Now This...

It's always astounded me to hear people - especially financially successful ones - of all walks and stripes get around to saying they are doing something to "give back to society" as a way of thanks for their bodacious success. What a crock.

Over the years, I've interviewed John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute, multiple times. Our conversations have always ended on the up-note of transferable information for the audience. Here is John's latest piece that puts today's headlines into a practical reality.  BW Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.

While I take serious exception to the allegation "the State must always exist to provide a framework of security.", there are credible comments below regarding private organizations, their successes, their impact on State monopolies - and even 'an app for that' free market, voluntary security system already up and running successfully around the country. From  Julian Adorney : In Ferguson, Missouri, when police and national guard failed to protect businesses from rioting protestors, a private organization called Oathkeepers stepped up to fill the gap.

From my Friend Jim Bovard: Americans must choose between “government-issue liberty” and “self-reliant liberty.” The choice is between a concept of freedom based on government handouts and a concept of freedom based on restraint of government, between a liberty in which people are perpetually treated as children needing to be restrained and a liberty in which they are allowed to experiment, take chances, and pay for their own bloody noses.

This comprehensive, compelling, factual, informative and disturbing article can - and should - be read here.

Pull quote: They will say no one saw it coming.   But there are those of us across the internet, on blogs just like this one, who have seen it coming and have been talking about it for a long time.  The exact details of every point of transition and interception is not easily discerned, but the overall macro trend is clear and there are a few moments of sudden adjustments coming.   The sad reality is that the disorganized masses will remain ignorant to the whole process as they become consumed with television news drama that hides the structural truth behind the engineered cultural implosion of the American identity.    More from Zero Hedge.

Another excellent piece to follow John Whitehead's "The Game is Rigged" (See "Column of the Year -2014"). Below, Brandon Smith summarizes the corroding effects of the growing epidemic of citizen abuse by increasingly militarized police at all levels throughout the country. He even points to a solution worth implementing....BW Police misconduct has a cumulative effect on a culture. We do not forget all of the oversteps of the past; we merely file them away until we finally reach a breaking point. 

From Zero Hedge: The Game Is Rigged: Why Americans Keep Losing To The Police State The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. The people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the country and us.

Some people don't realize that a grand jury is not an actual trial....it's the step BEFORE a trial. When a case is dropped by a grand jury and officers acquitted  it is not just saying that they are not guilty but that we don't even need a real trial to determine that. What makes these cases particularly egregious, sometimes in the face of video and other evidence is that the result is often pushed by prosecutors who work for exactly the same government system as the police. In fact, for most criminal cases, the police are part of the prosecution team. So essentially we have cops out raping and killing people, the public saying "Hey, wait this guy looks guilty from the video etc. we should have a trial to find out for sure." And the prosecutors defending their own colleagues by saying "Nah, we don't even need to have a real trial and hear evidence." Can we forget magic blue costumes which allow rampant abuse for a moment and imagine what would ...

Watching the tsunami of sensational news reporting lately reminded me of great revelation in my own soporiphic broadcasting career. You may want to file this “Suspicions Confirmed”. It was 1966 or 67 when I first learned about the Fear Filter. Or course, it wasn’t called that; it was a lesson, of sorts, in reporting news. As a radio dj “in the business” for a couple years and thoroughly untrained in the ways of Journalism, my lessons in reporting all came from classes at Monkey-See U. Back then, by watching my station’s News Director, Jim Erwin, the news was Who, What, When, Where, To What Degree and occasionally Why. Since Jim was the News Dept., he and the AP machine were the first and last words in our news content. Of course, the rest of the air staff helped out, phoning in “news tips” if/when we happened upon them (mostly traffic accidents). Then the Civil Rights movement came to town with its marches, demonstrations and speeches. Through a series of boring events, I got...

Narrated by talk show host, Brian Wilson,  "Down With Power" , a Libertarian Manifesto, by L. Neil Smith now downloadable as an audiobook Hard-line, long-time Libertarians know the name L. Neil Smith. Along with his labors in the vineyard for the Freedom and Liberty movement, L. Neil is also internationally known for his award-winning "library" of science fiction novels, each with strong libertarian plots. His comparatively few non-fiction works on matters of Libertarian principles have been as popular as his novels. Second Amendment fans will enjoy his short, simple and pragmatic  Why Did It Have To Be Guns? . His opus, a "Libertarian Manifesto",  "Down With Power"  contains 27 chapters, each focused on an element of Freedom. From the "Zero Aggression Principle" to "TSA", each is given a thorough examination from the Libertarian perspective.   It was my pleasure to have narrated this work for LNS. Brian Wilson