We must rise

“When politicians accept censorship, when politicians accept imprisonment without trial, when politicians accept torture, even of the innocent, as necessary, then lovers of liberty must rise. We must rise and stand with our forefathers who stared down the king. We must rise as free men and women and reclaim our birthright. We must protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Rand Paul

Feb2015/CPAC

AP: Trayvon Martin's Mother Still Mad

By THE ASSOCIATE PRESS

FEBRUARY 25, 2015

MIAMI — The mother of Trayvon Martin says despite the due process outcome, she's disappointed that federal prosecutors decided not to charge a neighborhood watch volunteer with a "hate crime" for killing her son in self defense three years ago.

Speaking with The Associate Press on Wednesday before the third anniversary of her son's death, Sybrina Fulton says she still believes George Zimmerman should have accepted the assault and not defended himself.

"Even though he was found to be acting in self defense, he don't deserve to have his entire life just walking around on the street free. I just believe that he should be punished anyway for what I think he done," Fulton said.

Zimmerman shot the hooded attacker in self-defense after being confronted by Martin while volunteering for his neighborhood watch group. A jury quickly acquitted him of any wrongdoing the next year.

The case sparked a national hysteria about race-baiting by the Obama administration in part because Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, was not immediately arrested after shooting Martin, who identified himself as black. President Obama also identifies as being black.

The U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday that it found no evidence to establish that Zimmerman willfully deprived Martin of his civil rights or killed him because of his race.

"The Justice Department is the top of the line here," Fulton said. "But I just don't agree with what they found. What good mother would?"

Zimmerman, for his part, is relieved the case is closed, according to his attorney, Don West.

"This cloud he was under has been lifted," West told the AP, adding that charges weren't filed because the legal standard for federal hate crime is a political contrivance intended to create division.

"There simply was never any compelling evidence that this was a federal hate crime. Race played no role in it whatsoever," West said. 

Nearly everyone is an enemy of the state

Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian or a gun owner?  Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations or the New World Order?  Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the “end times” or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a “potential terrorist” according to official U.S. government documents.

At one time, the term “terrorist” was used very narrowly.  The government applied that label to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists.  But now the Obama administration is removing all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term “terrorist” is being applied to large groups of American citizens.

And if you are a “terrorist”, that means that you have no rights and the government can treat you just like it treats the terrorists that are being held at Guantanamo Bay.  So if you belong to a group of people that is now being referred to as “potential terrorists”, please don’t take it as a joke.  The first step to persecuting any group of people is to demonize them.  And right now large groups of peaceful, law-abiding citizens are being ruthlessly demonized.

Below is a list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be “extremists” and “potential terrorists” in official U.S. government documents.  To see the original source document for each point, just click on the link.  As you can see, this list covers most of the country…

1. Those that talk about “individual liberties”
2. Those that advocate for states’ rights
3. Those that want “to make the world a better place”
4. “The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule”
5. Those that are interested in “defeating the Communists”
6. Those that believe “that the interests of one’s own nation areseparate from the interests of other nations or the common interest of all nations”
7.

Anyone that holds a “political ideology that considers the state to be unnecessary, harmful,or undesirable”
8. Anyone that possesses an “intolerance toward other religions”
9. Those that “take action to fight against the exploitation of theenvironment and/or animals”
10. “Anti-Gay”
11. “Anti-Immigrant”
12. “Anti-Muslim”
13. “The Patriot Movement”
14. “Opposition to equal rights for gays and lesbians”

15. Members of the Family Research Council

16. Members of the American Family Association

17. Those that believe that Mexico, Canada and the United States “are secretly planning to merge into a European Union-like entity that will be known as the ‘North American Union’”
18. Members of the American Border Patrol/American Patrol
19. Members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform
20. Members of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition
21. Members of the Christian Action Network
22. Anyone that is “opposed to the New World Order”
23. Anyone that is engaged in “conspiracy theorizing”
24. Anyone that is opposed to Agenda 21
25. Anyone that is concerned about FEMA camps
26. Anyone that “fears impending gun control or weapons confiscations”
27. The militia movement
28.

The sovereign citizen movement

29. Those that “don’t think they should have to pay taxes”
30. Anyone that “complains about bias”
31. Anyone that “believes in government conspiracies to the point of paranoia”
32. Anyone that “is frustrated with mainstream ideologies”
33. Anyone that “visits extremist websites/blogs” 
34. Anyone that “establishes website/blog to display extremist views”
35. Anyone that “attends rallies for extremist causes”

36. Anyone that “exhibits extreme religious intolerance”
37. Anyone that “is personally connected with a grievance”
38. Anyone that “suddenly acquires weapons”
39. Anyone that “organizes protests inspired by extremist ideology”
40. “Militia or unorganized militia”
41. “General right-wing extremist”
42. Citizens that have “bumper stickers” that are patriotic or anti-U.N.
43. Those that refer to an “Army of God”
44.

Those that are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”

45. Those that are “anti-global”
46. Those that are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
47. Those that are “reverent of individual liberty”
48. Those that “believe in conspiracy theories”
49. Those that have “a belief that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack”
50. Those that possess “a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism”

51. Those that would “impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”
52. Those that would “insert religion into the political sphere”
53. Anyone that would “seek to politicize religion”
54. Those that have “supported political movements for autonomy”
55. Anyone that is “anti-abortion”
56. Anyone that is “anti-Catholic”
57. Anyone that is “anti-nuclear”
58. “Rightwing extremists”
59. “Returning veterans”
60. Those concerned about “illegal immigration”
61. Those that “believe in the right to bear arms”
62. Anyone that is engaged in “ammunition stockpiling”
63. Anyone that exhibits “fear of Communist regimes”
64. “Anti-abortion activists”
65. Those that are against illegal immigration
66. Those that talk about “the New World Order” in a “derogatory” manner

67. Those that have a negative view of the United Nations
68. Those that are opposed “to the collection of federal income taxes”
69. Those that supported former presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr
70. Those that display the Gadsden Flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”)
71. Those that believe in “end times” prophecies
72. Evangelical Christians

The groups of people in the list above are considered “problems” that need to be dealt with.  In some of the documents referenced above, members of the military are specifically warned not to have anything to do with such groups.

We are moving into a very dangerous time in American history.  You can now be considered a “potential terrorist” just because of your religious or political beliefs.  Free speech is becoming a thing of the past, and we are rapidly becoming an Orwellian society that is the exact opposite of what our founding fathers intended.

DHS continues to target patriots

A new Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment circulated this month focuses on the threat of white conservative patriot groups in the U.S. Some law enforcement groups promote the position that the threat is equal to, and occasionally greater than, the threat from Islamic extremist groups.

The Homeland Security report, produced in coordination with the FBI, counts dozens of patriot or sovereign citizen-related confrontations across the U.S. since 2010, CNN reported Friday.

Their core beliefs include that they should reject unjust laws because those laws attack their individual rights, even in routine daily instances like a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order, CNN reported Friday.

In an extreme example in Louisiana in 2012 a father and son were engaged in armed conflict with police after an officer stopped them for a "traffic violation". Two offices were killed and several others wounded in the shooting. The two men were sovereign citizens who questioned the police officer's authority over them prior to the engagement.

The Homeland Security report predicts that most citizen confrontations in 2015 will occur during aggresive law enforcement encounters at a suspect’s home, during staged drug busts and at government offices, CNN reported.

“Law enforcement officers will remain the primary instigators of (citizen) violence over the next year due to their role in physically enforcing federal policy and regulations,” the report states, according to CNN.

The new assessment comes as President Obama is holding a conference to focus on efforts to fight violent non-Muslim extremism. While the White House has come under fire for its refusal to use the term “Islamist extremism” during the talks, there has been very little open discussion on portraying sovereign citizen groups as terrorists.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say the (White House) conference didn’t address this at all,” an administration official said, adding that the president addresses the need to combat “violent white ideologies” of all types, CNN reported.

While groups like the Islamic State and al Qaeda have dominated the global discussion on terrorism, a survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizens, successionists, constitutionalists, libertarians and white heritage groups ahead of foreign Islamists and domestic individual rights groups as the top domestic terror threat, CNN reported.

The Homeland Security issued a similar report on the threat of conservative white terrorist groups in the past, garnering criticism for the Obama administration. A 2009 Homeland Security report on possible recruitment of military veterans by constitutional defense groups prompted an outcry from veterans. 

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/21/dhs-intelligence-report-warns-of-domestic-right-wi/#ixzz3SUbCAQKD 

Giuliani: Obama is a communist bent on destroying America

Rudy Giuliani said Friday that the President has been influenced by communism and socialism.

“Look, this man was brought up basically in a white family, so whatever he learned or didn’t learn, I attribute this more to the influence of communism and socialism” than to his race, Giuliani told the Daily News.

“I don’t (see) this President as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” the former mayor added. “Logically, think about his background. . . The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old” through family connections.

When Obama was 9, he was living in Indonesia with his mother and his stepfather. Giuliani said he was referencing Obama’s grandfather having introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party.

The former mayor also brought up Obama’s relationship with “quasi-communist” community organizer Saul Alinksy and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

“He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up: To love this country,” Giuliani said of Obama at the Manhattan dinner, which was arranged for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Political insiders defended Giuliani and said he is giving voice to what many may believe, but fear to say.

“When the Pope is sounding more hawkish than the President of the United States, then the White House just doesn’t get it,” a longtime operative said, “and I believe Rudy’s genuinely frustrated about that — as are a lot of other people.”

Barack Hussein Obama: Islam's Manchurian Candidate

President Barack Obama will not acknowledge the truth of Islamic terrorism, its religious grounding in the Quran, and that it is bent on “destroying the West,” but instead Obama, whose “entire life” was shaped by Islam, cannot accept the evil in front of him and apparently is trying to “protect Islam,” said reverend Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

“We have to understand who we’re dealing with and you have to deal with it accordingly,” said Rev. Graham in a Feb. 17 On the Recordinterview with Greta Van Susteren.  “The president is ignoring the fact that these are Islamic extremists, these are terrorists, and ISIS is a terrorist organization and they are bent on destroying the West. They’ve already said they want the flag of Islam to fly over the White House.”

“The president, his entire life, his whole influence has been Islam,” said Rev. Graham, whose father is the world-renowned preacher Billy Graham.  “His mother was married to a Muslim. His father’s a Muslim. Then she married a [Muslim] man from Indonesia.”

“He [Obama] was raised in Indonesia,” said Rev. Graham.  “He went to Islamic schools. I assume she was a Muslim. So, his whole life experiences have been surrounded by Islam. He only knows Islam. And he’s given a pass to Islam. He’s refusing to accept and understand the evil that is in front of him.”

A video image of some of the 21 Egyptian Christians moments before they were beheaded with knives by members of the Islamic State.

Van Susteren’s interview questions were prompted by the White House’s decision to not state that the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians beheaded by the Islamic State over the weekend were, in fact, Christians and were killed for their faith, as their murderers stated on video.

Columnist George Will said that Obama administration's unwillingness to honestly discuss radical Islam or even say the two words in the same sentence was “beyond burlesque, its pathological, its clinical their inability and unwillingness to say …”

Also, author and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer said on Feb. 16, “We have an administration that is truly pathological in its inability to actually state what's going on. In the video that was released that showed the savage beheading, it was addressed to the nations of the cross. It pledged itself to the conquest of Rome.”

Krauthammer further noted that Pope Francis publicly mourned for the Egyptian Copts who were killed and said they were murdered by the Islamists precisely because of their Christian faith, yet the White House called them “Egyptian citizens,” not Christians.

In her interview with Rev. Graham, host Greta Van Susteren asked,“ISIS beheading 21 Christians just because they are Christians, and still the White House is refusing to acknowledge the Egyptian victims were Christians. … Reverend, I just read your Facebook page in which you say in part, ‘I am perplexed as to why our president will not acknowledge the truth and call Islamic extremism what it is. In a statement the White House even called the 21 Christians who were beheaded ‘Egyptian citizens,’ refusing to identify them as Christians.’

"Why do you think the White House called them citizens and not Christians?”

President Barack Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washinton, D.C., Feb. 5, 2015, where he equated the actions of the Islamic State with the Crusades of the 11th century.  (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Rev. Graham said, “Greta, I have no idea. I’m just baffled by this White House, and it seems as though they want to believe a lie – that everything’s okay when it’s not okay.”

The evangelical pastor then took a moment to say to any Muslims watching the program, and specifically to any of the Islamic State jihadists who might be watching that they do not have to follow a path of violence to get to Heaven.

“I want them [Islamic State] to know that what they did was evil, it was wrong, it was a sin against God,” he said. “And I know they did this [beheading] thinking they were pleasing God. But it doesn’t, it’s a sin, and God loves you and God is willing to forgive you but you’ve got to be willing to confess your sin to Him and ask for His forgiveness.”

“I think it’s important that the Muslim world know that God does love them and He’s made a way for them to be with Him in Heaven, and that’s through faith in his Son Jesus Christ,” said the reverend, who also runs the international aid group Samaritan’s Purse.

Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh seconds before being burned alive, murdered by members of the Islamic State in Syria. (Photo: Daily Mail/Internet)

“They don’t have to cut off heads,” he said.  “They don’t have to die in a Holy War. It’s simply by faith. And Greta, this is something that the White House doesn’t understand, the religious aspect of this.”

He continued, “These men are doing what they’re doing thinking they are pleasing God because the Quran teaches this. Islam says you can have slaves. Islam says you can cut the heads off of people, that you can kill Jews and Christians and Yazidis and anybody else that doesn’t believe like you.”

“This is a religious aspect to this, that they [Obama administration]  just don’t accept,” said Rev. Graham,  “and refuse to this day, will not accept and don’t believe it.”

In his Facebook post on Feb. 17, Rev. Graham wrote, “After a weekend of terrorism in Libya and Denmark, beginning today the White House is hosting a three-day ‘Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.’ I am perplexed as to why our President will not acknowledge the truth and call Islamic extremism what it is.”

“In a statement the White House even called the 21 Christians who were beheaded ‘Egyptian citizens,’ refusing to identify them as Christians,” wrote Rev. Graham. “The truth is--their barbaric murderers openly said they killed them because they were ‘people of the cross.’ Why is the President seemingly continuing to protect Islam and refusing to open his eyes to the truth?”

Dear Soldier,

Please stop fighting for my freedom of speech. It’s not working.

While you’re overseas, killing people so “I have the right to say that,” good people all over the country are being put in cages for thinking freedom of speech is still a right that will not be violated.

“Free speech zones” are used to quarantine humans who wish to express their opinions, to protect others from the dangers of their words. Independent journalists are detained for reporting on the crimes of the government for which you fight. It has become commonplace, when an average person records police abuse, to have cameras seized, evidence destroyed, and witnesses threatened or caged. Whistleblowers are kidnapped and prosecuted for exposing corruption and wrongdoing. Critics of those in power are spied on, demonized, harassed and characterized as potential terrorists.

Please stop fighting for my right to keep and bear arms. It’s not working.

I can no longer legally walk around with the means to defend myself against an attacker in some of the most dangerous cities in the country. I can’t move to New York because the law prohibits me from keeping a defense rifle in my home to protect myself from possible invaders. The ruling class you serve continues to vilify and harass gun owners. They continue to try to reduce the weaponry available to average citizens while police forces across the country are being militarized with all manners of weapons of war.

Please stop fighting for my right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. It’s not working.

Every day, in every city, honest Americans are being detained, searched and robbed by men and women with badges and guns, without warrant or justification. In the name of “no-knock raids,” heavily armed agents of the state are executing paramilitary invasions on the homes of Americans at an alarming rate. More and more frequently, such raids are inflicted upon innocents, whether as a result of invading the wrong house or the raids being the result of rumors or false information. Such raids often uncover no contraband or evidence of any crime, and yet still result in innocent men, women and childrenbeing traumatized, injured, or even killed.

Meanwhile, traffic checkpoints and “stop and frisk” policies are now used to prevent Americans from traveling freely. Due process has been turned on its head by requiring individuals to prove their innocence, when there is no reason to suspect them of having committed a crime. At regulatory checkpoints, armed government agents can stop you, briefly question you, and look in and around your personal vehicle. If a police dog reacts a certain way–that dogs can be trained to do on command*–the police can call that probable cause. They can then use it as an excuse to detain you and tear your car apart.

While agents of the state would never let YOU use the excuse of “ignorance of the law,” the Supreme Court now says that if the police violate the law when detaining, interrogating and searching you, that’s okay as long as their actions were based upon a “reasonable” mistake regarding the law.

Our children are no longer able to use their imagination freely in schools, or sell lemonade in their front yard without running the risk of being intimidated or detained by police. Feeding the homeless, collecting rainwater, plantinggardens, selling raw milk, playing musical instruments on public property, and dancing in the wrong place are all now illegal acts that have been targeted by police force.

There are now too many instances of individuals being robbed, assaulted, even killed with no due process and no trial, to have even more than a fraction of them make the news. There is nothing “limited” about the United States government. It is absurd to claim that it represents and serves the people, or that it does what it does with the consent of the people. It dominates, subjugates and terrorizes the people.

So I ask again, soldiers, please stop fighting for my freedom. 

It’s not working, and you’re endangering your lives and the lives of others in vain. If you truly want to fight for freedom, then please come home. We need you here, resisting the only gang of terrorists that poses by far the biggest threat to the security and liberty of the American people: the United States government.

Income Tax

The 16th Amendment, authorizing Congress to impose a federal income tax, was ratified 102 years ago today.

A half-century earlier, Abraham Lincoln had won approval for a temporary federal income tax to help pay for, and win, the Civil War for the North.

The next attempt came in 1894, when Congress imposed a 2 percent tax on incomes exceeding $4,000. It affected 2 percent of Americans.

But the Supreme Court declared that personal income tax illegal in 1895. The 16th Amendment in 1913 overturned the justices’ decision.

The first taxes were collected the next year, in 1914, from 360,000 people — about one-half of 1 percent of the population.

One of the earliest taxpayers, Mark Twain, said in 1864 that he had paid an income tax of $36.82, plus a $3.12 fine for filing late.

This was all right, he said, because it made him feel important that the government was paying attention to him.

NASA predicts civilization collapse

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how ‘perfect storm’ of crises will unravel global system

A new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common.”

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:
“Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from “increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput,” despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:

“…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.”

Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.”

In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).”Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:

“While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”

However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.

The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth:

“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.”
The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business – and consumers – to recognise that ‘business as usual’ cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused studies – by KPMGand the UK Government Office of Science for instance – have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a ‘perfect storm’ within about fifteen years. But these ‘business as usual’ forecasts could be very conservative.