. . . unless Deen paid her “a huge sum of money.”  So said the former employee at Paula Deen’s restaurant, a white woman who sued Paula Deen for racial discrimination in the workplace, claiming that her black niece was harmed by it while working at the restaurant.  The judge dismissed the claim today, revealing the whole charade as essentially an attempt at extortion.

Obama promises “transparency” or greater transparency. That’s what Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden brought us, so let them off the hook.

World government with teeth requires world police or forces. Whoever controls the world police controls the world government. Whoever controls the world government controls the world. Right now, several beginnings are UN forces and NATO forces. UN forces can be vetoed. NATO forces can’t be introduced everywhere. These blockages thwart them from becoming world police. However, NATO going in to Afghanistan was an extension to Central Asia. NATO has also extended its reach by partnering with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Egypt, Jordan and Israel.

Here’s another incipient road to world police: the US Special Operations Command. At present, Special Forces and this command get a pass from the American public. They are regarded as the elite good guys. They actually are a huge danger to liberty. In fact, any American force that can thwart an insurrection or rebellion in the US, even the nationally-controlled militia, is a huge obstacle to liberty.

Admiral William McRaven, who heads USSOC, wants “to establish a formal framework in which U.S. special operations forces (SOF), interagency partners and foreign allies join an alliance that promotes the sharing of intelligence, partner engagement, training and, if necessary, direct action.” It would be called the Global SOF Network.

The myth he is building to justify a global police of this kind is that there are linkages among countries. Yes, there are, but that doesn’t justify world police, not when people everywhere would have NO CONTROL over it, not when we know that arbitrary use of power accompanies holding power. A MONOPOLY world police force is a recipe for world-wide tyranny. Lawmakers in Congress WILL NOT thwart this organization. They will approve it with purported measures to control it. But SUCH CONTROL NEVER HAPPENS. Congress doesn’t control the agencies it has created. It certainly didn’t control the NSA. It doesn’t control the FED.

[Tim Kaiser observes the startling correspondence between USSOC and INGSOC from Orwell's 1984. Ingsoc was Newspeak for English Socialism.]

This behind-the-scenes Ron video is so much fun!

The incomparable controversialist Jim Goad has a brilliant and disturbing piece in Taki’s Magazine where he writes:

A statistical analysis from England suggests that a woman’s IQ is inversely proportional to her desire to breed. This, in turn, suggests that the world will grow dumber with every new day.

In his book The Intelligence Paradox, London School of Economics researcher Satoshi Kanazawa surveyed data from the United Kingdom’s National Child Development Study. Controlling for variables such as education and income, he reached the following conclusions:

• With each increase of 15 IQ points, a woman’s urge to reproduce is diminished by 25%.

• The average IQ of women who want children is 5.6 points lower than those who don’t want them.

• Among all 45-year-old women in England, 20% are childless, but this figure rises to 43% among those with college degrees.

The paradox is that women who are measurably more intelligent based on IQ tests are dumber in terms of evolutionary survival instincts.

Goad candidly observes concerning the welfare state’s fostering an insouciant underclass of hapless breeders:

The most egregious blasphemy one can utter in today’s insanely stifling and repressive climate of intolerant egalitotalitarianism is to gently suggest that genetics play any role in determining intelligence differences and relative prosperity between individuals and social groups . . . Intelligent people have the reflective capacity to consider things such as whether they’d have the economic wherewithal to raise successful offspring, whereas dumber people tend to invest as much thought into reproduction as they do to defecation.  The end result is an increasingly dysgenic world—Idiocracy made flesh.

By Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC.  Can you imagine how furious neocon chickenhawks like Limbaugh, Cheney, Hannity, Levin, Kristol, and the rest would be at the most highly decorated U.S. Marine in history if he were to be alive today and propose such a thing?

Some people are thinking about the post-U.S. map. Click on the map to enlarge it.

The war on drugs is a very profitable gambit for the state and its minions and parasites.  In addition to spending  billions creating a military police state to supposedly “police” drug consumption, billions more for all the ridiculous “just say no” programs in government schools, and even more for endless “studies” of drugs by the state’s kept academics, the state also spends astronomical amounts on “drug rehab.” So called.  I recently had an opportunity to observe first hand what government-subsidized “drug rehab” looks like because there are several “halfway houses” near the Starbucks where I consume my daily cappuccino, and there are always a dozen or more young drug “rehabbers” hanging out there.  Judging from their appearance and behavior, I’d say the following are what your tax dollars are teaching these young people to do to rehabilitate themselves:

1. Do not apply for a job or take a job.

2. Dress like an idiot.  For males, this means baggy basketball shorts, preferably with at least half of your ass hanging out.  “Wifebeater” tee shirt; ugliest tattoos you can find covering all arms and legs; Crazy Googenheim-style ball cap placed sideways on your head.  For females, well, just dress like a hooker.  Dress like this, identical to every other rehabber so that if your parents pressure you to get a job, it is unlikely that anyone would actually hire you.  If your parents complain about it, tell them you are “expressing your individuality.”

3. Hang out all day and all night at a Starbucks or other similar establishment consuming massive amounts of caffeine through coffee and Monster Energy Drinks (which have nine times the caffeine of regular Starbucks coffee).

4. If you are not a chain smoker of cigarettes, take up the habit.  Never, ever, use an ashtray.  It’s too “establishment.”

5.  Try not to speak a sentence without at least one F-bomb in it.

6.  Associate only with “former” drug addicts.

7. Get on food stamps.

8.  Get on Medicaid and SSI (Supplemental Social Security Income).

Do all of these things, and you will be, as is stated on the sides of the minivans that drive the “rebabbers” to and from Starbucks every day, “on the road to recovery.”

Journalism schools and corporate pressures, along with public education, have produced reporters who can’t and don’t write accurate headlines and don’t even know how to fashion a good article. I await the day when the truth stares them in the face and they wake up. Maybe if sales drop off badly enough, they might begin to act like real reporters. But I’m not holding my breath. There’s still some worth in the papers, but it’s harder to dig out.

The Wall Street Journal has a headline today: “Obama Proposes Surveillance-Policy Overhaul”. This is wildly inaccurate. He did nothing of the sort. Instead read these comments in Techdirt.

Obama did something unusual at his press conference. He took a personal shot at Putin that went beyond his other insufferably arrogant remarks. He clumsily attempted to lay this at the feet of the press, in a shot at them too. After he said it, realizing what he had just said, he attempted to cover it up by saying that he and Putin often had productive exchanges:

“I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is, is that when we’re in conversations together, oftentimes it’s very productive.”

Actually, does Putin slouch? He sure doesn’t look it to me when he’s horseback riding half naked.

Let’s face facts, folks. Who among us does not sometimes or even often look at other people and have a variety of petty, hateful, spiteful, biased, prejudiced, fearful and other thoughts? Who doesn’t size up other people and judge them? How many of us are saints 100% of the time? Putin has these thoughts too. Obama does. Nixon did, and so did LBJ. The question that always pops up in my mind is why we trust these men and women with huge power? Some of us may defer to their supposed knowledge and think they can make better decisions because of it, but do they actually have better knowledge? And can they get past the same petty, hateful, spiteful, prejudiced, jealous and fearful thoughts that everyone else has? And God knows what else lurks in the hearts of such ambitious men who think they’re chosen to make decisions for everyone else. They have to wheel and deal to get where they’re at. They have to sell their souls usually. I don’t see why they should be trusted. Maybe the argument is that we have to put the most devilish in charge because they can best deal with the most devilish from the other countries who are also in charge. A fine situation that is. Why should good people put up with that?

I’ve suggested that the US government be dissolved, and so people ask me how this can be done. George S. Patton has my answer:

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

One possible direction is through a state or two exercising its powers. Between 1789 and 1860, there was an understanding of constitutional principles to support such exercises. The Civil War was an aberration in the Constitution. That war took the Constitution out of its orbit. The intellectual and historical propagation of myths in support of the federal government has been one-sided ever since. Another direction is to break the hold of those myths. Men live by myths.

John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted whose son was brutally murdered in 1981, was recently profiled in AARP’s monthly magazine. In the article, he makes a statement about gun control that is unfortunately very common:

I am for the right to have guns. I’m a gun owner. But nobody needs to own an AK-47. They say these assault rifles are great for hunting. You can’t hunt game with an AK-47. And if you’re a responsible gun owner, why wouldn’t you go through a background check? The only people who don’t want background checks are fugitives, tax dodgers and terrorists.

Sorry, John. Many people who don’t want background checks know that the federal government has no constitutional authority to conduct them. They are constitutionalists and believers in liberty and freedom.

This mentality is exactly what is used to defend the TSA. If you’re a responsible fly, then you shouldn’t mind a TSA anal exam before you fly. Unless, of course, you are trying to hide something because you are a terrorist. My articles on gun control are listed here.

Bless you, Becky Akers, for your blog post Mail Manning (http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/mail-manning/)

Thanks to you, I shall be writing him. And, I thought I would share the contents of my letter with this blog. Before I do, let me ask you a question: might you be willing to spear-head the effort to get us all the mailing addresses for Edward Snowden and Julian Assange as well? Letters to them, I think would be just as, or at least almost as, apropos.

Dear Bradley:

If and when the Nobel Peace Prize is offered to you, please do NOT accept it. Or, rather, accept it but only on one condition: that this Nobel Peace Prize committee rescind their award to that war-monger, President Barack Obama. You are in my thoughts every day. You are a hero of mine. Please try to be in as good a space as you can be. There are millions of us pulling for you.

Yours truly,

Walter E. Block

Sen. Harry Reid has once again made a complete fool of himself.  Appearing on a local NPR station in Las Vegas, he criticized those who oppose Obama’s programs, adding that he hoped such opposition is “based on substance and not the fact that he’s African-American.” Is Reid advertising his intellectual bankruptcy by having to resort to name-calling, or is he engaging in the projection of his own dark side onto others? In connection with the 2008 presidential campaign, Reid referred to Obama as “light skinned . . . with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

What if a critic of a Harry Reid proposal had said that he hoped the measure was “based on substance not the fact that he’s supported by Las Vegas gambling interests”: how would Reid have responded?

Reid then decided to take a shot at anarchists, referring to their major influence in starting World War I. (In much the same way, Harry, that John Brown was the cause of the Civil War?) The tea party people – who are about as “anarchistic” as Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly – “don’t believe in government,” Reid declared.  As such, they make “it very difficult to get things done.” The same complaint could be registered against the World War II “resistance movements” in France and Warsaw, who made it very difficult for the German government to carry out its policies!

I remember this book from my high school days, when secession in Michigan had once again become a popular topic, partly due to Detroit’s fall from grace. This morning I came across a heroic 2nd edition (2011) of Superior: A State for the North Country in a quaint and very northern-ish Upper Peninsula coffee shop that sits across from the mighty Lake Superior in Munising, Michigan. I became engrossed in the historical aspects of this secession effort after flipping through the pages.

For those who have never been to northern Michigan, and the Upper Peninsula in particular, there is a culture here all its own, with no special love for the politics of Lansing and Detroit. As Tim Murphy wrote in Mother Jones in 2010:

My first impression upon driving into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was that this is what Alaska must feel like. Quite a statement, to be sure, coming from someone who’s never set foot in Alaska. But there’s something undeniably different about the place.

But there’s a cultural element, too. For most of its existence, the UP has been isolated from the rest of the state, bordered by three of the Great Lakes plus Wisconsin, and accessible to the rest of Michigan only by boat until the late 1950s when someone finally built a bridge (and Yoopers, as natives of the UP are known, immediately began talking about blowing it up).

…The Upper Peninsula has about as much in common with Detroit as Manhattan does to Manhattan, Kansas. And that’s why, for the last 150 or so years, Yoopers have talked about blowing up the bridge, breaking away, and starting a state of their own called “Superior.”

As with Vermont, the effort to secede in northern Michigan still has passion and traction. And with American secession efforts receiving more visibility and thus being taken more seriously, we will hear much more about it in the coming years.

Here are two more nails in the coffin of environmentalism. 1. Former General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner now says that electric cars pollute more than gas-powered cars because of the power plants that make the electricity for the electric cars. 2. Australian geologist Ian Pilmer comments on volcanic eruptions:

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in just four days – yes, FOUR DAYS – by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time – EVERY DAY.

I don’t really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.

Time to again read Lew Rockwell’s anti-environmental manifesto.

. . . for spraying paint on an abandoned building, and then laugh and high five each other about it.  This was the same thing they did after murdering those 80 or so children in Waco, Texas during the Clinton regime.  Here’s another video of a badge-wearing thug punching a 10-year-old boy, and another one of another cop punching a mentally ill young girl.

How long will Boobus Americanus put up with this?

Much attention over the past several months has focused upon the intrusive National Security Surveillance State. One draconian dimension which has not received sufficient attention is this State’s experiments with, and implementation of, mind control upon the American people. As background introduction to this crucial topic, I would suggest LRC readers become familiar once again with one of the most outstanding investigative articles ever to appear on this website: Michael E. Kreca’s “How the Government Created the ‘Drug Problem’ in the USA.” It directly impacts on the two excellent documentaries presented below:

This program, Mind Control: America’s Secret War, is part of the popular series from the History Channel that investigates some of civilization’s unsolved mysteries and controversies. This episode goes deep inside the American government’s intelligence operations to investigate its secret studies and experiments in mind control. Much information was gleaned from documents accessed under the Freedom of Information Act. An interview with John Marks, author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, adds many facts that he believes the government does not want its citizens to know. In 1983 I discussed these crucial matters with Marks. This was a conversation that left me very shaken and distrustful of the covert aspects of our sociopolitical culture. Towards the end of the documentary the subject of nonlethal weapons is broached. Here is an update.

This classic A&E Investigative Reports documentary with Bill Kurtis, Bad Trip To Edgewood, analyzes how between 1955 and 1975, the U.S. Army used 7,000 enlisted soldiers as human guinea pigs for experiments involving a wide array of biological and chemical warfare agents. These tests were conducted jointly by the U.S. Army Intelligence Board and the Chemical Warfare Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal’s research facility in Maryland. Approximately 3,500 of these soldiers were given doses of powerful mind-altering psychochemicals, including LSD, PCP, and BZ. These “volunteer” test subjects were not told which drugs they were given, and were not fully informed of the extreme physical and psychological effects these drugs would have on them.

I’ve said previously that Voice of the Martyrs is one of my favorite organizations. They run a website, Prisoner Alert, that helps you write to imprisoned Christians worldwide in their own languages. When freed, those folks often testify that the mountains of mail they received improved jailers’ treatment of them. That’s true even when their persecutors only mention the letters but deny them the opportunity to read them. For the thugs torturing them to know that the world is watching apparently tempers their bestiality.

Might I suggest we write to Bradley Manning? He is a political and persecuted prisoner just as our brothers and sisters overseas are. Indeed, most of the USSA’s inmates fall into that category since they have committed no crime: the only thing of which they’re guilty is angering a politician or bureaucrat because they persist in buying or selling plants Our Rulers dislike, or they consider their money their own rather than the IRS’s, or they’ve defied the totalitarian State in some other way.

I don’t know whether the tyrants running this country have taken a page from North Korea and Saudi Arabia to deny Manning his mail, but no matter: writing him reminds the brutes that we are out here and we’re watching. So if anyone has Mr. Manning’s snail-mail address in prison, send it to me, and I’ll post it.

Meanwhile, if you know victims of the USSA’s prison-industrialist regime, please write them. I’ve corresponded with several such gentlemen, and they are amazingly grateful for such a tiny favor. The days are coming when we may well be in their place, craving word from the outside.

Update: Jerri Ward sent this link to information on writing to Bradley Manning. Thanks, Jerri!

He’s saying that he can’t say anything. He’s saying that his First Amendment right to free speech has been removed:

“I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on—the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.”

Brewster Kahle got one. The litigation on the gag order within national security letters is discussed in this Wikipedia article. Section 505 of the USA Patriot Act has greatly expanded use of the national security letter. Congress is busy passing laws that abridge the right to free speech.

Listen to his interview with Pat Buchanan.

A friend who works for one of military’s corporate suppliers forwarded the following anguished memo “exactly as it was sent to me.”  He adds, “I have a different take on this than most of my coworkers, as you can probably surmise, but in the industry, the focus is less on whether or not a particular program or troop level is necessary versus how many jobs are gained or lost from it. In the industry, cuts are always bad.”

To wit:

Subject: Check out Hagel Forecasts Massive Cuts to Troop Numbers

Here ya go!  This is not a soap opera, folks; our complacency will be our demise!  Speak up and make a difference!

Hagel Forecasts Massive Cuts to Troop Numbers | Military.com

Why do I suspect our anonymous hand-wringer never urges his cronies to speak up and make a difference for liberty?

The government is going after encrypted speech. It’s strongarming companies into giving up the encryption keys. This is one reason why an e-mail service linked to Snowden has shut down.

Citing the shutdown of Edward Snowden’s email provider, Texas-based Lavabit, and the lack of true end to end security in email, US-based Silent Circle has discontinued their Silent Mail service. Commenting on Lavabit, Silent Circle said (emphasis mine):

Today, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system lest they “be complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.

The next time someone parrots the old “if you’ve got nothing to hide” line, you can send them this about the chilling effect of massive government spying on businesses.

(H/T LRC Reader Chris B.)

Please watch this extremely powerful new documentary, State of Mind: The Psychology of Control, which details the dark history of the State’s hegemonic manipulation and mind-control conditioning of its subject population toward passive obeisance and servitude to predatory elite rule, while emphasizing resistance strategies of Socratic questioning of authority, critical thinking, and self-actualization. This film need to go “super-viral.”

Google recently added a “feature” to your inbox without telling you about it. It’s three new folders, including a “Promotions” folder where the Lew Rockwell daily email is going:

Click on promotions and scan it for an email from “Lew Rockwell”:

Here are instructions assuming you would like it in your Primary inbox. Left-click and Hold the mail from Lew, then drag it to the top of the page and drop it in the “Primary” folder on the left. You’ll get a yellow confirmation message – be sure to click “Yes” so you don’t need to do this again:

If you haven’t signed up for the LRC Daily email, take a moment to do so, right over top of this blog in the upper right of the page. Enter your email address in the email address box, and click the blue “Subscribe” button. It’s free, and if anything happens to the site, we’ll be able to email you with the location of our new Internet address.

Texas-based Lavabit posted a cryptic message as their homepage and has shutdown service. This is the provider that Edward Snowden supposedly used, so it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that some unholy alliance of the NSA, FBI, CIA, and some other alphabet-soup star-chamber despots served them papers including a gag-order. Here is the message in full (emphasis mine):

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely, Ladar Levison Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

http://lavabit.com/

(H/T to LRC reader Patrick)

I will be giving a one-time seminar called “Delusions of Krugman” in which I take a hard look at Paul Krugman’s Keynesian theories and compare them with what the Austrians are saying. The seminar will last about 90 minutes and begins at 5:30 p.m. The seminar will be done over WebEx. I hope to see you Friday!

In the aftermath of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attack on libertarians in general and Rand Paul in particular, neoconservative Charles Krauthammer has described Christie’s call for more government domestic spying as “electrifying” and “fearless.” Declares Krauthammer:

It was an extremely important moment. Rand Paul represents the sort of isolationist wing of the Republican party; by this direct, fearless attack on him by Christie, I think he takes up the mantle of the majority of the GOP, which is interventionist. And that’s a really important moment. (emphasis mine)

For years, Ron Paul has been advocating that the USA be friendly to other nations and engage in trade and other exchanges with them, with that being the heart of U.S. foreign policy. And for years, neoconservatives like Krauthammer have declared that the only acceptable foreign policy is the USA serving as the world’s policeman, with the American Cop increasingly bashing heads and killing whom it may, all in the name of “national security.” While I obviously do not agree with everything Rand Paul has to offer, nonetheless his call for an end to the government’s massive domestic spying has been a step in the right direction.

However, the Republican Party in the end always will reject the sound advice of the Pauls. As Krauthammer declares, the GOP is inherently “interventionist,” which means the party endorses (to paraphrase the late Gore Vidal) perpetual war in the name of pursuing perpetual peace.