Category: US Domestic Issues

Parasites: Always Looking for More – How Fighting Vice then Pre-Crime Can be Lucrative

I know I can over-analyze and assume that someone is behind the bigger picture, like a mafia boss looking for more work to keep the “family” in the money.

I really think the latest drive by MSM/Government towards divisiveness is to not only take the focus on the corrupt government (politicians, MSM, Deep-State, elite, etc) but to also is a great marketing campaign to generate more business and more revenue.

It has worked with the CIA for decades, its black-budget ops funded by being the middleman to the black market drug trade (thanks to the government “war on drugs” AND the US’s continued presence in Afghanistan, home to 90% of the world’s opium) that they have in place where the price of drugs remains high (no pun intended), for now, until marijuana is legalized in the USA. What was a vice before the 1930s, then became a crime especially in the 80s/90s (with its parallel spike in violence that ALL prohibition generates), is bound to become a vice again in the 2020s.

This same forecast of legalized pot is seen by local, state and federal police leaders and politicians as a threat to their status quo and the prison-industrial complex. The only way forward is into the arena of pre-crime, since fighting vice (which all victimless crimes are) will no longer generate revenue like the drug war did.

Enter the new hate crime definitions stacking up and the interest of the police state to “research” this area and venture into keeping society “safe”. The latest is from Michigan where Remus at the Woodpile Report shares:

What is hate speech? Legally. According to the Supreme Court. Joe Briggs cites the controlling case, Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, which states hate speech must meet three conditions: Intent, imminence and likelihood.

You have to intentionally be inciting people to commit crimes of violence. Those crimes have to be specific and imminent. “Let’s go down the street and hang this guy” would be specific and imminent. “I’d like to string that guy up” would not be. And there has to be a strong likelihood that once the threat is made, the crimes will actually be committed. If any of these three things is lacking, the speech is protected. It can be hateful as all get-out, but it’s still protected.

That was then .. this is now:

Michigan’s attorney general and Department of Civil Rights on Friday laid out plans to increase the documentation and prosecution of hate crimes and incidents while citing a reported uptick in extremist and hate groups in the state.

Uptick in “extremist” groups no doubt because there are new definitions (like veterans, etc) and the surge in MSM reporting on a fake story for two years that drove many people crazy with “Russia-fever”, but I digress.

[Attorney General Dana] Nessel’s new unit will fight against hate crimes and review any groups identified in the SPLC list, her spokeswoman Kelly Rossman-McKinney said.

OK, wait a minute. The SPLC is in a world of hurt lately as it was finally revealed as to how corrupt an organization like this can get. That corrupt organization will be the reference point? What can go wrong? (Sarcasm alert)

Arbulu’s plans for a database would document hate and bias incidents that don’t rise to the level of a crime. The database would then be used to identify areas where awareness and education programs are most needed, he said.

So prosecuting actual crime is no longer the first order of business in Michigan because they have run out of the revenue that actual crime generates. So what would be the proper recourse for the state to let someone know that what they said to someone was hate, but not a crime? A 1AM SWAT team intervention?

Riding the wave of the latest snowflake triggering hate “speech” means an opportunity for the parasite .. errr I mean state to offer its “services” .. at a special rate I am sure ($$$).

I wish I could say that voting better might change this, but I would be lying. The swamp extends well beyond Washington DC, so it is time that people start waking up to that fact.

Short of this, how about everyone just mind their own business, and when someone offends you, just keep the police state out of the resolution equation.

‘Nuf said.

-SF1

A Rebel, or Just a Seeker of Truth and a Humble and Honorable View of Life

Over half a century ago, as my parents purchased World Book Encyclopedia set that came with Childcraft books for kids, I started my own quest of what the Abbeville Institute calls, as its mission, to:

preserve and present what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition

I did not know this at the time. The only reason I chose researching the “Southern tradition” when I was a young child was the fact that I was born in Columbus, GA back when they still had white drinking fountains, and black drinking fountains. I know just being born on land that happens to be south of the Mason-Dixon line does not make one a “Southerner”, just the fact I was born in Muscogee County within a few miles of the Chattahoochee River made me want to learn all I could of that region, its people and their history..

So starting when I was 6 or 7 and continuing into high school when I could go to the library and read all about the South, its culture, its quest for independence in 1775 and again in 1860 and the predominant aspect that set it apart from the rest of the nation, its connection with the land, and with kin. As the Internet developed, Amazon Kindles were manufactured, I have continued this research in the last couple decades.

Today’s installment of the Abbeville Institute daily educational e-mail brought me to a new place in my research journey. You see, for all these years I thought it was just because I am a rebel at heart, or sometimes being able to see ahead with a prophetic eye (not foretelling, but forth-telling) or maybe the fact that I tend to align myself with the underdogs in life, that these were the reasons I stayed in touch with my “southern research” and seeing value in much of the Southern traditions. But today, I saw something that I don’t think I understood before, it was the agrarian view of life that attracted me at my core to stay attached to how the South responded to the world around them through the centuries since a ship first landed at Jamestown in 1608.

Here is the paragraph that made the light bulb turn on:

In 1787, Patrick Henry warned Virginia and the South about the danger of forming a union with the people of New England. Patrick Henry predicted that the North, being the numerical majority, would control the Federal Government and use the Federal Government to extract tribute (taxes in the form of tariffs) from the South. Patrick Henry was joined by other Southerners, such as George Mason and Rawlins Lowndes who warned of the danger of a union with the North.[2] From its very beginning, the United States has been a nation divided. The division was not one of slave states vs. non-slave states but a division between a commercial society vs. an agrarian society.

Agrarian societies, in my humble opinion, know intimately well the realities of nature in this world and how broken it really is. One could plant a crop one year with the timing perfect and yet see the crops be decimated before harvest time. Alternatively, one could sow a crop in all the wrong ways and reap a bountiful harvest. Being agrarian, in my own opinion, keeps one humble, and keeps one from thinking that one could improve on nature to the point of perfection.

I look around today at the progressives, left-collectivists (as well as those on the other side of the aisle, so-called conservatives, neo-cons, right-collectivists) and know that they probably have never farmed a day in their life. These people, born into an urban or suburban setting only know how to idealize how everything can be fixed, in their utopian view for “free” based on their own shallow notion of where security and wealth come from. Government tends to be their god.

Alternatively, those who can tell the difference between capitalism and crony capitalism, between creating value honorably verses buying a monopoly via lobbyist actions in DC, know that there is a difference between labor, fiat money and wealth, values and a generational legacy to hand down.

This article also points out the heartache all honest businessmen and entrepreneurs  have in the current climate, that was the case even back in the 1800s:

In 1828, Missouri Senator Thomas H. Benton declared that the Federal Government’s tariff policy was forcing Southerners to pay 75% of the Federal revenue used to support the government. He lamented, “This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this.” [5]

In an 1828 letter to Daniel Webster, Abbott Lawrence of Massachusetts advocated a proposed tariff bill because “This bill if adopted as amended will keep the South and West in debt to New England the next hundred years.”[6] As Patrick Henry had warned and Senator Benton noted, the agrarian South was being exploited by the commercial North—a Northern commercial and financial crony capitalist society that could not exist without the steady inflow of revenue gained from protective tariffs.

Massachusetts historian Charles Bancroft admitted this harsh fact ten years after the North’s conquest of the South, “While so gigantic a war was an immense evil; to allow the right of peaceable secession would have been ruin to the enterprise and thrift of the industrious laborer, and keen-eyed businessman of the North. It would have been the greatest calamity of the age. War was less to be feared.”[7] Follow the money, and you will discover the real reason for war.

Being exploited for other’s gain is never a good feeling. The ability of parasites both in industry and in government to siphon off one’s wealth and makes it that much more difficult to put profits away for future capital expenditures means that everyone is working harder for less realized credit. It does seem at times that the deck is stacked against the entrepreneur, not just the broken world part, but a government entity and all their regulations (federal, state, local) that sucks life out of …. life.

Here is a final quote from this article, one that shows not unlike those in the South after their attempt for independence failed, we too are in fact these days subjects, not citizens. We are tax slaves on the government plantation:

Confederate President Jefferson Davis explained the motive for Northern invasion of the South, “The lust for empire impelled them [Northerners] to wage against their weaker neighbors [Southerners] a war of subjugation.”[11] Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon in 1861 warned Congress that the Federal Government was becoming an aggressive empire.[12] The London Telegraph in 1866 observed that while the United States “may remain a republic in name, but some eight million of the people [Southerners] are subjects not citizens.”

So yet again there are forces in this land that are ripping people apart. The majority think this is a right or left problem, and that if we get government right, and get the right people elected, all will be well. But at our core, those that are critical thinkers know this all sounds very hollow. We know that it is not the takers that find truth and honor in this broken world, but the givers, those who sacrifice for their kids, grand-kids, family and friends to make this journey a more pleasant one.

Again, the land has a lot to do with this process, and in these days when so many are generations away from the land we tend (myself included) to take nature and the Creator of that nature for granted.

I guess I am coming to the age where I see that more clearly every day, just to watch ducks and geese in a pond for 10, 20 or 30 minutes observing their journey as the weather changes. These days it seems that we have to intentionally carve out time to enjoy this earth, but in my own mind, there are rewards in that that far outweigh that time on social media or in front of a television.

Not sure what the path forward is, but getting back to nature and self-sufficiency seems to be part of the formula. No answers here today, just a lot of questions.

-SF1

Intrigued: A Ten Year Old Book Predicts a Political Tsunami – Morality Wars

The past few weeks and especially the past few days has been particularly revealing. I have said “only in 2018” so many times this year that it does seem to be the swell one sees before a tsunami. *

(* – actually, not a perfect analogy as the water rushes OUT to sea just before a tsunami hits)

It started this morning when I read this from Lew Rockwell’s fantastic site, an article from Michael S. Rozeff that has a line stating:

America used to greet bringing the boys home from foreign wars with applause. Now there is immense criticism from all components of the pro-empire contingent, who act as if the empire and Washington will crumble because 2,000 American soldiers are leaving Syria.

We are talking 2000 soldiers (if we can trust Pentagon numbers, since they failed their first ever audit and also misplaced trillions, as in, “we can’t account for that money” over the course of the past 20 years) but more importantly is the continued US and coalition efforts in Syrian airspace without Syrian permission!

But I digress, what this article then led me to, which is so intriguing to me, is the relationship between empire, religion and political correctness. I love it when society, and the human psyche can link so many things like this into the “real life” experience here in 2018. Below was my segue:

For an explanation of the relation between the empire and immoral moralism, see here.

It does look to me like I will be spending $20 for this Kindle version of Morality Wars: How Empires, the Born-Again, and the Politically Correct Do Evil in the Name of Good in order to blog about this from time to time going forward. As usual, I have a dozen or so books that I am in the middle of and they all are vying for a blog post or two to highlight my own research and my own learnings.

Here are a few excerpts:

From Amazon reviewer John Williamson, Provincetown, MA shares that the authors of this book point out:

… the US Government has long been involved in immoral actions that have often been justified using arguments suggesting that the action was being taken for moral reasons .. We learn that, “In 1783 George Washington characterized the colonies as `a rising empire,’ and nearly all the Founders saw America as destined to become one of the world’s great empires. A great deal of attention is given to examples drawn from prior empires such as the Roman empire, the Spanish empire and the British empire to name only a few ... They review also describe how the neoconservatives used moralistic rhetoric to justify US involvement in Iraq .. The argument is that PC puts limits on “the range of acceptable thoughts, seeking to outlaw or marginalize those ways of thinking that might challenge the powers that be .. Right PC uses the concept of patriotism to intimidate and silence those on the left who are critical of the war in Iraq. They are vulnerable to the criticism of being unpatriotic .. the PC of the New Left during the 1960s as well as the current identity politics of feminist, gay, and race movements. Their focus is on the ways in which these movements use PC pressures to keep certain issues off the table. For example, in connection with feminist PC such questions as: (a) Do fetuses have any rights? ( b) Or are fathers discriminated against in marriage laws and divorce courts?..

… The authors tell a story of the evolution of the American empire or more precisely what they refer to as the five American Empires: (1) The Fledging Constitutional Empire, 1776-1828, (2) Manifest Destiny Continental Empire, 1828-1898, (3) Allied Global Empire, 1898-1945, (4) The Good Empire versus the Evil Empire, 1945-1991, and (5) World Hegemon: 1991-Present. This section of the book basically reviews the many ways in which the US behaved badly – in the name of high moral ideals – like other prior empires during each of these periods.

So a clip from the book’s introduction states (remember, this is a ten-year old book):

I do not know about you, but I do see, especially since Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, quite the storm, perfect in only that there are so many triangulations involved that the average person can’t keep up and they depend on MSM or the government to explain what is going on.

I still say, there is a LOT to learn from history that helps the discerning thinker and reader to consider things that they previously had made up their mind on. Critical thinking is extremely in scarce these days, however, it is these kind of people that will be invaluable in charting the course in this storm and into the world beyond it.

This thinking will be scary to most, however, as I have said before here, a crumbling empire is a perfect environment for a grassroots, black market, underground networking of Love to give hope during and after the storm, as was demonstrated in the 1st century in the Roman Empire. It will be in that environment I do hope many can entertain a thought without accepting it as they try to adjust to a very different world.

Just thinking of my kids and grand-kids yet again, seems to be a theme .. (yes, I am not your typical “boomer”)

Stay tuned

SF1

America: Identity Crisis .. Did It Ever Really Have One Identity?

We have civil unions and then we have civil wars, am I right? What was one becomes two (or more) when trust is lost, fear of overt conflict (keeping the peace), lack of commitment, and avoidance of accountability which in fact are four of the “five dysfunctions of a team” in the book of the same name.

When talking about America, well first one has to understand that the whole TWO continents of North and South America were considered “America”.  But if we narrow this down to the British colonies in America, we still have to ensure that we are talking to just the thirteen colonies that decided to seek independence from a colonizing empire.

Once you understand this, only then can you see the birth of this republic was one that had thirteen different personalities! Thirteen sovereign entities decided to “federate” (join forces on a temporary basis) to push out or wear down the colonizing effort England had on these territories.

Each of the thirteen entities decided what government to have themselves first and joined at their own volition into a joint effort against the British.

What got me thinking about this was an article from Abbeville Institute which has been addressing this topic all year and since its inception in 2002. In this article they point out several important factors into the current identity crisis we are having in the United States of America:

Since our conferences in 2018 were on the coming apart of American national identity, it’s appropriate to the end the year with some reflections on that topic. After 15 states peacefully seceding from the Soviet Union in 1991, John Updike famously asked, “without the cold war what is the point of being an American?” A good question. Is American identity based on a historic self-sustaining culture, or has it been held together by the constant centralization demanded by War: the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria? War, Randolph Bourne said, is the “health of the state.”

War unifies, rightfully or wrongfully, since those who are not caught up in the patriotic spirit are indeed marginalized in this country. In other countries, that are more collectivist like socialistic, marxist or communist states, this can easily get you killed! What if our whole identity was held together by having a common enemy for 140 years, as I would add the war on the American Indians in the late 1880s as part of this?

What about the time before civil union led to civil war?

The Jeffersonian America that existed from 1776 to 1860 was not a unitary state “one and indivisible” as it was said to be after 1865. Just as the European Union is a federation of nations and not itself a nation, so the pre-Lincolnian America was a federation of sovereign states and not itself a nation state. The closest thing to a “national” identity were state and regional identities. Tocqueville said that in federating the states had not forfeited their distinct “nationality.” Everyone understood this.

People identified to their community and to their state:

An early 19th century New England poem reads:

Amy Kitteridge is my name,
Salem is my dwelling place
New England is my Nation
And Christ is my salvation.

After the civil war where the eleven states were terrorized back into the “civil union”, the effort was made to cement this union more permanently so that this would not happen again:

the America that emerged after the Union victory in 1865 did claim to be a unitary nation state “one and indivisible” from which secession would be unthinkable.

We are now, after the distractions of many wars and many enemies, face to face knowing in our heart that we are united in name only. What is to become of the “united” States?

the conflict between Red and Blue states is here to stay for the foreseeable future. A recent Reuters poll found that nearly a third of Americans believe some sort of civil war will occur within five years, and some security analysts issued similar warnings.

This does not bode well, however, we can learn from history.  The USSR dissolved into 15 republics, and our own history tells us of better times when the culture extremes were tempered with state and local sovereignty:

The only part of our tradition that has anything to say about these disunited Red and Blue states, and the mosaic of conflicting cultures that are drifting toward violence, is the founding Jeffersonian tradition (1776 to 1860) which worked quite well without being a unitary nation state. It was able to check the growth of central power because it was grounded in state and local sovereignty not the fantasy of “national” sovereignty. What is needed today is political devolution, division, and separation, not more unification and centralization. How to do this in a civil and peaceful way, in a country still under the spell of “indivisibility,” is a much needed national debate.

Unfortunately, at this time, it seems that dialog is not even possible as polarized as the factions in this nation are. To peacefully seek our own separate ways and yet hope for each entity to go in peace and prosperity is a very mature attitude. Can today’s society act mature? That is a tough question to answer. Maybe this nation has to go through some major trials and culture storms in order to emerge on the other end a bit more humble.

Time will tell.

-SF1