Category Archives: Civil Liberties

Trump Territory, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on April 21, 2018 | 1 comment

A racially tinged scandal brews in Great Britain. Across the Atlantic, the vitriol, rancor, and scurrilous invective against President Trump has reached a point that it essentially stops debate on those aspects of Trump that should be debated: his policies. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

British media report today that Donald Trump may visit the country in late summer. (Renewed) calls for mass protests are everywhere, of course. The Metro news outlet features a picture of a pamphlet that reads No To Racism. No To Trump, that dates from an earlier occasion (Trump was supposed to come several times, but never did).

Now, good luck with those protests, it’s still a free country, in name at least. But boy oh boy, would you guys miss the point. Because as we now all know – or could-, your country is being governed by a group of people who are so racist they make even Trump’s fake tan pale in comparison. If Theresa May is still in office by the time Trump visits, you’re all a bunch of racists.

Both May and her Home Secretary Amber Rudd – and you all know they’re far from alone- look so completely deranged in reports about the Windrush scandal that you will have to get rid of them first, or else shut up about Trump because you will have no moral ground whatsoever left on which to protest his visit.

For those of you who don’t know what Windrush is about, and if you’re British you have no excuse not to know, it’s the name given to a group of people who arrived, on invitation, in Britain between the late 1940s and early 1970s, often as children, and whose legal status in the country is now put in so much doubt that some have already been deported, some are denied health care, and all live in fear. Despite having lived and worked and paid taxes all their lives.

There are many instances of people who have never left Britain for a family visit, some who can’t see their own children because they did go for that visit and weren’t allowed back in, the entire story is so appalling and disastrous it’s hard to read the various reports on it. The common denominator of all of these people? They are black.

To continue reading: Trump Territory

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Investigations, Media, Politics

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Crimes of a Monster: Your Tax Dollars at Work, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on April 17, 2018 | 1 comment

What an appropriate article for the day our taxes are due. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

Let us not mince words.

We are living in an age of war profiteers.

We are living in an age of scoundrels, liars, brutes and thugs. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

We are living in an age of monsters.

Ask Donald Trump. He knows all about monsters.

Any government that leaves “mothers and fathers, infants and children, thrashing in pain and gasping for air” is evil and despicable, said President Trump, justifying his blatantly unconstitutional decision (in the absence of congressional approval or a declaration of war) to launch airstrikes against Syria based on dubious allegations that it had carried out chemical weapons attacks on its own people. “They are crimes of a monster.”

If the Syrian government is a monster for killing innocent civilians, including women and children, the U.S. government must be a monster, too.

In Afghanistan, ten civilians were killed—including three children, one an infant in his mother’s arms—when U.S. warplanes targeted a truck in broad daylight on an open road with women and children riding in the exposed truck bed.

In Syria, at least 80 civilians, including 30 children, were killed when U.S.-led air strikes bombed a school and a packed marketplace.

Then there was a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz that had 12 of its medical staff and 10 of its patients, including three children, killed when a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on it repeatedly. Some of the patients were burned alive in their hospital beds.

Yes, on this point, President Trump is exactly right: these are, indeed, the crimes of a monster.

Unfortunately, this monster—this hundred-headed gorgon that is the U.S. government and its long line of political puppets (Donald Trump and before him Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.), who dance to the tune of the military industrial complex—is being funded by you and me.

It is our tax dollars at work here, after all.

Unfortunately, we have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used.

We have no real say, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow, for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

To continue reading: Crimes of a Monster: Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Debt, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Military, Taxes, War

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American Empathy Gap: Massacres in Gaza and US Silence, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on April 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

Most Americans ignore the Palestinian issue and the US media, when it reports on it, generally slants toward Israel. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

For a writer, any criticism of Israeli military action is a veritable “third-rail” in American politics. Touch that nerve and you’re open to charges of anti-Semitism or worse.

Still, recent events in Gaza demand that some of us, at least, shed light on the plight of Palestinians.

Let us begin with a thought experiment: imagine dozens of unarmed, protesting Caucasian Christians or Jews – say, Israelis or Europeans – were shot dead by heavily armed brown folks, like, say Palestinian Muslims. What would we call this? That’s easy: terrorism. How would the media cover such an event? Simple: extensively and emotionally, probably for many days. The smiling faces of the victims would be splashed across the screens of television networks from Fox News to MSNBC.

Heck, for proof just look to the recent past: terror attacks in France and Belgium, for instance. Certainly, even decades back, Americans demonstrated more empathy for white, Christian victims. When, in 1972, British paratroopers fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Northern Ireland, killing thirteen, the episode was christened Bloody Sunday. I come from a city (New York) where sympathy for the catholic Irish was so robust that certain bars overtly collected money in tip jars for “terrorists” in the IRA well into the 1990s.

Well, something remarkably similar has occurred over the last two weeks, as thousands of Palestinians – protesting the deplorable conditions for the 1.8 million human beings besieged in Gaza – were subjected to Israeli Army gunfire that has left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. To date, not a single Israeli has been killed. This is typical of the recurrent violent episodes in Gaza. Scores or hundreds of Palestinians die – often including many women and children – whilst a few, if any, Israelis are killed or wounded. Still, mainstream U.S. media covers each incident as though there is parity of blame, responsibility, and suffering. It’s a very old and very persistent farce.

To continue reading: American Empathy Gap: Massacres in Gaza and US Silence

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Geopolitics, Government, Media, Morality

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Freedom and Income Taxation Are Opposites, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on April 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

The title should be a noncontroversial statement, but it’s not. From Jacob. G. Hornberger at fff.org:

As the April 17 deadline for filing income tax returns and paying federal income taxes approaches, it is important that we all remind ourselves of an important point: Income taxation and the Internal Revenue Service are irreconcilable with the principles of a free society.

Another way to put it is this: If you’re living in a society in which the government wields the power to seize the fruits of your earnings, you are not living in a free society, no matter how convinced you are.

Americans lived without income taxation for more than a century. They also lived in a society in which there was no welfare state and no warfare state. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, welfare, food stamps, public housing, drug laws, immigration controls, public schooling, Pentagon, military-industrial complex, CIA, NSA, FBI, EPA, DEA, SEC, Homeland Security, ICE, or most of the other myriad agencies of the welfare-warfare state.

It was that way of life that defined an American. That’s what Americans defined as freedom. That’s what made the United States the most unusual society in history (notwithstanding the horrible exception of slavery).

Succeeding generations of Americans give it all up in favor of socialism, interventionism, and imperialism.

They embraced and adopted the variation of socialism known as the welfare state.

They embraced and adopted the totalitarian structure known as a national-security state.

They embraced and adopted drug laws, which are the hallmark of tyrannical regimes.

They embraced and adopted the regulated, controlled, and managed economy.

They embraced foreign wars, foreign interventionism, partnerships with dictators, coups, assassinations, torture, and other practices long employed by dictatorial regimes.

And of course they embraced and adopted the means by which all of this statism is funded — income taxation and, also, to large extent, the Federal Reserve System, which fraudulently taxes people’s income and wealth through inflation.

To continue reading: Freedom and Income Taxation Are Opposites

 

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Taxes, Uncategorized

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Doug Casey Warns “It’s Going To Get Very Unpleasant In The US At Some Point Soon”

Posted on April 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

Doug Casey presents a case for anarchy. From Casey at internationalman.com, via zerohedge.com:

You’re likely aware that I’m a libertarian. But I’m actually more than a libertarian. I don’t believe in the right of the State to exist. The reason is that anything that has a monopoly of force is extremely dangerous.

As Mao Tse-tung, lately one of the world’s leading experts on government, said: “The power of the state comes out of a barrel of a gun.”

There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other, either voluntarily or coercively. And the State is pure institutionalized coercion. It’s not just unnecessary, but antithetical, for a civilized society. And that’s increasingly true as technology advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible, in oxcart days, for bureaucrats to order things around. Today it’s ridiculous.

Everything that needs doing can and will be done by the market, by entrepreneurs who fill the needs of other people for a profit. The State is a dead hand that imposes itself on society. That belief makes me, of course, an anarchist.

People have a misconception about anarchists. That they’re these violent people, running around in black capes with little round bombs. This is nonsense. Of course there are violent anarchists. There are violent dentists. There are violent Christians. Violence, however, has nothing to do with anarchism. Anarchism is simply a belief that a ruler isn’t necessary, that society organizes itself, that individuals own themselves, and the State is actually counterproductive.

It’s always been a battle between the individual and the collective. I’m on the side of the individual.

I simply don’t believe anyone has a right to initiate aggression against anyone else. Is that an unreasonable belief?

Let me put it this way. Since government is institutionalized coercion—a very dangerous thing—it should do nothing but protect people in its bailiwick from physical coercion.

What does that imply? It implies a police force to protect you from coercion within its boundaries, an army to protect you from coercion from outsiders, and a court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to coercion.

I could live happily with a government that did just those things. Unfortunately the US Government is only marginally competent in providing services in those three areas. Instead, it tries to do everything else.

To continue reading: Doug Casey Warns “It’s Going To Get Very Unpleasant In The US At Some Point Soon”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Philosophy

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The Future of Europe is Civil War, by Ash Sharp

Posted on April 11, 2018 | 2 comments

Europeans are quickly tearing down what took their ancestors centuries to build. From Ash Sharp at republicstandard.com:

Europe is committing suicide- or at least it’s leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether European people decide to go along with this is, naturally, another matter. ~ Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe

Europe is my home. It is where I live. Everything I value is here- on this continent. Everything I love and will suffer to lose is here. My country, separate, slightly odd, provincial and uncool; Brexit Britain, land of bad food and uncharitable reputations on dental hygiene and house cleanliness, is a European country too. God knows it is a conflicted time to be an Englishman abroad. God knows it hurts to look at the goldfish bowl from outside. Yesterday brought the story of 78-year-old Richard Osborne-Brooks.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said:

‘At 00:45hrs on Wednesday, 4 April, police were called by a homeowner to reports of a burglary in progress at an address in South Park Crescent, Hither Green SE6, and a man injured.

‘The 78-year-old resident found two males inside the address. A struggle ensued between one of the males and the homeowner. The man, aged 38, sustained a stab wound to the upper body.

‘London Ambulance Service took the injured male, who was found collapsed in Further Green Road, SE8, to a central London hospital. He was pronounced dead at 03:37hrs.’

What happened next? Of course, this pensioner was arrested on suspicion of murder. Murder! A crime which requires premeditation and to be without lawful excuse, for stabbing an intruder to your home. With his disabled wife upstairs, Mr. Osborne-Brooks encountered and subsequently killed an armed man who was intruding in his home, the purported castle of the Englishman. No more a castle, you are a serf of the state and subject to prosecution- for doing what any man ought to do in such circumstances. Are we to accept that criminals may just enter our homes, threaten our lives and take what they will?

This is a travesty of justice at any time, let alone the crime nightmare we find ourselves in today. You are more likely to be raped in London than New York. Terrorism is impossible to control. Islam is appeased and treated as an exalted religion over our own and is in control of increasingly large territories across the country. The leader of the Christian faith in Britain has simply given up. White Britons are a minority in their own capital. Free speech died long ago in the land of my fathers. You’ve heard this song from me and others before. The rhetoric of terrorism will never win and strong and stable becomes a little more shrill with every passing assault on my people. The police investigate online hate speech but not muggings- as the unfairly maligned Katie Hopkins said, if this terrorism losing, I’d hate to see it win.

To continue reading: The Future of Europe is Civil War

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Governments, History, Immigration, Insurrection

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“Firewalls” and “Taint Teams” Do Not Protect Fourth and Sixth Amendment Rights, by Alan Dershowitz

Posted on April 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

The attorney-client privilege is well-grounded in the Fourth and Sixth Amendments. President Trump’s right to confidentiality in his communications with his attorney may well have been violated in the raid on his lawyer’s office. From Alan Dershowitz at thegatestoneinstitute.org:

  • The Fourth and Sixth Amendments prohibit government officials from in any way intruding on the privacy of lawyer/client confidential rights of citizens.
  • The very fact that this material is seen or read by a government official constitutes a core violation. It would be the same if the government surreptitiously recorded a confession of a penitent to a priest, or a description of symptoms by a patient to a doctor, or a discussion of their sex life between a husband and wife.
  • The recourses for intrusions on the Fourth and Sixth Amendments are multifold: the victim of the intrusion can sue for damages; he or she can exclude it from use by the government in criminal or civil cases; or the victim can demand the material back. But none of these remedies undo the harm to privacy and confidentiality done to the citizen by the government’s intrusion into his private and confidential affairs.

Many TV pundits are telling viewers not to worry about the government’s intrusion into possible lawyer/client privileged communications between President Trump and his lawyer, since prosecutors will not get to see or use any privileged material. This is because prosecutors and FBI agents create firewalls and taint teams to preclude privileged information from being used against the client in a criminal case. But that analysis completely misses the point and ignores the distinction between the Fifth Amendment on the one hand, and the Fourth and Sixth Amendments on the other.

The Fifth Amendment is an exclusionary rule. By its terms, it prevents material obtained in violation of the privilege of self-incrimination from being used to incriminate a defendant – that is to convict him of a crime. But the Fourth and Sixth Amendments provide far broader protections: they prohibit government officials from in any way intruding on the privacy of lawyer/client confidential rights of citizens. In other words, if the government improperly seizes private or privileged material, the violation has already occurred, even if the government never uses the material from the person from whom it was seized.

To continue reading: “Firewalls” and “Taint Teams” Do Not Protect Fourth and Sixth Amendment Rights

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Government, Law, Politics

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