Government Trains Troops to Run American Cities

Earthhope Action Network

By Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com

Local government officials are training active duty military soldiers to run communities, re-igniting fears that troops will be used to deal with civil unrest in the event of a total economic collapse or other national emergency in a newly militarized America.

“The 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division met with City Manager Mary Corriveau, Mayor Jeff Graham and other City officials gaining insight about city infrastructure,” reports ABC 50.

“Government 101 is a new program that Fort Drum has established to learn from local officials about what it takes to run a community efficiently.”

The 10th Mountain Division is a light infantry division of the United States Army based at Fort Drum, New York that specializes in fighting under harsh terrain and weather conditions. The unit was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 for one year and then to Iraq in April 2008.

The troops are being prepared for “A sitution where in essence they will become the local government,” said Corriveau.

Watch the clip.

The program is ostensibly aimed at preparing troops to govern occupied areas of Afghanistan, but as we highlighted over the last two years, the real purpose behind the training could hit a lot closer to home.

A similar program that was announced back in September 2008 involving the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was geared around training troops who had recently returned from Afghanistan to conduct “homeland patrols” which began on October 1st of that year.

According to an Army Times report, part of the troops’ mission was to deal with “civil unrest and crowd control” by using non-lethal weapons against the American people. After the announcement caused controversy, the Army Times was forced to issue a clarification, claiming that the non-lethal weapons training was intended for use overseas, but the part about “civil unrest and crowd control,” a complete violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, was not retracted.

In November 2008, Northcom announced that over the course of the following three years, an additional 4,700 troops would be assigned for domestic homeland security missions.

The very next month, the Armed Forces Press Service initiated a propaganda campaign designed to convince the American people that deploying the 3rd Infantry Division in the United States in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act was a good thing, as fully uniformed soldiers were photographed helping to save car wreck victims, in another effort at incrementally conditioning Americans to accept troops on the streets as normal, despite the fact that it is the hallmark of corrupt dictatorships and empires in terminal decline like the former Soviet Union.

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Under the pretext of “helping” local communities short of police in difficult economic times, U.S. troops are now occupying America as the country sinks into a state of de facto martial law.

The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence.

One example occurred in Kingman Arizona, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.

During the Kentucky Derby on May 2 last year, Military Police were on patrol to deal with crowd control.

We reported on numerous other instances of militarized units being used in traffic control, checkpoints, and security procedures.

With the government preparing to seize Americans’ private pensions as the economy further deteriorates, innumerable forecasters are predicting riots and mass civil unrest once the vanishing middle class finally rises from its slumber and realizes that their entire way of life is under immediate threat.

Unless we can communicate the fact that having troops patrol the streets is not normal and in reality is a warning siren for a country in dire straights, those same troops will soon be firing non-lethal weapons at angry American citizens – or worse.

As Gerald Celente often warns, once Americans have lost everything, they will begin to lose it – rioting in massive numbers and mirroring the growing civil unrest we are already seeing in Europe as people rise up en masse in a backlash against austerity measures and governments raising the age of retirement and seizing pensions.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

Microsoft Proposes Government Licensing Internet Access

Earthhope Action Network

by Paul Joseph Watson Infowars

State should have power to block individual computers from connecting to world wide web, claims Charney

A new proposal by a top Microsoft executive would open the door for government licensing to access the Internet, with authorities being empowered to block individual computers from connecting to the world wide web under the pretext of preventing malware attacks.

Speaking to the ISSE 2010 computer security conference in Berlin yesterday, Scott Charney, Microsoft vice president of Trustworthy Computing, said that cybersecurity should mirror public health safety laws, with infected PC’s being “quarantined” by government decree and prevented from accessing the Internet.

“If a device is known to be a danger to the internet, the user should be notified and the device should be cleaned before it is allowed unfettered access to the internet, minimizing the risk of the infected device contaminating other devices,” Charney said.

Charney said the system would be a “global collective defense” run by corporations and government and would “track and control” people’s computers similar to how government health bodies track diseases.

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Invoking the threat of malware attacks as a means of dissuading or blocking people from using the Internet is becoming a common theme – but it’s one tainted with political overtones.

At the launch of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity agenda earlier this year, Democrats attempted to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Under the new proposals, not only would the government cite the threat of malware to prevent people from visiting Drudge, they would be blocked from the entire world wide web, creating a dangerous precedent by giving government the power to dictate whether people can use the Internet and effectively opening the door for a licensing system to be introduced.

Similar to how vehicle inspections are mandatory for cars in some states before they can be driven, are we entering a phase where you will have to obtain a PC health check before a government IP czar will issue you with a license, or an Internet ID card, allowing you to access the web?

Of course, the only way companies or the government could know when your system becomes infected with malware is to have some kind of mandatory software or firewall installed on every PC which sends data to a centralized hub, greasing the skids for warrantless surveillance and other invasions of privacy.

Microsoft has been at the forefront of a bid to introduce Internet licensing as a means of controlling how people access and use the world wide web, an effort that has intensified over the course of the past year.

During this year’s Economic Summit in Davos, Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, said that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.

“We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet,” he said, mirroring Charney’s rhetoric about controlling cyberspace in a public health context.

“If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance.”

“Don’t be surprised if it becomes reality in the near future,” wrote ZD Net’s Doug Hanchard on the introduction of Internet licensing . “Every device connected to the Internet will have a permanent license plate and without it, the network won’t allow you to log in.”

Just days after Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, Time Magazine jumped on the bandwagon, publishing an article by Barbara Kiviat, one of Mundie’s fellow attendees at the elitist confab, in which she wrote that the Internet was too lawless and needed “the people in charge” to start policing it with licensing measures.

Shortly after Time Magazine started peddling the proposal, the New York Times soon followed suit with a blog entitled Driver’s Licenses for the Internet?, which merely parroted Kiviat’s talking points.

Of course there’s a very good reason for Time Magazine and the New York Times to be pushing for measures that would undoubtedly lead to a chilling effect on free speech which would in turn eviscerate the blogosphere.

Like the rest of the mainstream print dinosaurs, physical sales of Time Magazine have been plummeting, partly as a result of more people getting their news for free on the web from independent sources. Ad sales for the New York Times sunk by no less than 28 per cent last year with subscriptions and street sales also falling.

As we have documented, the entire cybersecurity agenda is couched in fearsome rhetoric about virus attacks, but its ultimate goal is to hand the Obama administration similar powers over the Internet to those enjoyed by Communist China, which are routinely exercised not for genuine security concerns, but to oppress political adversaries, locate dissidents, and crush free speech.

Indeed, Internet licensing was considered by the Chinese last year and rejected for being too authoritarian, concerns apparently not shared by Microsoft.

Any proposal which allows the government to get a foot in the door on dictating who can and can’t use the Internet should be vigorously opposed because such a system would be wide open for abuse and pave the way for full licensing and top down control of the world wide web.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

Source: Infowars

Anarchy vs. Barney Fife

Earthhope Action Network

by Mark R. Crovelli Lew Rockwell

If you ever fell victim to the prejudice that people today are smarter and more intellectually sophisticated than the people of the 1^st or 13^th centuries, you need only ask your friends and neighbors about the terrifying word "anarchy" to prove to yourself that our generations are just as stupid and foolish as any others. Even mentioning the word with a straight face is bound to put your acquaintances on edge, which is remarkable in itself. But, once they recover their senses from hearing the word pronounced out loud without a clap of thunder following on its heels, they will usually offer an argument against anarchism that rivals in its sheer stupidity any arguments that the flat-Earthers ever gave in antiquity. 

It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the "criminals," (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism. 

So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable "criminals" out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt? 

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If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No "criminal" worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison. 

This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.

On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local police force. Unlike those ultra-civilized "public servants," you and I would like nothing more than to cut each other’s throats, if only the peace-loving police officers of the world weren’t holding us back. The truth, as anyone with eyes in America should be able to tell you, is precisely the reverse, since police officers and soldiers are often the most depraved perpetrators of the very crimes they claim to "protect" Americans from. The police are people just like us, after all, even if their waists are often larger, and they are capable of the same brutality as any other people. 

 

There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.

October 5, 2010

Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

 

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Child Still Expelled for Toy Gun - a Year Later

Earthhope Action Network

from NBC Miami News

Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks.

Earthhope Action Network

By Christopher Hitchens Slate

The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

 A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?

No, I am not. Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.

One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the "free exercise" of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.

It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b'peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant's penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris. A few tiny sects still cling to this disgusting ritual, which in New York a few years ago led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. On that occasion, despite calls for a ban on the practice from many Jewish doctors, the vastly overrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose an election year to say that such "free exercise" should not be interfered with. 

We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican's protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church's behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of "free exercise."

One could easily go on. The Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, and the Ku Klux Klan are all faith-based organizations and are all entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. But they are also all subject to a complex of statutes governing tax-exemption, fraud, racism, and violence, to the point where "free exercise" in the third case has—by means of federal law enforcement and stern public disapproval—been reduced to a vestige of its former self.

Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself. 

Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.

Source: Slate

The Constitution, The Articles of Confederation and Southern Independence

by Steve Belttari Earthhope Action Network

Even though the Kennedy brothers were my original instructors in state's rights (Why Not Freedom, The South Was Right), I do not agree with their strategy of a Constitutional Amendment. There is a great deal of schizophrenic thinking when it comes to the U.S. Constitution. One moment Southern Nationalists will say that the constitution created big government and all those evils associated with it, and the next moment they want to use the same constitution to limit government. It can't be both, either the government that the Constitution created was limited, or it was not.

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I have no schizophrenia whatsover on the subject matter, the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent government that the Constitution created is the antithesis of limited government. I think Southern Nationalists should focus on what would have happened to the South if the states had retained their sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. The slavocracy would have never been able to maintain the allegience of the 85% of white Southerners who didn't own slaves, so slavery would have been phased out from pressure from within the South, but instead, the North-South government that the Constitution created, caused poor white Southerners to rally behind the slavocracy, because of an outside threat (the North) to their way of life.

The South's recreation-leisure oriented life of low intensity agriculture was more conductive to limited government and the South would have had a leveling effect on the more commercial North, under the Articles of Confedration. I think Southern Nationalists should focus on these things and on their God given right to revolt against the Federalist's tyranny.

Source: Earthhope Action Network

Obama Hauls Arizona Before the UN Human Rights Council

Earthhope Action Network

By Ben Johnson Impeach Obama Campaign

 

Apparently Barack Obama is not content to make a federal case out of his immigration feud with Arizona; he just made it an international one.

The president’s first-ever report on U.S. human rights to the UN Human Rights Council contains a rich vein of offensive material. So far, one aspect has not been reported: our petty president used the situation to bash Arizona’s immigration law — and possibly transfer jurisdiction over the law from Arizona to the UN. 

Throughout the report, which sounds like an Obama campaign speech, the president discusses “the original flaw” of the U.S. Constitution, America’s tolerance for slavery, and his version of our long and despicable history of discriminating against and oppressing minorities, women, homosexuals, and the handicapped. After each complaint, he addresses how he is delivering us from ourselves, patting himself on the back for such initiatives as ending “torture,” promoting Affirmative Action, and passing health care legislation.

In his section on “Values and Immigration,” he praised the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to provide better medical care for detainees and increase “Alternatives To Detention” (e.g., letting them go). Then he turned to the one state that has had the temerity to stand in his way of fundamentally transforming the American electorate:

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

On Obama’s command, Attorney General Eric Holder has sued the State of Arizona for passing a law that he criticized without reading, and which merely upholds federal law. (He gave sanctuary cities a pass.) He now threatens an additional lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio for “racial profiling” when arresting illegal immigrants near the Mexican border.

Obama’s turns his skirmish with Jan Brewer from a states rights dispute into an international human rights cause. It also places Arizona’s law in the hands of the United Nations.

The national report is but the first step of the international government’s review process. On November 5, the United States will be examined by a troika of UN bureaucrats from France, Japan, and Cameroon (an oppressive nation which is a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference). This trio will consider three items: Obama’s self-flagellating report, reports written about America by UN tribunals or international governing bodies, and testimony from NGOs with a pronounced anti-American bias. It will also consider “voluntary pledges and commitments made by the State,” such as suspending an Arizona state law.

Then the French, Japanese, and Cameroon diplomats will draw up a plan of action for the United States to implement.

Nations are re-examined every four years. The Human Rights Council looks for voluntary compliance. However, its website asserts, “The Human Rights Council will decide on the measures it would need to take in case of persistent non-cooperation by a State with the” World Body.

When the Left cannot win at the ballot box (virtually every time), it overrules the people in the courts. Now that Obama is not sure he can prevail in the courts, he has overruled the American people by hauling Arizona and the two-thirds of Americans who support its law before the United Nations.

Source: Impeach Obama Campaign