow in submission to Herr Obama and obey his orders, no matter what, that's for sure.

In irrational America, a substantial number of people support the TSA groping and molesting little girls and grandmas, but look the other way while the feds encourage young Muslims to commit jihadi violence just to say "we've thwarted terrorism."

And most Americans will support Congress's continuing to raise the debt ceiling, raise taxes, increase their selfish spending sprees and kick the can farther down the road to bring America down to total impoverishment and chaos.

I could go on, of course.

So, can you see why I'm frustrated with all this?

(With apologies to the late Rod Serling.)

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Talk Radio, R.I.P.?

The Amerikan people have spoken: "We love and adore our Dear Leader. We want more fascism, more government control over our private lives, more theft of the workers and producers, more spying, more war, more drones, less freedom, more destruction and more death."

I wonder if Barack Obama invited his half-brother George Obama to the inauguration — remember George Obama? He's the president's half-brother who apparently lives in a shanty in Nairobi, the one President Obama doesn't seem to have helped out very much. However, George defends Barack's lack of being his "brother's keeper," so I guess it doesn't matter very much. (But it's just more important that Barack Obama spend $50 million on his inauguration, that's all.)

As all this is going on, Barack Obama's comrade, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick says he wants to raise taxes even higher on the workers and producers of the Bay State, on top of their federal taxes that have just gone up (thanks to the selfish degenerates in Washington).

This new tax-theft scheme is intended to fund Patrick's education and public transportation agendas and expanding of rail service. (Rail service hardly anyone will use, that is.)

In other words, Patrick might as well be saying, "Please let me siphon off more of your hard labor so that I can pay my union buddies in the state-construction racket to thank them for reelecting me and to further my own selfish political ambitions."

Nothing new here. "Good for you," as Elizabeth Warren might say.

Governor Patrick — a genuine Michael Dukakis on steroids if there ever was one — is surrounded on Beacon Hill by other self-centered degenerates, as top legislators give their non-productive staff members raises to add to their salaries they don't deserve, some of which apparently in the 6-figures, and this on top of the state auditor's staff who had been given a 16% raise. (The state auditor's office is in charge of getting rid of "waste, fraud, and abuse.")

Gov. Patrick the fascist also just signed the bill to fingerprint "teachers, workers at child care centers, school bus drivers …" and "everyone seeking to adopt children or become foster parents as well as employees of school departments who may have direct, unmonitored contact with children," with that information placed into a state police database and "forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Obviously, Patrick is no friend of civil liberties, due process or civil rights. He is a "liberal," after all.

And attempting to fill the shoes of his fellow anti-due process governor from New York, Patrick has filed a bill to further restrict gun ownership in Massachusetts, and to "require the state to send all relevant mental health records to a federal gun license registry," as well as "training teachers to recognize symptoms of mental illness in students."

But how about training students to recognize symptoms of mental illness in teachers? Hmmm? There's a lot of that going around these days.

Too bad Muffy Healey, Patrick's 2006 Republican opponent, lost that election.

Like Connecticut, Massachusetts already has the strictest gun control laws in the country. Connecticut's strict gun laws did nothing to save those 27 victims at Sandy Hook. Neither will Gov. Patrick's proposals or Obama's proposals — they will in fact cost lives, if history is any indication.

There are very few murders per year by use of those "military-style" assault rifles, as compared to pistols, shotguns, knives, hands and feet. But what the fascists want to do is further disarm the population and make people even more defenseless against murderers, wife-beaters, and rapists who use pistols, shotguns, knives, hands and feet.

Previous to Patrick's newly introduced anti-private gun ownership proposals, the governor of New York had exemplified the purely irrational emotionalism of the gun control crowd, as he screamed and wailed to "end the madness" in his recent State of the State address. His emotionally-charged bill to make people defenseless was rushed through the legislature, just as was George W. Bush's reactionary Patriot Act in 2001 and Obama's Affordable Care Act in 2010.

That act of legislation — now the law in New York — requires mental health practitioners to report to the government those patients that the doctor thinks may be a danger to others. And Obama's new proposed Executive Orders includes this: "Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes."

However, many of today's physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors, especially the younger ones, were brought up in the modern, government-controlled schools, which have dumbed down the people and discourage critical thinking skills. The schools now label kids who act normally with an abundance of energy as "hyperactive," or label kids who question their authorities' dictates as "defiant" or suffering from "ADHD."

Or, some of the teachers and parents are afraid to discipline misbehaved kids or to give them a failing grade when they deserve one, in an attempt to avoid "hurting their feelings." So, many of the secondary schools and colleges are accepting or giving passing grades to total incompetents.

Therefore, I am not completely confident in the judgments of our modern and future doctors and mental health practitioners, quite frankly.

And after the school authorities label kids as "defiant," "autistic," or "psychotic," the authorities dish out the psychopharmaceutical drugs, such as Ritalin and SSRI anti-depressants, like candy.

I have heard several of the people being interviewed or speaking on panels regarding the Sandy Hook shootings who have stated that alleged shooter Adam Lanza "should have been medicated," given Lanza's problems. However, it appears that Lanza may have been on some form of psychopharmaceutical drugs, and for many years, as asserted by the Lanzas' hairdresser and a former babysitter.

As has been the case in many mass shootings now, it's the opposite of that — they were medicated, but shouldn't have been. Alleged Aurora theater shooter James Holmes is now thought to have been on medication, but the documents filed by police, who supposedly had seized pill bottles from Holmes's home, had been heavily redacted and no specific name of drugs was disclosed.

Many of the school shootings in more recent years were committed by people on anti-depressant or anti-psychotic medication. Some may have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms after stopping their medication.

It is already known that some anti-depressant prescription drugs such as SSRIs and anti-psychotics can cause severely aggressive behavior. But, rather than addressing these prescription drugs, the chicken littles instead want to disarm innocent people and make them even more vulnerable, especially women. And the fascists want to seek out "mentally ill" people and either disarm them as well or perhaps even put them on psychiatric drugs. But who is to decide who is "mentally ill," and is there really "mental illness"?

But given the lack of good judgment of many health practitioners these days, requiring doctors and counselors to report possibly dangerous people to the government could itself be dangerous.

In fact, already in the U.K. the Cameron Regime has been having doctors report on patients who may be “vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism.” The U.K. has also engaged in the disarming of the civilian population and thus causing a rise in violent crime there (contrary to the assertions of one CNN nudnik who shall remain nameless here).

Also in the U.K., cameras being placed in private homes, government-sponsored "parenting classes," the government monitoring all emails and website visits in the U.K.?

Yes, I know, that's England and not America, but government-controlled education has dumbed down a lot of people in a lot of countries.

So why not have doctors reporting on patients, based on the doctors' own subjective biases, lack of critical thinking abilities and their ignorance as well?

As I have noted before, already in the U.S. we have a DHS and FBI wanting people and businesses to report on others as "suspicious" for what are really normal behaviors. But today, thanks to years of government-controlled education, behaviors that are really harmless are now viewed as "suspicious."

According to the FBI and DHS, some of those "suspicious" behaviors include: buying food in bulk amounts, believing in "individual liberty," distrusting "centralized federal authority," and "supporting political movements for autonomy."

For many ignoramuses now, "autonomy" and "independence" = "criminality" and "terrorism."

Being critical of the government is now being seen as "treasonous" or dangerous by some, even though it is our very own incompetent and corrupt government bureaucrats who have been acting criminally and treasonously in many ways, in my view. Just ask Bradley Manning, Brandon Raub, Susan Lindauer and William Binney.

But the psychiatric police state is here, and it won't involve just mental health professionals but all health care practitioners whose treatment includes their asking patients for very personal information. Because of how our society has declined culturally, intellectually and socially, I am not surprised to have personally already seen doctors of an emotionally and intellectually immature character. Obviously, with Obama's Soviet medicine, worse is yet to come. There just don't seem to be very many Dr. Georges around anymore.

If you are not very familiar with your doctors or counselor, it would be wise not to share information with them about your political views, especially "anti-government" views, which many readers here happen to have, or whether or not you own a gun.

You see, thanks to the government-controlled schools and modern Amerikans' lack of critical thinking skills, we have historically-ignorant people who really have no idea what the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment is. A lot of anti-gun rights people (and some pro-gun rights ones as well) actually scoff at the idea that our own government could turn against us.

The cognitive dissonance is amazing! "Liberals" want the civilian population to be disarmed, but they want only government police and government military to be armed, and heavily armed at that! And this despite all the police brutality, the S.W.A.T team raids at the wrong addresses, and criminal behaviors committed by police and prosecutors all over Amerika, as we have seen on a daily basis in the news, on websites such as LRC and on YouTube. Many police are drugging up on steroids, and the military doctors are screwing up the soldiers with prescription drugs including those SSRI anti-depressants and stimulants.

As I have noted here, and in my articles about America's descent and the coming civil unrest, yes, there have been moments in history in which the U.S. government has turned the guns against the people. And you think that all the atrocities committed by our military, the murdering of innocent civilians overseas, can't happen here on the Rulers' command? All you have to do is see one article after another on our police state in Amerika, and see exactly what the people in charge are doing to our society.

So Obama is being inaugurated into a second term, and one can reasonably expect it to not be as wonderful as his first term was.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: I Fear the Government and the Obedient Sheeple, More Than I Fear Guns

It appears that one of Boston’s two commercial all-talk radio stations is being closed down and replaced by another music station. WTKK 96.9 FM, “NewsTalk Ninety-Six Nine,” will cease to be, tomorrow. Last August, Boston’s until-then third all-talk radio station, “Talk 1200,” also ceased to be, and became an all-comedy radio station. The joke’s on us talk radio listeners, though. Now we’re down to just WRKO, which has local hosts Jeffrey Kuhner and Howie Carr, and syndicated hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, for commercial talk radio. But public radio stations WBUR and WGBH are heavy in news and talk, and provide a needed alternative.

I am not surprised with WTKK’s expiring, given the decline in talk radio in general over the last 20 years, and the decline in our culture that used to appreciate a diversity in points of view. But nowadays, the Left, which controls the government education system, doesn’t even want to consider or hear other points of views, and the neocons, who mainly have ruled over talk radio since the early 1990s, also don’t want to hear other points of view, as both sides remain ignorant and closed-minded.

So now, only a small portion of the population listens to talk radio, because it’s no longer very informative or entertaining, and only a small portion listens to NPR or watches TV news or cable talk/news. Mostly people turn on the radio to hear the crappy music that is now offered, and watch boring crap on TV. America is now a nation of unthinking, texting zombies, who vote for corrupt political sleazebags like Barack Obama and Willard Romney, and show contempt for truth-tellers such as Ron Paul.

But I’ve been a talk radio junkie since the 1970s, beginning with Mike Miller on WTIC in Hartford, Bernard Meltzer and Arlene Francis on WOR and Larry Glick on WBZ. Larry Glick took calls from people in many different states, as WBZ’s reach is quite wide, and Glick talked about the “light” topics and was very funny. Arlene Francis had a wider variety, discussing political issues as well as interviewing celebrities. While Meltzer didn’t discuss politics — his was sort of an advice show — he nevertheless cracked me up with his addressing the callers as “honey,” and “sweetheart.” Today he would be called a “sexist” for that. And Pegeen Fitzgerald and her husband Edward were also on WOR, broadcasting from their apartment that also included sounds of the cleaning lady vacuuming in the background, and their gossiping about the neighbors and bickering. What fun they were, the Fitzgeralds.

But it was really Jerry Williams who got me much more interested in the issues and current events. His show on WRKO during the 1980s was #1 in Boston radio for several years, as were most of the other shows on WRKO. Here is the website devoted to Jerry Williams, who died in 2003.

Jerry Williams’s background was in theater and acting, and he had an extremely diverse palette of interests of his to discuss. He interviewed many people from politics and show biz, and the arts and sciences. I don’t think there has been a talk radio talent as good as Jerry Williams. He was an old-fashioned, pro-union, pro-choice “liberal,” who became more populist in the later years of his show, thanks to the corruption of Gov. Michael Dukakis, the New Braintree prison deal, and the rise in tax-thefts in Massachusetts. Starting in 1994, Williams gradually reduced his hours on WRKO, and then fully retired in 1998. He made a brief comeback in December 2002 on WROL in Boston, and then, prior to his death in April 2003, had a “last hurrah” on WRKO on March 1st, 2003.

I kind of hadn’t been as enthusiastic in listening to Jerry Williams maybe starting in the early 1990s, as he seemed to have become obsessed with the seat-belt law and repealing it, and his discussions of the state political “hacks” were endless. In other words, he was becoming a little boring.

And with WRKO’s decline starting around 20 years ago, I would say that the decline of talk radio in general started around then, too. The cultural decline since the early ’90s is related to that. The 1980s gave us Iran-Contra and the Nazi-wannabe Oliver North plotting his future police state, and then the Cold War came to a close. So with those things then-President George H.W. Bush started his war on Iraq to keep the military-industrial-congressional-security-complex going. But no one seemed to question any of that. Bush managed to whine his way to the UN to get that collection of dictators, war criminals, misfits and degenerates to go along with Bush’s Iraq. But thanks to the decline in education in America, the decline in critical thinking, and the increase in State-worship authoritarianism, the American people didn’t question the propaganda.

Since the 1990s, talk radio has been dominated by the neocons. Rush Limbaugh really became popular thanks to Bill Clinton, the Left’s own Teflon President. And now, when you listen to the average talk radio program, you will hear the host spending long segments talking just by himself, and when they finally do take calls, usually it is fellow neocons agreeing with one another and patting themselves on the back in blindly supporting the military and the “war on terror,” and hating Muslims and immigrants. Basically that’s it now. No wonder their ratings continue to decline.

But if you compare the average hour of talk radio now with discussions that talk radio hosts had during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, you’ll hear a big difference, not just in the diversity of points of view and the talk hosts’ allowing that diversity, but the quality of conversations was much higher then than it is now. For example, you can hear Jerry Williams’s 1965 WBBM interview of well-known atheist Madeline Murray O’Hare (before the O’Hare), who discussed the Supreme Court’s ruling on prayer in public schools and how she had been beaten by the police (interviews are at the end of that linked post).

Or you can hear Jerry Williams interviewing John McLaughlin on WBZ (who later hosted the “McLaughlin Group” on TV) in 1974 while McLaughlin was still a Jesuit priest and working as a Nixon Administration flunky. I think that link is the second hour of the discussion, which is provided by the JerryWilliams.org website. Here is the following hour. (Links open a new media player window.)

And here is a 1972 Jerry Williams interview of then-Democrat Presidential nominee George McGovern. I don’t think they took calls from listeners, but it is an interesting discussion.

And here is Jerry Williams’s 1967 discussion of Jack Ruby’s death and the Warren Commission, from WBBM.

And here is a 1970 interview by Jerry Williams of controversial investment advisor Richard Ney, here and here.

And here is a four-minute audio clip from the early 1970s with Jerry Williams taking a call from a frustrated Marine, who stated that we the people needed to take our country back from the liars who rule over us. Not much has changed since 40 years ago, I’m afraid.

There are some clips from WRKO provided on the JerryWilliams.org website, but they do not seem to be as good as all the shows I remember hearing on WRKO throughout the 1980s.

There have been plenty of times that I have turned on the radio, wishing that Jerry Williams was still on, because on WRKO at that afternoon hour is Howie Carr, who replaced Jerry Williams in 1994. Howie Carr is still on! Some people had already been predicting that WRKO is also on its way to changing formats, as its ratings have also been very poor. Oh well, “Entercom happens,” as Carr would say.

Now, WBZ is considered an “all-news” station, and has good ratings. But from 8 PM until 5 AM they do have talk shows. I suppose former WBZ-TV reporter Dan Rea is okay as the evening WBZ talk host, but you can only hear the Registrar of Motor Vehicles so many times, you know. (It seems every time I tune in, he has the Registrar of Motor Vehicle on.)

But regarding WBZ’s evening talk hosts, Rea replaced the funny and politically-observant Paul Sullivan, who died in 2007 at the age of only 50, and Paul Sullivan replaced the libertarian intellectual David Brudnoy, who died in 2004 at the age of only 64. And even Brudnoy had replaced Lou Marcel, who died at an even younger age. (Hmmm. Could there be something wrong there at the WBZ studios? Also, WBZ radio news anchor Darrell Gould died in 1996 at age 56.)

But early deaths do not seem to be reserved for WBZ, as WRKO talk host Andy Moes died at only age 50 back in 2001. Perhaps there’s something going on with radio electronics or radio waves etc., I don’t know. However, some talk radio hosts still seem to have very good endurance, regardless of what might be going on in those radio studios. Howie Carr, 60, continues on WRKO for 18 years despite the health issues he’s had, and Rush Limbaugh, almost 62, continues his syndicated show of 24 years despite his health issues.

And Jerry Williams was a talk radio host from 1957 until 1998. Now that’s endurance. But how much longer will talk radio itself last, as long as we have a country lacking in critical thinking, and a population of zombies who constantly hold and stare at their cell phones like a second sex organ?

But there still seems to be hope for us, and for talk radio. Despite the neocons and progressives and the biased news media‘s attempts at suppressing Ron Paul’s message of freedom and peace this past year, those ideas have been making their way back into talk radio. Investment and monetary analyst Peter Schiff has his new show which is live 10 AM-Noon Eastern, and can be heard on several radio stations (although quite a few of those stations air only the rebroadcast of the show on weekends).

And economic historian Tom Woods fills in for Schiff quite a lot. Now, Woods is the one, in my opinion, who has the kind of communications and conversational talent and abilities to carry on a great talk radio show. If we can just get the Left-progressives and neocons to try to open their minds a little more to the moral principles of individual rights and non-aggression, and get them to step back and see that the State is not really what it and its handlers present it to be, then maybe Woods and others can rejuvenate the talk radio medium, and make it better again.

And if we can only get the zombies all across America to put down those damn cell phones!

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: A Rebirth of Radicalism Is Needed ToHealAmerica

I do not intend to write something here to convince the emotionally hysterical gun-control crowd to abandon their fantasy of removing guns from the world. They live in a fairyland and there appears to be no way to change their minds.

Nor am I trying to even convince the so-called conservatives, the Republicans, the alleged "gun-rights" advocates to stop it with their kowtowing. This is really just a rant (albeit an informed rant).

But I do want to note that the point of the right to bear arms — which is a right, by the way, not a government-granted privilege — is for people to have the means to defend themselves, not just from everyday criminals and predators, but mainly from government tyrants and their minions.

I just don't understand the so-called gun defenders and gun store owners suddenly joining the irrational hysterics of "Why would anyone need an assault rifle, or military-style weapon? We should ban those." Well, as history has shown, if you're going to forbid the civilian population from having certain firearms, then for your own safety you will have to forbid police and military from having them too.

But a lot of people don't seem to understand that. They trust government police and military. A lot of people feel safe with an armed government and a disarmed civilian population. (It really should be the other way around!)

And why is almost no one from the gun-rights crowd pointing out that it's really the government's gun restrictions, gun-free zones and "zero tolerance," in which honest, law-abiding civilians (e.g. teachers, school administrators and other adult school workers) are forcibly disarmed by government bureaucrats and police, that increases the vulnerability of these children to an attack by an armed intruder?

This is why I call people "sheeple," "zombies," and assert that many people now are totally hypnotized and brainwashed to love and adore their most vicious predators and threats to society: The State and its loyal flunkies.

For clearly, Washington is preparing for something, whether it is economic collapse and civil unrest, "natural" disasters, or civil war …

Whatever it is, it's something, and we know the bureaucrats are preparing for something, given the Department of Homeland Security's purchases of hundreds of millions of hollow-point bullets and high-powered battle rifles, Barack Obama's Executive Orders to seize control over mass communications in America and seize U.S. infrastructure and people involuntarily, Obama's preparing the FEMA rendition camps (not to mention the many coffins and mass graves being prepared), the U.S. Army's manual which outlines a plan to kill rioters and demonstrators, the Army's training troops to drive tanks through U.S. streets, FEMA's preparing for food storage confiscation, and more unconstitutional and criminal Obama-police state policies now.

There is also Obama's NDAA provision of indefinite detention of Americans, which gives the President the power to have the military seize and detain indefinitely anyone that the President or his minions have deemed a "terrorist," a "combatant," or otherwise a criminal, without providing any evidence against the accused.

Obama also has claimed the power — upheld by the court bureaucrats — to assassinate anyone he chooses, based on his own reasons, without any due process or any evidence against the accused.

A widely publicized example of that was Obama's assassination of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, whose only "crime" was criticizing U.S. foreign policy within his religious sermons, totally protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (I have addressed that here and here.)

You see, the power-grabbers have started with the Muslims, after the widespread post-9/11 brainwashing of Americans toward anti-Muslim prejudice and acceptance of anti-Muslim government policies and militarism.

So, thanks to the sheeple zombies' approval of the post-9/11 hysterical "War on Terror," Washington has now been cracking down on speech, critics of stupid government bureaucrats, political dissent and government whistleblowers. But start with the Muslims and they will go on from there.

More recently, former Marine Brandon Raub's Facebook posting questioning the government's official explanation for 9/11 caused such a stir, he was criminally abducted by Secret Service and local authorities and involuntarily detained in a psychiatric ward. He is not the first victim of the State's such crimes, as there have already been others in recent years.

Among the Obama Regime's war on whistleblowers, Army Private Bradley Manning suffered major abuse during his extensive pretrial military imprisonment. Manning allegedly released videos and documents to WikiLeaks exposing our own government bureaucrats' war crimes in Iraq and the bureaucrats' incompetence and corruption as well.

Former CIA asset Susan Lindauer was another government whistleblower who has already suffered at the hands of the un-American central planning degenerates in Washington.

More examples of the government bureaucrats' war on speech, political dissent and government criticism include former Obama Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein, who wants to "cognitively infiltrate" Internet sites and social media, and Obama's new law in which Constitutionally-protected protests will be stifled. And even Facebook has suspended the account of a user who questioned the official narrative involving the Sandy Hook, Connecticut school shooting.

But it is clear that Washington wants to stifle criticism and dissent amongst the masses, and us schmucks who do have a right to criticize the most buffoonish and imbecilic bureaucrats who have ever pervaded Washington, DC and who should be criticized, lambasted, raked over the coals, satirized, lampooned — all totally protected by the First Amendment, regardless of what the Supreme Bureaucrats say and/or whether there's a "War on Terror" or not.

Besides the government's cracking down on free speech, it has become oppressive in other ways. Examples include the TSA's VIPR teams now invading the bus terminals, Amtrak stations (which is being encouraged by all the filthy government hand-outs, of course), and on roads and highways, the government siccing S.W.A.T. teams on alleged student loan defaulters, and the FDA's war on raw milk.

As Jon Rappoport noted, government bureaucrats don't like it when the people over whom they rule do things on their own. That is why government bureaucrats are now forcing independent-minded people back on the government-controlled grid.

The government bureaucrats don't like it when the people express their own independence and who show that they do not need those government bureaucrats, or their alleged "security" workers to defend the people. That is why government bureaucrats insist on "gun-free zones," in which children are left vulnerable to attackers, rather than allowing the adults at the school to be armed to protect those children from real harm.

"Let's put a police officer or security guard in the school," the compromisers cry. However, locking down the schools like this turns the kids into prisoners, and won't protect them.

The near impossibility of being able to reach those who can rightfully be considered "sheeple" is frustrating now.

For those who are still in denial of the possibility that the U.S. government could possibly ever turn the guns on the people, there is already precedent of this. During the 19th Century American War on Independence, besides President Abraham Lincoln's State-murders of many thousands of innocent civilians in the South and his army's murders of hundreds of military protesters in the North, as Thomas DiLorenzo pointed out,

Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without any due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers…censored all telegraphs; rigged elections; imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature along with Congressman Henry May of Baltimore and the mayor of Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia to give the Republican Party two more U.S. senators; confiscated firearms in the border states in violation of the Second Amendment…

And there are other examples of those abuses, committed by Presidents Woodrow Wilson and FDR, besides the more recent examples.

And regarding the right to bear arms, a lot of people actually find it absurd if you point out how Hitler took advantage of gun control laws already in place, and further strengthened them to disarm Germans, mainly the Jews. So had Jews in Germany been able to exercise their right to bear arms, many of them might have been able to resist the Nazis from abducting them and taking them to their deaths. (See David Kopel and Richard Griffiths on that issue.)

It really should be the reverse of what the sheeple want: We would be much better off, much safer and more secure with an armed civilian population and a disarmed government!

Finally, while Premier Obama violates his oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" on a daily basis, one individual who has declared with very strong and straightforward language his personal pledge to resist the fascist disarmament campaign is Stewart Rhodes, Founder of the Oath Keepers organization. Included in his statement of resistance, Rhodes declares,

I pledge to refuse compliance with any and all laws that attempt to strip me and my children of those arms … I will use nullification, civil disobedience, and active resistance against all such laws.  I will nullify, disobey, and resist as an individual, and I will work with my neighbors to nullify, disobey, and resist as towns, counties, and states.  We will not disarm, we will not comply, and we will resist…

I pledge to defend myself, my neighbors, my town, county, and state, against any attempt to forcibly disarm them pursuant to any "assault weapons ban" or any other illegitimate "law" passed by oath breakers within Congress, or pursuant to any illegitimate order, action, or decree by the oath breaker within the White House. We will not disarm.  We will resist.  And if given no other choice but to fight or to submit to abject tyranny, we will fight, just as our forefathers in the American Revolution fought against the tyrants, usurpers, and oath breakers of their day.

If we are presented with the "choice" of submission to tyranny or fighting in defense of our natural rights, we will fight, as our forefathers fought, when the British Empire attempted to disarm them and confiscate the military pattern arms, ammunition, and supplies of their time.  We will make the same choice as Patrick Henry made, when he rejected "peace" purchased at the price of chains and slavery, and said "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"  I too choose liberty or death.

I hereby reaffirm my oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor in defense of the principles of liberty enunciated in our Declaration of Independence, for which our forefathers spilled their blood.   We will not let the Republic fall without a fight.

And he means it. I don't know anyone personally who has the guts to declare such a strong statement of resistance to government tyrants. I know I don't.

But we do need more Stewart Rhodes in America, that's for sure.

(And fewer buffoonish, dangerous government bureaucrats, that's for sure.)

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Americans Proudly Voting for Evil

If you found your way here by searching for "conservative websites," or "libertarian websites," or "libertarian conservative websites," then you've probably noticed a different way of thinking here. A radical way.

One thing I try to do with my writing is get people to say, "Hmmm. I hadn't thought of that." And I also want to get people to reassess their long-held views, particularly regarding the necessity of government bureaucrats having the monopoly power and artificial authority that they have.

Well, here's some news: government bureaucrats aren't necessary, and neither are government monopolies.

After an election season promoting the statist quo and stifling dissent, and a looming "fiscal cliff," it is time to more vociferously promote the American Revolutionaries' radical ideas of liberty and property.

And there are many writers on LRC who do just that. For example, economist Thomas DiLorenzo told it like it is in his article, Be Patriotic: Become a Secessionist.

I can't believe there are "anti-communist" conservatives who are denouncing secession as a "treasonous" act! These bozos are acting like communists themselves who want to keep people inside the prison State and not let the people out, not let them have their independence!

Incidentally, I have noted in the past how today's conservatives are very collectivist and communist in their views. I just want people to step back and see the hypocrite conservatives for what they are, that's all.

For instance, note the Republicans' no-tax-pledge betrayal now and their true support for ObamaCare in their lovey-dovey devotion to Big Government. (Yech!)

Notice, by the way, how both conservatives and progressives seem to oppose secession in general. These attitudes supporting State-slavery of the people have only paved the way for the totalitarian rules that are keeping Americans inside the territory.

And in some ways, this secession issue is related to immigration. The conservatives support this failed socialist central planning in immigration, despite all human beings' inherent right to travel, freedom of movement, and to migrate to wherever they wish, as long as they don't trespass on private property. (I have addressed that here and here, and see Hans-Hermann Hoppe as well.)

But we do need a healthy, radical exposure of the true nature of the State and its minions.

So it is time for the intellectual radicals to return and be politically incorrect, time to reverse course and promote actual morality and bring back the good old days of open, honest intellectual discourse.

Or, as stated in the Principles of Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society: "an uncompromising intellectual radicalism." Hoppe and his cohorts promote "totally unfettered individual liberty and private property." (Why do so many people have a problem with that?!)

But just as Hoppe pointed out in his 2001 book, Democracy: The God That Failed, the de-civilization of society has occurred because the government monopolies in place promote exploitation and covetousness. Further, giving central planners in Washington various legal monopolies has promoted war and aggression, and empowered the banksters and the government's monetary central planners to rob the people in broad daylight.

So here I want to do my part by clarifying how inherently criminal the State really is, especially in the areas of civil liberties, information-stealing and criminal wars.

Actually, the American Revolutionaries did not go far enough in their "radical" thinking. If only they had rejected giving governments legal monopolies and legal authority over the rest of the population, and if only they didn't create a central planning ruling agency in the first place! Our society would have otherwise advanced not only technologically but civilly, socially and culturally as well.

For example, government investigators, police and prosecutors have been getting away with unconstitutional and un-American invasive acts of surveillance, tracking, and searches. Many of these criminal acts are being excused by the court bureaucrats now, Supreme and otherwise. This includes the government's access into everyone's emails.

Private non-government people could not get away with such crimes. But because the people have unwittingly given the government a criminal monopoly of intrusion and theft, this is why the earlier Americans wrote the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution (which still isn't enough!).

Many discussions of the Fourth Amendment, for example, have centered around the "right to privacy," although the Amendment does not specifically mention "privacy."

The Fourth Amendment does, however, mention the word "secure": "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …"

In law and official government policies, people in various federal, state and local government agencies have the legalized authority to demand information from individuals' private lives, finances, properties, and have the artificial authority to access, keep surveillance on and trespass into people's "persons, houses, papers and effects," access that they have no right to have.

Especially in the absence of reasonable suspicion, these government laws and procedures are criminally invasive against the individual's person and property.

In reality, it is these people with government monopoly positions who are engaged in actual criminality, not their victims. This is especially the case when the society abandons the concept of presumption of innocence, in which the government agent must have a reason to suspect an actual individual of some actual crime against another individual's person or property — otherwise the government agent must leave the individual alone and may not invade, trespass or violate the individual's person, property or communications, period. No arbitrary surveillance, no fishing expeditions, etc.

You see, especially troubling are the monopoly and artificial authority that have been given to the government, to local government police, federal "national security" employees, and so forth. This artificial authority and monopoly of law and judiciary give those employees the power of being above the law, which cancels out the idea of "equality under the law."

When the people decided that these government monopolists are "the law," such a relationship inherently makes each individual vulnerable to officially sanctioned criminality.

The Sovietizing of America is taking place right before our very eyes, because the monopoly institutions of judicial decision-making and that unequal, two-tier caste system is the foundation for it.

Have you ever really thought about the moral backwardness of having to obey the orders of some government bureaucrat or police officer, or the laws that people like Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Archie Bunker Peter King create?

And let's be honest now, do we really believe in morality and having a civilized society? If we do, then laws, procedures, and regulations which in any way violate the individual's rights to life and liberty and the individual's "right to be secure" in one's person, property or effects need to be labeled as criminally intrusive laws, regulations and procedures. In my opinion, those who make these laws and policies, or enforce and prosecute them, are engaged in true criminality, intentionally or not.

So, that this monopoly exists, in addition to the disarmament laws, actually increases the individual's vulnerability, and so such an official policy is inherently violating of the rights to life and liberty of the individual.

Currently, besides the government criminals, private criminals are getting away with assaults, robberies, and murders because their victims have been disarmed by the local "authorities," and because the local government police monopoly doesn't even prevent these crimes.

And more often now it is the government-monopolized police who are brutalizing innocent people.

For further reading related to these ideas, see Albert Jay Nock: The Criminality of the State; Hans-Hermann Hoppe: State or Private Law Society and Why Bad Men Rule; Harvey Silverglate: Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent; Murray Rothbard: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Ch. 12: Police, Law, and the Courts); Robert Murphy: Policing for Profit; and Robert Higgs: If Men Were Angels.

Some good news is that states have begun to actively nullify some of the federal intrusions that are criminal in nature. That includes some aspects of the failed drug war, the NDAA's provision of indefinite detentions of Americans, and ObamaCare.

There have also been recent examples of jury nullification.

But it isn't just the states and their governments who should enact nullification through legislation, because many state and local laws, ordinances and regulations are just as criminal as the federal ones.

To further restore their liberty, communities, neighborhoods, families and individuals will need to nullify those legislative acts of criminality that empower a bureaucrat or cop to violate one's right to be secure in one's person, property and effects.

So we also need judge and police nullification.

When police and judges choose to not enforce victimless crime laws or invasive regulations, or choose to not prosecute and sentence people accused of victimless "crimes" or invasive regulations, then those police and judges who set innocent people free will be heroes, in my view. Would they be "breaking the law"? No. They would be upholding the true, moral rule of law.

But one thing I really wanted to cover here is America's war mentality, which is related to the aforementioned civil liberties matters.

Unfortunately, in 2012 it is considered "radical" to question government bureaucrats on so-called national security.

I really thought that, after Vietnam and 58,000 Americans killed for no good reason, the American people wouldn't stand for any more of such government criminality.

But no. Then came President George H.W. Bush, who had to invade Iraq in 1991. And then the Iraqi sanctions, 9/11 and the "War on Terror." To the elder Bush, in my view, the end of the Cold War meant a dismantling of the American foreign expansions (and a curbing of the voracious tax-feeding by the military-industrial-complex). The neocons and progressives couldn't stand for that.

But in practical terms, all these statists have done is provoke foreigners and make Americans less safe.

It's amazing the millions and millions of people over many generations who have been bamboozled and duped into supporting the wars that the U.S. government has gotten America into, and for no good reason.

Unfortunately, the masses tend to give the corrupt bureaucrats the benefit of the doubt with these wars.

So America is now a more primitive, politically correct and repressive society, thanks to the dumbing-down of generations of people by the government educrats. Grown adults now act like texting-obsessed, subservient TV sitcom characters who bow to the wishes of the most imbecilic, corrupt criminal types in Washington.

The dumbing-down is why we have U.S. senators who think that questioning the legitimacy of the "War on Terror" is "treasonous," or that someone who criticizes the war-buffoons in Washington is an "enemy combatant," or a "terrorist." It's sickening, and truly un-American, in my opinion.

The government schools have maliciously expunged the critical thinking skills necessary to challenge the assertions of government buffoons, which is necessary in maintaining a civilized society.

Why do so many people now have no idea that all human beings have an inherent right to due process and presumption of innocence? (Hmmm. Could that be because of the government-controlled dumbing-down of education in America? I don't know, maybe.)

You see, if a government bureaucrat or military officer wants to accuse an individual of something, the accuser is morally, ethically and legally obligated to provide evidence against the accused.

Otherwise, we might as well let the Rulers and their minions just sweep up totally innocent people with no evidence against them and detain them indefinitely. (Oh, wait a minute, the Bush Administration already did that.) Or let the Rulers just murder people at will. (Hmmm. Obama is already doing that, too. Oh, well.)

Sadly, there are generations of people who are brainwashed into believing that "war is different," and therefore suspending civil liberties should be permitted. Well no, war is not "different," nor "exceptional."

As I wrote here, war is an artificial concept used by collectivists and statists to rationalize the commission of criminal acts of aggression against others and get away with it.

So the people such as the two Bush Presidents who started wars of aggression — they are the aggressors, and thus the criminals, when it comes Iraq twice and Afghanistan.

There is no just rationalization for a war of aggression, period.

And Obama's drones murdering innocent people day after day, it never seems to end, all this stuff, as America descends into Leviathan's totalitarian enslavement.

What those who really value freedom and peace need is not just more radicalism in America, but more rebelliousness, more nullification of government crimes and especially a mass withdrawal of support of the current system of government monopoly that gives some people artificial authority over others.

Of course, the real solutions — as radical as they may be — to society's current national ordeal of "fiscal cliff" and "terrorism" are decentralization and secession, and dissolving the United Soviet State of Amerika entirely.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Civil Unrest: Do Our Rulers Actually Want It To Happen?

As our society continues to rapidly decay, we have a presidential election in which the zombies will be out there in droves voting for the two statists, Obama and Romney.

The conservatives continue to support an aggressive and belligerent foreign policy — despite all its blowback — that includes indiscriminate drone bombings and murders of innocent foreigners. So much for being "pro-life."

These days, warmongers who claim to be Christian have lost touch with their Christianity, so it seems. The arrogant and narcissistic attitude of "American Exceptionalism" far supersedes traditional Judeo-Christian moral values with todays conservatives. So despite Romney's many left-leaning problems, he will probably get the conservatives and the Exceptionalists' vote.

And the progressives — many of them will vote for Obama, knowing full well about the Obama Administration's drone-murders of innocents, and other anti-human rights, anti-civil liberties acts of immorality and criminality.

In a recent article on identifying and rejecting evil, Arthur Silber uses two articles, one from the New York Times and another from the Washington Post, to show how the Obama Administration not only wants its murder program known to the American people, but is doing so proudly.

The program in question is the U.S. President's assassinations of "terrorists," or "terrorist supporters," without due process, and without the President being required to present evidence against the accused.

So really we are talking about suspected terrorists. And worse, most of those who have been murdered overseas by Obama's drone bombings have been innocent civilians and not actual terrorists [.pdf].

To cover themselves, as noted in the earlier NYT article, the Obama Administration has defined as "militants" (and thus worthy of a U.S. Presidential execution by drone) "all military-age males" who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Silber notes how, while the Obama Administration (through its propaganda organs the Times and the Post) wants the American people to know about its murder program and that these officials are proud of it, most Americans nevertheless remain unaware of the implications of such a program. Silber writes:

Americans cannot legitimately claim ignorance of the immense evil being perpetrated by their government. They will not be able to claim, as others have tried to do in the past: “We never knew about the horrors that were being committed. How can you believe that we knew about that?” Americans know all about it, in horrifying, endless detail. The State wants them to know. But the State knows that almost all Americans will refuse to admit what it means. Americans have chosen to sleepwalk blindly into the mouth of Hell.

However, while the Times, the Post and many amongst the MSM act as spokesmen for the Obama Administration's drone-murder program, there are nevertheless many people who still don't know about them, about Obama's "kill list" and Obama's NDAA provision of indefinite detention of Americans, and so forth. In this video, an interviewer talks to Obama supporters who can't believe that those policies are Obama's. And in this video, the same ignorance is shown by a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

And in this video, former Homeland Security Sec. Tom Ridge exemplifies many Americans' cluelessness about the Obama "kill list," and their lack of understanding of the meaning of a government program that administers death arbitrarily without any legality or due process.

But in his aforementioned article, Silber continues with a reference to German political theorist Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and how the Post article is describing what could be referred to as the bureaucratization of terror. Silber writes:

Always remember that what these “U.S. officials” and “senior Obama administration officials” are discussing is the murder of human beings, including the murder of entirely innocent human beings. But they speak of a “disposition matrix,” and the “accounting of the resources being marshaled,” in the manner that might be used to discuss office supplies. “Oh, dear, we need more paperclips. Staplers, too.” “Hmm. This group of men — there seem to be about ten or twelve of them — seems to be engaged in a ‘suspicious pattern of activity.’ We’d better dispose of them.”

In his previous essay, Accomplice to Murder, Silber presents a scenario regarding a possible future for the very Americans who currently are knowingly supporting their government's use of drones and indiscriminate murders of totally innocent human beings overseas. The rationalization by the government, of course, is the accusation of being "material supporters" to terrorism, with the government's hired guns acting on behalf of the President as judge, jury and executioners. To the bureaucrats, even someone's leaving comments on a blog that are critical of the government's foreign policy could be considered "providing material support" to terrorism.

In a more high-profile example, American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed after having been targeted by Obama, without any due process, without Obama presenting any evidence against the accused.

Al-Awlaki had been a harsh critic of U.S. government foreign policy, and had used his religious sermons as a means to express his criticisms, expressions entirely protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In Accomplice to Murder, Silber points out the similarities between Romney and Obama in their support of the indiscriminate drone murders of entirely innocent human beings. Silber notes that, while a vote for Romney or Obama amounts to support for the government's drone-murder program and the killing of innocent human beings, he describes the people who nevertheless refuse to understand this, citing people such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky. Silber takes great pains to explain how voting for the lesser of two evils (in the case of his examples, progressives nevertheless voting for Obama), is still a show of support for evil, but states succinctly (his bold):

As I have written before: “the claim of a ‘right’ to dispense death arbitrarily — the claim that the State may murder anyone it chooses, whenever it desires — constitutes a separate category altogether, a category of which this particular claim is the sole unit. When death is unleashed, all possibility of action is ended forever.” For this reason — and it is the only reason required — it is not “perfectly rational and reasonable” to decide that “the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate.”

There is no evil beyond the claimed “right” to murder by arbitrary edict, to murder anyone, anywhere, anytime. If you support this particular evil — and if you vote for Obama, you support it — then you will support anything.

I very much recommend those two articles by Arthur Silber, The Refusal to Identify and Reject Evil, and Accomplice to Murder (the latter which may be quite lengthy but well worth your time). And in an even more recent article (NB: some profanity), Silber makes very clear just how deranged and psychopathic our rulers really are.

But regarding the increasingly transparent status of mainstream news media as government spokespeople, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have shown, as I pointed out here and here, these outlets now are not particularly biased to the left or to the right, or liberal or conservative, but mainly are biased toward the State. This authoritarian deference to the State by the news media has grown especially since 9/11. Civil liberties expert Glenn Greenwald expressed just recently,

That is what explains why the US media has been so obsequious first with George Bush and now with his Democratic successor (for those who doubt that “the liberal media” venerated Bush as much as [Michael Lewis and Douglas Brinkley] do Obama, I’ll remind you of this still-remarkable, borderline pornographic display of giddy fawning on Mission Accomplished Day, or the fact that Bush’s own Press Secretary wrote a book mocking the US media for how “deferential” it was to the Bush White House). It’s why journalists joyously dance with top officials, swing on their tires, are creepily grateful when they’re sprayed in the face by their squirt guns, and play fun beach games with the very campaign officials they’re ostensibly covering.

Just this week, with one nauseating item of misinformation and pro-State propaganda after another in each editorial: The New York Times: "we enthusiastically endorse President Barack Obama for a second term…" The Washington Post: "Four more years for President Obama…"

Hooray! Four more years of drone bombings of innocents that provokes foreigners and makes us less safe, four more years of the drug war, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, stimulus, illegal warrantless wiretapping, and the TSA and DHS violating the American people!

With a Fourth Estate like this, who needs Goebbels?

But the mainstream news media's growing subservience to the State merely reflects that of the masochistic American people in general, in my view.

So at the same time that the Times and the Post proudly advertise Obama's "kill list" and drone-murder policies (as mentioned at the beginning of this article), the American people's ignorance and infantilism nevertheless grow and grow, particularly their ignorance of the meaning of these policies and of the increasing probability of such policies' subsequent domestic usage.

Silber points out how during Nazi Germany the Germans actually did know about their government's policies of murdering innocents. Silber cites the book, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany by Robert Gellately.

As with the rise in authoritarianism and submissiveness toward the State here in the U.S., Gellately discovered how the news media played an active role in promoting the State, and how, like the American DHS program of "If You See Something, Say Something," it was really the German people who willingly and enthusiastically turned in their neighbors (but the Gestapo not as much).

Now, I have described in various articles how totalitarian a police state America has become, with its bureaucratic Berlin Wall, and its being like the Iranian SAVAK, like North Korea, and like Nazi Germany.

I know, a lot of people feel uncomfortable with these assertions. But when things really are happening, and our own government really is doing all these things — and it is getting worse by the day — then it takes some courage to face these realities. Being in denial will not protect you from the State's evil crimes.

And now, in addition to the many other articles to which I have linked detailing what a police state America has become, there has been yet another article, this one describing how the government intends to treat "doomsday preppers" as terrorists. And this despite the government's own preparations for various disastrous events, as noted in that article.

Meanwhile, the real terrorists are those who fire drones and indiscriminately bomb and murder totally innocent human beings, targeting rescuers and funerals, and who engage in counter-productive security theater for no good reason, molesting and groping little children and yelling "freeze" to intentionally frighten the public for no damn good reason!

Americans have been letting their government bureaucrats get away with murder, while at the same time the government with all its unjust, intrusive and immoral laws and procedures has been criminally persecuting totally innocent Americans!

Well, I agree with Jacob Hornberger, President of the Future of Freedom Foundation, who believes that we need an "American Spring."

Americans had better wake up and realize that the idea of "limited government" is impossible. They need to recognize the true evils of centralization and central planning, and maybe then will they understand that the way to reverse the evil is to totally decentralize and desocialize America.

But sadly, many Americans are zombies these days, addicted to TV and obsessed with their cell phones and their texting nonsense while compulsively checking emails from nobody. The zombies who vote will proudly vote for The Obomber or his pal Rombo, knowing what their policies are, but not really understanding the real implications of those policies, to our detriment.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a writer and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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There have been several different predictions and scenarios involving how inflation and austerity measures in the U.S. could bring about food shortages and other shortages, food riots, looting, violent protests, flash mobs, and martial law.

All these things can be prevented, of course, if more people could wake up to the fact that government central planning in money and economic matters is inherently flawed and doomed to failure, societal self-destruction and collapse.

Some people see the recent German court decision to approve German bailouts of irresponsible European governments as a new dictatorship for Germany and a boon for investors. And there are others who see this new scheme as the beginning of runaway hyperinflation in Europe that will spread to the U.S.

Following this decision by the high German court, the U.S. Federal Reserve has announced a new round of quantitative easing (QE3). Some people believe that QE3 will cause more economic instability, and further destruction of the dollar.

Eventually the austerity measures we have been seeing in Europe will reach the U.S.

Austerity measures will hit public employee benefits and pensions, and welfare and Medicare recipients (but not the bloated salaries, benefits and pensions of Congressmen and their beloved bureaucrats).

But it seems that the U.S. government has been pushing hard to get as many people dependent on government as possible. Food stamps spending has more than doubled since Barack Obama became President, although the number of Americans on food stamps almost doubled from 2001 to 2009 during the presidency of George W. Bush as well.

And the Obama Administration has gone so far as to push U.S. food stamps onto Mexicans! (And Mexicans can't even vote for Obama this November — theoretically, that is.)

Also distressing is how private corporations profit from the government's exploiting the population's vulnerabilities that the government's own interventions cause. One example is JP Morgan Chase's shamefully profiting from the food stamps program.

Incidentally, employees of JP Morgan Chase donated over $800,000 to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and, so far over $155,000 to Obama's 2012 effort. (There certainly has been no quid pro quo here, as former President George Bush the Elder might say.)

Now, regarding eventual shortages, austerity and civil unrest in America that would involve the unavailability of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) payments, in large part affecting food stamp recipients, one scenario I've seen details how rioting and turmoil could unfold, mainly beginning in the cities, but eventually flowing out into the suburbs. It is not a pretty picture.

One would think that the government bureaucrats who control these social programs could see ahead what would happen when withholding such benefits, especially with millions of people dependent on them for their daily sustenance. So, in the case of possible future EBT cards not functioning followed by rioting and violence, one has to wonder whether such an action by the government could be purposeful.

In the aforementioned scenario, the writer emphasizes urban minorities as the ones mainly perpetrating the flash mob rioting and violence. But, in 2010 34% of food stamp recipients were white, 22% black and 29% Hispanic, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

However, the flash mobs committing acts of violence in the cities in recent years do not seem to be associated with government austerity measures, food stamps, hunger, etc. In some instances, such violence has been racially motivated, black against white, as witnessed in this account, for example. Unfortunately, the mention of such a modern social phenomenon in the U.S. is politically incorrect, as many newscasters and newspapers reporting on those events censor the race of the perpetrators and that of victims, as author Thomas Sowell has noted. Race demagogues such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Shrapnel have gained much fame and popularity from such "race-hustling."

So are the Chicago-Washington community organizers and agitators trying to promote race riots? Obama and his "social justice" cohorts do not seem to have any comments on the violence committed by inner-city punks. The Holder Justice Department has refused to prosecute black against white voter intimidation cases. And Obama wants public schools to stop disciplining misbehaving black students. Hmmm.

And why have U.S. military recruiters allowed so many white supremacists to join the military?

It appears that the efforts of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and now the election of Barack Obama as President do not seem to have healed the friction among the races in America.

So there seem to be extremists on both sides, and the rest of us are caught in the middle.

But when there will be government austerity and EBT card non-functionality, the flash mob violence we have seen recently will probably be much worse, regardless of race or ethnicity.

But, racial conflicts aside, why have the Bush and Obama Administrations increased spending on food stamps so much? Social programs such as food stamps rob people of their incentive to provide for themselves, and they become serfs to bureaucrats.

It is as though these imbecilic bureaucrats are encouraging the masses to get dependent on these bureaucrats, and for devious purposes.

No, they wouldn't do that. Not that there hasn't been enough information about Obama and his immoral, unconstitutional acts as President to indicate any sort of deviousness, no.

With the moral hazard of government bureaucrats' luring people into this kind of dependence and serfdom, QE3 will cause further economic instability, part of the inherent moral hazard of having a central bank and lack of freedom and competition in money and banking. Such Fed policies continually rob the people through inflation, particularly the lower and middle classes.

Added to those moral hazards of these professional bureaucrats are Congress's raising the debt ceiling, Washington's lack of prosecuting criminally irresponsible banksters, the 2008 extortion-like bankster bailout, and foreclosure fraudsters.

And Obama's pushing through Congress the bill allowing for indefinite detention of Americans without charge or evidence, and his signing it into law, followed by his appealing the judge's striking it down — there probably isn't any deviousness behind that, and probably won't be any targeting of political dissenters during future civil conflicts in America, no. (There certainly hasn't been any of that, not in America, no.)

All these acts of government criminality could be leading America into a total breakdown of society.

So these people in Washington are either extremely clueless and don't know what they're doing, or they are doing these things intentionally, in which case they are just plain evil.

So, could the ruling elites be purposefully trying to cause so much massive dependence on government and such massive weakening of the financial and monetary systems, followed by a false-flag type economic collapse and sudden withholding of government benefits and unavailability of our own money in the bank, to intentionally bring about rioting and violence?

And, if Romney is elected in November, would he be any different from Obama?

And so, if these scenarios play out, and there is indeed massive civil unrest in America, we already know that various federal agencies and local and state police as well are preparing for it. The police state that J. Edgar Hoover, Oliver North, and Dick Cheney put in place is being fully embraced by Obama, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, FBI and CIA, as well as many local police neanderthals all across America — it is as though they are drooling for some action, and for a chance for them to show the rest of the world just how tough they are.

Can you imagine people with the kind of extremely questionable character and level of dishonesty and untrustworthiness as Obama and Romney presiding over a situation of military martial law?

In addition to all this, the Obama Administration has allowed foreign troops onto U.S. soil. NATO troops were in training in Tampa just prior to the Republican Convention. They now have Russian soldiers training in the U.S., and some insiders believe that these foreign troops are joining with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security toward some sort of illicit action against Americans under the pretense of "peacekeeping" during a time of civil unrest in America.

In my opinion, having foreign troops coming into the U.S. for any reason is dangerous, and Sheriff Richard Mack agrees with me.

And now, because of inner-city gun-related crime rates, and recent isolated shootings and mass killings, the emotionalistic calls for gun control have been on the increase. This despite violent criminals who disobey laws against assault, rape and murder probably are not inclined to obey gun laws as well.

And, as John Lott has noted, would-be assaulters, rapists and murderers are less likely to commit their crimes when they know their prospective victims are armed.

But because of the emotionalism surrounding certain tragedies, even Republicans such as SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, radio host Michael Savage and TV host Bill O'Reilly have shown irrationality on the matter. How will Americans, in their cars stuck in busy intersections when flash mobs rampage and attack them, be able to defend themselves if they have been disarmed by the government? When looters and burglars break into their homes and businesses, how will disarmed homeowners and businesspeople protect themselves?

And you can say what you want about anti-UN "conspiracy theories" and so forth. But, mirroring a zany 1961 U.S. State Department call for complete civilian disarmament, the 2012 UN Arms Trade Treaty would require signing member nations to enact much stricter national gun ownership restrictions. That was up for a vote in July but has been postponed until probably later this year. Some analysts have interpreted Article 15 of the Treaty to allow for foreign troops in the U.S. to confiscate guns from Americans in their homes. Even having U.S. troops going around door to door to search for and confiscate firearms is itself illegal and unconstitutional, but foreign troops?

It should not be difficult to believe that not just local police but our own U.S. troops would go door to door to seize Americans' means of self-defense, when we know that they have much experience in doing just that in Iraq, a country in which U.S. troops had no business or reason to be, violating private Iraqi civilians' own right to bear arms and defend themselves.

As the people's right to defend themselves against looters, rioters, rapists and killers, as well as against government tyranny, is being criminally whittled away by the degenerates in charge, those same degenerates are arming themselves up and preparing for something that could be interpreted as outright treason.

I have already expressed concern about martial law and explained that U.S. military and other federal armed goons and local police, who have all sworn to obey and defend the Constitution of the United States, are obligated to disobey unlawful orders by commanding officers including the U.S. President.

Unlawful orders include those in which a soldier or an officer is ordered to violate a presumably innocent civilian's rights to free speech, protest, dissent and criticize the government, right to bear arms and defend oneself against criminal assailants including government criminals, right to due process, and "right to be secure" in one's person, home and effects. If the officer or soldier does not suspect a civilian of some actual crime, then that agent of government is obligated by law to leave the civilian alone, no matter who ordered otherwise. (The Oath Keepers have made a list of orders they will not obey.)

Further treasonous is the rulers' inviting foreign troops in to aid in the rulers' abuses.

And, given the criminality of monetary easing to enrich bankers while creating inflation that robs the poor, one might very well describe those actions as treasonous as well.

If only Americans had listened to the American Revolutionaries' warnings about paper money and tyranny, wealth redistributionism, and their warnings against foreign entanglements.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

The Best of Scott Lazarowitz

This article at the Examiner details with links how the Grand Old Progressives a.k.a. "Republicans" stole the nomination away from Ron Paul, from the 2011 straw polls to the first 2012 primaries and caucuses, and leading up to the Republican National Convention.

At the conclusion of the convention, and in an extreme instance of the kinds of threats that Establishment State-apparatchiks are known for, real thugs apparently tried to give some freedom advocates a strong message.

But despite the contempt that Romney and his fellow Establishment ilk continue to show toward Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, cultural and religious conservatives, and libertarians, it seems that these grassroots freedom advocates just can't let go of their blind faith in these politicians. Author James Bovard calls it "Battered Citizen Syndrome."

I have been observing politics since high school in the 1970s. But in this election season and last week's Republican Convention it is the first time I have seen grown men and women act like spoiled rotten children, like babies — like Democrats. But the clueless Republicans — they would never admit to it, despite their obvious and blatant Soviet-like silencing of the Ron Paul delegates and rules-changing shenanigans.

It used to be that the Democrat Party was the party of immature brats who just want to take other people's money and their stuff, and the Republicans were the mature, responsible types who "worked for a living" and believed in playing by the rules.

Sorry. The Republicans have shown no shame in their childish impatience and short-sightedness, and especially since 9/11. They ostracized the one actual conservative in the Republican race, Ron Paul. And they were delusional and ignorant to seriously promote Willard Romney as a "conservative" and a "capitalist."

In their short-sighted impatience and nominating Romney that included the rules changes and the way the Romney people treated the Ron Paul delegates, these infantile Republicans have increased the risk of alienating real conservatives and libertarians and their Romney losing to Obama.

But in their immediate-gratification selfishness and their power-pumped adrenaline for more power, the elitist Republicans just can't see that. You see, it is these delusional Republicans who are the real tinfoil hat wearers, not the rational and realistic Ron Paul.

And now it's the Democrats' turn, this week. Speaking of "rules changes," because these old fools were ridiculed for their omission of God and Jerusalem in the Democrat Platform, Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa gaveled the revised version through on a "two-thirds" vote, even after three votes in which the "ayes" were obviously not in the two-thirds. He was "booed" by the "anti-God, anti-Israel" crowd, as Michael Savage would say.

But these useless conventions and State-aggrandizing elections are the natural consequences of democracy, of publicly-owned government and the centralization in DC of power and control over a large territory. Natural consequences of people forfeiting control over their own lives and destinies to a small group of bipartisan elitists and bureaucrats in Washington.

What we have been seeing is the natural decivilizing process of such centralization of power and the people's willingly enslaving themselves to serve the non-productive rulers. Economist and philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained these phenomena in his great book, Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order.

In that book, Hoppe explains, among other things, the long-term effects of empowering a centralized government with wealth-confiscation and redistribution, and the decivilizing effects of such redistributionism in terms of the breakup of the family and the cultural decline of the society. He also points out how such a scheme weakens the principles of private property, production and voluntary exchange that are, as Hoppe notes, the "ultimate source of human civilization."

Those very principles have been totally abandoned by Republicans — their rhetoric means nothing when they continually support socialists, fascists, warmongers and professional bureaucrats to rule over us. And such principles were resoundingly trashed by the Democrats and "progressives" a century ago with Democrat President Woodrow Wilson.

The temporary rulers of a democracy do not actually own the country and thus they are not particularly interested in its capital stock, as Hoppe has noted. This makes their decision-making short-sighted and exploitative. This has been true in America with Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, throughout most of America's existence.

And the pattern of America's conservatives blindly and loyally following Republicans off the cliff has increased over the past 20 or 30 years now. Despite Ronald Reagan's government expansion, the 1994 "Republican Revolution," the Bush II years and the exploitation of 9/11 (in which the government seemed to have had some complicity), the Republican Party Faithful continue to be suckered in to supporting more Big Government, more socialism and fascism, and less and less freedom.

Given Romney's record as governor and his statements over the years, how the hell could any rational person actually believe he will cut away at Leviathan and restore our liberty?

Unfortunately, the nation's conservatives and Republicans let themselves be fooled and bamboozled by the post-9/11 fear-mongering propaganda of the Bush Administration. They would never believe that when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, President George H.W. Bush would start a new, totally unnecessary conflict — in Iraq — to justify the continuation of an already overly-bloated military-industrial complex. The Iraqi sanctions throughout the 1990s continued to provoke Middle-Easterners, which led to 9/11.

The Romney-supporting "conservatives" do not seem to see how the system of redistributionism also includes their tax dollars being stolen from them for the sake of pleasing the profiteers of the military-industrial complex racket.

And the Democrats! Throughout this convention this week, it seems there has been no mention of Obama's wars and his drone bombings murdering innocent civilians overseas, his NDAA law, his war on whistleblowers, his war on medical marijuana and war on drugs in general, the issues of which so-called "liberals" would normally be very critical.

But no, the unprincipled Democrats and liberals now join the unprincipled conservatives and Republicans, as the Democrats now cheer on their Messiah.

So conservatives who actually believe in conservatism and traditional moral values and fiscal responsibility, and antiwar liberals and progressives who support civil liberties and individual rights, all had their chance with Ron Paul. But in their democratically-developed collective infantilization, they instead have gone with two anti-freedom warmongers, both bought and paid for by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, the worst of the worst.

But, in my opinion, even Ron Paul doesn't go far enough as far as emphasizing the futility and failure of central planning. (Yes, believe it or not, conservatives, when you support Dick Cheney and Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, you are supporting "central planners," and very bad ones at that!) I wish that Ron Paul could have been more direct in just stating the truth that central planning doesn't work, as the great 20th Century Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises showed in his book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.

The truth is, most Republicans and conservatives are no longer people who believe in fiscal responsibility or moral values. And most Democrats and liberals no longer believe in peace and civil liberties. They love central planning and the State, they love and worship Washington and its imbecilic and corrupt bureaucrats, no matter how those rulers destroy everything they touch, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and especially in America. That is the true, inherent nature of central planning.

The major political parties of today are a result of the continuing devolution and decivilization of society in their immaturity and infantilization, their pettiness, and their refusal to face the reality that they have been supporting tyrants and criminals, non-productive politicians and bureaucrats, most of whom have spent their entire adult lives feeding at the public trough (or benefiting indirectly from it).

These Parties of the State need to stop supporting socialists and fascists, and stop silencing, arresting or detaining those who want their freedom back and who want to cut the chains of Leviathan's enslavement.

And soon We the People will need to take the Tenth Amendment more seriously, that's for sure.

Scott Lazarowitz [send him mail] is a commentator and cartoonist, visit his blog.

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