America's Endless Wars

The United States presents itself to the world as a beacon of liberty and a proponent of human rights around the world, ready and willing to stand up for and defend the downtrodden.Florida Senator Marco Rubio recently said that the world looks to the U.S. as an example of democracy. This myth is not believed outside of the United States’ borders, and decreasingly within. There is simply too much evidence to the contrary.

The U.S. has been at war for over 220 of its 241 year history. During that time, it has shown a complete lack of respect for the human rights of both the citizens of the nations against which it wages war, and its own soldiers. We’ll take a look at examples from recent history, and see how the U.S. continues these barbaric practices today.

Source: Wikipedia

During the U.S. war against Viet Nam, which lasted for several years, conservative estimates indicate that at least 2,000,000 men, women and children were killed. Entire villages were burned; soldiers were told to assume that anyone, of an age, was the enemy.

U.S. soldiers gave poisoned cookies to children seeking their help. The My Lai massacre, in which between 350 and 500 innocent people were killed, mostly women, children and elderly men, garnered international publicity, but was only one example of U.S. barbarity.

U.S. soldiers returned home from this and later wars with severe physical and emotional problems. Veterans’ organizations worked for years to have the effects of ‘Agent Orange’, a chemical defoliant used in Viet Nam that caused birth defects in the children of soldiers who used it, recognized by the government so they could get government assistance. A generation later, the reality of Gulf War Syndrome was denied for years by the U.S. government.

How does this continue in the current environment? When the U.S. invaded Iraq early in the administration of President George Bush, it bombed residential areas in a country where over half the population was under the age of 15. It destroyed government institutions, even as it protected oil lines, leaving millions of people without essential services.

In Yemen, drones have killed at least 6,000 people. In the first drone attack authorized by then President Barack Obama, 34 people were killed. Of these, two were suspected of having ties to so-called terrorist groups. The other 32 were innocent men, women and children. And these atrocities continue to this day.

In Syria, the U.S. is supporting radical groups that are causing untold suffering. At least one third of the population of Syria has fled their homes; recently, due to the efforts of the Syrian army and its allies, some have begun to return. The death toll, directly attributable to the actions of the U.S., is at least half a million.

When it comes to a nation’s need to defend itself, the U.S. again has no equal when it comes to hypocrisy.Palestinians who defend themselves with rocks against the U.S.-provided weaponry with which Israel kills and oppresses them, are called terrorists. IDF terrorists and settlers, also terrorists, living in the West Bank in violation of international law, kill unarmed Palestinians with impunity.

What does all this mean for the basic human rights of the people whose nations fall victim to U.S. imperialism?Death, disease, homelessness, life in refugee camps, hunger, lack of medical care, lack of education opportunities, and much more.

The United States, despite its own claims to the contrary, has one of the worst records of human rights abuses of all the countries on the planet. They are worsened in war time, and as I mentioned earlier, the U.S. has been at war almost constantly since 1776.

This is the United States, that self-proclaimed beacon of peace and justice. This is international hypocrisy at it most blatant and deadly. People within the U.S. and without are working tirelessly to resolve these issues, but they are opposed by powerful interest groups. Yet such shocking cruelty and violations of international law and the human right of millions of innocent people cannot continue forever. The end of the injustices perpetrated by the United States will be a welcome day around the world

End of Days

In the days following the 241^st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the country is in an even more precarious position than it was in 1776. 

We face a situation of a fiat currency about to collapse as the consumer-based economy follows.  Whether orchestrated by our imperialistic government or following actions of a hostile foreign nation (prompted or unprompted) the government will gladly enter a war to “cleanse” the balance sheet and cull the herd.  Concurrently, the country is deeply divided domestically along lines of racial unrest.

The country also faces a threat to its existence in the face of Muslim extremists who are fostered by the traitorous socialist-Marxists in our government who enabled their entry under Obama as protected “refugees.”  U.S. policy in every arena is a chariot drawn by horses with no driver, jerking toward the “Blues” of the socialist Democrats or the “Reds” of the socialist, pseudo-Republicans in the domestic quagmire, the Circus Maximus partially in ruin after years of Barack Hussein Obama II’s reign.

The superficial and superfluous, in the meantime, becomes the public focus and hence the distraction: “Simulacra and simulation,” so to speak.  The majority have gone forward in their consumer-driven Habitrail according to the sacred Hallmark Calendar…the one that has a “THX-1138 Consumer Day” at least one day every month.  The one with a fixed venue: everyone left the house to shop, to eat, to plan on the big barbecue in the afternoon.  Finally, in the evening, everyone then piled into the cars to watch the fireworks.  Then they all went home, to mount the treadmill again in the morning.

The fireworks: thousands of tons of them, made in the People’s Republic of China.  It was a perfect, patriotic display, complete with “Ooh’s” and “Aah’s” as the Communist-Chinese fireworks simulated the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air.  Make no mistake: it is nighttime, and although our flag is still there, the country that it symbolizes is not whole anymore.  We have become an entitlement nation, where those who did not work and contribute to the system believe they are entitled to the fruits of those whose labors enable the country to keep chugging along.

The government believes it is entitled to what those who pay taxes earn.  And those who support the system?  We believe that we are entitled to reset everything based on the merits of hard work and conservative values: an automatic, bloodless reset.  All these “entitlement” mindsets, forgetting that everything is cyclical.  We are at the end of the cyclefor the United States.  We peaked long ago, and now we are deep in the decline-phase.  The Founding Fathers summed up in words what we are trulyentitled to…a loss of our freedoms following the moral and societal degradation that we have allowed as a nation.  Some fostered it (the Marxists) and we the conservatives allowed them to do it.

We didn’t put a stop to the degradation that occurred through the decades, and this is the result.  A law-abiding people is most easily controlled by the law.  There is no news today!  There is nocoverage over what is happening in the rest of the world!  Where was the coverage…live…when the Egyptians were fed up with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and enlisted the aid of the army…and aided it, rioting in the streets to oust those extremists that Obama allowed to take power?  Where was the true coverage of the coup d’états we fostered, supported, and enabled in Ukraine and in Libya?  No, the “coverage” is limited to the lives of tabloid celebrities and distortions of any objectivity.  Why?

To keep the citizens dumbed down, uninformed, working, taxed, consuming, mesmerized by sports and sex, and stultified to prevent them from taking any action against a government that is becoming more tyrannical, more repressive by the day.

The media obfuscates: they aid, and in turn are aided by, the government.  Benghazi, Libya.  An embassy of the United States destroyed, and the ambassador and four members of his consulate killed, and nothing…nothing…has happened to the perpetrators.  The Secretary of Defense just released a report that the armed forces of the United States are in severe disarray and lacking both manpower and materials.  Most of us (the conservatives) are recognizing all of this.

Thomas Jefferson wrote about the Tree of Liberty.

The situation was arrived upon because the populace overall does not take any personal responsibility.  That reason covers the entire spectrum of the basis for the entitlement mentality.  Conservatives have lied to themselves, saying “It’ll all balance out eventually,” or “We’ll just vote the bums out of office and it’ll be made right,” or “Somebody will take care of it.”  The “somebody” needed to be us.  The problem is that Americans don’t sack the Curia or burn down the Bastille.  Americans fear the lack of law-abiding action, fear the potential for anarchy.

But anarchy can also take form when the law-abiding do not put a stop to the lawmakers and their machinery turning a Republic into a tyranny: the controlled, purposed anarchy that follows is an anarchy of lawless laws, that only serve to empower the powerful and subjugate the subjects.

The payment of taxes serves to feed the jailers and build the ever-growing cage of surveillance and control that is inexorably tightening upon society and every citizen.  The 8-year destructive actions of Obama left the country on the verge of collapse and war, with only agonal breathing on its deathbed: the country visits its own wake.  Now we have an administration that supplies the formerly anaerobic society with about 4 liters of oxygen per minute when a full 16 is called for: a “watered-down” Republicanism with fifth columnists preserving Obamacare and that hand of government control is still tightening on the throat of the people.  The hand is a mail gauntlet with the thin veneer of a velvet overlay.

In just 3 ½ years, that velvet will fade, and the gauntlet will fully and openly reemerge once more.  If we make it for that length of time.  In truth, we face a larger problem that we have never encountered since the country’s founding.  We face the dual threat of war (orchestrated or otherwise) and a concurrent collapse of the economy, complete with civil war/social upheaval domestically.  The funeral dirge has been playing awhile, now.

Bottom Line: All of this is the planned and deliberate globalists’ agenda: to destroy the United States from without and from within, by any means necessary.

To truly celebrate the “birthday” of the United States, it will have to be “born again.”  The possibility exists that this means being born from the ashes of what remains after it hits rock bottom…through warfare, internal collapse, or a combination of both.  Society (and the stance of individual men) are both fragile things.  We also face the problem of needing to act, but it may be too late to act until everything is taken to the ground.  What will emerge from that is then up to those who survive the initial event.  Food for thought, after Independence Day, perhaps at the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

10 Signs The Global Elite Are Losing Control

By: anon67

Karma is coming for the elite in a big way. As the Powers That Be head toward a devastating defeat in their war plans for Syria, signs are emerging that their rule over humanity is rapidly diminishing.

Over the last decade the global elite have been on a mad dash to consolidate power over the world. It’s always been their plan like some evil villain in a comic book, but after 9/11 the plan went into overdrive and then turbo charged during the financial crisis of 2008.

Yet it’s doomed to fail because humans are meant to be guided by their own free will, not controlled like livestock. The more the elite try to control humanity, the more entropy occurs. Entropy, for those who don’t know, is the lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder.

Although the elite still enjoy a huge wealth advantage over the masses, they are now resigned to behaving like tyrants to maintain control. This, in turn, exposes their dark side which has been cleverly concealed for ages. Not anymore.

People are waking up in droves, at least as fast as the elite can build their full-spectrum prison matrix. Let them try. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, “No army can stop an idea whose time has come.”

Here are ten signs that the elite are losing control over the people:

1. OFFICIAL LIES NO LONGER EFFECTIVE:

The lies they tell simply don’t work anymore. There was a time when official lies, especially about war and peace, were believed. Because, after all, how evil would it be to lie about such things? Generally people want to believe they are being told the truth when life and death is at stake. The boy who cried wolf has cried one too many times. Even if they told the truth at this point, very few would believe them.

2. NO CONFIDENCE IN POLITICS:

US politicians have a paltry approval rating. The trust in government is at all-time lows here and around the world. Mainstream polls show only 10% of the public has confidence in Congress. In other words, 90% don’t believe in them to be competent to govern.

Watch this Town Hall exchange below where a man threatens US Senator John McCain with arrest for treason to his face. This would have never happened just a year or two ago:

3. NO CONFIDENCE IN MEDIA:

The most recent polls show that 77% of the population no longer trusts corporate TV news. Is it any wonder why the establishment media failed to sell the lies about the alleged Syria chemical event? With all their monopoly might over the airwaves, they can no longer claim that black is white simply because officialdom says so.

4. BANKERS REJECTED:

Hungary recently became the first country to follow Iceland’s lead by shedding international bankers (IMF) and is considering pursuing prosecution of past prime ministers who enslaved the people with debt.

Look for this trend to continue even if nations decide to default to break free.

5. VATICAN ABRUPTLY CLEANING UP ITS ACT:

Under the previous Pope, Pope Benedict, scandals erupted from the Vatican ranging from covering up pedophile priests to money laundering and fraud. Benedict, in an unprecedented move, abruptly retired to make way for a seemingly much more likable Pope Francis. Pope Francis by all measures is working furiously to reclaim the church’s peaceful and humble reputation. Whether this is genuine or a PR move, it’s telling that the church was forced into such a drastic turnaround to save itself from losing all credibility.

6. MUTINY AMONG SOLDIERS:

Finally. Soldiers, who are outlawed from making political statements, are steadily speaking out against US military adventurism. As Einstein famously said “The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service.”

7. MILITARIZED POLICE STATE:

One of the darkest signs that the elite are losing their grip on power is the construction of the militarized police state specifically trained to combat domestic civil unrest. Local cops with tanks and other combat gear are working with Feds at Fusion centers, active Army units are on American soil for the first time in history, the NSA spy grid is being used by the IRS and DEA, and the elimination of due process for Americans under the NDAA are just some of the tyrannical moves made to secure the elite criminals from public backlash. They’re clearly scared, and they should be given what they’ve done to the American people and the Constitution.

8. SERIOUS SECESSION MOVEMENTS EVERYWHERE:

A state seceding from a larger political entity used to be an ultra-fringe concept, until now. In America, secession movements are winning over the public in parts of Colorado and California. In Europe, serious secession movements are happening in Spain and Scotland, as well as several EU nations flirting with the idea of dropping out the the euro. Decentralization = Entropy!

9. GMO FOOD BEING REJECTED EVERYWHERE:

Control the food and you control the people. True in theory, but much more difficult in practice. GMO leaders like Monsanto are being exposed. All of their economic and political strength cannot defeat the spread of knowledge about the dangers of pesticide-soaked Frankenfoods. GMO fields are being burned in protest in America and around the world, informed nations continue to reject their products, and labeling laws are gaining traction.

10. CANNABIS LIBERATION:

Many reading this will think marijuana legalization is a superficial development. However, it is a major signpost that the elite’s grip is fading. Enormous resources have been spent to keep cannabis illegal. Cannabis has been a powerful medicine for physical, mental, and spiritual health throughout the ages. This single plant represents a huge threat to the power structures and their industries, hence its seemingly senseless illegality. The approaching global reversal of the tyrannical policy of prohibition is the first of many concessions to come.

The Over-Criminalization Of American Life

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and legal egalitarianism.

While the corporate media devotes itself to sports, entertainment, dining out and the latest political kerfuffle, America has become the Over-Criminalization Capital of the World. The proliferation of laws and administrative regulations, federal, state and local, that carry criminal penalties has swollen into the tens of thousands.

The number of incarcerated Americans exceeds 2.3 million, with the majority being non-violent offenders–often for War on Drugs offenses.

Holly Harris has written an important summary of this profoundly destabilizing trend:The Prisoner Dilemma: Ending America’s Incarceration Epidemic (Foreign Affairs, registration required).

The over-criminalization of America is a relatively recent trend. As Harris notes:

It wasn’t always like this. In 1972, for every 100,000 U.S. residents, 161 were incarcerated. By 2015, that rate had more than quadrupled, with nearly 670 out of every 100,000 Americans behind bars.

The over-criminalization of America is rooted in federal laws and regulations, and state and local governments have followed suite. here is Harris’s account:

The burgeoning U.S. prison population reflects a federal criminal code that has spiraled out of control. No one—not even the government itself—has ever been able to specify with any certainty the precise number of federal crimes defined by the 54 sections contained in the 27,000 or so pages of the U.S. Code. In the 1980s, lawyers at the Department of Justice attempted to tabulate the figure “for the express purpose of exposing the idiocy” of the criminal code, as one of them later put it. The best they were able to come up with was an educated guess of 3,000 crimes. Today, the conservative Heritage Foundation estimates that federal laws currently enumerate nearly 5,000 crimes, a number that grows every year.

Overcriminalization extends beyond the law books, partly because regulations are often backed by criminal penalties. That is the case for rules that govern matters as trivial as the sale of grated cheese, the precise composition of chicken Kiev dishes, and the washing of cars at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health. State laws add tens of thousands more such crimes. Taken together, they push the total number of criminally punishable offenses in the United States into the hundreds of thousands. The long arm of the law reaches into nearly every aspect of American life. The legal scholar Harvey Silverglate has concluded that the typical American commits at least three federal felonies a day, simply by going through his or her normal routine.

Federal policies reward states for building prisons and mandating harsher sentences:

…federal incentives for states that safely decrease their prison populations and reconsider ineffective sentencing regimes…would represent a stark reversal of legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, which did just the opposite, offering federal dollars to states that imposed harsher criminal penalties and built more prisons, which contributed to the explosion of incarceration rates during the past two decades.

How did we become a Gulag Nation of tens of thousands of laws and regulations and mandatory harsh sentences for non-violent crimes–a society imprisoned for administrative crimes that aren’t even tried in our judiciary system? I would suggest two primary sources:

1. The relentless expansion of central-state power over every aspect of life. As I describe in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, the state has only one ontological imperative: to expand its power and control. There are no equivalent mechanisms for reducing the legal/regulatory burdens imposed by the state; various reforms aimed at reducing the quantity of laws and regulations have not even made a dent in the over-criminalization of America.

The second dynamic is the political reality that the easiest way for politicos to be seen as “doing something” is to pass more laws and regulations criminalizing an additional aspect of life. The state and its elites justify the state’s relentless expansion of power and control by claiming problems can only be solved by centralizing power further and increasing the number and severity of penalties.

Criminalization is the ultimate expansion of the state’s monopoly on coercive violence.As the state expands its power to imprison or punish its citizens for an ever-wider range of often petty infractions, increasingly via a bureaucratic administrative process that strips the citizens of due process, another pernicious dynamic emerges: the informal application and enforcement of formal laws and regulations.

In other words, the laws and regulations are enforced at the discretion of the state’s officials. This is the systemic source of driving while black: a defective tail-light gets an African-American driver pulled over, while drivers of other ethnic origin get a pass.

This is also the source of America’s systemic blind eye on white-collar crimes while the War on Drugs mandates harsh sentences with a cruel vengeance. When there are so many laws and regulations to choose from, government officials have immense discretion over which laws and regulations to enforce.

Prosecutors seeking to increase their body count will use harsh drug laws to force innocents to accept plea bargains, while federal prosecutors don’t even pursue white-collar corporate fraud on a vast scale.

The over-criminalization of America has undermined justice, the rule of law and the bedrock notion that everyone is equal under the law, i.e. legal egalitarianism.

The over-criminalization of America breeds corruption as the wealthy and powerful evade the crushing burden of over-regulation by either buying political favors in our pay-to-play “democracy” (money votes, money wins) or by hiring teams of attorneys, CPAs, etc. to seek loopholes or construct a courtroom defense.

Meanwhile, the peasantry are offered a harsh plea bargain.

The over-criminalization of America is one core reason why the status quo has failed and cannot be reformed. That is the title of one of my short works, Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, which explains why the ceaseless expansion of centralized power leads to failure and collapse.

Captain Clay Higgins

The free world... all of Christendom... is at war with Islamic horror. 

Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. 

Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

We are a world at war. The enemy is radicalized Islamic jihadists. The terrorists certainly take advantage of the politically correct madness that consumes the West. They revel, that many in the western world are frightened to speak freely. 

I've never been accused of being politically correct. I call things the way I see them. The meaning of candid speech is frequently mischaracterized or misunderstood. 

This is about prioritizing national security and protecting American lives. Every measure must be taken to eliminate radical Islamic terrorism and the threat it poses to the free world. My only concern is protecting the people that live in my district, my state, and my country. We must stand strong against radical Islamic terror. 

The fate of the free world will be determined by the courageous, not by the intimidated.

Hügelkultur

Hügelkultur is a permaculture system employing raised beds constructed from decaying wood debris and biomass plant materials covered with soil. The composting core holds water & provides nutrients for the garden above. Hügelkultur is a German word meaning hill culture & has been practiced in German societies for hundreds of years. The mounded beds are ideal for areas where the underlying soil is of poor quality & rainfall sparse. They are easier to maintain due to their relative height & form a light-duty swale. 

Taxes

"The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system," 

- John F. Kennedy  / Dec. 14, 1962 

(At the time the adjusted US per capita tax rate was less than half of what it was in 2016.)

"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

- Thomas Jefferson

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

- Frédéric Bastiat

“The federal income tax system is a disgrace to the human race.”

- Jimmy Carter