Tag Archives: The People

The Very Real “Walking Dead”

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

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John Whitehead comments, in the wake of George Romero’s death, on the zombie-fication of America.

Just take a look around you.

“We the people” have become the walking dead of the American police state.

We’re still plagued by the socio-political evils of cultural apathy, materialism, domestic militarism and racism that Romero depicted in his Night of the Living Dead trilogy.

Romero’s zombies have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, as well.

Indeed, you don’t have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters, running for their lives in 5K charity races, and putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

In fact, the CDC put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.”

Zombies also embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.

Case in point: in AMC’s hit television series The Walking Dead and the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, it’s not just flesh-eating ghouls and cannibalistic humans that survivors have to worry about but the police state “tasked with protecting the vulnerable” that poses some of the gravest threats to the citizenry.

I’ve written about “The Walking Dead,” the TV show, over at FP a few times. But I’ve never seen any of it. I don’t have to as I live in modern America. I see zombies out and about every day.

Whitehead’s column is a short tour de force on the command and control accepted from them the police state.

I think what little he misses is the acceptance part. The people are more than happy to roll over or lie down for anything, no matter how egregious, so long as the TV, the phone, and the AC work and the beer and fast food flows.

A friend of mine is fond of saying, “We’re in the zombie apocalypse. It’s just not the cool kind.”

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SHTF Plan.

Don’t be infected. Resist. Unplug and free yourselves. Be survivors.

They really do want your brains.

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A Different America, as if Through a Time Machine

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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Paul Craig Roberts reminisces from out the tattered remains of the post-modern nation:

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He could remember riding his horse into the town three miles from his grandparents’ farm with a real pistol strapped to his side and a rifle in the scabbard when he was 12 or 13. No one said a thing. Today a SWAT team would be on the scene. He would be lucky not to be shot dead and never know the fate of his grandparents, who would be guilty of all sorts of offenses, including failure to supervise a minor.

That reminded him of what he had recently read in a newspaper. On a cul-de-sac devoid of car traffic a mother sat in a chair outside the house while her child played in the front lawn. A busybody neighbor, trained to report parental malfeasance, whose view of the mother was blocked by shrubbery, saw an unsupervised child at play and called the police. When the police arrived, they arrested the mother on the basis of the unverified report from the neighbor. The mother was taken to jail. The newspaper did not say what had happened to the child, whether the kid was taken to foster care and whether the husband had to rush home from his job and ply lawyers with money to help put his family back together. These kinds of horrors inflicted on families by public authorities often have worse consequences than the predations of criminals. He wondered if parents and children would be safer if the police were disbanded and outlawed.

Yet, society had accepted these abuses as justified. What, he thought, would have been the public reaction when he was a kid? The policemen would have been fired, the chief disciplined, and the mayor would have lost the next election. It would not have been possible for them to become heroes by destroying a family. The busybody neighbor would have become a pariah in the community.

Just the other day he had seen a grandmother at the supermarket with tattoos and face piercings. A grandmother? How had this come about? At the mountain resort pool and exercise center it wasn’t just the men. He had seen young women who were covered in tattoos. A friend told him that some women not only had face and tongue piercings, but also navel, labia, and clitoris piercings. Piercings were what he remembered from boyhood days of looking through stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. Articles explained with words and photographs facial piercing practices by tribes in “darkest Africa.” Now they were the practices of upper class womyn who played in resorts.

…

Read that one, especially if you’re over 40. It’s a totally different country today, maybe not for the better. Ignorance, sloth, and weakness masquerade as individuality and liberation. And with the dumbing down comes a constant lose of freedom.

For a more in-depth look back, please buy and read the following, which I recalled as I nodded along with Roberts:

When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country

G. Gordon Liddy

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Liddy / Amazon.

The lost past.

The sad present.

The better future is at: Patreon, with Perrin.

Quit Sucking Your Thumb

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

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Paul Craig Roberts on the gullibility of Americans and those ever so happy to lie to them:

The false reality constructed for Americans parallels perfectly the false reality constructed by Big Brother in George Orwells’ dystopic novel 1984.

Consider the constant morphing of “the Muslim threat” from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to al-Nursra, to ISIS to ISIL, to Daesh with a jump to Russia. All of a sudden 16 years of Middle East wars against “terrorists” and “dictators” have become a matter of standing up to Russia, the country most threatened by Muslim terrorism, and the country most capable of wiping the United States and its vassal empire off of the face of the earth.

Domestically, Americans are assured that, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing, that is, flooding the financial markets with newly printed money that has driven up the prices of stocks and bonds, America has enjoyed an economic recovery since June of 2009, which must be one of the longest recoveries in history despite the absence of growth in median real family incomes, despite the growth in real retail sales, despite the falling labor force participation rate, despite the lack of high value-added, high productivity, high wage jobs.

The “recovery” is more than a mystery. It is a miracle. It exists only on fake newspaper.

…

Chasing and creating phantoms while the economy rots.

And of the economy, rumors circulate that Trump will soon make it four in a row at the Fed’s helm:

President Donald Trump is increasingly unlikely to nominate Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen next year for a second term, four people close to the process said.

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn is now the leading candidate to succeed Yellen as the world’s most important central banker, these people said. Yellen begins two days of congressional testimony on Wednesday, and her own future in the job may come up in questioning.

If Trump taps Cohn for the Fed, it could enrage economic nationalists in the White House and some staunchly conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill who don’t like the former Goldman Sachs president’s background as a Democrat who generally favors free trade.

And it would spur a backlash from progressive lawmakers who have blasted the president for picking multiple Goldman alums to run economic policy.

While the departure of Aunt Janet would be a great thing, her replacement by the former president of Goldman does not induce that warm, fuzzy feeling.

The best thing about Cohn is that he isn’t a credentialed economist – those have been dead wrong about everything for the past 100+ years. Otherwise, this will be the fox managing the henhouse.

But, hey, it’s now less than two months until football season…

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Influencing the Internet

26 Monday Jun 2017

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Time Magazine just released its list of the 25 Most Influential People on them interwebs. Sadly, I did not make the cut. In fact, with a few exceptions – Matt Drudge and the Tweeter in Chief – the whole is is devoid of anyone with meaningful contribution. This highlights the culture of celebrity-worship, ignorance, and mindless zombie-ism.

After Drudge it’s a cavalcade of entertainers, rappers, Kim Kardashian, a cartoon frog, and people I’ve never heard of.

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Time / Getty. 

I’m sure some of these folks do contribute something to the web and the world – all of them, in some way and in their own way. “You are what you eat” doesn’t just apply to Cheetos and Twinkies. Like TeeVee the internet runs the risk of falling victim to promoting the lowest common denominator.

That’s not you, obviously – you’re here. I thank you for that.

As Always, the Elites Live it Up While the People Die

02 Friday Jun 2017

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This was SOP in the Soviet Union and anywhere communists come to power. While the people of Venezuela starve and eat their pets the well do to and the politically connected dine on lobster and fly private. The people begin to notice.

CARACAS, June 2 (Reuters) – One is shown blowing a kiss from a private jet. Another is seen posing in front of a store of luxury jeweler Cartier in China. Others grin as they tuck into a plate of lobster or a massive birthday cake.

Venezuelan activists are increasingly posting details of locations and lifestyles of leftist officials and their families, depicting them as thriving off corruption while the population struggles to eat in a devastating economic crisis.

The social media blitzes, targeting officials and their business partners, relatives and even lovers, are another weapon in a wave of huge protests against President Nicolas Maduro’s government that began in April. Protesters are seeking early presidential elections, freedom for jailed activists, and humanitarian aid to alleviate chronic food and medicine shortages.

One Twitter account published photos purportedly showing the wife of Vice President Tareck El Aissami enjoying champagne and lounging on a pristine beach with her sisters. In another case, an alleged lover of a powerful Socialist Party official is shown on trips to the Middle East.

It is always like this. “Let them eat rats…” It’s another double standard. You pay for it. Then you pay for it again. Then you eat Fido.

hot-dog

Caracas slum hot dog. Daily Ritual.

Good Cop, Bad Citizen, Crazed Law

30 Tuesday May 2017

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I noticed two things this morning.

One was that WordPress assigned one of my previous Police State articles as a related companion to last night’s terrorism post. Two years ago I was concerned about the militarization of the domestic police in the U.S. Things have gotten only a little worse since then.

Second, was a new, somewhat-related column out there…

Now, as Eric Peters recounts, one Republican lawmaker would have the militarized police nearly immune from any consequences of their illegal activities towards We, the People.

Naturally, the solution to the problem of police abusing their authority is to hold them less accountable when they do exactly that.

Leave it to “law and order” Republicans such as Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe to evolve such logic. They have put forth the Black and Blue – whoops, Back the Blue – act (see here) which would make it harder to sue run-amok law enforcers in civil court to recover damages resulting from actions undeniably illegal – while at the same time imposing more severe penalties on Mundanes who affront the holy person of a law enforcer than those imposed on Mundanes who do exactly the same thing.

Look for this law to pass. Republicrats always want to be seen as “tough.” Trump will go right along to show support for “the brave men and women in uniform.” Democraps really don’t care.

Some federal judge may show a little concern, maybe five years from now; he might undue the extra (double jeopardy) excessive self-defense penalties against victimized citizens. Or he may not. The immunity from civil prosecution will stand. One wonders (if one is so inclined) if this prohibition includes 1983 (federal civil rights) actions – frequently the only recourse in the event of police brutality.

In Old England (and in the Colonies and the early Republic) there was a common law doctrine that a person (and witnesses) had a right and even an obligation to forcibly resist illegal police activity. Ancient history. Today it is virtually impossible to hold a wayward officer accountable. Soon it may be completely impossible.

Most officers I have ever known or encountered are/were decent and honest. That’s good because the bad ones are about to get more than a pass. It will be more like a rubber stamp of approval. Progress and such.

hut-hut-hut-

EP.

This is Why You Don’t Fly Commercial

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

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Security Theater. Useless, pointless, demeaning bullsh!t that does nothing to deter terrorists. *Note: they switched from planes to cars, trucks, and knives (and bombs). Someone tell the idiots on the Ninth Circus. For us, the decent Americans, this is what we can look for why we enter an airport.

A mother who asked TSA agents at DFW International Airport for alternative screening for her son with special needs said they were “treated like dogs” and forced to miss a flight during an extensive security check, according to her Facebook post that has since gone viral.

But the Transportation Security Administration said in a prepared statement that it followed approved procedures to “resolve an alarm of the passenger’s laptop.”

Jennifer Williamson wrote Sunday morning that her son has a sensory processing disorder and that she asked agents to “screen him in other ways per TSA rules.”

An accompanying video shows a TSA agent patting down her son. The agent pats down his backside before moving to his front. She writes in the post they were kept for more than hour in the “horrifying” incident.

TSA disputed Williamson’s account, noting in its statement that the passengers were at the checkpoint for about 45 minutes, including the time it took to discuss screening procedures with the teen’s mother and the inspection of three carry-on items. The pat-down took about two minutes, according to the agency.

Two minutes. Forty-five minutes. 15 years. Who cares? One second of tyranny is too much. With the TSA you have two choices: 1) be irradiated while a pedo records a porno of you, or; 2) be sexually molested. All in the name of “safety”.

‘F it!

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Clearly averting a terror attack here…

Watch the video and ask yourself if you want your sons, daughters, mothers, friends, or even enemies treated like this. Do you enjoy it? This is not America.

The courts and their enemy combatant accomplices say terrorists and invaders have rights. We do not. That is plain. Plainly not American.

This is why I do not fly commercial. And if I encounter these bastards at general aviation or an interstate rest area, you will all know about it. Join me or get in line to be raped.

TrumpNet: Just the Facts

19 Sunday Mar 2017

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And this isn’t even the information Trump has promised for the coming weeks:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Infowars.com have obtained credible information from law enforcement sources regarding individual records of U.S. citizens under National Security Agency (NSA) electronic surveillance in the years 2004 through 2010 – a database that suggests both Donald J. Trump and Alex Jones were under illegal, unauthorized government monitoring during those years.

Michael Zullo, formerly the commander and chief investigator of the Cold Case Posse (CCP), a special investigative group created in 2006 in the office of Joseph M. Arpaio, formerly the sheriff in Maricopa County, an Arizona State Certified Law Enforcement Agency, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, provided sections of the database to Infowars.com.

The electronic surveillance database, provided to Zullo by a whistleblower in 2013, was apparently created by the NSA as part of the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional Project Dragnet electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens, first revealed by news reports published in 2005, as further documented by the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Investigator Zullo have identified dozens of entries at various addresses, including both Trump Tower in New York City and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, under which Donald Trump was apparently under NSA electronic surveillance from 2004, during President George W. Bush’s term of office, through 2009, the first year of President Obama’s presidency.

The government has the ability to intercept just about all electronic transmissions these days. And, largely, they do just that. What they do with the information depends on several factors, none of them grounded in the law of Anglo-American jurisprudence.

There was little doubt that Trump has spied on. The question was whether he was targeted for something else. If he was, then he is in a unique position now to extract retribution from those who surveilled him. If he wasn’t, then he still has a unique opportunity to address the constant mass spying against nearly all Americans – spying which people either knew about or should have known about 10 or even 20 years ago.

One would think this sort of thing would be taken seriously in the “Land of the Free”. Then again, a bunch of above-average height men in squeaky shoes are playing with balls right now on the TeeVee.

The people must prioritize.

Developing…

The Border of the Fourth Amendment

02 Thursday Mar 2017

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“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

-U.S. Constitution, Amend. IV

Persons, their papers and effects, safe from search and seizure. Warrants. Freedom. America. Civility. Constitution. Rights.

Ancient. History. Gone, my friends. Read on: the “border” of the 4th Amendment:

Over the last decade, tens of thousands of visitors to the US – plus US citizens and residents returning home – have been subjected to warrantless border searches of their electronic devices.

Border officials may seize, search, and copy the contents of any such device. There’s no arrest, warrant, or even probable cause required – just “gimme.” And activists claim that since the inauguration of President Trump, this practice is becoming increasingly common.

While the majority of searches seem to occur when entering the US, border officials also have the authority to search electronic devices before you leave the country. In some cases, you may even be asked to log into your social media and email accounts and allow border officials to peruse their contents.

And that’s not all. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would apply these rules not just at the “border,” but also within 100 miles of any border crossing. In other words, many of America’s largest cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco are also effectively “constitution-free zones.” So is any city with an international airport.

While I haven’t heard of warrantless electronic device searches outside actual entry points into the US, between October 2008 and June 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the US border, according to the DHS records.

In most legal challenges to this practice, federal courts have essentially rubber-stamped these policies. Even if you take the precaution of encrypting the contents of your electronic devices (highly recommended), border officials may demand the password.

…

The border and incoming arrivals I can kind of see. Don’t like it, but I can see it. It’s the 100-mile radius and the interior aspects that call up my inner Lexington and Concord here. While I have not heard of DHS (to protect us from CIA-bred terrorists, remember) searching phones or laptops in the interior, I have heard of their checkpoints, random places on the highway and nowhere near any border.

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These aren’t the civil rights you’re looking for. Lucas Film / 20th Century Fox / YouTube.

Please read Nestmann’s full article. He gives some great tips for surviving these ordeals. He mostly recommends encryption and throw-away devices. Sage wisdom. And, as he notes, you may forget legal challenges. Constitutional protections are only afforded terrorist “refugees” now. You. Don’t. Count. Anymore. Pay your taxes and shut up!

Mr. Trump really has precious short time to Make America Great Again, if he can. Nestmann’s digital dodges work fine for now. There’s always a temporary and relatively easy way around tyranny when it starts. The rifles come out a little later.

To Pay or Not to Pay: American’s Taxing Issues

17 Friday Feb 2017

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Last month President Trump ordered that heaven and earth be moved to spare Americans the financial horror and burden of the failing Obamacare boondoggle. It seems the IRS at least may have taken note. Rumor, and I need to look into this, has it that they will no longer require oppressed taxpayers to answer the little (penalty ridden) question about yearly coverage.

Following President Donald Trump’s executive order instructing agencies to provide relief from the health law, the Internal Revenue Service appears to be taking a more lax approach to the coverage requirement.

The health law’s individual mandate requires everyone to either maintain qualifying health coverage or pay a tax penalty, known as a “shared responsibility payment.” The IRS was set to require filers to indicate whether they had maintained coverage in 2016 or paid the penalty by filling out line 61 on their form 1040s. Alternatively, they could claim exemption from the mandate by filing a form 8965.

For most filers, filling out line 61 would be mandatory. The IRS would not accept 1040s unless the coverage box was checked, or the shared responsibility payment noted, or the exemption form included. Otherwise they would be labeled “silent returns” and rejected.

Instead, however, filling out that line will be optional.

Consider this, if true, amnesty for people who actually deserve it. And hopefully by next year it will be a moot point. Trump is ready and Congress claims that they will act next month to repeal the lingering disaster of President What’s-His-Muslim. Of course, the GOP has said this for the past 6 years. Still, hope abounds.

Other Americans, those who normally love sending aid to Washington, are taking hope in civil disobedience. They are refusing to pay any federal income taxes. Because Trump.

Andrew Newman always pays his taxes, even if he hates what the government is doing with them. But not this year. For him, Donald Trump is the dealbreaker. He’ll pay his city and state taxes but will refuse to pay federal income tax as a cry of civil disobedience against the president and his new administration.

Newman is not alone. A nascent movement has been detected to revive the popularity of tax resistance – last seen en masse in America during the Vietnam war but which has been, sporadically, a tradition in the US and beyond going back many centuries.

“My tax money will be going towards putting up a wall on the Mexican border instead of helping sick people. It will contribute to the destruction of the environment and maybe more nuclear weapons. I think there will be a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy elite and Trump’s campaign for the working man and woman was an absolute fraud. If you pay taxes you are implicated in the system,” said Newman, an associate professor of English and history at Stony Brook University on Long Island, part of the State University of New York.

“The government wants our money and if a lot of people were thinking about this kind of peaceful protest, it would get their attention,” he added.

I love the attention. I love civil disobedience and I hate taxes and all the evil they fund. I wish these folks well. And, Andrew is right: if everyone stopped paying – for any reason -maybe things would change. He hates the wall idea. I hate everything D.C. does and is.

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Probably not yours, Dearie. Scott Olson / Getty.

However, things like this usually don’t end very well. They usually end in prison. If Andrew doesn’t like his 1040 IRS number, he’ll hate his B.O.P. number.

Still there’s that hope thing.