How the NeoCons Made America the Most Hated Nation

The Soviet Empire collapsed not solely because of corruption and decay, but because even the Commie bosses could see that a free society was incomparably more productive and, thus, more powerful than their own ramshackle totalitarian system that was incapable of managing a high tech economy without endless malfunctions, misallocations  and disasters.

Thus the Free World, and particularly the US, won the Cold War.

And as the victor in a near bloodless struggle with a hated system of monstrous tyranny, the US was not only the World's wealthiest and most powerful nation, but the World's most admired nation.The entire World wanted to wear jeans and sneakers, and visit Disney World.

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The Neocon authors of the Project for the New American Century sought to exploit the opportunity thus created to transform America from a wealthy, powerful nation state, where free speech and personal liberty were respected, into a global empire that would serve the interests of an international plutocratic elite. The strategy was simple: to establish American hegemony over the Middle East and Central Asia, where most of the World's proven hydrocarbon energy reserves are located, and thus to control the World by controlling the distribution of energy.

The project was to be self-financing. Profits from the exploitation of the oil and gas reserves to be appropriated would cover the military costs of empire. The payoff was to come in the form of security for corporations operating globally under the terms of the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now institutionalized as the World Trade Organization. That is to say, corporations operating with complete freedom to move capital and technology to wherever labor is cheapest and workplace health and safety standards weakest, to move products to wherever profits are highest,  and to move profits were taxes are lowest.

The consequences of the imperialist project have been as follows:

Unlawful killings: Source

America has spent trillions on multiple wars, suffered large numbers of military casualties, including six thousand killed in action and around 150 thousand suicides among war vets.

Globalization of trade has devastated the American and European economic middle-class, roughly the middle 50% of the population, through job losses, loss of job security, or reduction in wages and benefits, all the direct result of allowing Western corporations to move capital, technology and jobs to the Third World, where labor costs remain less than one tenth of those in the West.

Europe's new people: Image source

Workers throughout the West have been further harmed by mass Third World immigration, which intensifies competition for work, housing and the use of public facilities including schools, hospitals, highways, etc. As a result, in part, of mass immigration, the people of England now occupy and average of less than half an acre each, or a patch of ground around 45 meters square.

Opposition to war and globalization has been suppressed by (a) false flag attacks on Western nations; (b) the use of terror tactics against citizens, including the sexual assault and X-irradiation of travelers by the US TSA, (c) the firing of academics and journalists who challenge state and corporate propaganda about globalization, imperialism and the rise of Western domestic tyranny.

A genocidal program for the destruction of the nation state, which means concerted efforts to trivialize religious and cultural traditions. To hear it from the corporate lick-spittles such as Tony Blair, there is really no such thing as Christianity, or Islam or Hinduism: they are all one and the same, mere "spirituality."

Goldman Sex: Image source

So will the United States be forced to blunder on, contrary to the innermost feelings of the great majority of her people? Will the tiny corporate oligarchy, the Soros's the Rockefeller's, the financial pimps and prostitutes at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the other great financial institutions that largely fund America's presidential elections continue to impose their will through puppet politicians whose elections they finance, the media -- news, books, movies, broadcasting -- that they own, and the education system they control?

Or is the whole edifice of lies, corruption and cruelty about to collapse as did that of the Soviet Union?  

The Nazi TSA welcomes you to the USA

The question is no longer in the hands of the American people, or the people of any other, so-called, democracy. The people are brainwashed, bullied and borne down with economic adversity. They have little understanding, and little energy to fight. Only outright starvation will create a general revolt, and that will be staved off with food stamps.

The question, thus, is in the hands of the elite. A handful of people, really. A few in the military, in the intelligence world and at the top of the financial heap.

Will these people drive the nations of the Earth into a system of eternal slavery?

Or will they acknowledge the horror of what they have wrought and pull back while there is still time to save the beautiful and creative diversity of the nations, races and religions of the World, and allow all nations to pursue their own destiny, within a global system that restores the concept of civility and law in the relations between nations?

Goldman Sachs Profiting From Under-Age Prostitution

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Image source

The New York Times, March 31, 2012:THE biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com.

This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.

That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equity financiers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake.

Read more:

See also: Goldman sex! 'God's bank' offloads shares in firm linked to prostitution after deciding it was 'uncomfortable with direction of the company'

"The bad publicity was driving down our market cap. faster than selling kids for sex was racking up our profits" -- Golden Sex spokesperson.

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

Now we know it: Goldman Sachs rules the World

Eric Hobsbawm: the Commie Traitor Who British Lefties Loved

He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was a hero of the BBC and the Guardian. Was Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?

Historian defended the Soviet killing of millions in the name of Communism When he was at Cambridge in the 1930s he knew Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and other Soviet agents, who were recruited by Marxists.

Four years before his death said he wanted to see MI5 files on him to find out who had 'snitched on him.'

By A.N. Wilson

Daily Mail, October 2, 2012:Eric Hobsbawm once described himself as an 'unrepentant communist' and was a towering figure on the British Left for decades

On Monday evening, the BBC altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg.

The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary.

You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out of their way to pay tribute, that the nation was in mourning.

Yet I do not believe that more than one in 10,000 people in this country had so much as heard of Eric Hobsbawm, the fashionable Hampstead Marxist who was the cause of all this attention. He had, after all, been open in his disdain for ordinary mortals.

Hobsbawm came to Britain as a refugee from Hitler’s Europe before the war, but, as he said himself, he wished only to mix with intellectuals. ‘I refused all contact with the suburban petit bourgeoisie which I naturally regarded with contempt.’ Naturally.

If the name Hobsbawm rings a bell at all, people might recollect that it was also the name of Julia Hobsbawm, a PR expert who, in collaboration with the future Mrs Gordon Brown, was one of the spin doctors who sold New Labour to this country.

There is a world of difference between the ideology of Julia’s sleek, modern New Labour ideas and her father’s hard-nosed Stalinism, but one of the things they had in common was contempt for ‘ordinary people’.

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Meltdown: What Really Happened at Fukushima?

By Jake Adelstein and David McNeill

The Atlantic, July 2, 2011: It’s been one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear disaster: How much of the damage did the March 11 earthquake inflict on Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors in the 40 minutes before the devastating tsunami arrived? The stakes are high: If the quake alone structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan is at risk.

Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: “The earthquake knocked out the plant’s electric power, halting cooling to its reactors,” as the government spokesman Yukio Edano said at a March 15 press conference in Tokyo. The story, which has been repeated again and again, boils down to this: “after the earthquake, the tsunami – a unique, unforeseeable [the Japanese word is soteigai] event - then washed out the plant’s back-up generators, shutting down all cooling and starting the chain of events that would cause the world’s first triple meltdown to occur.”

But what if recirculation pipes and cooling pipes, burst, snapped, leaked, and broke completely after the earthquake -- long before the tidal wave reached the facilities, long before the electricity went out? This would surprise few people familiar with the 40-year-old Unit 1, the grandfather of the nuclear reactors still operating in Japan.

The authors have spoken to several workers at the plant who recite the same story: Serious damage to piping and at least one of the reactors before the tsunami hit. All have requested anonymity because they are still working at the plant or are connected with TEPCO. One worker, a maintenance engineer in his late twenties who was at the Fukushima complex on March 11, recalls hissing and leaking pipes. “I personally saw pipes that came apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant," he said. "There were definitely leaking pipes, but we don’t know which pipes – that has to be investigated. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for Unit 1 had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.”

The reactor walls of the reactor are quite fragile, he notes. “If the walls are too rigid, they can crack under the slightest pressure from inside so they have to be breakable because if the pressure is kept inside and there is a buildup of pressure, it can damage the equipment inside the walls so it needs to be allowed to escape. It’s designed to give during a crisis, if not it could be worse – that might be shocking to others, but to us it’s common sense.”

A second worker, a technician in his late 30s, who was also on site at the time of the earthquake, narrated what happened. “It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes, I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped. I was pretty sure that some of the oxygen tanks stored on site had exploded but I didn’t see for myself. Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate and I was good with that. But I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told and I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.”

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The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

The prosecutor in the case is Vincent Bugliosi who claims to show in a NY Times best selling book that, beyond reasonable doubt, Oswald killed Kennedy.

The Kennedy assassination(s) appears to have been a CIA project, ably covered up by the Warren Commission under the guidance of Allen Dulles, who as head of the CIA, had just been fired by Kennedy.

George Bush's NeoCon Iraq war was launched on the basis of preposterous lies about Saddam's WMD's that made the CIA appear incompetent.

Taking these facts together suggests a certain logic concerning the literary and film-making activities of Mr. Bugliosi.

The Bush's, it may be thought in some circles, have become unduly independent -- as did the Kennedy's before them.

See also: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again: The Military and Warren Commission Cover-up.

The Debate: Did Obama Blow It or Throw It

Candidates' debates are rarely informative and often incredibly dull. Participants are uptight and heavily programed to avoid saying any thing off script.

Last night's debate seemed different. Both Obama and Romney spoke calmly, almost conversationally, despite the strict alternation of two, three or one minute speaking slots. Both candidates were polite: as Obama spoke Romney smiled; as Romney spoke Obama often nodded as if in full agreement.

But strangely, for an experienced and polished political performer, Obama perpetrated several remarkable blunders.

During an argument about corporate taxes, Obama charged that American companies receive tax incentives to move jobs offshore, but then remained silent when Romney declared Obama's claim to be entirely fictitious. Does Obama not know what he is talking about? Does he routinely spout nonsense off the top of his head? And if what he said were true, how does the failure of his administration to eliminate such a job-killing provision reflect on his own competence?

In fact, Romney could have made much more of this than he did, for the only tax incentive that American companies have to offshore jobs is the tax that Obama wants to increase on profits of corporations located in the US. Romney did state that the corporation tax is a job killer, but he failed to make the point in the context of Obama's assertion that the corporations received tax incentives to offshore jobs. What corporations face are tax disincentives, which Obama intends to increase, to locating jobs in the United States. Which is why GE, for example, employs over 900 accountants and lawyers to determine where in the world it is most tax-efficient to locate their operations.

Equally bizarre was his claim that the oil industry is subsidized. Technically, the claim is true, but as Romney pointed out, the subsidy of about $2 billion per year is trivial compared with the $90 billion in subsidies given by the Obama Administration to, so-called, green energy companies including the likes of Solyndra, the bankrupt solar cell maker, and the luxury car makers, Tesla and Fisker -- companies that contribute campaign funds to the Democratic Party.

The $35 Million estate said to be Obama’s next home (Source).

But were these blunders?

Obama's performance lacked not only energy but even engagement. He seemed like a man offering a mere pro forma performance, as though the succession had already been decided. It's the economy that matters and for the next four years America needs a corporate restructuring expert at the helm. Romney is the man with the credentials. Which raises the question: has the choice already been made? Is Obama just counting the days until he is free to retire to a luxury family compound in Hawaii?

We entertain no conspiracy theories without evidence. But Obama's debate performance was certainly suggestive, if not of a conspiracy to throw the race, at least of the absence of a serious determination to win it. 

Hillary Cinton and James Baker on China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan

Dull but informative. What this discussion suggests is that US policy on Iran is bipartisan, which in turn suggests that a Romney presidency will not necessarily launch the war on Iran that the NeoCons are working for. That may explain the NeoCon enthusiasm for a false flag attack on the US to justify the war on Iran that Israel's Government so desperately desires.

Did Sarkozy Order Ghaddafi's Murder?

By Felicity Arbuthnot

GlobalResearch.org, October 3, 2012: This weekend a detailed article in the Daily Mail (i) suggested that a: “French secret serviceman, acting on the express orders of the then President Sarkozy, is suspected of  the murder of Colonel Quaddafi”, on 20th October last year.

While bearing in mind that the NATO-backed insurgents now in power who have destroyed, de-stabilised, and terrorized much of Libya and who hope to carve up Libya’s resources for their own benefit have every reason to wish to disassociate themselves from the butchery of Colonel Quaddafi’s terrible death, the new allegations illuminate interesting points.

The French assassin, it is claimed, infiltrated the mob rabidly manhandling the Colonel, and shot him in the head.

“The motive, according to well placed (Libyan) sources”, was to prevent any chance of interrogation into Sarkozy’s links with Colonel Quaddafi.

The Mail previously revealed (ii) quoting a French governmental briefing note published by an investigative website, that fifty million euros has been: “laundered though bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland … from Colonel Quaddafi, to fund (Sarkozy’s 2007) election as President”, which if correct: “would have broken political financing laws.” Sarkozy’s: “numerous visits to Libya” were also cited.

Further claims are that: “The Swiss account was opened in the name of the sister of Jean-Francois Cope, the leader of Mr Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, and the President’s right-hand-man.”

Quaddafi’s son, Saif alIslam, whose life hangs in the balance and no doubt further so, should he be subject to the Libyan “judicial system”, has stated unequivocally regarding the Sarkozy campaign funding: “We have all the details and are ready to reveal everything … We funded it.”

No wonder Saif, also a generous funder (£1.5 million) to his former place of advanced study, the prestigious London School of Economics – where he also delivered the annual Ralph Miliband Lecture in May2010, named for the renowned academic and father of the former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his brother Ed, current Leader of the Labour Party – has been abandoned by the Western powers who had formerly welcomed him – then conspired in another illegal coup, this time in his country.

Sarkozy, on becoming President, memorably welcomed Colonel Quaddafi on a State Visit to Paris in December 2007, greeting him as “Brother Leader” and hosting his famed Bedouin tent next to the Elysee Palace.

Tony Blair, visited Quaddafi on many occasions, even flying in the Colonel’s private plane, pushing mega business deals. He too is mute on the horrors of the death and the fate of his children, grandchildren and country.

The Mail also makes the points that: “The United Nations mandate which sanctioned (the misnamed ‘no fly zone’) expressly stated that the Western allies could not interfere in the internal politics of the country.”

“Instead the almost daily bombing runs ended with Quaddafi’s overthrow, while both French and British military ‘advisors’ were said to have assisted on the ground.”

“Now Mahmoud Jibril, who served as interim Prime Minister following Gaddafi’s overthrow, has told Egyptian TV: ‘It was a foreign agent who mixed with the revolutionary brigades to kill Gaddafi.’ “

Another Tripoli source, according to the paper, stated: “Sarkozy had every reason to try to silence the Colonel and as quickly as possible”, with a further “diplomatic source” also stressing Quaddafi’s threats to reveal the financial details of the funding to the 2007 French Presidential elections donations.

An interesting point, if correct, is made by Rami El Obeidi, the : “former head of foreign relations for the Libyan Transitional Council (who) said he knew that Quaddafi had been tracked through his satellite telecommunications system as he talked to: “the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.” Which raises the question of what connection exists between the murderous Western backed rampages against Libya and Syria?

How much of alleged murky financial deals does Syria’s President also know?

Sarkozy has consistently denied receiving money from the Libyan Leader and was unavailable for comment in response to the Mail's article.

Worthy of mention is that in November 2007, just before Quaddafi’s Paris visit: “A US State Department cable had warned that those ‘who dominate Libya’s political and economic leadership are pursuing increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector’ and that there was ‘growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism.’ ”

“The cable cited a 2006 speech in which Quaddafi said: ‘Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.’ ”

“Quaddafi’s government had forced oil companies to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names. Worse, ‘labor laws were amended to ‘Libyanize’ the economy’, that is, turn it to the advantage of Libyans.”

“Oil firms ‘were pressed to hire Libyan managers, finance people and human resources directors.’ ” (iii)

Perhaps then it is no wonder, that, on hearing of Colonel Quaddafi’s horrific death, President Nobel Obama declared it was a: “momentous day.” (BBC, 20th October 2011.) Madam Clinton followed with a raucous laugh and: “We came, we saw, he died.”

There is only one certainty, in the whole shaming “regime change” in Libya, there are no clean hands.

And where is Colonel Quaddafi’s body?

How globalization is destroying the livlihood of Western youth

Image source

Greek Youth Unemployment Hits 55%

The economic elephant in the room that no Nobel-Prizing-winning economist dare mention is globalization and the offshoring and outsourcing of Western jobs to the Third World.

See also:
CanSpeccy: Obarmy Is a Tyrant But Romney Could Be Worse
Sep 08, 2012
In fact, offshoring is the gift of what was US GDP to China, India, and the other countries to which US corporations locate their production that they sell to Americans. US GDP goes down, the GDP of the countries who make the ...

CanSpeccy: The New Conrad Black: On the Stupidity of the Last four American Administrations ...
Aug 30, 2012
A few months behind bars seem to have done former Canadian Citizen, his Lordship, Conrad Black much good. Other newspaper proprietors would no doubt benefit from the same experience. By Conrad Black The Financial ...

CanSpeccy: How globalization destroys Western prosperity
Jul 10, 2012
But what the shills for globalization fail to mention is that comparative advantage, as Ricardo defined it, presupposes immobility of capital, a condition that certainly does not apply in a globalized economy, where international ...

CanSpeccy: Niall Ferguson: The Failure of the European Union and ...
May 25, 2012
In an interview with Michael Posner for the Globe and Mail, Ferguson points out that it is globalization, i.e., free trade with four billion third worlders earning pennies an hour, that is impoverishing low-skilled european workers, ...

CanSpeccy: How the Rich Destroyed the Economy
Sep 27, 2011
Economic policy failed for three reasons: (1) policymakers focused on enabling offshoring corporations to move middle class jobs, and the consumer demand, tax base, GDP, and careers associated with the jobs, to foreign ...

CanSpeccy: Exporting the economy
Dec 02, 2011
“Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. http://canspeccy.blogspot.com/

Netenyahu Seeks to Elect the Next Neocon US President

By David Remnick

New Yorker Blogs, September 12, 2012: It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

Mofaz, a former Defense Minister, who participated in the fabled raid on Entebbe, in 1976, along with the Prime Minister’s brother, was reacting to Netanyahu’s outburst against the Obama Administration, at a news conference in Jerusalem. “The world tells Israel ‘Wait, there’s still time,’ ” Netanyahu told reporters in English. “And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

No one had any illusions that Netanyahu was addressing anyone but Obama, with whom he has a tortured relationship, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had earlier said, “We are not setting deadlines,” but, rather, pushing forward on economic sanctions and diplomacy. Articles in the Guardian and elsewhere have set out the sorry recent episodes in this chaotic relationship. On a trip I took to Israel a few weeks ago for The New Yorker, the political philosopher Avishai Margalit told me that Netanyahu was a kind of “mythomaniac,” a politician utterly absorbed and guided by his sense of heroic mission, and dismissive of the opinions and analyses of even his closest advisers. This goes for his innate distrust of any and all Palestinians, as well as for the vast range of military and intelligence experts, both inside and outside the Israeli government, who are constantly telling him that a unilateral attack on Iranian nuclear facilities will end in political, diplomatic, and military disaster. Netanyahu’s opponents include the current leaders of the Israeli military and the major intelligence branches and their most recent predecessors, to say nothing of a decisive majority of the Israeli population. They fear consequences as dire as regional war and an Iranian regime unified and strengthened by a sense of common purpose. ...

Read more

See Also: White Man's Burden, How a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish launched the Iraq War

Why US Military Veterans Kill Themselves

By Luke Hiken and Marti Hiken

Progressive Avenues, September 28, 2012: Recent figures indicate that for every soldier killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, 25 veterans commit suicide upon their return to the U.S. That is an astonishing statistic! How can this be?

In 1971, Stanford University conducted a prison experiment to determine what the effects of imprisonment were on a selected group of students. One half of the students were chosen to act as prison guards while the other half were to be criminals convicted of serious crimes. The University had to bring the experiment to an abrupt end when it was discovered that the “prison guards” were becoming sadistic, violent oppressors, and the “criminals” were responding to the conditions of imprisonment in dangerously rebellious ways. The experiment underscored what happens to average, educated people, when they are treated without respect, and without protections. More importantly, it demonstrated the catastrophic effect that unrestrained authority, violence and corruption had on those entrusted with the roles of caretakers and guards.[1]

We are witnessing a similar breakdown of morality and judgment among U.S. troops presently carrying out our imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East. “The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology” recently issued the report that for every soldier who was killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East over the last 10 years, 25 more veterans have committed suicide.[2] Whether or not these suicide attempts are a result of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), mental health breakdowns, or the natural consequences of having good “soldiers” turn into murdering monsters because of the conditions they are placed under (i.e. the Stanford experiment), is debatable. Yet, what is more at issue here is the fact that over a ½ million soldiers and mercenaries (i.e. “civilian contractors”) have returned home to our communities from the Middle East, and the Pentagon opines that approximately 1/3 of them suffer from some form of PTSD.

What these statistics highlight, is the moral depravity resulting from all aspects of our involvement in the Middle East, and the impact our colonial assaults have, not only on the defenseless populations we have chosen to destroy, but also on the perpetrators of those assaults as well. It is impossible for soldiers to participate in unjustified mass murder, and not be scarred by it. One would have thought that our experiences in Vietnam would have provided a clue as to the disastrous results that unjustified wars have on the men and women asked to fight in them. But no, our Pentagon and “misleaders,” have learned nothing from Vietnam, the Russian and French failures in Afghanistan, or our deceitful and shameful attack on Iraq. These “misleaders” are unaffected by the cruelty and viciousness of their overseas forays, while many engaged in these wars will spend their days contemplating killing themselves.

Recent studies conducted by NYU and Stanford have documented the fact that hundreds more civilians have been killed by the U.S. drone attacks than the Pentagon acknowledges.[3] Yet some bull-headed bureaucrat in the Defense Department, named John Brennan, has the audacity to explain to Obama that these studies are inaccurate, and that our “pinpoint” accuracy with drones is only killing terrorists, and any unwarranted deaths are “extremely rare.” Are these pathologically absurd comments by Brennan designed to insulate Obama from his slaughter of hundreds of innocent women and children identified in the studies, or do we assume that Obama is even more of a scoundrel than we imagined, for setting up a clown like Brennan to rubber stamp the illegal use of drones?

A nation that murders civilians indiscriminately, wages wars of aggression against defenseless nations, and lies to its own people about our reasons for destroying governments around the world is not only subjecting its soldiers to resulting suicidal behavior, but destroying the moral integrity of the entire nation as well. At every sporting event where we see jet planes and U.S. flags displayed for purposes of propagandizing the American people to put up with our international war crimes, most of the people watching hang their heads in shame over the decline of what was once a great nation.

The Stanford prison experiment was a microcosm of what is happening to the U.S. worldwide. It demonstrates what happens to citizens who become international killers and to the nation that pays them to do so.  

FOOTNOTES

(1) The Stanford Prison Experiment - A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

“The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted at Stanford University from August 14 to August 20 of 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. It was funded by the US Office of Naval Research and was of interest to both the US Navy and Marine Corps as an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners.

Twenty-four male students out of 75 were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available.”

(2) Press TV, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/236543.html

“According to a New York Times article published on April 14, an American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan while veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes.

“The article also said more than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year -- more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.”

(3) Zucchino, David, Drone Strikes in Pakistan have Killed many Civilians, Study Says,” LA Times, latimes.com, 9-24-12 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/24/world/la-fg-drone-study-20120925

______________________________
Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former Associate Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org, 415-702-9682.

Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, military, immigration, and appellate law.

The Progressive Avenues website, www.progressiveavenues.org, is regularly updated in the “What’s Added, What’s New” link on the Home page, at http://www.progressiveavenues.org/Whats_New_Added.html

Pictures Worth a Thousand Words

Netenyahu Addresses the UN

The Netenyahu Salute

The Netenyahu Nuke. Afterwards, Bibi gave the picture to Romney to color in

Pictures Show Why US/Israel Hate Iran

(Image source)

If you want to know why US/Israel wish to destroy Iran, look at the people. Where are the Africans? Where are the Asians? Where's the diversity? There isn't any. Iranians are all white(ish). They're Aryans, you know, like Nazis.

The evidence is conclusive. Iran is a mono-ethnic nation state stubbornly intent on preserving its racial, cultural and religious heritage, something to which no nation but Israel is entitled to do.

Then there's the oil. One hundred and fifty billion barrels, or $15 trillion-worth at the wellhead. That's far too much cash for such a populous country in such a geostrategically important part of the world to invest in in its own development.

(Image source)

Iran must open voluntarily to the globalist system of corporate control or be opened up. They must eat bacon and hamburgers, Krispy Kreme donuts and Kentucky Fried Chicken whether they like it or not. They must acknowledge the superiority of multiculturalism over their age old civilization and allow low-wage Asian and African workers to flood their labor markets.

What's more, they have to restore control of the oil fields to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. (aka BP) and Exxon.

The Pretty Face of Genocide

By JAY

Norway appoints a Muslim woman "culture minister"

JewAmongYou, September 23, 2012: Norway has appointed a Muslim woman as its “culture minister”.  According to Alarabiya:

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has appointed a Muslim woman as part of his government during a Cabinet reshufle this week.
Hadia Tajik, 29, from Pakistani decent, was appointed on Friday as Norway’s minister of culture.
Hadia has become the first ever Muslim cabinet member and youngest ever government minister in the Scandinavian country.
The newly appointed minister of culture has already publicized her program for the upcoming months and highlighted that cultural diversity should become an undisputable part of Norway’s everyday life.
In 2009 she was elected as MP for the Norwegian Labour Party that represented Oslo.

It’s not clear why there needs to be a government minister of culture in the first place, but if there is to be one, shouldn’t he represent the indigenous people of Norway? With traitors like Stoltenberg comprising the ruling class, it’s easy to understand the rage of Anders Behring [Breivik]. As for Tajik, my guess is she was hired for her good looks – to give genocide a pretty face.

The new face of Norway: Not Norwegian

Paid PR scandal erupts at Trikipedia

Or where would a wise man hide a pebble? 

By Violet Blue

CNet, September 18, 2012: Concerned Wikipedians raised the alarm Monday that two trusted men -- one a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, the other a respected Wikipedian In Residence -- are allegedly editing Wikipedia pages and facilitating front-page placement for their pay-for-play, publicity-seeking clients.

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Isn't that what Wikipedia has been about from the outset? A place where critical lies can be embedded in a mass of otherwise useful information gathered at no cost by naive unpaid contributors?

The life of Jesus: Does it matter?

...there is not a single fact about Jesus of which we can be certain, other than that, if he actually existed, his name would not have been Jesus...
 

C'mon guys, you try it. (Image source)

The four gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul, which are the core texts of the Christian faith, tell the story of Jesus' life: his birth;  his intellectually precocious youth; his recognition by John the Baptist as the long-awaited Jewish Messiah; his 40-day fast during which he wrestled with the temptations of the Devil and determined the path he would follow; his recruitment of disciples; his journeys throughout Palestine; his teachings and miracles; his conflicts with the Jewish authorities; and finally, his arrest, conviction, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension to Heaven.

Yet there is not a single fact about Jesus of which we can be certain, other than that, if he actually existed, his name would not have been Jesus, since no such name was known to the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine of that day.

There is not a single reference to Jesus in the historical record. The day and month of his birth are unknown. The year of his birth is uncertain, the place of his birth, Bethlehem or Nazareth, is a matter of debate. And the circumstances of his birth and life as recorded in the gospels so closely reflect those of the Persian god, Mithra, and the founders of  other religious cults that the literal veracity of the gospel story seems impossible to accept.

If, then, the story about Jesus is largely if not entirely myth, what possible interest can it have for people of the present day? To many, the answer is "none." On that view, Jesus, if any real person existed who inspired the gospel stories, must have been a mere mortal, born not of a virgin, unable to raise the dead or turn water into wine, who died as any crucified man dies, and whose death was as final as will be yours or mine.

Lev Tolstoy by Ilya Repin (Image source)

That, precisely, was the view of Russia's literary giant, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Yet Tolstoy made Jesus the focus of his religious life. 

Why? 

Because the teachings of Jesus remain a fact undeniable on the basis of any historical evidence. The teachings of Jesus have a validity and significance totally independent of their authorship, and even of how they may have been edited or re-written. One can accept or reject them, but one cannot deny their reality or their force in the world. 

For that reason Tolstoy made his own translation of the gospels from the Greek bible. In it he combined the teachings from the four gospels in a single narrative, which omits reference to the supposedly miraculous nature of Jesus' birth, the miracles Jesus is supposed to have performed and the miracle of his resurrection.This work is available in English translation as The Gospels in Brief.

Tolstoy's rejection of the magic and mystery of Christianity naturally enough alienated him from the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated and anathematized him. His rejection of violence as a means to political ends alienated him also from the dictatorship of the Tsar, which though fearing to take action against Tolstoy himself, persecuted his followers. 

His ideas were equally repugnant to the Communists who claimed Tolstoy as a great patriotic artist while suppressing his religious and political beliefs and punishing those who attempted to put into practice his ethical principles. The Soviets shot more than 100 Tolstoyans, while consigning many more to slave labor camps and mental hospitals. 

An account of the evolution of Tolstoy's religious beliefs is provided in Rosamund Bartlett's fine biography: Tolstoy, a Russian Life.

Honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court to Cite Key US Administration Figures in 9/11 Criminal Case

By Ian Henshall

9/11 Doubts Seep into the Mainstream as Evidence Accumulates

The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack. 

Courtesy: liamscheff.com

 www.Salem-News.com, September 19, 2012: (LONDON) - As the annual 9/11 remembrance draws to a close, the world is as split as ever. Not only on whether the Afghan and Iraq invasions were justified, but between those who accept Washington's official 9/11 story and those who do not.

Under the mainstream media radar, the number of those who do not is steadily increasing, forming substantial majorities in places like Pakistan and Egypt and significant minorities even in NATO's heartland countries, France, the UK and the US itself. The issue is not whether, despite his denials, Osama Bin Laden might have wanted to organise the 9/11 attacks but whether Al Qaeda actually had the capability to infiltrate 19 terrorists into the US, including some very well known to the CIA, and the four highly skilled pilots necessary to pull off the spectacular coup. Up to then Al Qaeda's biggest success was setting off two truck bombs in East Africa. (1)

The stereotype promoted by the corporate media of a 9/11 sceptic, a badly educated redneck watching Fox News in a trailer park, could hardly be further from the truth. The website Patriot's Question 9/11 lists hundreds of University Professors, over a thousand architects and engineers and hundreds of aviation professionals who have spoken out against the official 9/11 story. (8)

The most significant expert may turn out to be Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the widely respected honorary president of the Italian Supreme Court and legendary mafia hunter who lost his brother in a revenge attack. Imposimato has written to the Journal of 9/11 Studies announcing his intention to bring a case before the International Criminal Court citing key figures in the US administration for involvement in the execution of the 9/11 attacks. (2)

Imposimato's take has received indirect support from people close to the heart of Washington's power elite. Richard Clarke, White House anti-terror czar at the time, has confirmed what researcher Kevin Fenton has established based on a meticulous examination of recently released official reports. Someone at the top of the CIA "made a decision" to stand down the FBI and the CIA, allowing the alleged hijackers a free run in the US when they would otherwise have been arrested and the plot foiled. (9)

Meanwhile the 9/11 truth movement continues with a drip, drip of new research. This year we have seen nothing on the scale of the revelations of iron spheres and uncombusted nanothermite in the dust at Ground Zero, strong indicators that the Twin Towers' spectacular collapses on live TV were caused by something a lot hotter than diesel fuel fires. But there are significant developments nonetheless.

Scientist Kevin Ryan was fired from work some time ago after he went public saying his employer Underwriters Laboratories, the company which had certified the quality of the steel used in the World Trade Centre, was involved in creating fake computer simulations to help support the official story that the fires were sufficiently hot to cause the disastrous collapse of three skyscrapers. He has since been beavering away at various aspects of the 9/11 story.

This year Ryan has released an analysis of the changes that the 9/11 events have brought to the US building industry. If the official story is to be believed, 9/11 was an architectural and engineering disaster. Buildings expressly designed to withstand a high speed jet impact and subsequent fire failed spectacularly. This disaster should have led to an urgent and exhaustive inquiry with many action points for other buildings of the same construction. Instead, says Ryan, nothing like that happened.The US engineering community has acted as though it does not believe the official 9/11 story any more than the alleged conspiracy theorists in their trailer parks. (3)

Meanwhile the US Public Broadcasting System became the conduit for the latest film from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth: Explosive Evidence - The Experts Speak Out, with downloads nationally pushing Bill Clinton's Convention Speech into third place, an astonishing success for a topic the mainstream media as usual were entirely deaf to (4). The film has a section in which psychologists and counsellors explain why the media and sections of the public are so reluctant to doubt an official story that might, from another government, seem highly unlikely if not absurd. The reasons come down to trauma, belief in authority and a phenomenon psychologists call cognitive dissonance. For every trailer park dissident there are several other citizens with a very strong desire to believe in authority, especially after the terrifying circumstances and unprecedented media barrage of 9/11. Confronted with contradictory evidence some time later, such people suffer from painful cognitive dissonance and often resort to denial.

An example of cognitive dissonance occurred last week on CNN when Piers Morgan tried to dismiss Jesse Ventura, a maverick politician and broadcaster. Morgan clearly knew little about the issue and could only say the suggestion of an inside job was "preposterous". The studio audience applauded Ventura. (10)

Another 9/11 researcher who goes by the name of Shoestring has presented a very detailed analysis of the various emergency offices that failed on the morning of 9/11. Probably the most shocking was the FBI's emergency management office in Washington, designed to cope with up to five major emergencies at one time, which knew nothing more than the TV channels. In the light of so much other bizarre activity - at the CIA, on the building investigation, the failure of Washington's Andrews Airbase to scramble any of its fighters for nearly two hours - the official 9/11 story of coincidence, surprise and cock-up begins to look less likely than some of the alternatives. (5)

But surely the post 9/11 war against Al Qaeda has produced a network of detainees, led by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who have corroborated the official 9/11 story of a plot hatched in the caves of Afghanistan? Even the supine 911 Commission was disturbed by the CIA's refusal to allow them any contact with KSM or even his interrogators. As suspicions of systematic torture were confirmed in media leaks, the CIA illegally destroyed most of its own records, presumably to save its officers the worry of future prosecution. This ugly picture of detainees tortured into corroborating the official 9/11 story has been enhanced by another recent revelation from the Defence Department Inspector General: detainees were given truth drugs, or to put it in official language were drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information". (6)

Last year's bombshell from the White House anti-terror czar at the time has produced a sequel. Richard Clarke has focused on the role of the CIA saying the then boss George Tenet must have known about the shocking unexplained decision to block three FBI field offices from acting against several 9/11 hijackers. Most researchers agree that the CIA's dedicated Osama Bin Laden Unit, kept secret until some years after 9/11, is the best place to start asking questions. Up to now they have focused on Bush favorite and torture advocate Cofer Black who oversaw the unit before moving on to make money as a principal in Blackwater, the mercenary company in Iraq.

Recently another CIA official has come into the frame: Black's deputy in the CIA's counter terror center, Enrique “Ricky” Prado. A book based on sources in the Miami Vice Squad describes Prado's apparent double life as CIA official and a member of Florida's Cuban mafia. The story was ignored by much of the mainstream media but carried in detail in Wired magazine, the Daily Beast and the UK's Daily Mail, which operates under stringent libel laws. (7)

When will the truth be known? Many agree that the planet's intelligence services probably already know. Iran's President Ahmedinajad's UN General Assembly speech calling for a new investigation into 9/11 was greeted with predictable outrage and the corporate media applauded when the NATO countries angrily walked out. But most countries did not walk out and with global opinion ever more sceptical as time goes by, this could prove a bad omen for Washington.

(1) In the UK a poll by ICM taken last year showed only seven percent were fully confident they had been told the whole story of the attacks, while in France a large minority thought the US government was involved in the attacks. Middle East experts as diverse as Alan Hart and Mohamed Heykal have both said that any Al Qaeda plot would have immediately been known to the many intelligence services who had agents in the ramshackle setup.

(2) http://www.journalof911studies.com/

(3) http://digwithin.net/2012/09/07/are-tall-buildings-safer/. Note: the media have featured someone claiming to be from the original engineers team who has said that planners never imagined a plane crash into the WTC but this is contradicted by the written record and there is scant evidence that this individual was in the role he claims.

(4) digitaljournal.com/article/332051

(5) http://shoestring911.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/why-were-us-intelligence-facilities-in.html

(6) http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/07/u-s-drugged-detainees-to-obtain-false-confessions.html(7) http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/28/did-a-cia-agent-work-for-the-mob-excerpt-from-evan-wright-s-new-book.html(8) For an interesting review of some of the questions raised see

http://www.WantToKnow.info/9119-11_official_story_questions

(9)  Fenton's book is "Disconnecting the Dots", published by Trine Day

(10) http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2012/09/18/piers-intv-jesse-ventura-911.cnn

Until Blogger Restores Our Side-bar -- If Ever

Here are a couple of excellent links.

The Game's Afoot -- Still

Winter Patriot's 100 plus episode Sherlock Holmes And The Alderney Street Mystery, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of Garth Williams, the Welsh math wiz and cryptanalyst who became a victim of the British secret state appeared to have reached a brilliant conclusion. However, Sherlock, assisted by his more intelligent older brother has now resumed the chase in pursuit of criminals behind a much broader conspiracy involving both 9/11 and the death of National Football League star Pat Tilman who supposedly died as the result of "friendly fire" in Afghanistan.

Did you ever want to know about those subsidies for coal and oil while alternative energy was starved of funds? Well here's the scoop from the Climate Resistance blog. : It’s a F*ct – We’re F*cked

Pursuing Truth on the Kennedy Assassinations

By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

LewRockwell.com, September 19. 2012: Everyone over the age of 60, and many over age 55 who were in grade school at the time, remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard what happened to President John F. Kennedy, on Friday, November 22, 1963 at 12:30 PM (CST). I was finishing lunch with other students in the dining room at Harvard Medical School’s Vanderbilt Hall lined with portraits of past professors when a student ran in and yelled, "President Kennedy has been shot."

I began studying and collecting books on the Kennedy assassination after reading Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, published in 1967. My interest in the subject is heightened by having personally known two physicians involved in President Kennedy’s care whose observations are pivotal to the case, Admiral George G. Burkley (1902-1991) and Dr. Malcolm Perry (1929-2009). Admiral Burkley was the President’s personal physician. He was the only physician who was with Kennedy in Dallas and also at the autopsy, done at a Navy hospital in Bethesda, MD. Dr. Perry performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy shortly before he died. He was the first physician to speak publicly about the President’s injuries in a televised news conference an hour after his death.

My family lived next to Dr. Burkley and his family on the grounds of the Newport Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island when I was a teenager, sharing a duplex that housed its Chief of Medicine, Dr. Burkley, and Chief of Surgery, my dad. His teenage son, George W., and I became friends. (We once sailed up Narragansett Bay in his Snipe sailboat and camped out on an uninhabited island. This adventure was cut short the next morning, however, when a Navy launch arrived to tow us back home, sent by our fathers after a hurricane warning was issued.)

Dr. Perry and I worked together at the University of Washington (UW). He moved to Seattle in 1974 with Dr. Tom Shires, Parkland Hospital’s Chief of Surgery, who came to Seattle to be Chairman of Surgery at the UW School of Medicine. Dr. Shires brought a group of surgeons from Parkland Hospital with him, which included Dr. Charles James (Jim) Carrico, who, as a surgical resident, was the first doctor in the emergency room to examine Kennedy after he was shot. Dr. Perry and Dr. Shires operated on Lee Harvey Oswald, but the bullet Jack Ruby shot into Oswald’s abdomen tore his aorta and vena cava and he bled to death on the operating table before they could save him. Dr. Perry was a vascular surgeon. We would perform surgery together on patients with a thoracoabdominal aneurysm. (I was the last UW faculty surgeon that Dr. Shires hired before he moved to Cornell in 1975. Drs. Perry and Carrico stayed, with Dr. Carrico becoming the UW’s Chair of Surgery in 1983, to 1990).

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren assured the American public and the world that there was no conspiracy. It said a lone assassin shot three bullets at the President from a window in the Texas School Book Depository, above and behind the Presidential limousine as it proceeded down Elm Street in Dealey Plaza. No one else planned or participated in the attack, not the Russians, Castro, anti-Castro Cubans, or organized crime – or any officials in the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex either, for that matter.

The Warren Commission concluded that one bullet hit Kennedy in the back, exited out through his neck, and went on to inflict all the injuries Governor Connally sustained sitting in a jump seat in front of the President. This bullet, as postulated in the Commission’s "single bullet theory," went through Connally’s chest, in-and-out of his wrist, and landed in his thigh. A second bullet missed the limousine, ricocheted off a curb and grazed a bystander. The third bullet the sniper shot hit the President in the head, killing him. The Commission concluded that the evidence compiled in its 888-page Report and 17,816 pages of Hearings and Exhibits (in 26 volumes) proves that a 24-year-old ex-Marine with Marxist sympathies, Lee Harvey Oswald, was the assassin. Likewise, the Commission found that nightclub owner Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later.

At the first press conference after Kennedy died, a newsman asked Malcolm Perry, "Where was the entrance wound?" Dr. Perry informed the American public and the world that, "There was an entrance wound in the neck…It [the bullet] appeared to be coming at him…," which on repeated questioning he twice more affirmed and the world’s press duly reported. This did not sit well with the Warren Commission’s view of the matter. Testifying before the Commission several months later, however, Dr. Perry supported its contention that the bullet shot into Kennedy’s back had exited his neck, not entered it. Accepting the proposed one-bullet, two-victim hypothesis as true, Dr. Perry agreed that the bullet wound he observed in the neck "certainly would be consistent with an exit wound."

Fifteen years later Dr. Perry told me in a surgeon-to-surgeon private conversation that the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck was, without question, a wound of entrance, irrespective of what he had told the Warren Commission....

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See also:
Why Three Kennedys Were Assassinated: Lew Rockwell interview with Dr. Miller

George de Mohrenschildt, George H.W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

Noam Chomsky "Debunks" 9/11 and JFK Murder After 7.00 minutes: (re: Kennedy assassination) "Who knows. Who cares. Plenty of people get killed all the time. What does it matter if one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy?) Yeah, right, Noam.

Losing Our Turbulence

By John Derbyshire

Taki's Mag, September 13, 2012: The country of my birth no longer much resembles the country of my birth, mainly as a result of mass immigration. Britons were already grumbling about the influx of Third Worlders in my student days back in the mid-1960s.

Thanks to a nifty little app put online by the Office for National Statistics over there, I see that the grumblers of those days were straining at gnats. Until 1983 the net flow was actually outward, with more Brits emigrating than there were foreigners going in for settlement. The inflow wasn’t so Third-Worldy, either: In 1975, the first year for which we are given immigrants’ “countries of last residence,” the top three were Australia, the USA, and Iceland.

Then, after straining at gnats for a few years, the Brits began swallowing camels. The big inflows started after the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997. Numbers peaked at a stupendous 591,000 in 2010 (top countries of last residence: India, Pakistan, and Poland). Last year, we are told, they declined somewhat.

As two dissident parliamentarians have pointed out—and proved, with an extraordinarily successful online petition—the British public is fed up with immigration.

They were fed up in the 1960s, though, as Enoch Powell’s famous 1968 speech showed. Not only did their fed-upness achieve little; thirty years on, immigration was massively greater.

All this illustrates something I spend a lot of time pondering: the strange disconnect between what democratic populations want and what they get—or fail to get—from their politicians.

I read something that I thought might be relevant to the issue in Gordon Bowker’s recent biography of George Orwell. On page 183 we read of Orwell’s investigations among the Depression-stricken coal miners of 1930s northern England:

He remained at the tripe shop for almost two weeks, during which he attended large gatherings of “sheeplike” miners, concluding, “There is no turbulence left in England.”

If there actually was any turbulence left in England eighty years ago, there sure isn’t any today. (The Irish, bless them, are a different story.) A turbulent people would long since have dealt with the politicians who handed their country over to alien hordes by burning those politicians out of their houses, then stringing them up from lampposts.

You may say that the absence of turbulence is a good thing, that (A) turbulence is a characteristic of unhealthy, unstable polities; and that (B) it destroys property and injures—even kills—citizens.

(B) is indisputable. At my age and with my responsibilities, I’d rather turbulence not come roiling through my neighborhood.

(A) is more questionable. It may be that some turbulence now and then does no lasting harm to a nation. England was plenty turbulent from (at least) the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the Reform Riots of 1831-2, a span of nearly half a millennium during which England never ceased to be England. The USA has seen turbulence aplenty: Authorities in New York City had just barely finished cleaning up from 1863’s Draft Riots when the Orange Riots of 1870-71 started up. Again, neither threatened the nation’s integrity.

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