Pete Hendrickson on NDAA
I want to take a moment to talk about this year’s presidential candidates. I hope not to offend, but deem this to be a most serious business, and so must be frank.
Please, please, don’t let yourself be taken in by the “national security” nonsense being used by every venal interest sitting in a well-feathered nest and wanting nothing more than the preservation of the status quo in which they are so comfortable, and on behalf of which they will shamelessly lie.
There IS no threat to America from the outside. Assertions to the contrary are just efforts to frighten you into giving up your liberties and your resources which will just end up in the pockets of others who laugh all the way to the bank.
PLEASE read every word of the (not really so lengthy) doc you will find at http://losthorizons.com/TheShield.pdf.
Understand that Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, John Huntsman, Rick Perry and Barak Obama all are interested in nothing but preserving the same conditions of corruption by which the country has been bankrupted and a police-state is rapidly being locked down on you and yours.
They all also want to continue ensuring that a good chunk of your money is spent on making widows and orphans in foreign lands by killing “others” who actually have never raised a hand against you. This prompts more and more of those “others” to express anger against us, which is used to justify the continuation of this suicidal spiral of evil, and so on. (An important side effect of this is that a good part of your money sticks to the hands of the arms-merchants and middle-men involved in the dynamic.)
Bizarrely, our own religious concepts are exploited in the effort to sustain this murderous evil, as though Jesus preached for “pre-emptive war”, or that we should deem ourselves to be so exalted as to have been made the “Sword of God” (something every shitty little bully and tyrant across history has megalomaniacally– or just cynically– asserted as a rationalization for doing what it wanted and thought it could get away with in service to one or another of its interests or those of its clients).
The latest manifestation of this madness is in, for instance, Lindsey Graham and Carl Levin crowing about Americans now being liable to be seized by the military and disappeared into perpetual black-hole custody without ever seeing a lawyer or a court-room, under the provision just signed into law as the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
It is argued that someone who has been (unilaterally) designated as an “enemy combatant” by some executive actor is not entitled to such niceties as due process. But even leaving aside the illegitimacy of the notion that because someone is, or is called an “enemy combatant” he can be seized– not in the heat of battle but as a “law enforcement” operation– and imprisoned indefinitely without due process, let’s remember that one of the purposes of “due process” is to give someone a chance to prove that he is NOT an enemy combatant, or properly subject to some particular provision of law…
The only thing accomplished by legislation like this is to provide a fig-leaf of “authority” for the government to “disappear” people whom it CAN’T prove legitimately merit the treatment to which they will be subjected.
As I said, it is madness, and any vote for any of these maniacs is a vote for more the same. Only Ron Paul stands against this insanity.
I appreciate your giving this serious thought, as I firmly believe that we stand right now on the verge of a frightful abyss.
-Pete
Lion of the Desert
Lion of the Desert
An unforgettable, sooo relevant, heroic movie…
that few people have even HEARD of ___ 10/10
For this one-of-a-kind cinematic experience and for the review, I have Dean Hazel to thank. He’s been 
after me for a while to sling some ink at Lion of the Desert, and I’m terribly sad I hadn’t watched this 1981 movie many years ago. Why is this movie an ‘Essential?’ So many reasons. But in a nutshell, it treats Arabs as human beings while showing how the Italian fascist colonial power of the early 20th century committed a full-frontal holocaust—complete with concentration camps, torture, rape, terror bombing, and WMDs—on the indigenous people of Libya.[1]
Moreover, the movie treats Arabs as heroic, rational, civilized beings that we can look up to and find inspiration from. Particularly, the person of Omar Mukhtar (Anthony Quinn), who was born in a small town near Tobruk, Libya, in 1862, and was working as a spiritual teacher of the Quran when the Italians came to conquer Libya in 1911. At the age of 49, Mukhtar became the resistance leader of a desert force that inflicted loss after loss upon the Italian forces who came to subdue him; he knew the terrain and used it to his advantage over the often young and ill-prepared Italians.
Nuremberg Principles?
Nuremberg Principles?
Good-government reminder from caring citizen
by Gerhard Fuerst
Scene from Nuremberg Trials
Editor’s Note: I was cc’d by Gerhard on this note to his federale reps and senators. As an immigrant from Germany[1] after the war, Gerhard has a special sensitivity to war and war crimes. Whether or not the United States government follows the humanitarian Nuremberg Principles (set forth under United Nations auspices in 1950 after the post WW2 Nuremberg Trials) or via the Geneva Conventions (whose ancestry heralds back to the founding of the Red Cross). Note: in both cases the United States government is a signatory, in fact a leading advocate, of the legal documentation.
It is interesting to read up on both sets of documentation. It is also useful to consider that historically countrymen of the state(s) who win a war are rarely subjected to war crime trials. [But this is America, by golly, and we should be leaders! Let's at least waterboard Cheney and Rumsfeld. — ed ]
Letter Sent to Rep. Fred Upton, R-MI, Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, and Senator Carl Levin, D-MI
For your most urgent consideration! Questions:
Have the Nuremberg Principles of 1950 been adopted by the USA and ratified by the US Senate?
Are these Nuremberg Principles still applicable?
If they are still applicable and binding, how under these circumstances do you see the past and current actions (ours and those of others) in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Libya, Syria, etc…or in other areas of national or international conflict.
If they are no longer applicable and binding, when and why, and under what circumstances were they set aside, and by whom, or on whose orders?
I would like to have an official response in writing in the near future. I thank you most profoundly for taking time to attend to this matter!
Gerhard A. Fuerst
Adjunct Professor of Social Science, ret.
Western Michigan University
701 Academy Street
Kalamazoo, MI 49007-4681
Tel: 269-3451422
G1st@aol.com
Text of Nuremberg Principles appears on Coffee Coaster guest column here:
http://www.brianrwright.com/Coffee_Coaster/06_Guest/2011/110822_Nuremberg.html
Rumsfeld to be Tried for Torture
And veteran protest
from IndictBushNow.org
Rumsfeld must face trial for torture, Court of Appeal rules
Bush official does not have personal immunity for torture
Indict Bush Now reaches international TV audience
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It is hard to overstate the significance of the ruling bythe US Court of Appeals that Donald Rumsfeld will face trial for torture. Every Bush-era official who committed crimes, including authorizing torture, has to be deeply alarmed.
The movement for accountability has entered a new, decisive stage and we are committed to stepping up the momentum.
Please make a much needed donation so that IndictBushNow can do this critical work.
Here is what has happened:
The court ruled on Tuesday that two U.S. citizens who worked for a private security firm in Iraq can proceed to take Donald Rumsfeld to trial for the torture they assert they endured during months of imprisonment in 2006 in a prison set up by the Pentagon at a military base near Baghdad’s airport..
The two men say they were arrested and then brutally tortured after they tried to expose bribery and corruption in the private security firm that was on the Pentagon payroll. They informed U.S. authorities and began cooperating with them to expose bribery and corruption. In early 2006 they were unexpectedly arrested and sent to the prison at the US military base Camp Cropper located near Baghdad’s airport.
God and Country?
As many Americans, I’ve tended until recently to put out of my mind the actual effects of aerial bombardment on, you know, people, especially when the bombs are dropped by the American military or its allies over there. It’s just too easy to attend to other matters, to focus on our brave boys doing all the work, flying the planes, risking being shot down, and so on. How many times have the media shown the aftermath, on the ground, of an aerial bombing?
Once I became ready to face the harsh reality, it took a microsecond to grasp that being bombed from aircraft, in the city or the country, is probably the most horrific holy hell any living being can go through. Your screaming children writhing from shards of glass, people crushed or buried alive by falling concrete and steel, appendages torn off in an instant, then with the incendiaries like napalm—esp. napalm-B[1] coming along in the Vietnam Warcrime era—people’s lives ending in a slow, excruciating fireball of goo. [Speaking of Vietnam and antipersonnel weapons, millions of the ingeniously sadistic CBU (cluster bomb unit) 24s were dropped from US aircraft (mostly via B-52s and B-57s from undetectable altitudes).[2]][3]
So just wondering what any of my readers think about aerial bombing as an act of terror… (?)
Libertarian Alternative Government?
Libertarian Alternative Government
Modest proposal to the LP of Michigan, Mar 2011
“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any … government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it…”
or to fire the dipwads and find someone else to do the job.
Background
Probably four to six months ago, I was moving around the Web and saw a Google ad for Panarchy South Jersey, so I clicked it and started reading. Panarchy? Hmmm. I had not really heard of the concept, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and sure enough it’s been around a while. Two sentences from the Wiki article, with the heading “Panarchy as freely chosen government:”
“Panarchy is a conceptual term first coined by the Belgian botanist and economist Paul Emile de Puydt in 1860…. In his 1860 article “Panarchy” de Puydt, who also expressed support for laissez-faire economics, applied the concept to the individual’s right to choose any form of government without being forced to move from their current locale.”
Whoa!
Amazingly enough, panarchy thus defined came to me as a revelation and an inspiration, I contacted the proprietor of the South Jersey site, Dwight Johnson (http://governmentbycontract.com/) and we began a correspondence. I really haven’t developed my own ideas much more than that, but I have written a couple of columns in the Coffee Coaster that discuss the idea of freely choosing one’s government(s).
###
Please comment freely, if you post it I will no doubt approve it. Editor, Brian Wright
Free Pete and Kevin
Freedom Fighter Support Network
Now is the time to pick your favorite political prisoners and make their freedom your priority
ref. Pete Hendrickson, Kevin Innes
Sometimes I sound like a broken record, but on these matters of helping the patriots on the leading edge of the freedom movement —that is, in jail—I’m a one-trick pony. I’ve stated elsewhere that each freedom-movement individual[1] who has some form of earnings and remains out of coercive-government custody needs to adopt at least one, preferably more, person who isn’t so fortunate… and actively help—with funds and with moral support—these brave men and women on the front lines of the libertarian resistance.
My two guys are Pete Hendrickson, author of Cracking the Code: The fascinating truth about taxation in America, and William Kevin Innes, head of the Liberty Dollar store in Asheville, NC. Pete has been convicted in a kangaroo fed court in which the judge literally lied to the jury about the tax law (and refused to allow the jury to read the applicable law). He is serving a sentence in Milan, Michigan, working on his appeal. Kevin is being held as a flight risk (!) after an arrest following a federal raid on and confiscation of the Liberty Dollar facilities. — Brian Wright, Coffee Coaster Proprietor
2d Thoughts on Old Glory
Second Thoughts on Old Glory
Time to lay the nation-state to rest
by Brian Wright
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
— John Lennon
I think, in America, anyway, yes. The bad guys have stolen the symbol that used to mean liberty and constitutional government, and they use it to justify the most heinous crimes… inside our country and out.
What brought on the second take… [more]
Statement of Independence
From the column Panarchy Papers, Part 3:
Declaration of Freedom and State Severance
As a mature human person, I declare and assert my full natural freedom to live as I choose without initiating force (aggressing) on others and without others aggressing on me. I declare and assert my freedom voluntarily to contract—or not—with any agency, company, or person for all social services I desire. I recognize no authority claimed by any agency of coercion; “coercion” = aggression = initiation of physical force. Specifically, I do not grant authority to any coercive government. I accept no coercive infringement on my freedom to earn a living, to travel, to associate with others, to express ideas, to assemble, to keep and bear arms, or on any other action of mine that is nonaggressive and consensual.
Accordingly, I claim the moral justification and prerogative—the “right”—to voluntarily join—or not—with other human persons peacefully to cooperate for any of the above security and social services.
The presumption of freedom entails that a government obtain its just powers solely from the consent of the governed. In the absence of an individual’s freely given consent, a government has no authority over an individual. In a relationship between a coercive government and an individual, consent by the individual to the government’s authority—in the absence of a written agreement signed without duress by the individual—must be assumed not to have been freely given. Therefore, no valid contract exists, or has ever existed, between a coercive government and an individual, particularly concerning the individual’s payment for services or obedience to coercive government measures.
When an individual—through ignorance or a reluctance to deny the authority of a coercive government—has long yielded to that government’s rules and power, it is desirable that the individual publicly declare whether he explicitly consents to or explicitly does not consent to that government’s authority. Even if the individual has made no arrangements for services of a noncoercive governing alternative, it is desirable that he publicly declare and record his statement of severance of the coercive government… out of simple courtesy, and to help prevent the coercive government from assuming it may rightly or legally continue to aggress upon him as before.
Whether or not an individual publicly declares his independence from a coercive government and whether or not an individual separating from a coercive government has made alternative arrangements with another government, the coercive government may not initiate force upon the individual to compel performance of any specific act of a contract. No valid contract exists between an individual and any agency of coercion, especially government. Indeed, the natural moral law of nonaggression requires that no body of human beings —governmental or private—may coerce other human beings.
Specific Government Relationship [This is USG]
Although the United States Constitution was a substantial achievement in limiting government aggression on individuals, thru the decades US federal government aggression has grown to catastrophic levels. The current government of the United States has reached a threshold of coercion that requires action: it has abrogated the Constitution through undeclared wars, mass detentions, mass torture and murder of civilians, assumption of dictatorial powers in all areas of production and trade, confiscation of wealth, invasion of privacy, conduct of secret programs for torture and/or murder of individuals, destruction of nature, and massive wealth transfer from productive persons to a privileged oligarchy of financial interests.
Because of the extended unconstitutional behavior of the United States Government (USG) a state of tyranny now exists. We must acknowledge that the USG, in its capacity as a coercive agency, has no contractual authority over us, and never did. We hereby sever all allegiance, obedience, and payment to the USG and insist that it cease and desist from any coercive actions toward indviduals. Egregious violations of the nonaggression principle by any government official or persons hired by coercive government are subject to prosecution by the people as petit treason.
[Final paragraph to be personalized by the declarer, pointing out any new contracted agency of protection, and probably universally containing verbiage for a nonaggression pledge and intention to be bound by cooperative standards for legal judgments in civil matters. For instance, we don't want child custody disputes to be attended by shootouts and cycles of kidnapping.]
Please let me know your thoughts on what to leave in and what to leave out.
Brian
SNaP for Christmas
All I want for Christmas is the Sacred Nonaggression Principle…
The Sacred Nonaggression Principle
Second Edition: “Mantra for a Nourishing Planet”
by Brian Wright
Copyright 2010, Freeman Press, 175 pages
Yes, the second edition—or as I prefer to call it, the “second-first” or “kindergarten” edition (SNaP II)—of the book, the Sacred Nonaggression Principle, is finished. Hopefully, March 7, 2010, will go down in history as the point when the fully viral SNaP meme was introduced to the world.
SNaP I is past. It was no slouch, but like a hitter in baseball swinging at a first bad pitch, I felt I did not really “connect” with it. Actually, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that I seemed to approach the age-old malady of human aggression as a mathematician might come at a deep problem. The effect, I feel, was to leave too many readers mystified at hello.
So that’s behind us now, and in this incarnation of the Sacred Nonaggression Principle (SNaP) I start with things we all learned from kindergarten: don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie. These “Kindergarten Rules” are the nonaggression principle (NaP) libertarians have been talking about, like, forever. But the important thing from a book-reception perspective is, “EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS IT.”
Please comment at your convenience. The SNaP, widely understood and disseminated, is essential to get humanity through the Barrier Cloud into the New Paradigm.
Wednesdays with Diether
Book Review by Brian Wright
The book… is amazing. Wednesdays with Diether is a compilation of columns Dr. H. wrote for the Kalamazoo Gazette during his years at Western. The editor breaks down the contents into three parts:
- On Campus: Notes from the ivory tower—Some humorous anecdotes as well as profound insights about the general higher education experience in America.
- English as a Second Language: Observations of an immigrant nitpicker—As it states, a light yet lively bunch of columns on English and how it’s being used and abused by students, teachers, and everyone else.
- As I See It: Observations, opinions, and anecdotes—On family and love, politics, neighborhood, political correctness, and so on.
- Memories: Of times and places past—More of Diether’s reflections on his unique life and experiences as a man of learning.
The column format is wonderful, because you can get in and get out quickly if you want to. Although you will find you want to take your leisurely time with Dr. H’s material. He’s the “friend of letters” you never met, but then you do and you realize he’s just like every ordinary guy only more so.
Please share your comments with me, especially all who know and remember this great and congenial man.