By a series of links involving the holocaust of Russians during the Stalin years, I landed up on a blog called ZionCrimeFactory.

Like many such blogs, it conflates being anti-Zionist with being pro-Nazi. While there is no need to exaggerate or embellish what Hitler did, there is a point when these sorts of blogs actually break with reality.

ZCF (which I won’t link) claims that Hitler wasn’t the murderous psychotic of  history books.

Fortunately, there was a time in my early teens when I was immersed in WW II history, and I still remember such books as the memoirs of Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence, SS General Walter Schellenberg.

Schellenberg, a highly-ranked Nazi, describes the eugenicist projects of the Nazis, the arrangement of sexual unions between racially “superior” types, and many other repellent features of the Hitler regime that developed well before the events of the Holocaust.

To portray these developments as simply German nationalism resurgent is delusional.

Psychiatry online has a piece about the Nazi eugenicist program (h/t Henry Makow):

Ralph Nader at Countercurrents:

“There was something missing from the release of a tape showing Mitt Romney pandering to fat cats in Boca Raton, Florida with these very inflammatory words: “There are 47 percent who are with him, (Obama) who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax.” Romney said his job “is not to worry about those people.”Mr. Romney, says Nader, doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” (Photo: AP)

Hey, Mitt, why start with the 47 percent? Fully 100 percent of the nation’s 500 biggest corporations are dependent on various kinds of corporate welfare – subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, waivers, and other dazzling preferences – while many pay no tax at all on very substantial profits (see their familiar names – General Electric, Pepco, Verizon etc. – here).

Are the corporations that receive this corporate welfare going to vote for President Obama? (Mr. Romney has declared that corporations are people.) Of course they’re not. Nor are all of the 47 percent of people who are “dependent upon government.”

Mr. Romney doesn’t understand the double standard where government checks, whether already paid for or not, to people are called “entitlements” while far bigger checks to corporations are called “incentives.” Romney has lost control of his self-consciousness. Here is a man who talks about 47 percent of American households paying no income taxes (more on this later) while he has refused, unlike his father, to release back years of tax returns because they’ll show he has parked much of his wealth and income in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas precisely in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Indeed, as tax expert and former New York Times Pulitzer prize-winner David Cay Johnston said on Democracy Now, Romney has maneuvered the tax laws so that his five sons will continue to receive millions of tax-free dollars from their parents’ enormous pot of wealth.

Why aren’t the big-time Democrats making much more of an issue of this “make or break” Romney campaign vulnerability? Maybe it is because, as author Kevin Phillips once said, “The Republicans go for the jugulars while the Democrats go for the capillaries.”

Essentially, [Mitt Romney) is a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

Now, either ignorance, callousness or both infected Mitt Romney’s pejorative characterizations of the “government dependent” 47 percent with victim mentalities who believe that they are entitled to the government providing them the necessities of life without paying income tax. Let’s see who these people are in these recessionary times. Unemployed Americans. Americans who are too poor to pay income taxes. Elderly Americans who live on their social security checks from money for which they spent their decades of working years paying. Americans using the “earned income tax credit,” so vigorously supported and extended by President Ronald Reagan. And disabled Americans who have no dollars for any income tax.

What do many of the 47 percent pay to the government? They pay payroll taxes for social security and Medicare, federal fees and state and local taxes on their property, and sales taxes.

The avarice of Romney and his buddies at the strip-mining, job-exporting, bankrupting private equity company called Bain Capital has no bounds. He thinks it’s perfectly fine for companies like Verizon, Boeing, Duke Energy, Navistar, Wells Fargo and Pepco to use all of our country’s government funded public infrastructures and services, and yet not only pay no income tax but actually rig the tax system so they can get billions back in “benefits” from the U.S. Treasury, as General Electric has done for years. At the same time, Romney never speaks out against 35,000 super-wealthy Americans who also do not pay any federal income tax. He rarely questions crony capitalism, wants to maintain an even bigger bloated military budget, and spearheads the many-sided supremacy of corporations over real people throughout our entire political economy. He is, essentially, a corporation running for president masquerading as an individual.

If the Democrats are anything but inept and defeatist, they will wrap Romney around Congressman Paul Ryan, his vice-presidential nominee, and recover the Congress in November. The Romney-Ryan campaign is now hanging by a few threads, unmasked even before those millions of American voters who dutifully vote for politicians who disrespect and betray their economic plight and political powerlessness once in office.”

Chris Hedges at Truthdig writes:

“The costs of our most basic needs, from food to education to health care, are at the same time being pushed upward with no control or regulation. Tuition and fees at four-year colleges climbed 300 percent between 1990 and 2011, fueling the college loan crisis that has left graduates, most of them underemployed or unemployed, with more than $1 trillion in debt. Health care costs over the same period have risen 150 percent. Food prices have climbed 10 percent since June, according to the World Bank. There are now 46.7 million U.S. citizens, and one in three children, who depend on food stamps. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Obama has, meanwhile, expelled 1.5 million immigrants, a number that dwarfs deportations carried out by his Republican predecessor. And while we are being fleeced, the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank has since 2008 doled out $16 trillion to national and global financial institutions and corporations.”

Comment:

I don’t really see the removal of these support systems as such a calamity for the beneficiaries, except in a minority of cases. I see it mostly as a calamity for the providers and political allies of the support system.

That is cynical, but, here where I am, it’s hard to get anyone to work for less than $15 an hour, which is only ten dollars less than what I’ve worked for lately and much more than I’ve worked for when much younger.

So, not to be heartless, but cry me a river.

If you can’t find cheap or even free food somewhere in the US being given out by private donors/churches, then you are simply not looking hard enough.

You can live on sprouts raised in a one-bedroom apartment. You can grow food on the fringes of an abandoned lot or, with nice neighbors, in someone’s garden.

Health care bothers me more, because, really, if you have a sick child in need of brain surgery, alternative medicine isn’t going to help you.  So yes. That’s a serious issue.

Food costs rising 10%. Wow. Over how long? What sort of food? Where are you shopping? You can still get bread for around a dollar a loaf if you look. And canned veggies can run between 50 cents and a buck a can.

Spinach is up a buck from a few years ago. So stop eating spinach and eat kale which is still around the same price, or just a bit more.

Instant coffee is up a lot, but it’s not good for you anyway. If you look around and buy non-brands, or ground, you can still manage, if you must have your shot of caffein.

But that’s not starvation, by any means.

Having got that caveat out of the way, let’s indulge Mr. Hedges and agree with everything else he says.

So what is he proposing to do about it?

Nothing, except write eloquent tracts and vote for a third party. More politics, in other words.

Here’s my solution.

It doesn’t require voting.

It requires public support and anger.

Can you muster up some anger that’s directed and focused, instead of wasted on “Illuminati,” “lizards,” “German death cults” and so on?

Let’s stick with those we can get our hands on, and then I promise you  the Illuminati will be delivered dead as a door-nail to you.

Instead of attacking Iran, let’s attack the financial institutions and corporations that got public money to the tune of  $16 trillion.

How hard is that? Most of the corporations are HQ’d here on US soil…or on Israeli soil, which is maybe not all that different these days.

All it would take is a bit of will power.

Declare the enemy to be those 100 or so individuals named by the establishment itself as the cause of the financial crisis (check out Vanity Fair).

To be fair and balanced, we can add a few more to bring the total to about 200-300.

They all come with attached corporations. Declare a retaliatory war on all of them. Don’t waste time assigning levels of guilt. Don’t waste time trying to do any of this through the legal system either. It’s been bought off.

Create a military tribunal special to the commission of war crimes. Because we are in an economic war. A war conducted through the stock exchange.

Any legal action taken against the b******* will not affect the body of law or constitutional theory because it will pertain to war-making. America is full of clever lawyers. Someone can spin a good theory that will keep the enemy tied up in court while public opinion builds up against him.

Declare these 300 enemy combatants and round them up.

All bail-out money can be frozen immediately and seized.

All senior managers of bailed out corporations, with no exceptions, can be fined for their dereliction of duty during the financial crisis.

It costs too much and the system is too captured to go after individuals.

For the most culpable individuals, we can toy with the possibility of the electric chair, or, at least, life imprisonment…. but not at tax-payer expense.

Their punishment can be billed to their corporations for life.

Just indict the senior managers of all companies guilty of (economic) war crimes.

That would be a start.

We’ll spare them and us a Nuremberg trial, since we’re not interested in grand-standing prosecutors getting air time.

Quietly, quickly, seize the equivalent of the bail-out funds from their assets and return that money to the public treasury.

Then, divest the criminals of their citizenship, divest their corporations of legal status and protections.  Exile them to any country that will take them, with the proviso that they are permanently disbarred from working as managers, consultants, brokers, advisers, ever again, either directly or indirectly.

They can try manual labor in some place that’s thoroughly un-policed; where it’s each man for himself.

Libertarian nirvana.

Let’s see how they like it, when they’re starving nobodies and the bribers and blackmailers are no longer their friends but their enemies.

Publish photo IDs on the net, with no compunction, so they can be turned in wherever they flee, because one and all of these criminals have supported the spy state and surveillance for the rest of us. One and all of them have made money off of it.

A taste of their own medicine will be salutary.

Co-ordinate with the laws of other countries to ensure that rules aren’t bent for them.

Drive the top three hundred racketeers off the face of the US, confiscate their booty, and voila, problem solved.

So why doesn’t anyone do it?

Because, you, dear reader, are unwilling to do your part.

Which is to actually use your head and stop trusting people who manage to be so very angry..in a general way… but never actually name any names.

Who never ask for major criminals to be prosecuted, but waffle on about the sanctity of property and gun ownership.

They’re all for prosecuting criminals who attack their own own homes and properties. Then, there’s no mercy or compassion.

But if you don’t want the criminals at the top prosecuted, then you shouldn’t want those at the bottom prosecuted either.

If you believe in compassion and mercy for criminals, let it be all for all criminals.

Either punishment for all or punishment for none.

If you won’t jail the financiers, then open the jails and never jail anyone again.

Break open Super Max.

Batter down the doors of Alcatraz.

Let the murderers walk. Let the serial killers go free. Forgive the child rapists and the arsonists.

Weep for the bankers? Then you must weep for the burglars.

Put down your gun when the home invaders come. When your wife is raped, embrace the rapist and talk to him of mercy and compassion.

When Ted Bundy or Jeremy Dahmer stalks the land, talk about mercy and forgiveness to them too.

Then..and only then… will I  believe you.

Either prosecute the top 300 criminals of the financial crisis, the ones named by your own pet institutions and pet journalists, or shut up forever.

And you fools out there.  You suckers who line up to hand your pitiful savings  to charlatan activists.

Stop following clowns and jokers.

They are whited sepulchers. The numbers prove it.

300 or so corporate bosses/financial honchos on one side. Three hundred million non-bosses and non-honchos on the other.

Do the math.

Can’t you see if that if we can’t get the job done, it’s not for lack of man-power but from lack of will?

It’s because we prefer to sit on our backsides, play with slogans, t-shirts, and pretty girls on videos telling us how Google or Microsoft really really loves us, while we high-five our buddies on forums.

Do we really care about changing the system?

Or do we just want to talk about…or pay other people to talk to us about…. how someone else can change the system….if he’s paid enough to do it….

Think about that the next time someone complains about politicians, bankers, elites and the rest.

Take a good look in the mirror.

Let’s ask ourselves what any of us have done to change things. Ask ourselves  if it cost us anything. Ask ourselves why we expect anyone else to do what we ourselves are unwilling to do.

Uncovered politics.com tells the unpleasant truth the Paul supporters refuse to see.

[Note: I hadn’t planned to vote for anyone, but I sure feel more sympathetic toward Johnson than to Paul.

Further note:

A vote for Johnson will probably help Romney, because it will be one less person voting for Obama.

Romney is Goldman Sachs’ candidate and seems to be salivating for war.  So if you want to vote, on paper, theoretically, Obama makes more sense.

That is the mess the Paul campaign left us with by going soft on Romney for most of the time.

Best course of action? Spend your time getting prepared and save your money for your family.

Turn off your TV,  hang up the phone on people calling for contributions, tear up letters asking for money and use them to line the bird cage.  Arrange your affairs so you’ll be fine in case of global war, should Romney win; and in case of high taxes, regulations, and collapsing businesses, should Obama win. In both cases, prepare for depreciation of the currency, rising prices, currency controls, and possibly emergency or martial law.

If you can, leave the US, but only for something better, which isn’t easy to find or cheap.

If you are middle-class and have no savings, forget that and stay put, preferably in a warm, relatively cheap state. Texas is good if you need a job; otherwise, any warm cheap state is better than freezing through the next four years.

If you’re not doing well, avoid people and get a dog. This makes for happiness easier than anything else. You need to be happy somehow or other to get through the next few years.]

“What’s the biggest difference between Congressman Ron Paul and Governor Gary Johnson? It’s not ideological, although there are some key and important distinctions on their positions.

The biggest difference is money.  How much they have and how they’ve spent it.

For Gary Johnson, his whole campaign has been a shoestring affair.  Having raised only several hundred thousand dollars in pursuit of the Presidency, he’s spending the limited funds he has on travel and critical campaign operations.  Calling the Johnson campaign “budget conscious” would be an accurate descriptor.  They know their resources are tight, the money they have raised has not come easily and they seem legitimately dedicated to stretching their campaign-dollar to the maximum.

The same cannot be said for Ron Paul’s latest bid for the Republican nomination or the myriad organizations he and his family members have spawned to fleece the “true believers” of their every last dime. People don’t just support Ron Paul, many are personally obsessed with the man. They give and give, and then give some more. In fact, it often seems like Ron Paul’s role model is less Barry Goldwater than something closer to L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction author and founder of the cult-like cash-cow known as Scientology.

[And it’s no surprise to me that behind the career of libertarian Harry Browne can be found Scientologists like Michael Baybak, who also had a history of stock manipulation. Scientology is notorious for unethical financial practices. Likewise,  I will not even attempt to compile the number of convictions/investigations that seem to attend the careers of prominent libertarians and their backers.]

It would be one thing if the Paul campaign spent their money as wisely as the Johnson campaign. There’s no telling how much could have been accomplished with the tens of millions of dollars that the Ron Paul machine has generated over the last half-decade. Unfortunately, we will never know what might have been.

Recently we learned that Jesse Benton, Ron Paul’s bumbling campaign manager and grandson-in-law, had been paid a staggering $586,616 by the Paul campaign and associated organizations. That number has likely grown by, at least, tens of thousands of dollars since it was first reported. Gary Johnson could have financed his entire campaign thus far on Benton’s salary alone!

The problem goes beyond just Benton, who recently enraged Paul supporters when he put out a series of statements to the public that explained a shift in campaign strategy away from active campaigning in upcoming primaries. He explained this was a way to conserve campaign resources. The press interpreted this as Paul suspending his campaign and the announcement likely cost Paul a significant number of delegates in the Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas primaries. It also signaled a desire to preserve relations with the Romney campaign and the GOP establishment, likely with the hopes of protecting the future career of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.

Some of the Paul diehards have suggested that Benton “acted alone” in making these campaign policy shifts and in setting his own salary, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. This is Ron Paul’s standard operating procedure: his family gets paid, every time.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has noted that Representative Paul was one of the worst offenders in the U.S. House for using campaign and PAC money to enrich family members. In CREW’s recent survey of 2008 and 2010 spending by Congressional candidates, they noted: “Rep. Paul’s campaign committee, Committee to Re-elect Ron Paul, paid salaries to his
daughter, his grandson, his daughter’s mother-in-law, his granddaughter, his grandson-in-law, and another relative. In addition, his campaign committee reimbursed the congressman and several other relatives and paid his brother’s accounting firm. Finally, Rep. Paul’s leadership political action committee (PAC), Liberty PAC, reimbursed the congressman, paid his brother’s accounting firm, and paid his daughter a salary.”

Considering the way that the Ron Paul political machine has generated so much of its millions of dollars from small donors over the last half-decade, many of whom could hardly afford to give to a political campaign, it is shocking that this is how much of the money was apparently being spent. Many of the footsoldiers of the liberty movement have dedicated so much of their lives to supporting this one man, it’s reached such an unhealthy degree that they can no longer see the greater cause they are supposedly fighting for.

There is now a Libertarian governor with a resume far more impressive than that of Congressman Paul, standing up and reaching his hand out to them. And yet they largely ignore this amazing opportunity, fixated on a sad old man who has mesmerized them into attempting to etch his likeness onto everything from chocolate bars to a pub in New York City to discussion of building a statue of the man himself.

Described by some as one of the “biggest purveyors of nepotism in U.S. history,” the failure of Ron Paul to even consider passing the torch to Gary Johnson shows that he is now entirely focused on building his family’s political dynasty, and perhaps even trying to find a spot for his son Rand on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney. Ron Paul’s supporters aren’t just promoting the message of liberty, they are worshiping a man who deserves very little of their praise.

Contrast this gross abuse of donor trust with how the Johnson campaign operates. Gary Johnson’s adult son, Erik Johnson, has been working day and night on the governor’s campaign and is getting paid no salary to do so. The governor even got a little choked up when he acknowledged his son’s sacrifice in a touching moment during his acceptance speech at the Libertarian Convention last month.

Gary Johnson is an avid skier, adventurer, and bicyclist. He has reached the highest peaks on four of the seven continents, including Mt. Everest. He’s built a successful private sector business, and been elected the chief executive of a large state for two highly productive terms, during which he vetoed more bills than the governors of the other 49 states combined. His libertarian credentials are unmatched, and yet today Rand Paul endorsed Mitt Romney for President. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about the Paul clan’s priorities.”

“Those who try to remain viable in the mainstream by denigrating 9-11 research or aiding and abetting other conspiracies of silence end up with neither victory nor a clean conscience, as the case of the defunct Ron Paul campaign demonstrates, says Jason Erb at Faux Capitalist.

“Lee Rogers of Live Free or Die Radio on Oracle Broadcasting has been at the forefront in the true alternative media in questioning whether Ron Paul’s campaign has been intentionally set up to fail, in saying that he wasn’t supporting Ron Paul in 2012 because of what happened in 2008.

Lee Rogers is no armchair quarterback when it comes to Ron Paul, as he conducted an interview with him in the run-up to the 2008 campaign, and he later revealed that Ron Paul said he had asked him tough questions.

Since Ron Paul didn’t win the nomination, the argument that Ron Paul should throw 9/11 under the bus again in 2012 is moot, since he didn’t win, regardless.

On April 29, 2011, I posed the question, will Ron Paul throw 9/11 Truth under the bus again, like he did in 2008?, and was met with a mostly hostile reaction on RonPaulForums.com. While I didn’t hear of him throwing it under the bus in 2012, he also didn’t embrace it or even say that those seeking a full independent account of what happened on 9/11 had some legitimate points in doubting the official story.

The fact that avoiding 9/11 Truth didn’t win him the nomination confirms the futility of that strategy, and the same strategy of any subsequent libertarian presidential candidate. To say that if he had embraced 9/11 Truth, he would’ve lost even more is like saying that it’s better to lose less in a contest where winning is the goal and there’s only room for one winner.

Dr. Stan Monteith has said that “most of the conservative organizations have been infiltrated,” and I don’t think Ron Paul’s campaign is any different.”

That is hardly a revelation.  Conservative movements have been infiltrated, for sure. The real news is that so has the libertarian movement. At least, that is the mildest interpretation of events.

I for one think it is much worse. I think many “libertarian” leaders are controlled opposition, compromised in some way, working against their expressed goals, cozy with the kleptocracy, or otherwise operating in bad faith, not just from ignorance.

I’m sorry to think that. But I’ve learned to respect my gut instinct. And that is what my gut instinct tells me.

In Ron Paul’s  case, I get the feeling he is being “handled” by others, and either can’t or won’t stand up to it.

It hardly matters which at this point.

Dr. Stanley Monteith:

“These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children,” he continues. “More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.” They went to war “predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation…. Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to.” “We’re like America’s little pit bull,” one Marine wryly told Wright. “They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.”

The mindset Wright described in Generation Kill is displayed in much greater detail in Hard Corps: From Gangster to Marine Hero, the battlefield memoir of Iraq veteran Marco Martinez.

A product of a military family from Albuquerque, Martinez enlisted in Latino street gangs as a teenager. He was “rescued” from a life of private-sector gangsterism through a federally funded, police-supervised school program called GREAT (Gang Resistance Education and Training), which eventually led him to enroll in the ROTC program at his High School. This curriculum prepared Martinez for a career as a state-authorized gang-banger.

“Salvation from a civilian existence is through these doors, boys,” Martinez and several other enlistees were told as they assembled at the local recruiting station. Like most gang-bangers, Martinez was susceptible to an appeal based on tribal and territorial loyalties, so he was an apt pupil at boot camp. Discipline refined his instinct for violence; training enhanced his capacity to inflict it; and the potted platitudes of nationalism sanctified his urge to kill into something he believed was noble.

Reciting the Rifleman’s Creed “got me so fired up that it put me into a blood lust,” Martinez recalls. “I wanted to kill America’s enemies. I could see and taste it.”

That opportunity came in April 2003, one month after George W. Bush ordered the assault on Iraq. Corporal Martinez was part of a 42-man Marine platoon that was dispatched on a “contact patrol” in the town of Al-Tarmiya, a predominantly Sunni town about sixty miles north of Baghdad.

A “contact patrol,” Martinez explains, “is the most coveted of infantry patrols…. Marines on contact patrol become human wrecking balls, leaving maximum carnage in their path, as any person encountered, armed, is to be considered hostile and killed at will.”

This was not the first time Martinez had carried out a mission of that kind. As a street thug, he and his buddies would often go out on “contact patrol” by rolling into a rival gang’s turf, seeking to provoke a firefight by throwing gang signs and calling out their “sets” at their enemies.

“You are to take out anybody displaying any type of aggression toward U.S. forces,” explained the lieutenant commanding Martinez’s platoon prior to the mission in Al-Tarmiya. How residents of a neighborhood could be guilty of “aggression” by displaying hostility toward armed invaders, the lieutenant didn’t explain. In any case, the rules of engagement were clearly intended to bring about the result Martinez described: The Marines were being sent into Al-Tarmiya to provoke a firefight and kill as many people as possible.

Shortly after the platoon was deployed, Martinez’s squad was ambushed by a group of guerrillas. The squad leader was severely wounded. Martinez identified the source of the gunfire, threw a grenade into the nearby building, then stormed in and gunned down four Iraqis.

That this was an act of individual courage is impossible to deny. Martinez’s actions saved the life of his squad leader (who was left crippled by his injury, and actually became a public opponent of the Iraq War after leaving the military). But the word “heroism” isn’t appropriate here – unless we could apply it just as accurately to similar actions taken by a street-level gangster in an inner-city turf war.

“All those times that I’d carried a gun as a teenager had been for sh*t,” insisted Martinez in Hard Corps. “My friends at the time and I were prepared to shoot and get shot at over girls, cars, money, or something as stupid as the way somebody looked at us…. But my Marine buddies and I carried weapons to defend our nation against its enemies. We, like millions who came before us, used the awesome might of America’s military power for liberation, not conquest….”

It takes a formidable gift for self-delusion to refer what was done to Iraq as “liberation,” and a complete hostility to the truth to suggest that the invasion of that country was in any sense a defensive act. Martinez’s rationalization for the state-mandated criminal violence he committed could have been adapted from the hymnal of the Soviet Cheka secret police: “To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles….”

Even when it is fought for purely defensive purposes, war is an unqualified curse. As James Madison famously warned, war is the greatest of all “enemies to public liberty” because it “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” This isn’t only the case with corruption of public policy and the consolidation of political power; the principle applies just as well to matters of individual morality on which the preservation of freedom ultimately depends. This is why Madison lamented the “degeneracy of manners and morals” that inevitably ensues whenever a country goes to war, however briefly – and why he emphasized that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Those facets of war most abhorred by Madison were considered by Karl Marx to be most admirable. Writing in 1851 to his disciples, Marx extolled the revolutionary “virtues” of generational war: “You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change existing conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and fit yourselves for the exercise of political power.”

How do people who pass through this revolutionary curriculum behave? What does it mean to be people Marx would describe as “fit … for the exercise of political power?” And what would America look like a generation from now – if not sooner – as a result of being immersed in “continual warfare?” One appropriate answer could be found in examining the people who embodied the revolution Marx and his heirs inflicted on Russia – the agents of the Soviet Cheka secret police, the chief instrument of Soviet terror.

The ruling ethic of Lenin’s regime, recall, is that the fundamental political question is not defined by the Golden Rule, but rather “who does what to whom” – and the Cheka, being the enforcement arm of the “Who,” saw no reason to restrain itself in plundering, torturing, and slaughtering those unfortunate enough to be part of the “Whom.”

“This organization is rotten to the core,” observed Bolshevik official Serafina Gopner in a March 22, 1919 letter to Lenin. Those who enlisted to be the “sword and shield” of the revolution were, almost without exception, “common criminals and the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape … practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money.” (7)

“The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately,” reported a Bolshevik regional secretary in Yaroslavl on September 26th of the same year. “Safe in the knowledge that they cannot be punished, they have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors.”

A dispatch to Moscow dated October 16th informed Feliks Dzherzhinsky, the head of the secret police, that “Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis. Drunk with blood and violence, the Cheka is doing its duty, but it is made up of uncontrollable elements that will require close surveillance.”

If those reports from a century ago have a strongly contemporary flavor, this is not entirely coincidental. If we could peel away the veneer of “respectability” from those who rule us, we would be rewarded with a spectacle at least as squalid as the ones described above. More ominous still is the fact that the degenerate elite presuming to rule us has effectively eradicated every significant institutional, legal, and social impediment to the exercise of total power. And they are filling the enforcement apparatus with people who subscribe to the nihilist’s credo “Respect yourself and no one else” – the hip-hop culture’s updating of Lenin’s “who/whom” formula.”

Russell Peters, an Indo-Canadian stand-up comedian, has won four Grammy awards for his hilarious routines about racial stereotypes, accents, and other politically incorrect topics. In this clip he takes on media stereotypes of Arabs.

The Times of India describes the increased levels of “eve-teasing” and groping in India since liberalization in the 1990s.

White women are more often targeted on the streets, as Hollywood culture ensures that they’re seen as more promiscuous and available. In addition, all white women are often  assumed to be “American” and therefore rich, complain some Latin women.

Finally, since white/fair skin is slavishly admired in Asia, white women are also objectified and targeted as symbols of status and economic class. Conversely, black men and women are denigrated.

Such colonial attitudes seem to be worse in north India.

In contrast to demeaning attitudes toward women in the the West, which seem to be most prevalent in areas dominated by urban cosmopolitan males (such as the financial industry) , the harassment of women in neo-liberal India seems to be more in the nature of street crime committed by  the semi-educated and the illiterate, under the influence of mass culture.

I noted this in a recent blog post arguing against the ban of the burqa and pointing out its use in protecting women from harassment on the street.

Among the educated and the professional classes in India, slavishness and obsequiousness toward the West and to whites is is a much more common social ill.

” Foreign women tourists in India often find themselves placed in uncomfortable cultural stereotypes and an increasing number of them have begun attributing this attitude to a colonial throwback.

A decade ago, women comprised only 25% of the total Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India every year. Presently, at 40%, women tourists are still a comparative minority despite the increase. According to a recurring Forbes survey on the world’s friendliest countries for expatriates and tourists, India ranked in one of the last slots for the second year in a row.

India’s not-so-friendly attitude towards tourists in general and female tourists in particular, varies in different regions. While the southern and western parts of the country rank favourably, north India is unanimously the most prejudiced culturally.

Theresa Price, a college student from Britain said, “Most people do tour North India because of the Taj Mahal, but it is steeped in cultural prejudices. The usual problems foreign women face like constant staring and eve-teasing is most rampant here.”

Amid this, the capital, which ranks second only to Mumbai in terms of popularity, emerges as a curious conglomerate. “Delhi is just like any other impressive modern metropolis on the face of it, but there coexists another reality as well. I find it very interesting that despite being such a representative city, a large section of people are still ignorant,” said Agata Ruiz from Argentina.

“White- skinned people are treated as being economically advanced and intrinsically powerful on account of their ‘fair skin’, despite which country they are from. This notion is usually shared by people of lower income groups. Taxi and auto drivers in Delhi just assumed I was American!” said Agata. She however agreed that this ingrained idealization of a stereotypical west is something she has seen in Argentina as well.

“Whenever I go out with my Canadian girlfriend, people think I am her ‘guide’. The shopkeepers at Chandni Chowk treated me like a middleman, as I stopped one from trying to unfairly fleece her, he cursed me for ruining the deal,” said Vikas Arora.

A lot of foreign tourists agreed that local north Indians tried too hard to please them, and this problem was compounded in the case of women. Sharell Cook, an Australian married to an Indian, living here for the last five years observes, “Indian men are more likely to want to try and please me. I find that in my daily dealings with Indian people, the men are likely to ‘adjust’ in my favour, whereas the women won’t. Indian women aren’t as influenced, impressed, or intimidated by me. They want to look after me and mother me.”

“Certain sections of Indian society still see their relationship with white-skinned people as that of master-servant. Putting them on a pedestal creates a distance, and this distance makes Indians feel resentful towards them. They conveniently stereotype us as being rich, powerful, wasteful, amoral and culturally degrading,” said Theresa.

In the same vein, women from the west are branded as morally loose and sexually promiscuous. This notion is at the root of the habitual eve-teasing that foreign women suffer. A lot of women complained about the touching and groping that happened in crowded public places over north India.

Recently, in the wake of rape cases, two(incidentally Asian) British politicians have observed that a section of Asian men think white girls are ‘easy’ and ‘fair game’ and this notion perpetrates the crime. The long list of crimes against foreign women and the flourishing foreign prostitution industry in India are also cases in point.

This implicit racism has another side to it. Dark-skinned people are deemed as undesirable and less economically advanced and civilised. “In North India, people are obsessed with fair skin. That is probably why African women do not face the same problems arising from sexual desirability that their white counterparts do,” said Theresa.

According to Indian Tourism statistics, a large number of Africans visit India every year, the highest number being Nigerians who come to Delhi on a medical visa for cheap medical treatment. “The sight of Africans on the metro is far from uncommon these days. I have heard commuters call them ‘habshi’ which is a derogatory colloquial word for a black person of African origin,” said Vikas.

Derina Kay, a research scholar form Namibia said, “In my experience of living in the capital, Indians have often behaved as if they were socially and economically superior to me. I remember a shopkeeper ignoring me and calling out to other white tourists in Dilli Haat. It was usually assumed I was less cultured and educated.”

She said, “I saw this in Ghana too. There, any non-black is immediately assumed to be a rich foreigner likely to spend more. This may be a developing world problem. But hopefully, over time, as the world becomes more globalised, these divisions will break.”

Ten things that will transform the whole situation without requiring you to make up you mind on any of the binaries being thrown your way – Republican/Democrat, Left/Right, Romney/Obama, Gold/Paper, or anything else:

1. Withdraw your money from the big banks (multinational banks, especially those tied to the financial crisis).

This can’t be done suddenly. You’ll need a lot of research. And you may have to park your money in one of them for a while, until you’ve decided. So be it. But start doing it and don’t tell anyone when you’ve done it.

Invest it in real things, in businesses, in tangibles, collectibles, metals, land, and property, after careful research. Only you know what’s the right mix, but it should produce both safety and income for you.

Get out of debt either by paying it off, restructuring, or begging forgiveness.  Save money or borrow from friends or community banks or groups. Better yet, pay as you go.

2. Get the best encryption you can afford and use it for everything. It won’t always work. Your enemies will crack it; it will be buggy and slow. But live with it. Eventually, it will become second nature. The Internet is not a lovely playground. It’s teeming with all kinds of threats and dangers.  Even with encryption, try to limit posting on forums. Someone, somewhere is always targeting your computer.

3.  Stop watching all mainstream TV and cancel your print subscriptions. This will bankrupt the major media and their owners. If you can add to that all mainstream Hollywood movies, you are well on the way to warrior status. You will have foiled the main avenue by which intelligence prepares the public mind for its capers. Become a pop culture idiot. Brittany who?

4. Minimize shopping at major stores like Walmart. I know. It’s hard. But believe it or not, there are some better deals in smaller shops. Try them. Avoid rebates and programs that need your information. Or set up fake accounts, if you can. Try anonymous cards, nominee accounts and anything else to foil ID thieves and snoops.

Loose the consumer attitude. Make your own stuff, recycle, reuse, make do, buy second-hand, avoid the society of consumption addicts. Bargain for everything. Make companies earn your dollar.

Want to change corporations? Become their savviest, cheapest, most value-oriented  customer. They will respect you.  Heap contempt on people who do not live within their means. Take them under your wing and show them how. If they don’t listen, don’t pony up when they come back to you crawling. Give them a loan only if they renounce their evil ways. Even then, get your money back. Helping a friend and subsidizing his bad habits are two different things.  When people want to trample on something, give them a doormat and keep your boundaries.

5.  Disbelieve any major story in the media, reflexively. Practice saying, “It’s a psyop” to anything that comes up. You will be right about 85% of the time. And the remaining times you’re wrong, someone will be forced to actually dig to prove it. So much the better.

6. Refuse to endorse any personality cult whatsoever. Whether it’s for Obama or anyone else. Even politicians with “better” sounding credentials. The NWO wasn’t born yesterday. It’s had decades to decide which person to put into which slot at which time.

It has nothing to do with the individual merits of the person. The system is more powerful than any one person’s attempts to work within it. It will crush him, take your time and money, and destroy any real change.

Avoid people who promote personality cults. They are either fanatics who can make anything fit their ideology, genuinely naive, not the brightest bulbs, or shills.  That doesn’t make for long term happiness in their company.

Remember what Yeats said. The worst are full of a passionate intensity.

People who say “I don’t know” or ” I was wrong” or “I changed my mind” are greatly in short supply. Join their ranks.

Practice not having an opinion and just watching other people having them. Then shrug and tell yourself something like “It’s all part of the great web.”  Go for a walk.

7. Refuse to get involved in any cointelpro-type slandering of people. It’s perfectly correct to criticize and call out people, especially those proposing political programs or campaigning on them or harassing you.

But gross invective, malice out of nowhere, obvious mischaracterization of words/arguments,  accusations without evidence are all signs of an agenda.

Life is too short to figure out all the agendas out there.  Stay on top of the ones that hurt you personally, but stay clear of the rest.

Don’t make more enemies than you need to. They’ll add up on their own anyway, if you’re doing what you need to do and saying what you have to. So be it.

8. Develop religious faith or belief in the universe and its essential goodness. Don’t believe, however, in the essential goodness of men. Those are two different things, often confused.

Be prepared for the very worst from your fellow man, but expect nothing but support from the universe. In both, you will never be disappointed.

9.  Don’t be transparent. It’s giving ammunition to your enemies and material to IP thieves. Let them work for it.  Rehash old ideas, but keep your best ideas and thoughts to yourself. There is no law you have to share ideas with people who don’t credit you or share with you. Name and shame, if needed.

In fact, by defending yourself, you put others on guard that there are such things as rights. The internet is teeming with rights violators, who are never called out, because this is considered “free speech.”

It’s not.

It’s intellectual fraud and violence, which is the source of physical fraud and violence. The two go together like dosai and chutney.

Anyone arguing otherwise is simply wasting their time and yours. Avoid them.

10. Don’t reinvent the wheel. There’s no great complex idea needing to be discovered to change the world.

The prophets have already come and we killed every one of them.

We don’t need any more prophets. We need people working on at least one thing wrong about themselves.

No need to tell anyone what that is. Just work on it. And keep your mouth shut about it.

Stick with the good old ideas.  The essence of the old ideas was –  don’t do to other people what you don’t want done to yourself.

That works out to – don’t lie and steal and murder and screw around.

Remember there really is a god and he’s (she’s) the final judge, not human beings.

Make your parents proud (at least, sort of).

And take a day off.

That’s about it.

Ali Hashem on the elite-controlled Al-Jazeera:

“In 1996 a new channel came to life. Qatar launched al-Jazeera and hired most of those who were dumped by BBC. This time they were assured that nothing would stop the new station, mainly because there were no limits, no red lines, and an unlimited budget. In the Arab countries, where people are used to listening on a daily basis to speeches by their leaders or members of ruling families, the new channel introduced counter-fire talk shows and documentaries from hotspots with an emphasis on controversial issues. For the first time, people saw opposition figures from around the Arab world saying in Arabic what they had only dared to say before on western channels in English or French.

Over the past 16 years al-Jazeera has emerged as the most credible news source in the region, though it was also joined by other channels such as al-Arabiya, Iran’s Alalam, the American al-Hurra, Russia’s RT and others.

The new Arab TV channels seemed to be flourishing and gaining credibility until the Arab spring came along and they began providing daily coverage of the revolutions. From Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, people expected TV stations to embrace their dreams and defend their causes, but it seems that major networks decided to adopt some revolutions and dump others.

One example was the way they dealt with the uprising in Bahrain. It was clear that Gulf-financed stations were more interested in regional security than Bahrainis’ dreams of democracy and freedom and their revolt against tyranny.

Meanwhile, mainstream Arab channels gave the Syrian revolution a large portion of airtime, but things took a different path when they started interfering with the coverage. I was one of those who experienced it when al-Jazeera, the channel I used to work for, refused to air footage of gunmen fighting the Syrian regime on the borders between Lebanon and Syria. I saw tens of gunmen crossing the borders in May last year – clear evidence that the Syrian revolution was becoming militarised. This didn’t fit the required narrative of a clean and peaceful uprising, and so my seniors asked me to forget about gunmen.

It was clear to me, though, that these instructions were not coming from al-Jazeera itself: that the decision was a political one taken by people outside the TV centre – the same people who asked the channel to cover up the situation in Bahrain. I felt that my dream of working for a main news channel in the region was becoming a nightmare. The principles I had learned during 10 years of journalism were being disrespected by a government that – whatever the editorial guideines might say – believed it owned a bunch of journalists who should do whatever they were asked.

Today, Arab media is divided. Media outlets have become like parties; politics dominates the business and on both sides of the landscape and people can’t really depend on one channel to get their full news digest. It is as if the audience have to do journalists’ homework by cross-checking sources and watching two sides of a conflict to get one piece of news.

The problem isn’t who is telling lies and who is accurate. Media organisations are giving the part of the story that serves the agenda of their financier, so it’s clear that only part of the truth is exposed while the other part is buried. What is obvious is that the investment in credibility during the past two decades has been in vain. The elite are once again dealing with Arab news channels the way they used to do with Arab state media.

Once again, people have started relying more on western media to know what’s going on. That is reflected in the number of viewers the BBC Arabic TV channel gained during the past year – reportedly more than 10m while leading Arab channels have been losing viewers.

Governments who own media organisations in the Middle East, and impose their agendas, are pushing them towards journalistic suicide. They are taking the Arab media landscape back to the early 1990s rather than moving it forward.”