UN Spotlights Radical Mahmoud Khalil As Keynote Speaker at UN Education Conference

The United Nations wants every girl in the world to know that the true purpose of education is to prepare for revolution. And we give the UN $18 billion for this nonsense.

  • US Contribution:
    The US is the largest single contributor to the UN, providing $18.1 billion in 2022, according to The Heritage Foundation. This includes both assessed and voluntary contributions. The UN’s total funding exceeds $74 billion, with the US being the largest contributor. 
     
    As it marks its 80th year, the United Nations is facing a major budget shortfall. The situation could worsen as the United States – the UN’s largest funder and debtor – reassesses its ties to the organization.Jul 31, 2025

I know Trump has his hands full right now,  but before his time runs out, could we please have him address the whole UN nonsense? He is the man for the job.

From  Hot Air:

UN-Backed Feminist Education Program Features Syrian Mahmoud Khalil Praising Terrorist Icon and Urging Student “Revolution”

A refresher on this Muslim fellow first: After more than three months in ICE detention, Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil returned home to the New York area after a federal judge ordered his release. NBC News’ Maya Eaglin has more.

Earlier this week, I attended Transform Education’s From Classrooms to Revolution, featuring Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil.

What’s troubling is that Transform Education is part of UNGEI, the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative. Instead of focusing on education, the event promoted student “revolution” as a moral duty and necessity. 

Khalil praised PFLP terrorist Ghassan Kanafani as an inspiration, framed education as “resistance,” and lauded Columbia’s militant campus activism and mutual aid networks that supported students during arrests. He described carving protest chants into his prison bunk, hailed students as the “moral compass” of radical change, and even preached about “positive masculinity.” 

Quotes by Kanafani:

“Imperialism has layed its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.”

Given the militancy of Columbia’s protests, it’s alarming that a women’s education program would choose Khalil as its keynote speaker.

Now I remember a time when education was presented as transformative, but the transformation was supposed to be internal to the student. Before one went out into the world to transform it, young people needed to expand their own minds, learn how to think and analyze, understand the complexities of history, and learn how to think in general. 

Khalil was famously the spokesman for the Columbia student “occupiers” who vandalized the campus and harassed Jews. His icons are Marxists, and his goal is to decolonize the West. 

How very UN of him. 

On top of it all, the very idea that the United Nations is promoting revolution is bizarre. It is, after all, an organization of sovereign nations. It happily includes some of the worst regimes in the world and even gives them spots on its human rights commissions, so it would be interesting to have the Secretary General specify exactly which countries the UN is trying to foment revolutions in. 

The very best of the swamp.

The Stench of Mike Rodgers, FBI Director Candidate – Another Swamp Rat

Mike Rodgers appears on the scene again. Benghazi? He all but buried the report and did his best to protect Hillary Clinton. There is zip being reported about what Mike Rodgers and his wife are all about.

Steve Bannon of War Room fame supports Kash Patel for the job and reported prematurely it was in the bag for him. Patel is the alternate candidate probably for the FBI Directorship. An absolute firebrand, and would torch the FBI. So about this Rodgers fellow.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and was a Michigan US Rep., is in the running to be nominated for the FBI Director. This after losing his recent run for Senate in Michigan.

“Businessman Sandy Pensler his opponent, is accusing former Rep. Mike Rogers, his opponent in the Republican primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, of protecting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the House’s Benghazi investigation.” (Washington Examiner)

Hello! Benghazi!! Anyone remember?. So I dug into Bunks Box of Golden Oldies and racked up some parts of old posts, one of many over the past ten years. He has been on the Deep State scene since at least 2014.

Note this post is 2017 – Rinse, wash and repeat for 2024.

Drumbeat for Mike Rodgers for FBI Director starts, another swamp rat

All one has to do is google “Rodgers for FBI Director” and what appears is the drumbeat Trump considers former Rep. Mike Rogers for FBI Director: report …thehill.com/. Here is why this is a terrible possibility.

Nothing smells worse than the word on the street that Mike Rodgers is up for the FBI Director position in the Trump administration. Much of this post I did back in 2014 but the stench isn’t any better today.

If there is any question about the faux Benghazi report that came out from the Intelligence Committee under the less than esteemed Chairman Rodgers, let me answer by looking at the cast of lying weasels that played a part in this. The is the fine fellow who buried the Benghazi facts.

Published on Nov 24, 2014

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning that last week’s the House Intelligence Committee’s Benghazi report, which hollowed out a number of Republican arguments on the incident, was “full of crap.”

H/T:Right Scoop with video

Let’s take a look first at Rodgers wife and just who she is and see if we can connect the dots. First as a CEO of a Defense Contractor and then hired by a lobbying firm.

 Just who Chairman Rodgers wife and her role in D.C?

CNN Transcripts” -(Full transcript at link)

GRIFFIN: Want an example? Take Kristi Clemens Rogers.

Four years ago, she married the powerful chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers.

Up until 2012, she was also the CEO of the American branch of Aegis, a defense and security contracting firm, where. according to her new employer, the law firm, Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, Kristi Rogers successfully developed and led a two-year pursuit and capture strategy to win a five-year, $10 billion contract under the Department of State’s Worldwide Protective Services program.

And, yes, it’s an area her husband’s committee has Congressional oversight, making sure diplomats and their staffs are properly protected.

She is not a registered lobbyist. She just happens to work for a firm that does extensive lobbying, and on its Web site, touts its “strong relationships in Congress” with a “solid record of success in securing legislation and federal funding on behalf of clients.” NYHART: And it’s this kind of conflict of interest that leads to this deep distrust.

GRIFFIN: What we are told constantly by the members is, I never talk to my spouse about this issue.

“I never talk to her on this business. There’s a firewall between me and my sons who are lobbyists.”

GRIFFIN: And the fortunes go both ways. Mike Rogers’ wife, Kristi becomes CEO of defense contractor, then is hired by a lobbying firm.

Rogers becomes chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and according to the Federal Election Commission, political donations from the defense industry quadruple, all legal, all within the rules, all routine in the family business of Washington.

Joe diGenova tells WMAL GOP Congressman Mike Rogers (MI-8) is trying to kill Benghazi Investigation

Posted on 3/10/2014 

Speaking with Larry O’Connor and guest host Christine O’Donnell, Joe diGenova tells WMAL that GOP Congressman Mike Rogers (MI-8) is trying to kill the Benghazi Investigation.

It is so bad, that even John Boehner has taken Mike Rogers to task for his lack of action.

Back up a bit to 2014:

Does Mike Rodgers have his heart in the Morell Benghazi hearing today: UPDATE

The CIA’s top officer on the ground in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terror attack will appear before a House panel for the first time Tuesday afternoon — to deliver what could be critical closed-door testimony, ahead of ex-CIA Director Michael Morell’s scheduled appearance on Wednesday.

Two congressional sources confirmed to Fox News that the CIA chief of station will appear before a House intelligence subcommittee. His perspective was long-sought by lawmakers, and the timing is critical — coming before Morell’s first-ever public testimony Wednesday about his role, and that of the administration, in the flawed “talking points” which blamed a protest.

‘Revolving door’? Ties between consultancy, gov’t raise questions about Benghazi probe

Meet Beacon Global Strategies.

The online bios for its founders and managing directors suggest no group knows more about the Benghazi terrorist attack and the Obama administration’s response. Yet the consulting firm has deep ties to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others involved in the controversy – ties so intertwined with the administration and Capitol Hill that they raise questions about an upcoming hearing where former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell is slated to testify.

Morell, who also is a national security analyst for CBS News and has a book deal, joined the Beacon firm after retiring from the CIA last year. In doing so, he joined an organization already stacked with ex-government officials. Among them is Philippe Reines, whom the New York Times magazine recently described as Clinton’s “principal gatekeeper.” According to Beacon’s website, Reines traveled to more than 110 countries with the then-Secretary of State as part of her senior team.

Another employee, Jeremy Bash, was a former chief of staff to Leon Panetta at both the CIA and Defense Department. Andrew Shapiro was a Clinton policy adviser at the State Department whose portfolio included ridding Libya of shoulder-launched missiles called MANPADs.

And it includes Republican J. Michael Allen, who was a former majority staff director for the House Intelligence Committee, headed by Republican Rep. Mike Rogers. The following link is a great read and worth the time.

Source Fox News- a great read.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/revolving-door-ties-between-consultancy-govt-raise-questions-about-benghazi-probe

This brings us to this post over at Conservative Tree House.

Reported Senate Offer: We’ll Give You Matt Gaetz in DOJ, if You Give us Mike Rogers in FBI

Not beyond the realm of the possible as the FBI Directorship remains strangely unfilled as Gaetz moves about the Senate rounding up votes and perhaps making a deal. Bannon thought the deal with Patel was made and then the position goes strangely silent? It gives credence to the story.

This type of deal is exactly how the IC can hunker down and avoid the sunlight of investigation upon their corrupt operations.  This type of deal is how the counterintelligence division of the FBI can simply operate to protect the DOJ-NSD embeds that will attempt to remain in power within Main Justice.   This type of deal is how the FBI remains entirely political.

Portion of Mike Rodgers latest CV

Mike Rogers served as an Officer in the U.S. Army before he joined the FBI as a Special Agent in Chicago where was tasked with tackling organized crime.. Mike served as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2011- 2015, leading the committee through two major conflicts. Following his time in Congress, Mike founded cyber security companies where he advised large and small businesses on best practices to protect their data against foreign bad actors like China, Iran, and Russia. Mike is currently a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.

The swamp reeks tonite. It surly is the best of it.

Think you are being followed? If in the D.C. Area for ANY reason Around 1/6 you are!

If you happened to be in the DC area at some point around the Jan 6 “event”  you didn’t know the Air Marshalls are tracking you via the “Quiet Skies” program. You didn’t even need to be physically at the Capitol during that time. You might have been visiting the area for any reason.

Some people are/have been aware due to increased screening at times prior to boarding. Pretty comforting to know you are flying with your own GOV security.

And they claim Trump is the dictator…So if you did nothing wrong you’re being tracked. Totally not a fascistic

Let’s catch up on the latest this week you may have missed. Memes, satire… unbelievable. 

That’s all she wrote – have a wonderful day..

Reduction in the Cost of Drugs Begins – Welcome to the New Bureaucracy of Winners and Losers

Of course the argument goes: Every other government in the world negotiates prices. Why in the hell can we not do it?

Of course the cost of drugs is too high. But if anyone thinks that taking this approach will simply be lowering the price alone, I suggest looking at what else is involved with this bill.

The winners have already been picked, and as this clip indicates, it is questionable how “they” arrived at these ten drugs. No one mentions as to “who” actually “they are” that did the choosing. The legal action taken by the drug companies include actions the government is taking beyond just the government’s negotiation of price.

Recall at the time of Obamacare how the halls rang with this refrain? “The cost of hospitals is too damn  high’? Well Medicare took care of that. Reimbursement rates fell far below the cost of care. New Regulations were endless. Smaller hospitals went out of business or were forced to merge creating mega hospital systems. The days of the local family Doc doing his own thing were over.

If anyone thinks that medicine has gotten better since Obamacare, think again.  It went far beyond simply offering an insurance policy. Its intent was to force hospitals and Doctors into submission with vast control of the management of the hospital. But I have covered that ad nauseam previously.

I suggest these “simple negotiations” for ten drugs will wind up in the end, for Medicare folks being required to accept the drugs Medicare determines are “right for you.”  After all, the next round will be 15 drugs. Why stop there? A new bureaucracy has been born. A new panel of the wise, they will build their fiefdom.  Before its over, they will mandate to all what the “appropriate” drug for you and me shall be.

The government doesn’t negotiate. The government tells private companies what they are willing to pay. And private companies can’t say anything about what is happening in the “negotiation”.
And if you don’t agree with the negotiation your full drug program is taxed at a very high rate. Who will pay for that?

Former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the latest in Medicare’s drug cost battle, as the Biden administration is expected to release a list of 10 drugs for which Medicare will negotiate prices, and more. 15 drugs next round. I can see this panel sitting around together, smiling as they rub their hands together. Ten years from now we will read their emails regarding this new nefarious activity.

Love that they conveniently left out the part where Joe asked if another round of shots dijour was needed and Gottlieb saying in hindsight we should have let natural immunity run its course.

Note: As discussed below: Large molecule drugs are made of proteins that are complex in structure and much less stable compared to small molecule drugs. Large molecule drugs are costly to manufacture and, at this time, can only be administered through an IV or infusion. These drugs have a targeted effect on tissues and are increasingly used to treat cancer.

For those needing examples of how the government works with Obamacare, here are a few wayback posts of Bunker:

Sebelius to unleash Bounty Hunters on Hospitals and Doctors with new edict

More chillingly, however, the administration is defining Medicare fraud down to include “unnecessary” and “ineffective” care. And to root this out, it plans to make expanded use of private mercenaries—officially called Recovery Audit Contracts—who will be authorized to go to doctors’ offices and rummage through patients’ records, matching them with billing claims to uncover illicit charges. What’s more, Obamacare increases the fine for billing errors from $11,000 per item to $50,000 without the government even having to prove intent to defraud.

Medical Service Codes Go From 18,000 to 140,000

Example:

The best of the swamp.

Friday News Humor & Satire- ‘That Was The Week That Was’

How about this week’s news with a bit of twist? Conservative Politics, Satire, News, Odd Humor, Memes.

Step back and enjoy. Anyone recall the American version of the T.V. program with this title? Here is Bunks version this week.

Let’s get started

Washington Post

 

 

Serious business

Kanye

Russian take on the exchange

Friendly Biden

 

Our Press Secretary at her best

 

 

Important things

 

 

 

 

Our gal Hillary

 

 

Inflation

Boom!

 

 

 

I will conclude with something pretty. Best in full screen.

 

Andre’ Rieu – Fernando – Celebrates ABBA

That’s all she wrote. Have a great day.

Freedom: Never Give Them An Inch!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Ronald Reagan

 

Never Give Them An Inch

From the 2003 Television docudrama: George Orwell – A Life in Pictures. A reminder from George Orwell.  This is where we are.

George Orwell – A Final Warning

 

George Orwell’s final comment. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

Neil Oliver: Think the Unthinkable; Open Your Eyes and See

We are the battered spouses in an abusive relationship with government. Nothing we can do is going to appease the abuser, it is the inherent state of their disposition. Nothing expressed that abuse better then to see Hunter Biden stand with the President at his airplane, smiling at us, at the same time the FBI was going through President Trump’s wife’s personal effects and plundering their home.

A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.

The power and control abusers hate the partner they cannot force into submission. That’s why the victims’ physical escape from the relationship is the most dangerous time for them as far as living or dying.

The regime now in charge of us has given us a choice, stay in the abusive relationship via denial and silence and fear, or speak up, do not comply and take our chances.

No other choice really.

“Across the Atlantic, the Biden Whitehouse sent the FBI to raid the home of former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden and his son Hunter – he of the laptop full of the most appalling and incriminating content – fly together on Airforce 1. No raids planned on the Obamas, nor on the Clintons. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and onwards to China. Her son Paul, an investor in a Chinese tech firm and with seats on the board of companies dealing in lithium, was along for the ride, into that part of the world where three quarters of the world’s lithium batteries are made. Taiwan leads in that technology.

It is hard to think the unthinkable. It’s hard to think that all of it, all the misery, all the suffering of the past and to come might just be about money, greed and power. It is hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool and taken for a ride. It’s hard, but the view from the other side is worth the effort and the pain. Open your eyes and see.”

Opening our eyes to what is really happening does, as Mr. Oliver said, give a clarity that is briefly overwhelming. You realize that the world you are inhabiting is completely different from the world you thought you were living in.

Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that translates every word into a language instantly understood.

This reorientation is quite painful at first, but it finally allows you to stop asking the endless “Why?” questions that tormented for so long. Now we know why.

Neil Oliver: ‘It’s hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool but open your eyes’

Transcript follows the video.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI _Solzhenitsyn "I understand, I ...

A portion of this post from Conservative Tree House and comments with an interview with Neil Oliver and the following transcript.

[Transcript] – It is hard to think the unthinkable – but there comes a time when there’s nothing else for it. People raised to trust the powers that be – who have assumed, like I once did, that the State, regardless of its political flavour at any given moment, is essentially benevolent and well-meaning – will naturally try and keep that assumption of benevolence in mind when trying to make sense of what is going on around them.

People like us, you and me, raised in the understanding that we are free, that we have inalienable rights, and that the institutions of this country have our best interests at heart, will tend to tie ourselves in knots rather than contemplate the idea those authorities might actually be working against us now. I took that thought of benevolent, well-meaning authority for granted for most of my life, God help me. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was as gullible as the next chump.

A couple of years ago, however, I began to think the unthinkable and with every passing day it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are no longer being treated as individuals entitled to try and make the most of our lives – but as a barn full of battery hens, just another product to be bought and sold – sold down the river.

Let me put it another way: if you have been driving yourself almost demented in an effort to think the best of those in charge – those in senior positions in government, those in charge of the great institutions of State, those running the big corporations – but finding it increasingly impossible to do so … then the solution to the problem might be to turn your point of view through 180 degrees and accept, however unwillingly, that we are … how best to put this … being taken for a ride.

When you find a stranger’s hand on your wallet, in the inside pocket of your jacket … rather than trying to persuade yourself he’s only making sure it doesn’t fall out … it might be more straightforward to draw the conclusion you’re in the process of being robbed.

Once the scales fall from a person’s eyes, the resultant clarity of sight is briefly overwhelming. Or it is like being handed a skeleton key that opens every locked door, or access to a Rosetta Stone that translates every word into a language instantly understood.

Take the energy crisis: If you’ve felt the blood drain from your face at the prospect of bills rising from hundreds to several thousands of pounds while reading about energy companies doubling their profits overnight while being commanded to subsidise so-called renewables that are anything but Green while listening to this politician or that renew their vows to the ruinous fantasies of Net Zero and Agenda 2030 while knowing that the electricity for electric cars comes, in the main and most reliably, from fossil fuels if you can’t make sense of it all and just know that it adds up to a future in which you might have to choose between eating and heating then treat yourself to the gift of understanding that the powers that be fully intend that we should have less heat and less fuel and that in the planned future only the rich will have cars anyway. The plan is not to fix it.

The plan is to break it, and leave it broken. If you struggle to think the best of the world’s richest – vacuous, self-obsessed A-list celebrities among them – endlessly circling the planet on private jets and super yachts, so as to attend get-togethers where they might pontificate to us lowly proles about how we must give up our cars and occasional holiday flights – even meat on the dinner table … if you wonder how they have the unmitigated gall … then isn’t it easier simply to accept that their honestly declared and advertised intention is that their luxurious and pampered lives will continue as before while we are left hungry, cold and mostly unwashed in our unheated homes.

Here’s the thing: if any leader or celeb honestly meant a word of their sermons about CO2 and the rest, then they would obviously lead by example. They would be first of all of us willingly to give up international travel altogether … they would downsize to modest homes warmed by heat pumps. They would eschew all energy but that from the sun and the wind. They would eat, with relish, bugs and plants. They would resort to walking, bicycles and public transport.

If Net Zero and the rest was about the good of the planet – and not about clearing the skies and the beaches of scum like us – don’t you think those sainted politicians and A-listers would be lighting the way for us by their own example? If the way of life they preach to us was worth living, wouldn’t they be living it already? Perhaps you heard Bill Gates say private jets are his guilty pleasure.

And how about food – and more particularly the predicted shortage of it: the suits and CEOs blame it all on Vladimir Putin. But if the countries of the world are truly running out of food, why is our government offering farmers hundreds of thousands of pounds to get out of the industry and sell their land to transnational corporations for use, or disuse unknown? Why aren’t we, as a society, doing what our parents and grandparents did during WWII and digging for victory? Why is the government intent on turning a third of our fertile soil over to re-wilding schemes that make life better only for the beavers? Why aren’t we looking across the North Sea towards the Netherlands where a WEF-infected administration is bullying farmers off their land altogether, forcing them to cull half the national herd.

Those Dutch farmers are among the most productive and knowledgeable in the world, holding in their heads and hands the answers to all manner of questions about how best to produce food, and yet their government is so intent on scaring them out of the business that a teenage boy in a tractor, taking part in a protest to defend ancient rights and traditions, was fired on by police.

Why do you think it matters so much, to the government of the second most productive population of farmers in the world, to gut and fillet that industry? Why? Why have similar protests, in countries all across Europe and the wider world, been largely ignored by the mainstream media – a media that would have crawled on its hands and knees over broken glass just to report on a BLM protester opening a bag of non-binary crisps. Why the silence on the attack on farming?

And while we’re on the subject of farmland ownership, why is computer salesman Bill Gates buying so much farmland in the US – more than a quarter of a million acres in 19 states at the last count, while simultaneously promoting the production and sale of fake meat? And why have so many small planes crashed into massive food processing plants in the US, sparking fires and thereby hobbling the production and distribution of yet more of the very stuff of life? Why is this happening to farmers and farming … all across the hitherto developed world …?

Isn’t the simple obvious answer … the answer that makes most sense and that is staring us in our trusting faces … that power for the power-hungry has always rested most effectively upon control of food and its supply? Why are the powers that be attributing this to a cost-of-living crisis when everyone with two brain cells to rub together can see it’s a cost of lockdown crisis – the inevitable consequence of shutting down the whole country – indeed the whole world – for the best part of two years. Soaring inflation, rising interest rates, disrupted supply chains.

Might they be calling it a cost-of-living crisis as part of their bare-faced attempt to distract us from the fact that while ordinary individuals face a life and death struggle in the coming months, the corporations have celebrated their share of the greatest transfer of wealth in history? Doesn’t that seem more likely? However unthinkable, might it not be more compelling to ask why our government, and governments around the world, have effectively stood by and held the coats of huge corporations while those money magnets pulled almost all of the world’s wealth into their already creaking coffers?

Are our governments more interested in enabling, in aiding and abetting the rich, than in lifting so much as a finger to protect our livelihoods, our ways of life? I’m only asking. What about the money in our pockets? Why is it getting harder and harder to use good old cash, notes and coins? Why are we being nudged further and further away from spending-power we can see and hold, and towards a digital alternative that exists only on the hard drives of the banks that run the world? Why is that do you think?

Rather than dismiss as yet another conspiracy theory the idea of cash being ultimately replaced with transactions based on the exchange of what amount to glorified food stamps that will only be accepted if our social credit score demonstrates that we’ve been obedient girls or boys … how about taking the leap and focussing on the blatantly obvious … that if we are not free to buy whatever and whenever we please, free of the surveillance and snooping of governments and the banks that run them, then we have absolutely no freedom at all.

And while we’re on the subject of money and banks, why not pause to notice something else that is glaringly obvious – which is to say that the currencies of the West are teetering on the abyss, and that one bank after another is revealed, to those who are bothering to watch, as being as close to bankruptcy as its possible to be without actually falling over the edge.

Then there’s the so-called vaccines for Covid – I deliberately say “so-called” because by now it should be clear to all but the wilfully blind that those injections do not work as advertised. You can still contract the virus, still transmit the virus, still get sick and still die. Denmark has dropped their use on under-18s. All across the world, every day, more evidence emerges – however grudgingly, however much the various complicit authorities and Big-Pharma companies might hate to admit it – of countless deaths and injuries caused by those medical procedures.

And yet here in Britain and just about everywhere else, governments continue to try and get those needles into as many arms as possible, even the arms of the smallest and youngest. The ripe stink of corruption is everywhere. I trusted authority for most of my life.

Now I ask myself on a daily basis how I ignored the stench for so long. Across the Atlantic, the Biden Whitehouse sent the FBI to raid the home of former president Donald Trump. Meanwhile Joe Biden and his son Hunter – he of the laptop full of the most appalling and incriminating content – fly together on Airforce 1. No raids planned on the Obamas, nor on the Clintons. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and onwards to China. Her son Paul, an investor in a Chinese tech firm and with seats on the board of companies dealing in lithium, was along for the ride, into that part of the world where three quarters of the world’s lithium batteries are made. Taiwan leads in that technology.

It is hard to think the unthinkable. It’s hard to think that all of it, all the misery, all the suffering of the past and to come might just be about money, greed and power. It is hard to tell yourself you’ve been taken for a fool and taken for a ride. It’s hard, but the view from the other side is worth the effort and the pain. Open your eyes and see. (link)

This supposed utopia we’re having rammed down our throats isn’t working, says Neil Oliver
 

This supposed utopia we’re having rammed down our throats isn’t working, says Neil Oliver

The very best of the swamp.

Machiavelli’s Heavy Hand

 

by Mustang

For well over 2,000 years, all of humankind’s philosophers — from the Greeks to the Renaissance thinkers, focused on the “end of the state.”  They believed, for example, that political power (of the state) was the only useful tool to achieve a further higher moral end.  Of course, that would depend entirely on the head of state’s definition of morality.  Niccolò Machiavelli, however, had a different point of view.  To him, the power of the state WAS the end of the state.  Every state must focus on maximizing its power; if the state fails to maximize (retain) its power, it must collapse.  So, Machiavelli turned his attentions toward the means of achieving and then maintaining state power.

Uffizi statue: Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli

Machiavelli told us that the state is the highest form of human association.  This is true, he argued, because the state is indispensable to promoting human welfare.  People must worship the state, even to the extent of sacrificing themselves to maintain it, and rulers must do whatever is necessary to retain that power — emphasizing “whatever is necessary.”  By state, we must include governments and non-governmental entities, such as religion.  Whatever a government must do to retain its power over the people, religious organizations must do as well.  The state cannot achieve and maintain control without the capacity for and willingness to force the people into compliance with the dictates of the state/ruler. 

 

Those who do comply with the dictates of the state are patriots.  Those who do not comply are enemies of the state.  Machiavelli was no republican.  Republicanism presupposes a virtuous, honest, civic-minded citizen who agrees to bind themselves to a social contract.  Machiavelli didn’t find any of those kinds of people in Italy; he found, instead, a corrupt society of greedy, selfish people — people who needed (and deserved no better than) a heavy-handed prince to keep them in line.

 

Americans did much better than that in the late 1700s.  Our social contract with the government was the U.S. Constitution and several (near-mirror image) state constitutions that defined the relationship between the ordinary citizen and the government, federal or state.  Unhappily, the U.S. government began to ignore the Constitution almost before the ink was dry … and has been regularly doing so ever since.  Machiavelli is still with us, embodied in the Democratic Party, which deigns to force Americans into compliance with its government dictates — and somewhat embraced by the Republican Party, as well.  The so-called Patriot Act is an excellent example of Republican acquiescence to Machiavellian philosophy.

 

Nothing of what has happened to America’s grand experiment is recent.  The cauldron of social discontent began to boil before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution.  In the early 1790s, Alexander Hamilton argued for a nationalistic economy; Jefferson opposed Hamilton, arguing instead for democratic and agrarian programs.  This very contentious debate led to the formation of national political parties.

 

In 1798, the Federalist-dominated 5th U.S. Congress submitted to President John Adams for his signature, the Alien and Sedition Acts — a series of four acts.  The Naturalization Act made it more difficult for an immigrant to become a citizen.  An Act Concerning Aliens allowed the President to imprison and deport non-citizens deemed dangerous to the state’s interests.  The Alien Enemy Act barred citizens from hostile countries.  The Sedition Act made it a criminal act for anyone to make “false statements” critical of the U.S. government — a clear affront to the First Amendment.

 

While the Alien and Sedition Acts were highly unpopular, the treasonous acts of men such as James Wilkerson, Aaron Burr, and (some will argue) Thomas Jefferson did justify Congressional action.  There is clear justification for thinking Wilkerson and Burr were treasonous; Jefferson, on the other hand, took on a leadership position as a pro-Southern opposition to federalism.  By the end of President Washington’s presidency, Thomas Jefferson was an avowed political enemy of Washington and Hamilton.  Jefferson’s pro-French/anti-British sentiments led him to repudiate Washington’s sage advice to avoid foreign entanglements.  We’ve been going “downhill” ever since.

 

Washington and Jefferson were two genuinely decent men with different ideas about governing an ever-enlarging population of mostly ignorant farmers and industrial workers.  Nevertheless, in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson and James Madison authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, which made this abrupt assertion: The Union was a compact of several states, with the federal government as their agent, imbued with certain specified, enumerated, delegated powers.  The states, Jefferson argued, may have joined the Union, but they always retained their sovereign authority to determine for themselves when the federal government exceeded its powers and declare such excesses “void and of no force” within their respective jurisdictions.

 

The first nullification crisis didn’t arrive until 1832, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.  South Carolina declared the federally imposed tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void.  These acts, South Carolina argued, favored northern states, and punished the southern states, who relied on an agricultural economy.  After South Carolina adopted an Ordinance of Nullification in November 1832, Jackson threatened federal troops to enforce federal law.  South Carolinians did not react well to Jackson’s threat, and this goes a long way in explaining why South Carolina militia fired the first shots of the Civil War.

 

Of course, at the heart of that conflict was the issue of human bondage.  No one alive in 1850 had anything to do with creating the institution of slavery; they inherited it and relied on it to produce the mainstay of the southern economy: agriculture.  And, in keeping with states’ rights philosophy, southern legislatures reasoned that it was up to each state to determine whether to retain or do away with it.

 

Truth be known, northern states were hardly any better.  There was slavery in the northern states, of course, some blacks, but primarily whites indentured to the status of slaves for some period of time, and of course, locked into slave labor at minimum wages to sustain northern industrial profits.

 

The geniuses in Congress made the issue of slavery more volatile by establishing the idea of popular sovereignty as a determining factor in the creation of new states from federal territories.  The first violence over the issue of slavery took place in Kansas in 1854, but the final straw, insofar as the southern states were concerned, was the election of Abolitionist Abraham Lincoln to the presidency.

 

Actually, Lincoln was a popular candidate under the new Republican Party ticket, evidenced by the fact that Lincoln won the election of 1860 even though ten southern states omitted his name from their election ballots.  But Lincoln’s election triggered the secession of southern states, whose legislatures decided that if the U.S. government was going to renege on the U.S. Constitution, they no longer wanted to be part of the United States.  The southern states formed a new country after secession: the Confederate States of America.

 

We, of course, know who won that bloody war — and we know why.  What most people do not realize, however, is that the outcome of the war changed forever all the work accomplished by the founding fathers in putting together our Constitutional Republic.  After the Civil War, the people’s rights were limited.  After the war, states’ rights were limited.  The Civil War Amendments, forced down everyone’s gullet beginning in 1866, was only possible by manipulating the admission of western Virginia as an independent state.  Here again, we see an example of the Republican Party embracing the philosophy and advice of Niccolò Machiavelli.

 

This underhanded manipulation of the Constitution continued for several decades as Congress initiated an amendment to deny the right of state legislatures to choose their representative in the U.S. Senate.  I will never understand why any state should approve the popular election of senators, for in doing so, the states gave up their vital role in U.S. federalism and our system of checks and balances.

 

The effect of these machinations is that we have a powerful federal government today that can determine which rights the people may enjoy.  The assault on the First Amendment began in 1798, continues today.  The modern argument is that there is no absolute Constitutional guarantee.

 

We are NOT entitled to free speech if that speech offends anyone.  We are NOT allowed to associate with others if the federal government does not approve of our associates.  We are NOT allowed to express our religious beliefs if they offend anyone who believes otherwise.  We are NOT guaranteed privacy in our personal belongings and property; we are NOT guaranteed open hearings in matters relating to search warrants or grand jury deliberations. 

 

According to the government, the government may spy on us, collect information without warrants, and retain that information against us.  We do NOT have a right to a speedy trial, nor a right to consult with an attorney, nor a right to bail, and the government may arrest and detain us in perpetuity — if it chooses to do so.  In fact, the Supreme Court and Congress agree that a President may suspend the Constitution under certain circumstances — that is, circumstances that the federal government decides justifies doing so.

 

Granted, this is much to think about … but responsible citizenship demands that our people today think about such things — if they value their inalienable rights.  Should our first question directed at a political candidate inquire if they intend to abide by the Constitution — as their oath of office demands of them?  And, if they do not, should we impeach them?

 

To Niccolò Machiavelli, the state’s power was the end of the state.  This is what “we the people” are witnessing today — if we are, at all, paying attention.  So, I ask again, what are you doing about it?  What are you willing to give up to maintain your inalienable rights as an American?

 

Photo Credit:  “Uffizi statue: Niccolo Machiavelli” by Crashworks is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

 

Mustang also blogs at Fix Bayonets and Thoughts From Afar

 

I Took the Red Pill And Here Are The Headlines – See Anything Wrong Too?

 

Here are the headlines. It looks to me like there is not a lot of sense to it.  Pick your favorite and drop a comment. Joe excelled this week. A few of his remarks and activities or lack thereof this past couple of days are included.

 

 

Here is the Father of Rittenhouse’s “victim.”

 

Alice in Wonderland

Image

 

Have a great day.

Once Upon a Time

By Mustang

Once upon a time, a kingdom became a Republic, and the Republic became an Empire, and then the Empire collapsed.  It took a little over 1,100 years to accomplish all that, but the end was sure, and no one was prepared for that future event until it arrived suddenly and unannounced.  Some say that Rome never died a natural death.  Others claim that it was a suicide.  People drank poisoned Kool-Aid for well over 1,000 years.  Suicide appears to be the correct analogy.  Let’s briefly discuss what happened —

The Fall of Rome“The Fall of Rome” by Always Curious is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

  • The very barbarians whom the Romans assimilated to share their power with began to attack the state and ultimately, by chipping away at its institutions, caused Rome to implode.

  • Arable land became a scarce resource. People starved, increased taxes drove millions into the poor house, the tax base eventually collapsed, and the only people who benefitted from Roman society were the rich and politically elite.

  • The people grew distrustful of and unhappy with Rome’s institutions (government, courts, the military).  They initiated several civil wars, all of which Rome’s government brutally defeated, which led to people becoming increasingly and psychologically more anti-Roman.

  • The decline of Rome, some argue, was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.  Prosperity accelerated moral decay, the decay weakened the supporting mechanisms, and the edifice collapsed upon itself.

  • Some even blame Christianity for the fall of Rome, preferring cruel religions based on murder and mayhem to love and tolerance.

But wait … are we actually discussing Rome or a more modern Republic?  We could be discussing the United States of America (or any other western society) if we simply substitute “barbarian” with “progressive,” and/or the attempt to assimilate people who are culturally anti-western.  Suppose we also replace “limited arable land” with our insane over-emphasis on the environment (at the expense of agricultural production), if we then carry forward widespread unhappiness, moral decay, and blaming Christians for the immorality of the politically elite — then yes. In that case, we could be discussing the USA.

How will Western civilization end?  How will America be destroyed?  Hmmm.