11 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Math in Washington
Never adds up. After Iran dealt the Empire a crimpling pinpoint blow in Iraq, the initial lie was that there were no casualties. 0
Then it started creeping up, with brain injuries from the concussions being reported. That number now stands at 100. In DC, 0 = 100. The same government pushes math education, with similar results. Vote harder this November!
26 Sunday Jan 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Idiots’ Empire
Gary Barnett on the declining, soon-to-fall, immoral US Empire:
Yes, the American Empire will fall, but it won’t be due to outside threats. It will be due to the abandonment of falsely espoused values, of internal strife and divisiveness, of mass corruption, of political upheaval, of monetary suicide, and of collective immorality. Collectivism breeds empire and allows it to flourish, and because of the loss of individual thought, it becomes the internal disease that leads to the extermination of that empire. This is the real America, not the land of the free and home of the brave, but a collective mob of ignorant sheep awaiting the slaughter due to their own weakness and stupidity.
That’s them, alright. Put that in your constitution and smoke it.
06 Monday Jan 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on The Punch?
Was this the plan behind the Baghdad attack all along?
BREAKING NEWS: U.S.-led military coalition says it will WITHDRAW from Iraq after country’s parliament voted for anti-ISIS troops to leave in wake of Qassem Soleimani’s death
General in charge of U.S. coalition forces in Iraq tells military counterpart to prepare for helicopter flights as troops pull up stakes
Letter says troops will soon begin flying out in transport helicopters under cover of darkness
A little Saigon 1975 maybe, but we’ll take it if it’s true.
16 Saturday Nov 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Not All It Was Cracked Up to be
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Thomas Dilorenzo states the manifest problems with Muh Constitution and the resulting subverted state.
All governmental power is propped up by an avalanche of myths and superstitions about the alleged benevolence, omniscience, honesty, selflessness, and magnanimity of the state, coupled with critiques if not outright demonization of private property, free market voluntarism, private enterprise, limited government, the rule of law, the free society, and all those who educate about and advance such concepts. Your author once co-authored a book entitled Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, about mountains of such myths and superstitions. A case can be made that at the top of the list of statist myths and superstitions is the myth of American nationalism — about the supposed “superiority” of a virtually unlimited, centralized and consolidated government, coupled with the never-ending hatred and demonization of federalism, states’ rights, nullification and secession, and anything else that challenges the notion of the “supremacy” of the central government.
In this regard American “nationalism” has nothing to do with the older concept of a people with a common language and culture, living within the borders of their own nation state. The unique American version of “nationalism” was invented at the time of the founding by a group of conniving, Machiavellian politicians who sought to overthrow the results of the American Revolution – the casting off of the centralized, oppressive, mercantilist/crony capitalist British empire – and adopt the very same system in America – the British empire without the British. There is nothing wrong with a corrupt, tyrannical, mercantilist empire that uses the coercive powers of the state to enrich the ruling class at the expense of the working class, these men said, confident that they would naturally assume the position of the ruling class.
These men were led by the likes of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Paine, and other “Federalists,” many of who were “defectors” to the cause of liberty – the cause of the American Revolution – as Murray Rothbard wrote in Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic: 1784-1791.
The Americans were a real and distinct People, scattered amongst several coherent Nations. No more. Both have faded away, their legacies perverted into the worship of a nonexistent, but all too real (too powerful) Empire. Thank God it is at its end.
BTW, Rothbard made some good points but he was not one of Us.
30 Monday Sep 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Fading Empire Fades
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As it has for some time. A great article on the subject, the first of two.
Insurgents have repeatedly battled US forces to a standoff or worse. Two major powers have weapons that can stymie or destroy significant parts of America’s conventional offensive capabilities, that can be used offensively with devastating effect, and for which the US has no defensive countermeasures.
This set of facts is plainly incompatible with the control the US establishment believes it can and should exercise around the world. Russia and China appear to have no such hegemonic aspirations, concentrating their efforts in their own backyards and letting the US waste its blood and treasure on imperialistic adventures. The US’s unipolar moment began fading in 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic bomb, but repeated encounters with reality have done little to shake the illusion of control. Economic, financial, and political developments at home render the illusion delusional.
This week’s TPC column will cover some of these issues, from the perspective of my special interview guest. He says that the US shouldn’t be so keen even on relying on that nuclear threat – which it so happens is also fading. Coming soon!
21 Tuesday May 2019
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Ron Paul on the Three Crimes
Delineated in the Constitution: piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. VAWA is, as Dr. Paul notes, utterly illegal (as are most of the Empire’s “laws”).
Another great example is the Violence Against Women Act. Passed in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act provides federal grants to, and imposes federal mandates on, state and local governments with the goal of increasing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of those who commit domestic violence.
Like most federal laws, the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional. The Constitution limits federal jurisdiction to three crimes: counterfeiting, treason, and piracy. All other crimes — including domestic violence — are strictly state and local matters.
Not that the Constitution matters, at all, anymore. But, where have we read about these three “real” crimes before?
12 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
The Fake News “Resistance” now, after decades of atrophy, seeks to protect the Constitution. Or something. Whatever it is, they’re aiming to protect against The Trump. Oddly, said Trump is the last vestige of hope for possibly restoring any semblance of Constitutional order. If he fails, then it’s over and we might as well let it go. “It” being the old Republic, now more of memory than an institution.
Trump. Trump. Trump. Russia. Russia. Russia. Fake news, impeachment, and indictment.
My old friend, Ken Starr says a sitting President can, in fact, be indicted for crimes.
“I think the president can be indicted,” said Starr, who led the investigation into former President Bill Clinton‘s sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky. “But that is not the position of the Justice Department traditionally.”
“The basic point is we do not have an authoritative resolution on the issue,” he said, noting it “cannot happen, as I see it, under Justice Department policy that’s enforceable on [Special Counsel] Bob Mueller.”
“No one is above the law,” he said. “And so in my judgment the president can in fact be indicted.”
I respect my friend’s learned judgment – as to his theory. But he seems a little caught up in the past. We are in a new and different place, legally. He’s probably correct – in theory – the president could be indicted.
However, a sitting president could now use (“legally”) something like the following to preempt any criminal proceeding:
Paper indictments do not stop AGM-114’s. NRO.
Do you like the new legal/political landscape? You know, if we’re honest, you voted yourselves into this imperial place. Pleased? If not, then say five “Hail Constitutions,” go forth, and vote no more, my children.
That, or hope Trump has a cool head and an iron constitution (not one of paper). Trust the plan?
11 Friday Aug 2017
Posted in News and Notes
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If you haven’t read A Republic, Not an Empire, you should. Eighteen years later and Pat’s thinking is still timely:
If the past is prologue, and it has proven to be, the future holds this. A renewal of ICBM tests until a missile is perfected. Occasional atrocities creating crises between the U.S. and North Korea. America being repeatedly dragged to the brink of a war we do not want to fight.
As Secretary of Defense James Mattis said Sunday, such a war would be “catastrophic. … A conflict in North Korea … would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”
When the lesson sinks in that a war on the peninsula would be a catastrophe, and a growing arsenal of North Korean ICBMs targeted on America is intolerable, the question must arise:
Why not move U.S. forces off the peninsula, let South Korean troops replace them, sell Seoul all the modern weapons it needs, and let Seoul build its own nuclear arsenal to deter the North?
Remove any incentive for Kim to attack us, except to invite his own suicide. And tell China: Halt Kim’s ICBM program, or we will help South Korea and Japan become nuclear powers like Britain and France.
Given the rising risk of our war guarantees, from the eastern Baltic to the Korean DMZ — and the paltry rewards of the American Imperium — we are being bled from Libya to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen — a true America First foreign policy is going to become increasingly attractive.
Kim’s credible threat to one day be able to nuke a U.S. city is going to concentrate American minds wonderfully.
Here the best common sense solution is also the easiest. Sadly, common sense usually doesn’t coalesce until after an Empire falls and fades away. Ask Gibbon.
There was a recent glimmer of hope on a related matter: privatizing the war in Afghanistan (still fighting 16 years later, you know). But it was a false hope. Rather than a privateering program like the one that withstood the British Navy during the Revolution, they propose a mass extension of, a monopoly trust system for, the corporate welfare. More imperial faliure awaits.
And all the while, as we chase phantoms in places we don’t belong, the enemy within our own nations Aloha Snackbars away. Again and again.
Reuters.
Always from within, never without.
20 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Military-Industrial Complex Notices the Collapse, Wants More
Of course, the solution is to spend more and grow the MIC even more. Please read:
In the first of a series, we report on stunning new evidence that the U.S. Department of Defense is waking up to the collapse of American primacy, and the rapid unraveling of the international order created by U.S. power after the Second World War.
But the Pentagon’s emerging vision of what comes next hardly inspires confidence. We breakdown both the insights and cognitive flaws in this vision. In future pieces we will ask the questions: What is really driving the end of the American empire? And based on that more accurate diagnosis of the problem, what is the real solution?
An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs.
The solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.
[MORE OF THE SAME]
The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling.
Having lost its past status of “pre-eminence”, the U.S. now inhabits a dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is “resistance to authority”.
Danger comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China, both portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but also from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events. These will erupt not just in the Middle East, but all over the world, potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future.
The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and U.S. Army, calls for the U.S. government to invest in more surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
The report was published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the DoD’s approach to risk assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development; and the Army Study Program Management Office.
One wonders if Gibbon is read at the War College.
Just not enough being spent… Portside.
09 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Statuaries: Fred on Robert E. Lee on American Decline
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Please consult the inaugural column by Toadstool over at Fred Reed’s place. Toadstool writes in similar fashion to Fred; they may be related. This one is about how General Lee called out the modern Empire. Actually called it by that name.
“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.” – Robert E. Lee
The column repeatedly calls for a return to the Articles of Confederation, to freedom. That would be a vast improvement to the current failed system. Most anything would be an improvement. We could still heed Lee’s warnings. We won’t.
Instead we’ll just keep taking down his statutes.
Begone! Civilized free-thinker! Right-think idiocy courtesy of ‘Nawlins, a filthy swamp of a town.
