The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
January 6” in a nutshell: Leftists trying to silence criticism and peaceful protest. Forever, in America.
Biden didn’t address the nation yesterday morning. He addressed his own party. Half the country can go to hell, as far as he’s concerned. Right back at you, creepy Joe. I am waiting for the divorce.
No, Harris and Biden, you are wrong. “January 6”, whatever that means, is NOT another Pearl Harbor or 9/11. YOU two, and the people you work for, are another Pearl Harbor and 9/11. You are destroying our economy, our culture and our Bill of Rights — with a ruthlessness and recklessness that even the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 could never have envisioned.
Snowflake tyrans onf MSNBC, CNN and at the NY Times and Washington Post are scared of a real insurrections. It’s so easy to scream and shake fists over a FAKE insurrection.
As Ed Mazlish wrote on Facebook: If they want to call it an insurrection, they need to charge and convict on counts of sedition. Given that hundreds of people are still locked in jail a year later without having been charged, let alone convicted, of sedition, the only insurrectionists today are the ones falsely crying “insurrection.”
Assess the moral status of people who want rapists, murderers and looters released without bail while peaceful 2020 election protesters (guilty of misdemeanors, at worst) are jailed indefinitely, without due process. THESE are your friends and relatives who support Democrats, leftists and Bidenistas. They are the problem. Stop complaining about Biden. Look at the people around you who are doing this to us!
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Thursday on CNN’s “Situation Room” that downplaying what happened during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was “its own form of violence.”
TRANSLATION: “If you don’t agree with my characterization of something, then you are committing an act of violence.” Violence, of course, is against the law. So if you don’t agree with me — off to prison camp with you.
If you don’t think these people are dangerous tyrants who are a real and present threat to your liberty, and potentially to your life, then I cannot help you.
In “Socialism: An Economic and Socialogical Analysis,” Ludwig von Mises lays out the case against socialism and its varying forms. In focusing on human persons and their wide-ranging motives, Mises’ methodology set him apart in 1922. Nearly a century later, the majority of mainstream economists still fail to appreciate the degree to which their discipline ought to rest on a more sophisticated view of human nature. Even as we might wish him to deploy a more nuanced morality in service of his arguments, Mises nonetheless helps us see the discipline’s ongoing failure to comprehend the complexity of human action and the inspiration for socialist dreams.
Praxeology and Order
Mises asserted praxeology as the foundation of all the social sciences “resting on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals.” Therefore for Mises, “(A)ll rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks . . . .” and “all rational action is economic.” Economics, and indeed all social science, concerns the analysis of individuals’ choices and preferences, distinct from society. Society is primarily a consequence—not a cause—of our individual reality.
At the most basic level, Marxism reverses the order. The Marxist methodology of dialectical materialism purports to show how society grows and responds under highly constrained economic circumstances, and the way that History itself—and capitalism in particular—moves inexorably toward communism. By contrast, Mises argues that society emerges through the sum of all the individual actions of reasoning human beings, each with their own motives, status, and relative power. In viewing the human person in this manner, Mises established his methodology as individualist—that is, he ranked the work of understanding individual behavior as central to good social science, without negating external factors in forming an understanding.In a sharp distinction from even contemporary “capitalist economics,” Mises does not confine economic action to that which is profit-driven. By daily experience, we know reactions to price signals in purchasing decisions can be guided by non-economic objectives: buying for someone else’s benefit can be considered a market-based decision with a non-economic end goal (one for which profit is not the sole objective). Not-for-profits can procure goods and services for those in need, which require the price system of profits to enable procurement in the first instance; even as profit is not the end goal, it is essential to the means. Decisions for such charitable work are fully in keeping with economics in a Misesean view, because his account of the human person allows for a much richer assessment than the prevalent economic prism of profit maximizer or “homo economicus.”
An Anthropology for Real People
As contemporary scholar Samuel Gregg writes, the fundamental error of Marxism is anthropological. Method and anthropology are inseparable. By employing a methodology that denies the primacy of agency, Marxist thought fundamentally ignores the source of dignity in each human being: “According to Marx, the political faith of the individual depends on the class to which he belongs,” as Mises pointed out. Because thought is determined by class, we have “a remarkably convenient theory which saves the Marxian the trouble of arguing with them (opponents).” Some contemporary arguments, on race, nationalism, and gender issues, for example, demonstrate the old Marxist logic applied in fields well beyond traditional class analysis. Hoping to better understand the realities of power relations, a few classical liberals are seriously engaging relatively recent theories such as intersectionality, offering an alternative to an appropriated Marxist presupposition. By contrast, Mises elevates the constituent element of every group—the individual—proceeding not to negate a host of influences such as racial constructs or nationality, but to understand them from the vantage point of the person.
While Mises rejects natural law or any attempt to assert a moral basis for the preference of his methodology over that of Marx, his method nevertheless works within the bounds of natural law theory. In Socialism, Mises seeks only to make utilitarian arguments for free markets, but his methodology assumes certain facts about the nature of the human person, giving it a normative component that is anthropological in nature. Mises’s adherence to utilitarianism is perhaps based on a narrow view of natural law as “religious:” The Christian tradition of natural law and the existence of an “autonomous rational morality” identified by Aristotle are distinct, even if complementary in ways he does not quite recognize. Praxeology demands that autonomous moral reality and utilitarianism cannot offer that fully developed moral system. In a way, Socialism’s arguments contain the substance for deeper moral justifications, an endeavor Mises does not set out for himself in the book.
The Kingdom of Ends
Mises states “[a]ll economic activity depends on ends,” which “dominate the economy and alone give it meaning.” Socialism seeks coordination by the state bureaucracy as a replacement to social relations in a condition of economic liberty. Free markets rely on freely set prices, providing the measures by which we determine human needs and wants. Without the profit indicator, the means to morally improve the conditions of oneself and one’s family cannot be undertaken to the mutual benefit of others in systems of free exchange.
Mises’ rejection of socialism is not in contrast to an extreme Randian individualism, but to a just system of social cooperation within societies: “For the Marxists talk glibly about expressing the will of society, without giving the slightest hint how ‘society’ can proceed to will and act.” Mises uses the term “social” without reference to socialism on approximately 1,000 occasions in the book, demonstrating his concern with markets as a social institution for mediating just economic cooperation, and clarifying that it does not merely serve as a setting for profit maximization. Mises does not ignore the validity of action by communities through organs created by individuals in freely chosen collectives, working toward their aims as a group—praxeology helps us understand them as both social and economic activity.
What Socialism is Not
With the contemporary disparaging use of the term socialist in current discourse by some on the Right (whom Mises would strongly oppose), it is important to understand his definition: “The essence of socialism is this: All the means of production are in the exclusive control of the organized community. This and this alone is Socialism. All other definitions are misleading.” For Mises, socialism is all-encompassing, to be achieved for the original Marxist as an historical stage in an inevitable process.
Contemporary American socialism displays the defects of Marxism: rejecting the classical liberal position of the market as a social institution and seeking to use the centralized state for primacy over the individual—even while professing a commitment to liberal individualism on specifically-defined social questions of race and gender. The methodological shortcomings are not the domain of the Left, as evidenced by nationalism’s slide toward national socialism. Mises loathed racism—a social disposition all too easily enabled by the socialist presumption that the collective ought to be the master of individual fate.
Contemporary Importance
Mises explains that “socialist policy uses two methods to accomplish its purposes; the first aims directly at converting society to Socialism. The second aims only indirectly at this conversion by destroying the social order which is based on private ownership.” It is the second form that Mises identifies as more insidious, underhanded, and destructive.
A replacement of ownership with control and a variation on the original idea of class conflict are characteristics of the new socialism. Instead of the state ownership of means of production, it seeks to extract wealth by state control. The tools for control are the myriad of regulatory and legislative options held by the monopoly of state power. Mises alludes to the prospect of some of these phenomena in his day on the issue of small property holders in his chapter “Particular Forms of Socialism.” The “peasant and craftsman” can keep what they have and are fitted into “the machinery of the socialist community in such a way that the production and evaluation of their products will be regulated by the economic administration while their property remains nominally theirs.”
Only a staunch moral argument in favor of markets will combat this, as the appeal of socialist rhetoric rests on its ability to persuade society of its ability to deliver greater welfare to all. A “loss of this conviction would signify the end of socialism.” Mises’ central moral claim is that the public welfare cannot be respected without a methodology that respects all as individuals, and that socialism will inevitably destroy the individual.
Mises matters today because his method enables far more than a utilitarian calculation of the whole in building a just society. His praxeology offers a way to understand every person within our society at a deeper level than the “profit-motive,” and you can pick up Socialism to learn about it.
Garreth Bloor serves as a Council Member of the IRR, the oldest classical liberal think tank in South Africa and is a former executive politician in the country. He resides in Toronto working on trade and investment into Africa markets.
One, we need a Speaker of the House who actually assumes responsibility for keeping the U.S. Capitol safe. We did not have that on 1/6/21.
Two, you create political unrest when you perpetuate election fraud, one-party rule, and totalitarian dictatorship. The more you enslave people, the more they will rebel and the less they feel they have to lose.
American Marxists and American fascists who dominate our culture, media and government will commemorate January 6 because it’s in alignment with their toxic, depraved and violent ideologies. As with absolutely everything else: THEY, the leftists, are guilty of EVERYTHING they accuse their opponents of doing.
Democrats are a fusion of Communism and fascism. Their entire program is based on shaming, silencing and the use of violent force to achieve their collectivist, utterly unconstitutional goals. The Democratic Party is the real enemy of American freedom, not President Trump, Sean Hannity nor any of the others the toxic twits in power will villify on their Stalinesque holiday, January 6. The movement they have created has the potential to be even MORE destructiveurrectists than the Communism and fascism we saw in the 20th Century. Don’t minimize the real threat to YOUR personal freedom and prosperity.
Why don’t America’s socialists and Communists simply leave? And go to Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea? Because they are not interested mainly in imposing “utopia.” They are interested mainly in destroying America. American leftists loathe freedom, they loathe themselves and, at the core, they loathe human happiness. They stay in America not merely because they’re hypocrites, but because they — in their malignant sickness– enjoy watching our destruction.
OneAmerica is a large life insurance company in Indianapolis. The chief executive officer, Scott Davison just announced that judging by policy claims Americans of working age are suddenly dying in unprecedented numbers. He reports that all life insurance companies are experiencing a 40% rise in the death rate. “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic. So 40% is just unheard of.” These are not Covid deaths. They are deaths from conditions caused by the vaccine.
Brian Tabor, president of the Indiana Hospital Association, reports a corresponding huge increase in hospital caseloads, not from Covid but from all sorts of things, things known to be risks of the vaccine.
In other words, the extraordinary increase in deaths and hospitalizations is associated with the Covid vaccines.
For the past year and perhaps longer I have reported the findings and predictions of top medical scientists who are not on Big Pharma or Fauci’s payrolls. The findings of these scientists have been suppressed by Fauci and the presstitutes. In a nutshell, the vaccine undermines the human immune system and turns it into a weapon against your own body. The result is heart attacks and the range of adverse effects now associated with the vaccine. An exasperated and angry Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi explains the process here:
A number of experts have concluded that a large percentage of the vaccinated are going to experience disability and death. As Dr. Bhakdi explains, it doesn’t happen to everyone right away. Some experience death or disability immediately, some a month later, some a year afterwards, and some over a longer time.
As I understand it, the rate of death and disability of Covid vaccinated people will rise with time. If the process is rapid, one consequence could be societal collapse. If the process is slow, then those populations most vaccinated would experience numerical decline.
Clearly, the vaccination drive was a huge mistake, or an intentional population control operation. But now that it is known that there is more danger in the vaccine than in the virus, all vaccination should be stopped.
Censorship of renowned medical experts must stop so that we can escape marketing propaganda and come to an understanding of the true situation.
Covid was not deadly except for untreated persons with comorbidities. The current variant, Omicron, appears to be milder than the common cold, and as the vaccine does not protect against either, its use is completely irresponsible. Humanity will be paying the cost of the mRNA vaccines for decades to come.
It doesn’t abide by the U.S. Constitution, and that’s dangerous.
Deep State Debauchery Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times more >
OPINION:
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
Readers of this column know that the CIA tortures people in foreign lands, believing that somehow torture committed outside the United States cannot subject its officers to prosecution. We know this because of recent revelations in hearings in the military courtrooms at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling the truth before, during and after they repeatedly invaded his body cavities and nearly froze him to death in a walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
These revelations were not challenged by the military and civilian prosecutors.
There are many CIA actions that the agency wishes we did not know about, such as the wars it has fought, its physical presence in every statehouse in the U.S. and its domestic spying on Americans without search warrants. When Gen. David Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he admitted in a talk he thought was secret, but which was secretly recorded, that the CIA has access to all microchips in your home.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Thus, if you own a microwave oven, the CIA is quite literally in your kitchen. If you use a cellphone or drive a car, the CIA quite literally goes wherever you do.
No statute authorizes CIA torture or domestic spying. In fact, the Constitution and treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory and federal statutes prohibit both types of behavior. Yet, CIA agents engage in criminal behavior because they can — and because they know that they can get away with it.
Over the Christmas holiday, CIA officials leaked to friendly reporters at CNN their determination to overhaul their network of spies, cease paramilitary actions — which presumably include torture — and return to the “quiet statecraft” of spying on “adversaries” like China and Russia. Then the CIA learned that it has failed to recruit enough Mandarin and Russian-speaking agents to do so. Criminal and inept.
We also learned shortly before the Christmas holiday from testimony at Guantanamo Bay that nine FBI agents were formally transferred to the CIA so that they’d be free to engage in torture themselves without damaging the reputation of the FBI. CIA agents apparently don’t care about their employer’s reputation the way their bosses do.
During the Christmas holiday, former FBI agents revealed that they and others had secretly gone undercover and pretended to be part of the mobs that engaged in the riots in 2020 in Portland, Oregon. There, 200 folks were arrested in a six-month period and charged with various crimes, ranging from unlawful assembly to obstruction of justice to using violence to destroy government property.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When FBI agents go undercover, their task is to blend in with the folks they are secretly monitoring. That often means committing the same crimes as these folks. Thus, 100 of the 200 cases were dropped because the FBI agents who were sent to join the mob and pretended to be part of it failed adequately to chronicle what they saw.
Or so their now-retired former colleagues say. We will, of course, never know the true reasons why these cases were dropped. Nor will we know which of these crimes were actually provoked or committed by FBI agents.
We know from reports by the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 2020, and from courtroom files in the FBI-created conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, that the FBI never prosecutes its own when they are undercover and commit crimes, and, in fact, it regularly
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling the truth before, during and after they repeatedly invaded his body cavities and nearly froze him to death in a walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
These revelations were not challenged by the military and civilian prosecutors.
There are many CIA actions that the agency wishes we did not know about, such as the wars it has fought, its physical presence in every statehouse in the U.S. and its domestic spying on Americans without search warrants. When Gen. David Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he admitted in a talk he thought was secret, but which was secretly recorded, that the CIA has access to all microchips in your home.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Thus, if you own a microwave oven, the CIA is quite literally in your kitchen. If you use a cellphone or drive a car, the CIA quite literally goes wherever you do.
No statute authorizes CIA torture or domestic spying. In fact, the Constitution and treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory and federal statutes prohibit both types of behavior. Yet, CIA agents engage in criminal behavior because they can — and because they know that they can get away with it.
Over the Christmas holiday, CIA officials leaked to friendly reporters at CNN their determination to overhaul their network of spies, cease paramilitary actions — which presumably include torture — and return to the “quiet statecraft” of spying on “adversaries” like China and Russia. Then the CIA learned that it has failed to recruit enough Mandarin and Russian-speaking agents to do so. Criminal and inept.
We also learned shortly before the Christmas holiday from testimony at Guantanamo Bay that nine FBI agents were formally transferred to the CIA so that they’d be free to engage in torture themselves without damaging the reputation of the FBI. CIA agents apparently don’t care about their employer’s reputation the way their bosses do.
During the Christmas holiday, former FBI agents revealed that they and others had secretly gone undercover and pretended to be part of the mobs that engaged in the riots in 2020 in Portland, Oregon. There, 200 folks were arrested in a six-month period and charged with various crimes, ranging from unlawful assembly to obstruction of justice to using violence to destroy government property.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When FBI agents go undercover, their task is to blend in with the folks they are secretly monitoring. That often means committing the same crimes as these folks. Thus, 100 of the 200 cases were dropped because the FBI agents who were sent to join the mob and pretended to be part of it failed adequately to chronicle what they saw.
Or so their now-retired former colleagues say. We will, of course, never know the true reasons why these cases were dropped. Nor will we know which of these crimes were actually provoked or committed by FBI agents.
We know from reports by the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 2020, and from courtroom files in the FBI-created conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, that the FBI never prosecutes its own when they are undercover and commit crimes, and, in fact, it regularly permits its undercover sources to commit crimes with impunity.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is the destruction of personal liberty in America by the very folks we have hired to protect it. CIA and FBI agents have all taken the same oath as I did when I became a judge — to abide by the Constitution. The folks who torture, spy on without warrant, and create and participate in criminal behavior have
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling the truth before, during and after they repeatedly invaded his body cavities and nearly froze him to death in a walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
These revelations were not challenged by the military and civilian prosecutors.
There are many CIA actions that the agency wishes we did not know about, such as the wars it has fought, its physical presence in every statehouse in the U.S. and its domestic spying on Americans without search warrants. When Gen. David Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he admitted in a talk he thought was secret, but which was secretly recorded, that the CIA has access to all microchips in your home.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Thus, if you own a microwave oven, the CIA is quite literally in your kitchen. If you use a cellphone or drive a car, the CIA quite literally goes wherever you do.
No statute authorizes CIA torture or domestic spying. In fact, the Constitution and treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory and federal statutes prohibit both types of behavior. Yet, CIA agents engage in criminal behavior because they can — and because they know that they can get away with it.
Over the Christmas holiday, CIA officials leaked to friendly reporters at CNN their determination to overhaul their network of spies, cease paramilitary actions — which presumably include torture — and return to the “quiet statecraft” of spying on “adversaries” like China and Russia. Then the CIA learned that it has failed to recruit enough Mandarin and Russian-speaking agents to do so. Criminal and inept.
We also learned shortly before the Christmas holiday from testimony at Guantanamo Bay that nine FBI agents were formally transferred to the CIA so that they’d be free to engage in torture themselves without damaging the reputation of the FBI. CIA agents apparently don’t care about their employer’s reputation the way their bosses do.
During the Christmas holiday, former FBI agents revealed that they and others had secretly gone undercover and pretended to be part of the mobs that engaged in the riots in 2020 in Portland, Oregon. There, 200 folks were arrested in a six-month period and charged with various crimes, ranging from unlawful assembly to obstruction of justice to using violence to destroy government property.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When FBI agents go undercover, their task is to blend in with the folks they are secretly monitoring. That often means committing the same crimes as these folks. Thus, 100 of the 200 cases were dropped because the FBI agents who were sent to join the mob and pretended to be part of it failed adequately to chronicle what they saw.
Or so their now-retired former colleagues say. We will, of course, never know the true reasons why these cases were dropped. Nor will we know which of these crimes were actually provoked or committed by FBI agents.
We know from reports by the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 2020, and from courtroom files in the FBI-created conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, that the FBI never prosecutes its own when they are undercover and commit crimes, and, in fact, it regularly permits its undercover sources to commit crimes with impunity.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is the destruction of personal liberty in America by the very folks we have hired to protect it. CIA and FBI agents have all taken the same oath as I did when I became a judge — to abide by the Constitution. The folks who torture, spy on without warrant, and create and participate in criminal behavior have
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling the truth before, during and after they repeatedly invaded his body cavities and nearly froze him to death in a walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
These revelations were not challenged by the military and civilian prosecutors.
There are many CIA actions that the agency wishes we did not know about, such as the wars it has fought, its physical presence in every statehouse in the U.S. and its domestic spying on Americans without search warrants. When Gen. David Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he admitted in a talk he thought was secret, but which was secretly recorded, that the CIA has access to all microchips in your home.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Thus, if you own a microwave oven, the CIA is quite literally in your kitchen. If you use a cellphone or drive a car, the CIA quite literally goes wherever you do.
No statute authorizes CIA torture or domestic spying. In fact, the Constitution and treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory and federal statutes prohibit both types of behavior. Yet, CIA agents engage in criminal behavior because they can — and because they know that they can get away with it.
Over the Christmas holiday, CIA officials leaked to friendly reporters at CNN their determination to overhaul their network of spies, cease paramilitary actions — which presumably include torture — and return to the “quiet statecraft” of spying on “adversaries” like China and Russia. Then the CIA learned that it has failed to recruit enough Mandarin and Russian-speaking agents to do so. Criminal and inept.
We also learned shortly before the Christmas holiday from testimony at Guantanamo Bay that nine FBI agents were formally transferred to the CIA so that they’d be free to engage in torture themselves without damaging the reputation of the FBI. CIA agents apparently don’t care about their employer’s reputation the way their bosses do.
During the Christmas holiday, former FBI agents revealed that they and others had secretly gone undercover and pretended to be part of the mobs that engaged in the riots in 2020 in Portland, Oregon. There, 200 folks were arrested in a six-month period and charged with various crimes, ranging from unlawful assembly to obstruction of justice to using violence to destroy government property.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When FBI agents go undercover, their task is to blend in with the folks they are secretly monitoring. That often means committing the same crimes as these folks. Thus, 100 of the 200 cases were dropped because the FBI agents who were sent to join the mob and pretended to be part of it failed adequately to chronicle what they saw.
Or so their now-retired former colleagues say. We will, of course, never know the true reasons why these cases were dropped. Nor will we know which of these crimes were actually provoked or committed by FBI agents.
We know from reports by the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 2020, and from courtroom files in the FBI-created conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, that the FBI never prosecutes its own when they are undercover and commit crimes, and, in fact, it regularly permits its undercover sources to commit crimes with impunity.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is the destruction of personal liberty in America by the very folks we have hired to protect it. CIA and FBI agents have all taken the same oath as I did when I became a judge — to abide by the Constitution. The folks who torture, spy on without warrant, and create and participate in criminal behavior have
Two recent and unconnected revelations demonstrate that the deep state remains engaged, deceptive and dangerous.
Here is the backstory.
The deep state consists of those parts of the government that do not change in response to elections and are not transparent or answerable to voters.
This generally includes the intelligence and law enforcement communities, the military and diplomatic communities, and central bankers. Each has its private sector collaborators.
Some would include the judiciary. As a former member of the judiciary from one of the four states that grant life tenure to judges, I do not consider judges in the same category as CIA, FBI and other thugs — armed or flush with cash — who have their own secret agendas.
With the sole exception of the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, judges operate in public courtrooms. Whatever they do is reduced to writing and subject to an appeal or public criticism.
The deep state is well below the visible parts of government and rarely subject to public scrutiny. Its budgets are secret. And its power is rarely subject to appeal of any sort. Its two most notorious members — and the two that tormented former President Donald J. Trump — are intelligence and law enforcement. And the two best known in those communities are the CIA and the FBI.
There have been no full jury trials there since the inception 20 years ago of this George W. Bush-inspired modern-day Devil’s Island. Still, there have been hearings with juries to determine the punishment of those who have pleaded guilty to federal crimes.
In one of those hearings, we learned of four years of torture of a foreign national at the hands of the CIA, only to have its officers reveal their opinion that the torture was useless as the victim was telling the truth before, during and after they repeatedly invaded his body cavities and nearly froze him to death in a walk-in refrigerator/freezer.
These revelations were not challenged by the military and civilian prosecutors.
There are many CIA actions that the agency wishes we did not know about, such as the wars it has fought, its physical presence in every statehouse in the U.S. and its domestic spying on Americans without search warrants. When Gen. David Petraeus was the director of the CIA, he admitted in a talk he thought was secret, but which was secretly recorded, that the CIA has access to all microchips in your home.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Thus, if you own a microwave oven, the CIA is quite literally in your kitchen. If you use a cellphone or drive a car, the CIA quite literally goes wherever you do.
No statute authorizes CIA torture or domestic spying. In fact, the Constitution and treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory and federal statutes prohibit both types of behavior. Yet, CIA agents engage in criminal behavior because they can — and because they know that they can get away with it.
Over the Christmas holiday, CIA officials leaked to friendly reporters at CNN their determination to overhaul their network of spies, cease paramilitary actions — which presumably include torture — and return to the “quiet statecraft” of spying on “adversaries” like China and Russia. Then the CIA learned that it has failed to recruit enough Mandarin and Russian-speaking agents to do so. Criminal and inept.
We also learned shortly before the Christmas holiday from testimony at Guantanamo Bay that nine FBI agents were formally transferred to the CIA so that they’d be free to engage in torture themselves without damaging the reputation of the FBI. CIA agents apparently don’t care about their employer’s reputation the way their bosses do.
During the Christmas holiday, former FBI agents revealed that they and others had secretly gone undercover and pretended to be part of the mobs that engaged in the riots in 2020 in Portland, Oregon. There, 200 folks were arrested in a six-month period and charged with various crimes, ranging from unlawful assembly to obstruction of justice to using violence to destroy government property.https://bb57ef6f70a9bb0ecbfc9dac49900a63.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When FBI agents go undercover, their task is to blend in with the folks they are secretly monitoring. That often means committing the same crimes as these folks. Thus, 100 of the 200 cases were dropped because the FBI agents who were sent to join the mob and pretended to be part of it failed adequately to chronicle what they saw.
Or so their now-retired former colleagues say. We will, of course, never know the true reasons why these cases were dropped. Nor will we know which of these crimes were actually provoked or committed by FBI agents.
We know from reports by the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 2020, and from courtroom files in the FBI-created conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, that the FBI never prosecutes its own when they are undercover and commit crimes, and, in fact, it regularly permits its undercover sources to commit crimes with impunity.
What’s going on here?
What’s going on is the destruction of personal liberty in America by the very folks we have hired to protect it. CIA and FBI agents have all taken the same oath as I did when I became a judge — to abide by the Constitution. The folks who torture, spy on without warrant, and create and participate in criminal behavior have
PASSIVITY leads to depression. Thinking of yourself as “having depression” fuels your depression. You don’t “have” depression. You think and act in certain ineffective ways, and it alters your mood in a negative way. Your challenge isn’t to “get treatment” for your mood. The very phrase implies passivity. This will only make your mood worse. Your challenge is to get ACTIVE in your thinking and actions. Even if in small baby steps, to start. Passivity will break your spirit.
The corrupt media, Democrats, and Big Tech, anyone who protested the 2020 election is no different than the fools who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
On the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the corporate media is working overtime to convince the American public that Republicans as a whole stormed the nation’s beacon of democracy at the beginning of 2021 and have waged a war on all that is good and decent. While lunatics and fools did invade the Capitol last January, tens of thousands of Americans peacefully assembled to demand answers from the government about what they believed to be the sloppiest election in which they’ve ever voted.
Political violence should always be condemned, but a majority of the people present in Washington, D.C., and on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 weren’t violent. Yes, hundreds of people stormed the U.S. Capitol in a riot, but tens of thousands of people of all ages, races, backgrounds, and lifestyles gathered together that day at the Save America Rally to protest the Democrats’ sleazy election manipulation and hear from President Donald Trump.
Crowds began to form early at the White House Ellipse where Trump was scheduled to speak beginning at noon. After hours of waiting in the cold, Trump supporters finally heard from the president, who encouraged them to head to Capitol grounds and “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Following Trump’s urgings, tens of thousands of people slowly and peacefully marched to the Capitol grounds to rally at multiple planned events, all of which were permitted through the proper, official channels. Many of the peaceful protesters were unaware until the end of the day of the vandalizing and looting that had occurred inside the Capitol.
As multiple reports suggest, violence was not even considered by the vast majority of the rally attendees who simply wanted answers about what they saw as the messiest election in their lifetimes. Multiple states had used COVID-19 as an excuse to loosen absentee voting protocols, opening up a window for bad actors to push their preferred candidates to the top.
In Pennsylvania, the Democrat Party circumvented the state legislature and instead used the leftist courts to make six changes to the state’s Election Code ahead of the 2020 election. These changes included expanding mail-in voting and drop-boxes and relaxing verification standards for absentee ballots. Some key states and counties even accepted money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg through shady election-manipulating organizations designed to increase Democratic voter turnout.
These voters became even angrier when they realized how corporate media and Big Tech worked together to suppress stories that should have tarnished Joe Biden’s reputation and therefore his chances in the election. Whether the Democrats and their media cronies agree, these voters had every right to be upset and express their frustration peacefully at the feet of the government, legislators, and the system that they felt had betrayed them.
The idea that everyone who was at the Capitol grounds that day is an insurrectionist is patently and deliberately false. Yet the same corporate media outlets, Big Tech oligarchs, and Democrats who defended the arson, looting, and crime associated with the political riots after George Floyd’s death as “fiery but mostly peaceful” branded nearly everyone within a 10-mile radius of the Capitol an insurrectionist. These institutions gladly overlooked the numerous accounts of peaceful assembly, to wrongly conflate the rioters with protesters. Anyone who protested the election was no different than the horned-hat guy and the other fools willing to vandalize the U.S. Capitol.
The mischaracterizations didn’t stop in January of last year. For urging their state legislatures to listen to and take action regarding their grievances, Republicans as a whole are still being smeared by The New York Times for engaging in a so-called “bloodless, legalized form” of the Capitol riot. Just because of how they vote, Republicans are shunned for using the legal, rightful means presented before them to enact change that ensures safe and secure elections.
It is a familiar tactic often employed by the anti-Trump crowd, who use everything in their power, including political censorship, to disparage and tear down the reputations of conservatives and the former president. They think that by tarring all Republicans as Jan. 6 insurrectionists, they can prevent future GOP victories, and therefore prevent Republicans from taking action to ensure that the sloppiness of 2020 is never repeated.
For those of us who value liberty, these past two years have been a bad dream. It seems like we fell asleep in early 2020 and woke up in 1984! They said that if we just put on a mask and stayed home for two weeks, we’d be able to return to normal. The two weeks came and went and instead of going back to normal they added more restrictions. These past two years have been a story of moving goalposts and “experts” like Anthony Fauci constantly contradicting themselves.
Early on, in April 2020, I warned in an article titled “Next in Coronavirus Tyranny: Forced Vaccinations and ‘Digital Certificates,’” that the ultimate goal of the “two weeks” crowd was to force vaccines and a “vaccine passport” on Americans.
My concerns were at the time written off as just another conspiracy theory. But less than a year later that “conspiracy theory” became conspiracy fact. I am not happy about being right on this. The introduction of vaccine passports was from the beginning my worst nightmare. The idea that you must “show your papers” to participate in society is a concept that is totally opposed to a free society. It is inhuman.
The history of these past two years is that the worst ideas have been adopted by force and anyone questioning those ideas has been suppressed by force. We learned recently that Dr. Fauci and the director of the National Institutes of Health conspired to deliver a “quick and devastating take-down” of the esteemed scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration. Were the Great Barrington scientists horribly wrong? Fauci and his boss could not have cared less. They were not interested in a debate. Their only goal was to shut down any opposing views. That’s not science. It’s ideology, politics, and probably self-interest.
As my son Rand said on a recent Liberty Report, thousands of people died because Fauci refused to consider the proven effectiveness of natural immunity against Covid. He and his colleagues were determined to deny any outpatient treatments and insisted on vaccines as the only way out. Now, as we see the vaccines performing so poorly versus natural immunity, their whole strategy lies in tatters. Will anyone apologize to the relatives of all those who died?
When we look back at these two years, hopefully one thing that will be remembered is how the institutions of state power have all lost their credibility. They have been exposed as frauds and worse.
In a recent massively popular Joe Rogan interview with Dr. Robert Malone – inventor of the mRNA technology that is the backbone of the “vaccines” – Malone discusses the disturbing concept of mass formation psychosis, where fear and manipulation are used to drive a society mad in the service of a group of elites with an agenda. We saw it in Germany in the 1930s.
As Charles Mackay wrote in the 19th century about the madness of crowds, humans go insane in groups but recover one at a time.
What is to be done to defeat tyranny in 2022? We must continue to tell the truth. The truth is winning and the liars are losing. One by one their lies are being exposed. But it is not an easy task. Each of us in 2022 can do a little something to promote truth. Do what you can. The rewards are great!
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 