In some ways, the Constitution did us all a disservice by giving us an “almost king” government office called the president of the United States. While some believe that office can right the wrongs of the last president or even the last decade or so of bad decisions, others believe that there are forces that remain hidden in government structure and other power structures in and outside of this country that use this position as a puppet of theirs. It was evident from our first president that the power of the office would be abused, and abused often.
From The Burning Platform comes an interview with Doug Casey that reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly from the latest president and what it means for us going forward. Just a few snips from this article I would like to highlight as you could go to the link above and see what you think:
Let me start by saying that I’m very pleased that Trump was elected because, first and foremost, he’s not Hillary. In addition, he’s never been in political office. So he lacks some of the vices common to professional politicians. Even better, all members of the Deep State reflexively hate him.
That’s a good thing, because there’s some truth to the meme “the enemy of my enemy just might be my friend.”
I also like some of the things Trump’s done since he’s been in office—besides driving liberals and Deep Staters insane. He’s done some deregulating—not nearly enough, but he’s moved in the right direction. Of course, he did this not because he understands Austrian economics, but simply because he’s a businessman. He has some personal experience with the destructiveness of regulations.
So he has disrupted politics to a degree, which is good, but to inact long-term change requires more than just randomly hitting some things. He is missing something at his core which has been obvious all along in the way he approaches problems and seeks solutions almost “off-the-cuff”.
I do like that at the end of the day he would rather talk to the Russians than escalate things, but it is obvious he is limited by his deep state handlers as far as how far he can take this. Sanctions are stupid and are in fact usually the first step towards conflict. At the end of the day there seems to be no overarching philosophy for foreign policy. Trumps knee jerk firing of Tomahawks at sites in Syria a year ago after accusations of Assad using chemical warfare on his own people was an epic stupid move on the part of Trump .. but maybe there was a gun heald to his head like was held to JFK’s?
On the negative side, Doug Casey focuses on the obvious:
…. starting with running a trillion-dollar deficit. Where does he think that money’s going to come from? The Russians and the Chinese aren’t buying US debt anymore. Foreigners are looking to offload US paper.
Americans aren’t buying much, either. The only real alternative is to sell it to the Federal Reserve. Which is a real problem when the Federal Reserve is not only trying to deleverage, but has to refinance hundreds of billions of short-term paper coming due. Recall that almost all the $20 trillion of Treasury debt is very short term. Interest rates are going to rise, a lot. And so will the interest portion of the government deficit. Interest payments alone will be a trillion a year by the end of Trump’s second term—assuming he gets one.
Trump also—like all red-blooded Americans—loves the military. So, he’s adding to the already bloated military budget. It’s ridiculous, dangerous, and provocative. The United States already spends more than the next 10 or 12 biggest nations in the world put together. And most of that money is wasted and misallocated. It’s being spent on dinosaur technologies. What he’s doing there is very foolish. It’s accelerating the looming bankruptcy of the Government. And of course the Government will drag the country down with it.
He’s foolishly antagonizing the Russians by placing troops in the Baltics. He’s doing the same with China by sending ships to the South China Sea, which is their equivalent of the Gulf of Mexico.
But my biggest problem with Trump is that he has no philosophical core. He’s not by any means a libertarian. He’s a pragmatist, and an authoritarian. He’ll do whatever seems like a good idea at the time.
He’s got no background in or understanding of economics or history. I think it’s true that, as his critics say, he hasn’t read a book in 50 years. He goes strictly on gut instinct.
Exactly. So what we have is someone that keeps kicking things and reacting but never solidifying long-term change. But at the same time, the swamp is huge and he can’t be the only one draining it. While Congress remains inept at doing anything productive (like dismantling spending programs that have outlived their usefulness and mission) because that might keep them from getting re-elected. With an 11% approval rating, incumbents get re-elected at a 95% rate. If voting changed anything they would NOT let us do it!
So basically, this is essentially entertainment that your tax money pays for, the bread and circus distractions that empires do in their dying days.
At the end of the day all we can really do well is love our families, love our neighbors and pray that God has a plan to keep our kids and grand-kids is His care as this American Empire spins down.
While there is an effort to erase all history in this country by the government schooled ignorant masses, those that can think critically will need to research harder to find source material necessary to learn from.
Why do we need to learn? Because whenever you have culture wars, collective societies and empires in the mix you will need to know your enemy so you can effectively resist the wave, retain your freedoms and maybe even your life. Beyond this, there are others in your family or circle of friends that need to be sparked to research on their own over time. The struggle is real as one by one we give people truth in love and give them the freedom that is in our DNA from out Creator.
An article from Abbeville Institute sparked this thought in me this morning .. here is a clip:
“The Civil War was fought over slavery.” If you want verification of this “known” fact, this politically correct “given” all you have to do is ask a typical Southern politician, educator, media personality, minister or just about anyone you meet on the street.
True that you can ask this question all over the United States and get this as the 90% majority opinion. You might be surprised that those in foreign lands tend to see things a little clearer as I predict only 80% of the world that is knowledgeable of the American “Civil*” War.
* By definition, that war was NOT a “civil” war where BOTH sides want the WHOLE nation
Southerners who know the truth about the War for Southern Independence will try to correct the error of Yankee propaganda by announcing that the War was fought over states’ rights not over slavery.
So there is probably another 10% of Americans that would agree with this paragraph .. that it was all about “state’s rights”, that their state had a right to opt out of an abusive marriage when and if necessary years after it agreed to the marriage (whether it was the 1st marriage during the late 1770s with the Continental Congress or the 2nd marriage during the late 1780s with the US Constitution). While this is honorable and follows the founder’s thought processes, there is something more at the core of most of those who fought.
The author goes on to point out that your typical southern dirt farmer in 1861 was not all that political and really saw the imminent invasion as a threat to his way of life, and that of his family and his land! In fact, he offers a short story to segway to a way to look on the reality of 1861:
Suppose one is walking along a city street and you come upon an individual viciously beating someone. Out of a sense of honor and Christian charity you demand that the man cease beating his victim but the man looks at you and tells you to mind your own business because he has “a constitutional right to beat the victim.” Now don’t think outside of the scenario—with just the facts as given—how would you feel even if the person doing the beating did in fact have a constitutional right to beat the victim? Legal technicalities do not stand up well against an emotional appeal.
So the author suggests that the south missed the boat in the post war period by not getting to the core of the grounds for divorce in the first place. In addition to this, I contend that this political “evidence” pales in comparison to the life both southerners, northerners and westerners (Midwest today) had before that horrible war. The author goes on to lay blame at the southern politicians:
Instead of maintaining the struggle for the principle of Southern freedom; the right to be the masters in our own homes; the right of self-determination; and the right to live under a government ordered upon the free and unfettered consent of the governed—all of which was boldly proclaimed in 1776—Southern spokesmen meekly declared that the men in gray were fighting for states’ rights. Instead of challenging each successive generation of Southerners to break the chains of political and economic bondage fastened upon the people of the South by the ruling elite of the Federal Empire, our “leaders” sought to assure the Northern majority that “we the people” of the invaded, conquered and occupied Confederate States of America were once again 100% loyal Americans—meaning that we were obedient subjects of the newly created Federal Empire.
So in the North (Union) waging a war against southern culture is a particularly wicked way through wholesale burning of homes and cities, raping of women and taking anything of value from the innocent people left behind by their husbands who were fighting hundreds of miles away (i.e. total war), the north actually “kept the Union” (i.e. marriage) intact while a by-product was freeing the black slaves only to exit this war by making everyone a slave on the government plantation by force.
Now here comes the punch line …
Why did those men in gray, the majority of whom were not part of the plantation system, why did they fight for four long years against overwhelming odds with not a single friend in the community of nations to offer encouragement? Why were they willing to expend so much blood and treasure? The answer is as simple as it is eye-opening; they were fighting to be free; to prevent an aggressive and culturally dissimilar Yankee majority from making political and economic slaves of the Southern minority. They were fighting to prevent Yankees from turning Southerners, both black and white, into political and economic vassals of their newly created Federal Empire! They were fighting to drive back an aggressive and evil invader (the United States of America) and to preserve the independence and freedom of their country …
.. their land, their way of life.
Look around today in 2018 and be honest. Can you see why many people in this forced Union are now worried about a second “civil” war? Can you see why the south and its former independent spirit was targeted in the last decade to rid itself of the desire to once again desire to shake off the tyranny that runs loose in this land? Is there no refuge for those that just want to be left alone .. opting out of any government assistance and be self-reliant where they can raise their families THEIR way .. in FREEDOM?
It is critical that those who love their God-given life, family, healthy communities and land come to terms with the encroaching empire and its cultural rot and filth. One example of how a people can be free in spirit while being a serf in an empire is in the book of Acts in the Bible. These people were able to both rest in His love and hope while being proactive defenders of the ones they love on this earth. A future post will cover my own thoughts on this.
Until then, dream about freedom, research to know your enemy and be prepared for the times ahead .. teach that next generation well!
When you think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria (all adversely impacted by US foreign policy) and then consider the region’s powers of Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE that are pitted against Iran, it all becomes a bit more clear. Israel desires to be a permanent fixture in the Middle East in spite of its illegitimate birth at the expense of native Palestinians. To preserve their place in the Middle East, they have become more desperate in their quest to control the narrative as well as the lands outside their true borders (i.e. Golan Heights, West Bank as well as Gaza).
Paranoid to a fault, they have used the United Kingdom and the United States of America for seven decades since they were given partial ownership of land in this region after the Zionist movement gained UK support three decades prior to that.
From AntiWar comes a fair synopsis [ Titled: “Making Sense of US Moves in the Middle East” by Rebecca Gordon and Tom Engelhardt] of the region’s neighbors who have been decimated by US foreign policy working towards protecting Israel at all costs.
Starting with the US’s longest undeclared war to date, Afghanistan, the article points out:
The report was devastating – or would have been, if anyone here had noticed it. “Between 2001 and 2017,” it concluded, “U.S. government efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan mostly failed.”
If you think this has nothing to do with Israel, you are sorely mistaken. Israel has seen Iran (used to be Iraq) as it’s biggest enemy in the region since it has Saudi Arabia and UAE as allies.
Of course the US would like the world to believe that Iran is threatening the US but in reality just its existence WITHOUT any nukes it threatens Israel which has 100 nukes. Iran is not really an offensive powerhouse with its 40 year old military equipment mainly from the US before the Shah of Iran (US puppet) was overthrown.
So $2T to date has been spent in Afghanistan with 2,000 US soldiers dying there as well as 100,000 Afghans to date. The fact that the poppy-market (Opium) market there is thriving makes the country fantastic in funding CIA black budget towards its black ops worldwide as well as being lucrative for the Military Industrial Complex.
The background on Afghanistan and how it became a target after 9/11 is an interesting one:
In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired an minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.
Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the US deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas. Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.
In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines. But Washington still kept up sending money to Taliban until four months before 9/11 in an effort to keep it “on side” for possible use in a war or strikes against Iran.
The 9/11 attacks, about which Taliban knew nothing, supplied the pretext to invade Afghanistan. The initial US operation had the legitimate objective of wiping out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida. But after its 300 members fled to Pakistan, the US stayed on, built bases — which just happened to be adjacent to the planned pipeline route
So with that unpleasant fact out of the way (i.e. rationale for invading Afghanistan), let’s take a look at the West Bank before we turn our eyes to Syria.
Early on, Israel has made a point to solidify it’s grip on ALL the land promised the Hebrews and given to the Zionists (close enough for government work right?) by the UK and US after WWII:
From the AntiWar article mentioned above:
… the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.
Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.
The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution.
How convenient for Israel, and now in its effort to solidify this even more (as they are in fact now the minority class in Israel in terms of shear population), they are doing this (again from the AntiWar article):
.. as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.
A solution to this demographic dilemma – one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation. [Editor’s note: The Jewish Nation-State bill described here was passed early Thursday morning. This article was written before passage.]
Apartheid .. segregation .. a last ditch effort to strong arm its way in a region that is hostile to its own paranoid agenda. Acting like the US Empire as a world’s bully, not even allowing UN inspectors in Israel while it demands Iran to have total transparency in the world’s court.
Blowback is a bitch, but the current Zionist leaders only care about themselves and not their kids when they use this method to coexist in this world.
So while the US has given the Israeli military almost every toy the US has in its inventory as well as $134.7B (current, or non-inflation-adjusted) dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding and promising $39B more in the next ten years it appears that GOP, Democrats and Zionist Christians are falling all over themselves to aid in this intimate partnership for the long term. The world is NOT impressed.
Lastly, what is up with Syria?
Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Timesreported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.
Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions – 20,000 of them – reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.
So with Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria all smarting from Israel’s lover, the US, all to protect Israel (more than US citizens when you understand the $20T debt, $200T unfunded liabilities and the loss of freedoms across the spectrum the American people have suffered (out of ignorance they would not understand this sentence)) .. what else is there? Yemen!!!
Saudi Arabia with US weapons and assistance have decimated Yemen towards a genocidal disaster. It is almost as if the US is getting Saudi Arabia up to speed to be another useful puppet in the region to protect Israel .. yes, you heard that right .. in fact, the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia team were the proud parents of ISIS.
With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war – and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war – with Iran.
In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.
Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.
Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.
Nice … am I right? American exceptionalism at its finest! A nation under God right?
The author summarizes with this statement of hope (she is young, so you will have that):
For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?
That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows – and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.
Fat chance on the US really having a debate on foreign policy as the only export this country really has anymore is weapons and a bully military.
Again, blowback will be a bitch someday. I just with my generation would have learned from Vietnam and thought more like Thomas Paine:
