Legitimate Authority

Today, a man with rudimentary pipe bombs was charged, I presume, with terrorism. Sixty years ago, could most of my cousins who loved playing with (researching properties of) dynamite be there, too?
The man was also labeled on the news as a militia-type. As an admitted anti-authoritarian,  like most, including Einstein, I respect legitimate authority.  To evaluating whether authorities know what they are talking about first, I plead guilty. If questioning can become an argument of guilt (you hate taxes and government,) I'm in trouble.
Unlike Thoreau who went to jail instead of paying a tax he opposed, I'm not THAT dedicated. I do hate paying taxes are used by Kerry, millions, to fund Islamic terrorists who now it seems staged Sarin gas 'victims' in attempts to push Obama over the red line in Syria.  Israel, after shuffling the WMD proof from the rebels to the US and finding Obama unwilling to act (smart move,) has bombed Syria twice.  If that doesn't start military conflict (we no longer call it war,) what will? Of course, like Libya's pounding by 1000s of bombs/day for weeks, we see no collateral damage on our compliant media.
Did the IRA stop putting bombs in London pubs because Brits sent MORE troops?  No. the more sent the more they bombed. Blowback is the weapon of the vastly overpowered.

Musings and Hodge Podge

A new Pope named Francis has progressives buzzing as Francis of Assisi gave up wealth to follow the Church.  Wikipedia concurs: "While going off to war in 1204, Francis had a vision that directed him back to Assisi, where he lost his taste for his worldly life. On a pilgrimage to Rome, he joined the poor in begging at St. Peter's Basilica. The experience moved him to live in poverty."

In 12th century Rome, a religious center of power, disagreement meant being burned at the stake literally.  Our Constitution protects the individual's inalienable rights to disagree with any majority, regardless of how extreme or mainstream, as long as we do not violate the rights of others.  Ludwig von Mises: "If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action." So why do we assume a government bureaucrat can design a better system for spending our funds than we can?  As some priests abused their power, so do some who administer DC's progressive ideas.  Great wealth is leaving the centers of commerce like New York City and settling in DC where unemployment is 3%.  Rome became rich, as well, as peasants paid priests to release their loved ones from purgatory.

Washington, DC wages wars worldwide by invading and occupying nations or covertly training Libyan and now Syrian Islamist rebels with funding from the monarchies in the Middle East.  What if American militias were being funded by Middle Eastern monarchies and trained by the Chinese military to unseat Obama?  What if a drone had hit the home of our Anthrax terror suspect in Maryland and then hit the first responders with a military 'double-tap?'

Charity comes from the heart not from DC or Rome.  Compassion comes from humans not from drone operators.  Don't confuse society with government or caring with confiscation of earnings or military actions.

GE paid zero corporate taxes last year and submitted a 52,000 page tax return. Imagine the loss in brain power and advancements in our economy if those tax attorneys had not been slaving away on that return but had started a business of their own?   Zero out corporate taxes and watch the growth that follows.  Corporations don't pay taxes, after all, as they only add them to the cost of their products or services.

Why I don't trust Glenn Beck

Following is a letter I sent in 2007.  I received no replies.

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November 15th, 2007

To: The Institute for Justice, The Nebraska ACLU, US Senator Hagel and US Senator Ben Nelson

Glenn Beck, on CNN Headline News November 12th, says "While our foreign enemies are the obvious ones, the physical threat may be developing domestically" and says Ron Paul's 'Revolution' and his record setting $4.3 million 'money bomb' from November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day --referring to the movie, "V is for Vendetta", when the people took back control of their government -- is tied in "with a historical terrorist attack".  "if fringe elements take that disenfranchisement and turn it into violence, we endanger the freedoms we`re supposedly all fighting for."

David Horowitz said, "There`s a strain of isolationism and anarchy in the American tradition which Ron Paul is tapping into. I think it`s very significant that he chose Guy Fawkes as an image."
"There are plenty of, unfortunately, libertarian Web sites which are indistinguishable from the anti-American left these days. LewRockwell.com and others like that. Totally in bed with the Islamofascists and have turned against this country."

Lew Rockwell's site, LewRockwell.com, was thus identified by name and slandered. 

Beck finishes this segment with, "The Ron Paul revolution, I think it`s meant to be a catchy slogan, but I fear some of his fringe supporters are taking the word "revolution" too literally."

Ron Paul's 'Revolution' is a non-violent attempt to change foreign policy, fix the monetary system and return control of our government to the people, the majority of whom are opposed to our war in Iraq and very skeptical of our interventionist foreign policy.

Rockwell and Paul are public figures, possibly immune from slander, but their supporters are not.

When Lew Rockwell's site's non-profit status was challenged early in the 2008 campaign as clearly supporting Ron Paul's candidacy, Rockwell gave up his non-profit status and requested private donations although no longer eligible as tax deductions.  Hitting the alternative minimum anyway in 2007, I sent him $200 and on November 5th, I sent my second $100 to Ron Paul's campaign.  The results of Paul's November 5th fund raising forced the main stream media to cover the Ron Paul campaign -- necessary for success. 

But did I put myself, my liberty and my personal assets at risk?  If, as Beck and Horowitz implied, LewRockwell.com and November 5th donors support an implied threat of domestic terrorism, am I not then guilty of supporting a suspected terrorist organization?  Can my computer files be searched without warrant?  Is the same true for all the tens of thousands of small Ron Paul 'money bomb' donors on November 5th?  Will all their names end up on the no-fly list?

Is there an action that can be taken against CNN Headline News, naming Beck and Horowitz,  for allowing slander on a national television broadcast and putting private citizens, such as myself, civil rights at risk -- based only on my political associations?

Nydra

(address removed)

Please contact me and let me know my options for preserving my good name as a patriot.  My Swiss ancestry makes me think that Switzerland's non-interventionist policies work much better than ours.

paper copy to Senator Ben Nelson

Here is my background.

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My opposition to our covert foreign policy goes back to 1975.  An Afghan woman, married to an assistant attorney general of Afghanistan and related to the king (still in power), lived with our family for a year while attending UNO.  She was a delightful woman often making Kabul chicken, teaching us to eat with our fingers as we sat on the floor, and making elephant ear pastries for my little girls.  The cultural exchange of information was rewarding for all involved.

My husband's contract at Offutt often took him to the home office in McLean, Virginia.   While there, agents of our government took him to visit with the Afghan ambassador and the agents discussed the US sending trucks with large electronic equipment on top into northern Afghanistan to provide state of the art medical attention by broadcasting operations.  My husband, now deceased unfortunately, is not here to clarify what happened that day.  I do recall we laughed about the trucks  and their equipment as more likely to be used in some covert activities on the southern border of the USSR.  Little did we realize roads built in that area would allow access for tanks to eventually roll into Kabul.  

Things have gotten much worse for the Afghan people since 1975 with the invasion by the USSR and the infestation of radicalism that followed, brought by not only the ISI in Pakistan but the Wahhabis from Saudi.  

Eventually, I became a libertarian.

Harry Browne once said, paraphrasing,  if a close friend smokes, you tell him 'quit smoking or you'll get cancer'.  Browne was convinced terrorism would surely come to the USA based on 'poking that stick into the hornet's nest'- as he called the Middle East.  Based on what I was hearing and seeing, I agreed.  And many of us were very vocal in our concerns.  Our policies were making us unsafe - not only here at home from terrorism but when we traveled overseas.  

And when your friend comes to you with the news 'I have lung cancer', you do not gloat and say 'I told you so'.  In fact, you are devastated by the news and tell them 'we can beat this cancer.  We will do everything and anything we can to help'.  Watching the towers fall on 9/11, I was devastated, inconsolably so, as were many Americans.  I assumed a strike force would be sent immediately to the Afghan and Pakistani camps to capture and kill all involved in that deadly event.

The invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq coupled with the billions in aid being poured into Pakistan's dictatorship are not making us safer.  Threatening Iran is not making us safer.  Passage of legislation like the Patriot Act and the continuing trend of nationalization of local law enforcement by funding measures and Homeland Security (a third defense department after the Pentagon and the covert CIA) doesn't bode well for our personal liberty.  Citizens were supposed to police the federal government.  The Government wasn't supposed to police us.

When Ron Paul stood up to run for President, I knew I had to do everything I could to get him elected.  My grandkids are facing the falling dollar, saddled with the billions and trillions in debt and an aging boomer generation who will bankrupt Social Security and Medicare as we know them today.  They are being subjected to 'fear' every day even as schools have adopted 'lock down', a term I learned when I taught classes at the Correctional Center. 

My support of Ron Paul is to prevent a violent revolution, not create one.  Lew Rockwell and all the libertarians I have ever known do not believe in the initiation of force against anyone -friend or foe.  They know that only government agents and criminals initiate the use of force and thus they endeavor to limit the control of government over the individual by legal means.

Mead Was Right

Margaret Mead said that although the mom's role in child rearing has many biological components, the dad's role is largely social. And if we break that mold, it will be hard to reconstruct. 

We took young pregnant girls out of their neighborhoods, where blacks following WWII were born 75% into two parent families, and put them in high rises to raise their sons and daughters without any dads nearby. They grew up with no gramps, no uncles, and not knowing how to parent as a male. It’s little wonder their resulting behavior resulted in being 35 times more likely to commit violent crime and 75% of black babies born to single moms and sperm donors.

I only quote black numbers because they are the most glaring. I know it’s not just a minority problem.

Another glaring menace is the danger to babies of live in boyfriends who are not their biological father.  As the new lion kills existing cubs in the pride, human males seem dangerous, too. 

Most nations had a more humane 'dole' for families down on their luck. For us, if the dad was out of work and mom secured a place in the Omaha projects in the 1960's, social workers and police during midnight raids chased the cheaters, AKA Dads, out.  At the time it seemed the right thing to do.  LBJ's war on poverty only funded single moms with Aid to Dependent Children and it became a way of life.

We are living with the results now. 

Becoming a True Democracy

What comes next? I'm not fortune teller but, many of the blue states are broke.. worse then broke, they owe billions.

Obama will assist them and that means Bernanke must keep adding to the money supply.  Raising taxes on rich can't fund the deficit for more than a few months.  Bernanke and the Federal Reserve will continue to expand money supply.

To let a blue State go broke, is not something Obama will be willing to do. So look for MORE debt.. Bernanke right now is buying (with new US$s) $40 Billion a month in "mortgage backed securities" from who? not you or me, but the 1%, making housing prices appear to be recovering. After that, then what?

All the while, Bernanke is keeping interest rates below inflation so there is no chance of saving and building a nest egg.. buying power actually evaporates in our savings accounts.

Obama will be lauded for saving the Blue States and any vestige of our Republic will finally be crushed.  Centrally planned Democracy will result, explained here and the US will be destined to end as Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury to Washington and author of the Federalist Papers explains: "It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."... and other founders back this up:

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

 

"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."

 

~ James Madison, 4th President of the United States, Father of the Constitution

 

"The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived."

 

~ John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States

"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."

~ John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1801-1835

1798 Wisdom

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or imagined, from abroad." (from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798)

Federal Reserve and TARP

Jon Stewart 'gets it' yet neither one of the Presidential teams will TOUCH IT.  Audit the Federal Reserve, yes.  Quit putting bankers and federal reserve executives in government.  Force our currency to remain market based, not banker based.

The Daily Show
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If you read many of the old English tales, the family inherited a set amount of pounds annually making them either independent or barely above poverty level.  But never did their pounds buy less decade after decade as does our US$.  The British pound, also referred to as the pound sterling, was asset based and held its value.

As this chart shows, Nixon's ending of the Bretton-Woods Agreement (44 allied nations agreed not to inflate,) unleashed inflation.  Why would Nixon break an agreement that had brought us such economic growth and stability after WWII? Nixon needed inflation to mask the costs of his secret wars in Cambodia, for one.   If you want to learn how the 'inflation tax' steals our wealth from the 99% and redistributes it to the 1% who are connected to the fiat currency or connected to government, google it.

All we have to do is repeal legal tender laws allowing other currencies or precious metals to be used as currency and what we earn can again retain it value.