Author Archives: Lila

Something wicked this way comes….

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I got this interesting response from a reader:

I like reading whatever you write. It is good to see your website up and working again. I don’t comment much as I have received threats in the past.

Interesting…

Another point.

Not too long ago, my website traffic (which has already fallen quite a bit, for various reasons – some intentional and some not), fell some 30%, almost overnight.

This seemed to follow on the debate about  brutalist versus humanitarian libertarianism.

That meme may have marked the opening of a campaign against certain kinds of political speech.

Militant gay rights and militant feminism are now very much government policy, indeed, foreign policy, and such campaigns, masquerading as grass-roots activism, are to be expected.

Meanwhile, perhaps related to this or perhaps not,  some  libertarians have been purged from FakeBook.…and complaints have been lodged against a few others.

My own modest page at FakeBook, set up by someone else, seems to have been stripped…

(Which is all to the good.  FB was always a trap).

In any case, I thank everyone who reads this blog.

And please ignore the threats. Comments are very valuable.

Also,  to the reader who wrote,

 Keep up the good
work.  Truth always finds a way!   Y
You are obviously a person of the light.  
Take good care.

Thanks very much.

Margaret Newsham: Echelon Whistle-blower, Hero

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I’ve blogged before about Margaret Newsham, who was dismissed in 1984 (30 years ago) from Lockheed Martin, where she was working on the Echelon global espionage system, a project kept secret even from the US government, since it was completely unconstitutional.  In other words, it was a project of the corporate overlords of the government and the intelligence services, a product of the “shadow state” as it were, not of the day-light government.

While Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden and Mr. Napolitano hold forth with no mention of thirty years of whistle-blowers,  I would like to salute Margaret Newsham, for her enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of the truth and the common good. Here is an excerpt from a 1999 interview she gave to a Danish newspaper:

From “I sold my life to Big Brother”:

” The government didn’t really know what was happening or what the many billions were actually being used for. And I felt very loyal both to the government and to the American Constitution, which was constantly being infringed. The world of espionage was also called ‘The Black World’ because most of the operations were carried out in secrecy, beyond any control.”

Since her dismissal, Margaret Newsham has been under heavy pressure, because her case against Lockheed Martin could mean that an open court case would shed light on the NSA’s ‘black projects’. Among other things, the case deals with swindling for more than 10 billion DKK (ca. 1.4 billion USD), and for the time being, her lawyer has provided her with legal assistance that is the equivalent of 140 million DKK (ca. 20 million USD).

PREMATURE DEATHS The case has had a fatal effect on her health. Since ’84 she has had seizure that left her  totally paralyzed, survived a cardiac arrest, and on top of everything else is suffering from cancer. Today, she lives on borrowed time and suffers from high blood pressure.

“It didn’t help any when my husband asked for a divorce after I had survived my cardiac arrest. He is chief of security at Lockheed Martin and has also been under a lot of pressure. He was grossly harassed because of his affiliation with me,” Newsham says.

She lives alone now and has struggled to maintain contact with her three children and six grandchildren. Today, she lives in a quiet Las Vegas suburb. Not even her neighbors know about her past.

“NSA’s activities have not only affected me, but also my former espionage colleagues at Lockheed. Nearly half of the people I worked with on clandestine projects are either dead or mortally ill today. For example, my former boss on the Echelon project, Robert Looper, died prematurely of heart failure, and Kay Nickerson, who worked on developing the Stealth bomber, died of brain damage.”

Galileo Goes To Jail and Other Myths……

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“Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,” Ronald L. Numbers, Harvard University Press, Dec. 8, 2010

Review

An illuminating study of the relationship between science and religion…This book features the contributions of a team of 25 scholars that includes agnostics, atheists, and Christians. Their collective objective is to dispel the “hoary myths” of the supposedly bellicose relationship between religion and science. Readers will be fascinated by the evidence that for advocating Copernicanism, Galileo was not imprisoned (as commonly thought) but interrogated–albeit under the threat of torture–and set up in an apartment. Other misconceptions concern the connection between Darwinian thought and Nazi biology, Einstein’s belief in God, and Islam’s alleged hostility toward scientific enquiry. (C. Brian Smith Library Journal 2009-03-02)

 

Slandering Christianity: The “flat earth” lie

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Veritas.ucsb.org debunks the secular lie that the Medieval period was a dark age in which Christians believed the earth was flat:

A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat–especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat…….

A few–at least two and at most five–early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge?…………

No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history………..

But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth?

The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.”

And why did these historians spread propaganda against Christianity?

It was in order to shore up the arguments of Darwinists  (with whom Darwin himself would have disagreed) against Christians.

It was to make Christians look stupid and opposed to science.

It was to falsely equate a non-existent “Christian” belief in a flat earth with anti- Darwinism so as to shame educated Christians into subscribing to the dogma of evolution, without fully grasping the import of what they were doing.

It was subversion of religion by stealth.

 

Pro-life advocacy is “torture,” claims feminist NGO

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The American Center for Law and Justice reports that women’s rights NGO’s are trying to claim that the pro-life position falls under the rubric of torture:

To be clear, the effort by the Center for Reproductive Rights clearly and explicitly targets the church’s rights to free speech and religious liberty. Here’s an excerpt from its recommendations to the Committee:

QUOTE

Note that the Holy See has negatively interfered with states’ attempts to develop legislation on abortion that would have served to better protect women from torture or ill-treatment. Note that the Holy See’s actions are a violation of Articles 1, 2, and 16 of the Convention against Torture and that the rights of freedom of speech and of religion extend only so far as they do not undermine women’s reproductive rights, including the right to be free from torture or ill-treatment. “(Emphasis added.)

END QUOTE

This is an astonishing statement, one that clearly targets the Catholic Church’s pro-life advocacy, equating it with state-sanctioned “torture or ill-treatment” of women and girls. By equating advocacy with torture, the Committee could begin an international legal process that would cause the U.N. to review statements or actions by pro-life public officials as “torture” within the meaning of the Convention. Radical pro-abortion groups would file amicus briefs citing new international legal standards equating pro-life advocacy with torture, thus claiming such advocacy is beyond the protection of the First Amendment.”

 

Official dissent: Teaching the serfs how to obey

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Oh Tarzie at the Rancid Honey-Trap, points out what still isn’t clear to many people:

People don’t get on the major media unless  their “dissent” is useful to the powers-that-be.

If  they really threatened the power-structure, they wouldn’t be anywhere on the networks.

A cone of silence would descend. They would suddenly find themselves in some fringe area of the net, ignored by the right people and overlooked by the rest.

Read what happened when liberal commentator Chris Hayes timidly criticized the overuse of the word, “hero.” He correctly noted that it  encouraged  jingoism and militarism…and then he swiftly recanted:

Let me spell it out: Someone in some high place finds Hayes useful. If and when he’s no longer useful, he’ll be purged. There was a very public reminder to this effect in May when, on a Memorial Day program, Hayes expressed ambivalence about the word “hero”, because it is “so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

Even though Hayes offered this tepid remark in a segment rich with militarist schmaltz, right wing pundits and veterans groups pounced. The next day, Hayes issued a revolting apology which went above and beyond the normal requirements of atonement, complete with the far right-wing suggestion that civilians can’t really speak with authority on military matters……”

Lila:

Hayes’ apology was completely uncalled for, for two reasons:

One. The military is intended, constitutionally, to be under the civilian command.
Two. Civilians have often been more militaristic than the military.

So why did Hayes grovel?

Tarzie explains:

“Public capitulation rituals of this kind aren’t just a part of heat vampire liberalism; they are, in fact, its very essence. This is basically what DeBoer’s Marx/Daschle formulation describes: a clear eyed, even radical, assessment of all that’s wrong in the world coexisting with acquiescence in oligarch-approved methods for putting things right, no matter how often and resoundingly these methods fail.

So constituted, heat vampire liberals act as role models for the rest of us, reconciling things that aren’t logically reconcilable, successfully wrestling themselves into compliance with status quo fundamentals while bemoaning the particulars.”

That’s why it’s imperative to call out “official dissenters.”
I know it looks churlish: Aren’t there much worthier targets than Mr. Hayes, who makes so many apt criticisms of  war and the police-state?

No, no, a thousand times no.

There’s no hope at all of real public outrage so long as  “domesticated outrage” flourishes without embarrassment.
Hayes and Greenwald and Snowden and Assange and the rest   aren’t simply co-opted. They are actively “instructing” the rest of us in compliance. They are conscious conduits for the “second-level” brain-washing that faces anyone who extricates himself from  the”first-level” brainwashing of the masses.

Flagolatry Then and Now

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Third-World Traveler has an excerpt from “Hoax,” by Nicholas Von Hoffman

(Nation Books, 2004).

p33
Flag Waving

Flagolatry , or the excessive or demented reverence for the national symbol, has its innocent roots in the first lines of the National Anthem. Then things began to get out of hand. Respect for the flag commenced to become flagolatry, part of the degraded and antic patriotism which distorts what, in saner hands, are decent and praiseworthy feelings for one’s country. That country was hardly born before people started running Old Glory up the flag pole with a vengeance.

p34
Some flag waving is good, a lot of flag waving is tolerable, incessant flag waving is crazy and dangerous and easily manipulated by the war party to get people bubbling at the mouth in fear and rage.

p36
… when flagalotry takes over the landscape, as it has in the last generation, it says something about people who dwell in that country. Not only does every unpaid-for, overly-mortgaged house in the United States boast its own copy of Old Glory, but so does every SUV, every truck, every truck stop, the side of every barn.

p38
I suppose that the purpose of flag display is inspirational, but taken together with allegiance-pledging and such, its effect is stifling, confining, and intimidating. It was used for the same purpose in the months leading up to America’s entry into World War I. An electric sign was strung across New York City’s 5th Avenue in 1916 flashing the orders for “Absolute and Unqualified Loyalty to Our Country.” In a society of lapel pin flags and standing to attention and red, white, and bluing, the uninterruptedly repeated message is don’t talk, listen up, and get ready to rumble.

Surveillance Psychosis Theater

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Yet another act in the ongoing theater of the International Surveillance State:  “Wikileaks names US cell-phone spy target as Afghanistan, claims Google”(h/t Wenzel@EPJ)

The protagonists are well-known by now:

Wikileaks, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden,  and Paul Watson (from Infowars, Alex Jones’ site).

They’ve already established their “street cred” (credibility at the grass-roots) with their activism, so their words are taken at face-value:

Earlier this week, Pierre Omidyar’s national security blog, The Intercept, reported that the US is recording all telephone calls made in and out of the Bahamas and one other unnamed country.

The story, co-bylined by Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, explained that the Intercept had decided not to name that second “country X” due to the risk of increased violence in response.

As I wrote at the time, this decision prompted a furious response from former allies Wikileaks, which “condemn[ed] Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation.”

Upping the stakes, Wikileaks also promised to name the redacted country within 72 hours.

Late last night the organization made good on its promise, issuing a statement claiming that “country x” is Afghanistan…

“Country X”! I’m surprised Greenwald didn’t put on a V for Vendetta mask and hiss “Psssst” from the bowels of a seedy bar.

As I’ve written here and here and here and here, and even back in 2005  in “Language of Empire,”  the government has been spying on all our calls and emails, without a warrant for a while now.

Even the mainstream press has reported this a long time ago.

That fearless dissident voice, The New York Times, published the following only a decade ago:

“Bush lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,” James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, NY Times, December 16, 2005.

Let me call your attention to this line:

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said.

Except for the suspiciously low number of people the government admits to targeting,  what did this piece really hide?

Here is a leading establishment organ substantiating what activists and immigrants have known since 9-11:

Every call overseas, every email, is subject to government monitoring.

Now, I don’t know what other people take to be monitoring. But, by 2004 many immigrants like me were generally aware that the government was listening to all our calls and emails abroad.  We even joked about it.

It was in 2010, when I was browsing Cryptome’s archives, that I realized that calls and emails directed abroad were also being taped and archived.

That part, I admit, was a shock.

 

 

Humanitarian killer: Abortionist Douglas Karpen

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Credit: Life Dynamics

An example of the explicit, real racism practiced by the left’s humanitarians and “feminists,” a racism that is never criticized in the major media.

Here, it’s analyzed by Judie Brown at CNSNews.com in a piece written on June 28, 2013:

“Abortionist Douglas Karpen, who operates two abortion facilities in Houston, Texas, is currently under criminal investigation. His practice of twisting “babies’ heads off” their bodies in order to ensure that a late-term abortion results in death for the baby was discussed in exclusive live interviews with three of his former employees. And the fireworks began.”

These letters were co-signed by 20 Texas lawmakers.”

What were the fire-works about?

They were set off when African-American pro-life activists asked why it was that Douglas Karpen, a white man, was allowed to keep his clinic open while being investigated for homicide, while the clinics of Kermit Gosnell and James Pendergraft, both black men, were instantly raided and shut down.

The question should be asked, because racism is already a large part of the abortion industry, which was founded on the eugenicist hopes of self-identified racists, like Margaret Sanger.

Abortion Inc. also targets poorer women in the US, usually Hispanic and black,  and it causes the deaths of more than three times the number of black babies as white.

Yet Gosnell’s trial, although pushed off the front pages, has had at least some attention from alternative sites, whereas Karpen, whose crimes are even worse, appears to have slipped under the radar:

She described how some babies would emerge too soon and would be alive, moving, and breathing. She also told of how Karpen would sometimes deliver the babies feet first with the toes wiggling until he stabbed them with a surgical implement. At the moment the toes would suddenly splay out before going limp. Sometimes he would kill the babies by ‘twisting the head off the neck,’ according to Edge……

…‘Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out,’ she explained. ‘He would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize. And I’m talking about the whole floor dirty. I’m talking about me drenched in blood.’

Karpen also injured the mothers recklessly:

Rodriguez also accused the abortionist of showing disregard for the safety of his patients. She indicated that he would sometimes insert the instruments through the woman’s stomach if it was the easiest way to kill the baby.

Edge also claimed that she routinely observed Karpen ‘hurting patients on the table’ and not telling victims of botched abortions that he had lacerated their cervix or uterus.”

Yet, in December last year  a grand jury refused to indict Douglas Karpen:

Operation Rescue alleged that Karpen was murdering babies in in a similar way as convicted Pennsylvania abortion Kermit Gosnell, who was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder for intentionally killing babies born alive during late-term abortions.”

Documents show that Karpen had a lengthy history of using high-pressure sales tactics on under-age minority girls to get them to undergo  dangerous late-term abortions, tripling his medical fee in one case, and threatening them to stop them telling their parents.

Conservatives cozy with the establishment

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The infiltration of conservative and paleo- libertarian circles by progressives continues apace, writes the paleo-libertarian blogger at MoreRight.net:

“Why does a self-admitted liberal have a regular column at a website called The American Conservative, founded by Pat Buchanan, and his column is passed off as a conservative voice?”

It should make anyone wonder about several conservative pundits. Some of them seem to be more interested in their media presence than in supporting traditionalist positions.

Whether they are simply naive or actively working to undermine social conservatism is the question.

MoreRight.net continues:

” If you dig into the archives of this magazine, you see the same refrain again and again:

And what issue is more important than life? As a practical matter, conservatives would probably do better with voters by becoming less rigid on social issues where Americans are becoming more liberal. But they also stand to gain by doubling down on the issue that should matter most.

Translation: we ought to give up on social conservatism because no one will vote for it, let’s just focus on stopping abortion and forget the rest.”

The blogger gets a part of the picture right, although I think there are other reasons for someone to focus on abortion, as recently I have begun to.

He then points out evidence of conservative pandering:

“What else? Articles written by the left-libertarians from the Cato Institute, fawning over Jim Morrison (who was found dead in a bathtub from a heroin overdose), bizarre apologetics for Communist folk musician Pete Seeger, and other one-off oddball articles.”

Lila Rajiva:

I can point out even greater pandering and compromise on paleo-libertarian sites:

  • Using the same scatological and vulgar personal attacks that the left favors
  • Constantly mocking conservatives, right-wingers, and  Republicans (admittedly these aren’t all the same thing), without anywhere near equal time for their opposite numbers, thus doing the left’s work for it
  • Promoting  disinformation sources, such as  Robert Morrow and John Loftus.

MoreRight than traces some  direct links between traditionalists and neo-reactionaries with progressives.

Last year, I  came to the conclusion that Neo-reaction (also called the Dark Enlightenment)  was some kind of leftist/government ploy, but given the anti-Catholic slant of the term “Cathedral,” I also have to wonder why this blogger uses it.

Deep waters indeed….

Imagine the reaction if one were to term the establishment the “Synagogue” or the “Temple”?

Of course, it shouldn’t be fear of reprisal that stops someone from using either of those terms.  It should be the clear evidence that the establishment uses all sides of the debate against each other, Catholic and Jewish among them.

The people who are supposed to be standing up for traditionalists in the “new media” sphere are not-so-subtly stabbing them in the back, not just in their associations, but in their heartfelt beliefs.

In the DC/NYC new media milieu, credibility emanates directly from the center of the Cathedral, that is, The New York Times. Everyone is angling for a spot at the trough, including so-called “traditionalist” conservatives.

Lila:  I was cited by the New York Times a couple of times, a while back. I daresay could have cultivated that route had I the stomach for dissimulation needed for it. Frankly, I don’t.

[Josh] Barro is part of the “media/liberal thought elite,” which includes other mediocrities and Cathedral mouthpieces such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anil Dash, Dave Weigel, Matt Yglesias, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and so on.

What of the connection with “paleo”-conservatives? Jonathan Coppage, associate editor of The American Conservative, is friendly with Barro. They’re both connected to Forbes writer and former Business Insider analyst Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who acts clueless about the decline, calls himself a “former reactionary who now embraces the Enlightenment,” and tells us about how great economic and social equality are. They’re connected to Michael B. Dougherty, another “surf the decline” conservative who openly mocks reactionary politics and argues in favor of “pragmatic” policies such as embracing immigration amnesty.

All these guys are very friendly with left-libertarians like Jason Kuznicki, Cathy Reisenwitz, and Josiah Neeley, who are doing their best to turn movement libertarianism into a subdivision of Frankfurt School progressivism. They’re in turn connected to witch hunters for liberal purity such as Julian Sanchez, also at Cato, and open borders enthusiasts such as Bryan Caplan (Cato), Eli Dourado (Mercatus), and Dylan Matthews (Vox). The relationship between so-called “paleoconservatives” and these left-libertarians and progressives is far too close for comfort.”