Be Careful What You Wish For

I have to admit that I've gotten caught up in singing the praises of all the "patriot" sheriffs popping up lately.

One of my favorite bloggers and liberty watchdogs has posted on the topic and I have to give him his props for a splash of cold water in my face.
 

“I will not enforce an unconstitutional law against any citizen of Smith County,” insisted Sheriff Larry Smith. The sheriff wants his constituents to believe that he would refuse to participate in a federally mandated gun grab, or permit one to be carried out by federal officials within his jurisdiction. Yet ten days before Smith offered that assurance, his office had taken part in an early-morning SWAT rampage throughout East Texas in which 73 warrants were served as part of the federal government’s patently unconstitutional war on drugs.

 

During a December 2011 campaign debate, Smith said that he wanted to “invest more resources” – that is, redirect wealth plundered from the productive – into a “Drug Task Force,” and insisted that under his administration the Sheriff’s Office would embrace a “Task Force mentality” in dealing with law enforcement issues. 

 

The problem with the mindset Sheriff Smith was extoling should become obvious once it’s understood that the German term for “task force” is einsatzgruppe. By their actions many multi-jurisdictional task forces in contemporary America are increasingly faithful to their historic pedigree. 

 

Smith’s devotion to narcotics task forces might be the residue of his early law enforcement career, which included two years as a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration – an agency that could be considered the mentally deficient stepchild of the CIA, which is the world’s largest narcotics syndicate. 

 

Twenty years ago, an ATF einsatzgruppe launched a murderous raid against an isolated religious group at Mt. Carmel outside Waco. The warrant they were enforcing was clotted with falsehoods. The investigation that produced it was haphazard. Its target, Vernon Howell -- aka David Koresh -- was suspected of trivial violations of federal firearms regulations, and had indicated his eagerness to cooperate with ATF investigators to clear the record. 

 

If an arrest were to be carried out – and one was neither necessary, nor justified – it could have been performed during one of Koresh’s frequent solitary jogging expeditions, or one of his routine visits to town. Instead, the ATF – seeking a dramatic, high-profile enforcement action to generate headlines for the scandal-plagued agency – staged a paramilitary assault on the religious sanctuary. They did so even though the raiders had lost the element of surprise, and when they arrived at Mt. Carmel they opened fire on the building despite the fact that an unarmed Koresh had confronted the stormtroopers with his hands up, pleading for them not to shoot.

 

Four ATF agents were killed during that Sunday morning raid. Their deaths were utterly unnecessary, and entirely well-deserved: They were attempting to murder innocent people, and the would-be victims acted within their rights in using deadly force to defend their homes against that assault. The criminal clique that had sent the ATF to attack the Davidians sent a larger contingent to lay siege to their residence, and eventually arranged for the holocaust that annihilated 76 people, including seventeen small children.

 

 

Like most gun owners in Eastern Texas, Smith can remember where he was the morning of April 19, 1993, when the Mt. Carmel refuge went up in flames. He was on the scene as an agent of the ATF, which he had joined in 1989. Smith believes that the initial ATF raid on the Davidians was justified, and that the entire operation was at least a partial success. It’s doubtful that his assessment is shared by many gun owners in his jurisdiction.

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You can read the rest here.

Dollars All The Way Down

Will Grigg is... well, Will Grigg...

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its purchasing power. The fact that the dollar can be used to purchase anything of value is an abiding testimony to the power of official myths to contort the thinking process of human beings en masse.

There is nothing behind the dollar apart from the "full faith and credit" of the world's most powerful criminal syndicate -- well, that, and the willingness of oil-producing states to accept the dollar in exchange for petroleum. Cut that last lifeline, and there is nothing to impede the dollar's immediate fall into utter uselessness.

I find myself reminded of the old joke about an astrophysicist who is accosted after a public lecture by a crusty old man of decidedly pre-Copernican views of the universe.

"You seem like a very bright young fellow," the old man begins, seasoning his words with condescension he wasn't entitled to express, "but you've got it all wrong. You see, the earth is actually carried on the back of a giant turtle. That's the simple truth."

"But what supports that turtle?" inquires the astrophysicist with a mixture of amusement and annoyance."

"Why, another turtle, of course!" ripostes the old man.

"And what --" begins the increasingly irritated scholar, before being cut off.

"You're a clever fellow, but it won't work!" exclaims the old man. "It's turtles all the way down!"

Commissar Bernanke and other guardians of official monetary superstition are committed to preserving the delusion that prosperity can be sustained on the back of a currency that is backed by nothing but itself. It's dollars all the way down -- an infinite regression into worthlessness.

Pro Libertate: Have a Nice Apocalypse!

Pro Libertate: The Plague of Punitive Populism

Will Grigg has once again outdone himself...

The Plague of Punitive Populism

By William N. Grigg

"Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."

-- Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath

I suggest that liberty-minded Americans... can learn much about themselves and those around them through [what] we could call the "Tom Joad Test."



I'm not a fan of Steinbeck's incurably wrong-headed economic views or his idiosyncratic collectivist politics in general, although I must admit a sneaking respect for anybody who attracts the hostile interest of the FBI solely on the strength of his published writings.

His creation Tom Joad isn't among my favorite fictional characters. But there is substantial merit in Joad's pledge to sympathize with those who are victims of Power.

Early in The Grapes of Wrath, Joad--recently paroled after serving four years in prison for killing a man who stabbed him in a fight -- becomes re-acquainted with Jim Casy, a fallen Oklahoma Pentecostal preacher who has embraced a populist version of Emerson's "oversoul" concept: "Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."

Thus was planted the seed that would sprout into Joad's famous soliloquy, which included the pledge that "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."

So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the "Tom Joad Test":

When you see a cop -- or, more likely, several of them -- beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?

If it's the former, you're an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.

If it's the latter, you're an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.

It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn't invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject's default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.

Read it all here.

Gaza, the Horror and The Hope

The following quotes stick out in my mind as exemplifying the salient points in the current situation in Gaza. The first is from an interview with Arnon Soffer, one of the intellectual architects of official Israeli policy with respect to the Palestinians. Whether you agree with him or not (I don't) he gives a clear indication of why the "peace process," whatever that means, is a meaningless fiction. I'm quite sure there are those on the Palestinian side who feel pretty much the same way Soffer does. I believe the term intractable foes applies.

[W]hen 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist. The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings. ~ Arnon Soffer

From my perspective the policy of the United States should be neutrality. We have no moral authority or national interest in supporting one side or the other. Unfortunately, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out here and here, there is little chance of our current policy is going to change. It is too firmly entrenched in both parties. The hope, such as it is, lies in the fact that the United States simply cannot afford to maintain the current foreign policy. It will change when the reality of our economic system rears its ugly head.

William Grigg, as he usually does, cuts right to the quick in his analysis of the situation.

U.S. withdrawal wouldn’t palliate ancient ethno-religious grievances, or those of a more recent vintage rooted in the dispossession of the Palestinians. But it would force the antagonists to make a more realistic accounting of the actual costs of the conflict, which might prod them to make the kind of grudging, halting, agonizingly reluctant material overtures that eventually lead to peace.

Of course, American withdrawal is going to happen anyway when the destruction of the dollar is consummated, a fact that should not be lost on those interested in Israel's survival. That nation's ability to dominate its rivals militarily is a particularly pernicious variant of an investment bubble, one that has distorted Israel's priorities and discouraged it from creating a security framework on assumptions that don't involve leveraging U.S. power on its behalf.

The bubble of U.S.-Israeli dominance in the Middle East will burst as soon as the fiat dollar's global hegemony ends. ~ William N. Grigg

The sad thing is when that happens it will be to the betterment of Israel and the Palestinians, but it will be a catastrophe for us. They'll be forced to find a solution, we'll be standing in the wreckage of our dreams.

One Big Rez

In a fascinating interview with Scott Horton, Indian activist Russell Means describes how the American Indian Reservation System has been the incubator for totalitarian social engineering programs both here and abroad. The subjugation of the American Indian, he warns, provided the model for the ongoing dispossession of the American middle class.

As the financial system implodes, inhabitants of our de-industrialized country are having what remains of our wealth confiscated in order to serve the interests of the most corrupt elements of the ruling elite. The sky is thick with portents of impending military rule in order to suppress any organized resistance to this unprecedented plunder.

We will know that the Wounded Knee option is on the table when our rulers demand of us what they required of the conquered Sioux: The surrender of our personal firearms.

It is a glorious fact that America's private gun owners possess more firearms than the combined armies and police forces of the entire world. It is that fact, and perhaps it alone, that explains why the Regime hasn't succeeded -- yet -- in transforming our country into one giant Rez. We should never assume that this cannot change, in a hurry.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2009/01/one-giant-rez.html

Rubicon in the Rear-View

There is widespread but very mistaken view that only those on the political left are concerned about freedom and civil liberties. William Norman Grigg is a very conservative Bible-believing Christian. His blog, Pro Libertate, contains some of the most hard hitting, even courageous, examinations of the threat posed to our country by the national security mindset.

He has written a series of three essays which standout among the many other clear-eyed and important expositions he has posted on his site, unfortunately unread by any but the wacko, nutbag fringe of which I am proud to name myself a member.

Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part I: Militarizing the Police


The future of law enforcement: The 193rd Military Police Battalion, Colorado National Guard, trains at Ft. Carson last July 12 in preparation for deployment as part of JTF-DNC -- the military component of security arrangements for the Democratic Convention in Denver.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. ~ Garet Garrett, The Revolution Was (1938)

Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part II: Perpetual War, Here and Abroad


Two missions that should never intersect are those of the military and of the civilian police, respectively. The logic of empire ultimately demands that which our rulers have now provided: A militarized apparatus of coercion in which military and police roles are inextricably blended.

Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part III: En Route to Military Rule

The military occupation of New Orleans, post-Katrina.

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free. ~ Alexander Hamilton (of all people) Federalist Paper No. 8

When it all comes down to it, given the choice, whom would you prefer to look up and find by your side?

These guys...


...or him?


It's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.

Pro Libertate: Free Mark Cuban!

Pro Libertate: Free Mark Cuban!

Pro Libertate: Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part I: Militarizing the Police

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. Garet Garrett, The Revolution Was (1938)

The future of law enforcement: The 193rd Military Police Battalion, Colorado National Guard, trains at Ft. Carson last July 12 in preparation for deployment as part of JTF-DNC -- the military component of security arrangements for the Democratic Convention in Denver.

The seamless integration of the military and law enforcement into a single "Internal Security Force" is the defining characteristic of a fully realized police state. Once this fusion is accomplished, the question becomes not "whether" a police state exists, but rather how acute its institutional violence against the subject population will become.

That condition now exists in the country that still calls itself -- without any apparent irony -- the United States of America.

Pro Libertate: Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part I: Militarizing the Police

Pro Libertate: Dispossession by Decree

William N. Grigg gets better with every post.

Perhaps I was too distracted to notice, but I don't recall a spontaneous outpouring of public demand for a taxpayer-financed bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the costs of which will eventually run into the trillions of dollars. In that case, however, there is an almost imperceptibly thin thread of public accountability, since Congress -- acting with the desperate haste it displays only when carrying out an errand on behalf of the Power Elite -- passed a patently unconstitutional measure "authorizing" the Secretary of the Treasury to bail out Fannie and Freddie.

This means that the electorate, which installed and tolerates Congress, shares some responsibility for this crime.

However, it's impossible to blame the electorate for the most recent act of mega-larceny, the Federal Reserve's $85 billion bailout of the American International Group. This was done by the FED -- an nominally private entity that exercises immense political and economic power without constitutional standing or accountability of any kind.

Pro Libertate: Dispossession by Decree

Pro Libertate: The Denouement (Updated)

Denouement (n) -- The unraveling of a plot; a catastrophe....

From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

There is something supernally appropriate to the fact that, in order to find the most suitable definition for just right word to describe the ongoing crisis of the financial system, we have to refer to a dictionary published in 1913.

We are now into the second year of the unraveling of the world financial system. It could be described as the Great Denouement (or final act) of a plot that began in 1913, when Congress created the Federal Reserve System, aka the Focus of Evil in the Modern World. So far the effects of the unraveling have had minimal impact on the larger economy.

This is about to change.

Last Friday, there were five globe-bestriding Wall Street investment banks. Today there are three. Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old financial colossus, is headed for bankruptcy and oblivion. Merrill Lynch, which was following the same trajectory, was bought by Bank of America.

Tellingly, the markets greeted that acquisition by selling off Bank of America shares, despite CEO Ken Lewis's happy prattle about the "synergies" supposedly catalyzed by this buy-out. Likwise, the bank's credit rating took a hit following the transaction. This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect to see when one business demonstrates its vitality by purchasing another. In this case, however, it is well understood that BofA wasn't gaining assets, but rather taking on an infection.

Read the rest... Pro Libertate: The Denouement (Updated)

Pro Libertate: Stormtroopin'

William N. Grigg: Coming-out party for the Homeland Security State'

In March 2007, the RNC in St. Paul was designated a National Security Special Event (NSSE). Shortly thereafter, the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department began hiring and deploying infiltrators. According to Sheriff Bob Fletcher, his department, working through the local Joint Terrorism Task Force, was involved in a nation-wide effort to track down and keep suspected protesters under surveillance.

Ramsey County's Special Investigations Unit has an interesting relationship with the federal government. It was the chief local federal subcontractor for the crack-down on dissent during the RNC. But it was also being investigated by the FBI for corruption. And in one of those bits of historical symmetry one would find implausible in a novel, those two developments intersected in the days immediately prior to the RNC. More...

Pro Libertate: Behold a Palin Horse

Pro Libertate: Behold a Palin Horse

I love it when someone gets it just right.

Yes, the prospect of an Obama presidency is terrifying — not necessarily because of the candidate himself, but because of the success the conservative movement has enjoyed in endowing the presidency with autocratic powers.

For entirely self-serving reasons, the Republican Party’s base, which until recently treated Bush the Lesser with the same slack-jawed, glassy-eyed adoration rendered to Obama by his more devoted supporters, is just now awakening to the dangers of executive aggrandizement.

But such concerns will evaporate among the GOP faithful if McCain is victorious in November. Indeed, tumultuous applause greeted every derogatory allusion to the Bill of Rights offered by Palin and her warm-up act, the Polystyrene Panderer from Massachusetts. The salient fear displayed by the Republicans is that Obama will inherit a distended office and destroy what remains of our liberty before the Republicans have a chance to finish that job themselves.

More…