#I HAD TO INVENT THE REPUBLIC'S ENTIRE FEDERAL LEGAL SYSTEM

[clockworkcuttlefish]

'you shouldn't glorify violence in your stories'

i'm about to glorify violence irl because i'm going to fight literally every. single. star wars. eu. writer. that didn't bother. to think through. their fucking worldbuilding

[sociologyquotes]

A Case for Decriminalizing Drugs

from the article Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs by Dan Baum

“In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.

[...]  Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.

[...]  Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs. And there will be no victory in this war either; even the Drug Enforcement Administration concedes that the drugs it fights are becoming cheaper and more easily available.

[...]  Depending on how the issue is framed, legalization of all drugs can appeal to conservatives, who are instinctively suspicious of bloated budgets, excess government authority, and intrusions on individual liberty, as well as to liberals, who are horrified at police overreach, the brutalization of Latin America, and the criminalization of entire generations of black men. It will take some courage to move the conversation beyond marijuana to ending all drug prohibitions, but it will take less, I suspect, than most politicians believe. It’s already politically permissible to criticize mandatory minimums, mass marijuana-possession arrests, police militarization, and other excesses of the drug war.

[...]  The government’s own data, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, shatters the myth of “instantly addictive” drugs. Although about half of all Americans older than twelve have tried an illegal drug, only 20 percent of those have used one in the past month. In the majority of those monthly-use cases, the drug was cannabis. Only tiny percentages of people who have sampled one of the Big Four — heroin, cocaine, crack, and methamphetamine — have used that drug in the past month. (For heroin, the number is 8 percent; for cocaine, 4 percent; for crack, 3 percent; for meth, 4 percent.) It isn’t even clear that using a drug once a month amounts to having a drug problem. The portion of lifetime alcohol drinkers who become alcoholics is about 8 percent, and we don’t think of someone who drinks alcohol monthly as an alcoholic.

In other words, our real drug problem — debilitating addiction — is relatively small. [...] Dealing with addiction shouldn’t require spending $40 billion a year on enforcement, incarcerating half a million, and quashing the civil liberties of everybody, whether drug user or not.

[...]  Although treatment is a bargain — the government estimates that for every dollar spent on drug treatment, seven are saved — treatment and prevention get only 45 percent of the federal drug budget while enforcement and interdiction get 55 percent, and that’s not including the stupendous cost of incarcerating drug offenders.

[...]  The Netherlands effectively decriminalized marijuana use and possession in 1976, and Australia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany, and New York State all followed suit. In none of these jurisdictions did marijuana then become a significant health or public-order problem. But marijuana’s easy; it isn’t physically addictive. So consider Portugal, which in 2001 took the radical step of decriminalizing not only pot but cocaine, heroin, and the rest of the drug spectrum. Decriminalization in Portugal means that the drugs remain technically prohibited — selling them is a major crime — but the purchase, use, and possession of up to ten days’ supply are administrative offenses. No other country has gone so far, and the results have been astounding. The expected wave of drug tourists never materialized. Teenage use went up shortly before and after decriminalization, but then it settled down, perhaps as the novelty wore off.

[...]  The lifetime prevalence of adult drug use in Portugal rose slightly, but problem drug use — that is, habitual use of hard drugs — declined after Portugal decriminalized, from 7.6 to 6.8 per 1,000 people. Compare that with nearby Italy, which didn’t decriminalize, where the rates rose from 6.0 to 8.6 per 1,000 people over the same time span. Because addicts can now legally obtain sterile syringes in Portugal, decriminalization seems to have cut radically the number of addicts infected with H.I.V., from 907 in 2000 to 267 in 2008, while cases of full-blown AIDS among addicts fell from 506 to 108 during the same period.

The new Portuguese law has also had a striking effect on the size of the country’s prison population. The number of inmates serving time for drug offenses fell by more than half, and today they make up only 21 percent of those incarcerated. A similar reduction in the United States would free 260,000 people — the equivalent of letting the entire population of Buffalo out of jail.

[...] Portuguese-style decriminalization [...] wouldn’t work in the United States because Portugal is a small country with national laws and a national police force, whereas the United States is a patchwork of jurisdictions — thousands of overlapping law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors at the local, county, state, and federal levels.

[...]  We’ve grown used to living with the consequences of legal alcohol, even though alcohol is undeniably costly to the nation in lives and treasure. But few would argue for a return to Prohibition, in part because the liquor industry is so lucrative and so powerful. Binge drinkers — 20 percent of the drinking population — consume more than half of the alcohol sold, which means that for all the industry’s pious admonitions to “drink responsibly,” it depends on people doing the opposite. At the same time, Big Alcohol’s clout keeps taxation low. Kleiman, of NYU, estimates alcohol taxes to be about a dime a drink; the societal cost in disease, car wrecks, and violence is about fifteen times that. Neither the binge-dependent economics of alcohol nor the industry’s capture of the regulatory process is something we would want to mimic when legalizing substances such as heroin and crack cocaine. We’ll have to do a better job at legalizing drugs than we did at re-legalizing alcohol if we want to hold addiction to a minimum, keep drugs away from children, assure drug purity and consistency of dosage, and limit drugged driving.

[...] Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands have successfully made heroin legally available to addicts through networks of government-run dispensaries that are divorced from the profit motive. The advantages of a state monopoly over a free market — even a regulated one — are vast.

[...]  Just about everybody who thinks seriously about the end of drug prohibition agrees that we’ll want to discourage consumption. This goal could be accomplished, at least in part, under a system of regulated, for-profit stores: by setting limits on advertising and promotion (or banning them altogether), by preventing marketing to children, by establishing minimum distances from schools for retail outlets, by nailing down rules about dosage and purity, and by limiting both the number of stores and their hours of operation.

[...] That the government should profit from a product it wants to discourage could be seen as hypocritical, but that’s the way things stand now with tobacco, alcohol, and gambling. States generally reduce the moral sting of those profits by earmarking them for education or other popular causes. In the case of drugs, the profits could go toward treating addicts. 

[...]  “Without marijuana prohibition, the government can’t sustain the drug war,” Ira Glasser, who ran the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, told me. “Without marijuana, the use of drugs is negligible, and you can’t justify the law-enforcement and prison spending on the other drugs. Their use is vanishingly small. I always thought that if you could cut the marijuana head off the beast, the drug war couldn’t be sustained.”

[...] If it is now time to start thinking creatively about legalization, we’d be wise to remember that, like carefully laid military plans, detailed drug-liberalization strategies probably won’t survive their first contact with reality. “People are thinking about the utopian endgame, but the transition will be unpredictable,” says Sterling, of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “Whatever system of regulation gets set up, there will be people who exploit the edges. But that’s true for speeding, for alcohol, for guns.” Without a state-run monopoly, there will be more than one type of legal, regulated drug market, he says, and the markets won’t solve every conceivable problem. “Nobody thinks our alcohol system is a complete failure because there are after-hours sales, or because people occasionally buy alcohol for minors.” Legalizing, and then regulating, drug markets will likely be messy, at least in the short term. Still, in a technocratic, capitalist, and fundamentally free society like the United States, education, counseling, treatment, distribution, regulation, pricing, and taxation all seem to better fit our national skill set than the suppression of immense black markets and the violence and corruption that come with it.”

[ramrodd]

Peter J Williams & Bart Ehrman • The story of Jesus: Are the Gospels his life?

COMMENTARY:

In essence, Ehrman has adopted the Republican argument that there is no quid pro quo here and applied to his version of the Gospels.

Ehrman's entire Christian journey has been based on the fraud of his "born again" experience. Ehrman's Christian experience is essentially the same as Brett Kavanaugh's, whose cultural orientation is the same as Matt Gaetz if only by being white, male and over 13 and growing up right in the middle of the intellectual and commercial transition from the Playboy Philosophy to #MeToo that really got traction when the white boys who came to town with Reagan ( the period Tucker Carlson identifies when "Conservative was Cool". Conservative was never cool; they misstook the social buffering copious cash flow could purchase with being part of Sinatra's "Rat Pack", much less a child of the sexual revolution going on in DC during the 70s.

Having a "Born Again" experience as the essence of Christianity was marketed relentlessly by Bill Bright and his 4 Spiritual Laws and Campus Crusade for Christ as being in with the cool white kids in school who  controlled the Prom Commttee. The very possibility that an authentic "Born Again" experience bringing someone into the presences of Jesus in real time could ever be apostate. My opinion is that Ehrman faked a "Born Again" experience in order to be in with the cool kids raised in near perfect white privilege, especially the chicks. I mean, I've had a working relationship with the Holy Spirit since 1954 and in high school, Senior High Youth Groups on Sunday was short, intense make-out sessions totally absent of "sexual relations", as in, vaginal intercourse. It was more fun avoiding sexual relations and the necessary purchase of condoms in a small town pharmacy that were legally forbidden for sale to minors. "Paradise by the Dash Board Lights" is the sound track of Sunday Evening Church Meetings. Hand Jobs are the favorite of the Holy Ghost: see  who can cun fastest.

So, that's pretty much the Pro-Life Evangelical status in regards to the sexual revolution. And that's why Ehrman became "Born Again" and then discovered it offered a congenial career path in various ways until he ran headlong into the social milieu of Dale Martin and that being apostate was a superb career move. Being an evangelical athiest is business plan.

The thing about knowing Jesus is that, once you know Jesus, you cannot unknow Jesus. That's the source of the dramatic tension of "The Book of Job". The three friends who try to entice Job into denying The One by perfectly logical and compelling arguments, probably similar, if not identical, to the internal debat Ehrman conducted to become a born-again virgin, so to speak, and cash in on the post-modern deconstruction of the professional athiests and evangelical anti-thiests like Ehrman. Anti-Theism and Pro-Life Evangelicalism are opposite sides of the same coin. They both trade on the moral confusion which they create and share.

The Gospel of Mark is written by a Roman professional soldier directly from the Q Source, the Roman military intelligence files in Caesarea. All four Gosples draw directly from the Q Source, which was controlled by Cornelius, Pilate's military spy master and fellow member of the military guild of The Praetorian Guard, the so-called Italian Cohort. Both Pilate and Cornelius are instrumental clones of the core mechanism of the Roman Republic that August had incorporated into his model of Empire and Tiberius and Sejanus perfected by 31 CE.  Like the American federal government (that is, all the personnel on the federal payroll, including Congress, the Courts and the Executive,  the Praetoraian Guard is the Deep State of the Roman Empire.

And everbody in that particular organic structure of the Roman diplomatic and military patriots knew about Jesus before Peter or Paul came to Rome before the next Easter. Tertullian was perfectly correct. Christianity was an underground military communion. Like Jesus, the centurion class of the Roman legions shared Jesus's ontology: they knew Yawah, Queen of Battle. The sacrifice of Isaac is a study in the nature of Duty in a Duty, Honor, Country kind of way.  

Nobody in the Roman legions expected anything like the Resurrection. Consider that old Easter favorite, "Were you there when the crucified My Lord?" All four gospels agree that there were 12 Roman soldiers and I Gunnery Sergeant centurion whose pay voucher reflected they were present and correct at that particular routine crucifixion guard mount. And, then, there were 16 soldiers and one Gunnery Sergeant centurion whom sealed the tomb with a big rock it took everybody to move and then sealed it with 7 official Roman seals. And we have their movements and experience that comes directly from the Q Source that had been triggered as a routine force protection/threat assessment when Jesus created a stir among the Hebrews connected with John, a religous agitator.

The Gospel of Mark is named after the publisher located in Alexandria, Egypt, John Mark. John Mark did not write Mark, although he constributed to the Q Source and edited the Mark narrative in at least two places, but it, the Gospel of Mark was compiled as a continuing intelligence assessment of all things Jesus. I mean, Resurrection is big medicine and not to be taken lightly for soldiers. Yaweh is Minerva and both are She Who Must Be Obeyed, the Bitch Queen, Duty. Cornelius is the only other person in the Bible to be justified by faith by God besides Abraham and Devotion to Duty is why.

And The Gospel of Mark is at least the second intelligence report to come out of Judah regarding resurrection, the first being immediately and may have arrived in Rome before Pentacost. Again, Tertullian observes that Tiberius has received this FLASH intelligence sometime between 30 and 37, when he was assassinated.

My guess is that it was after Sejanus was executed and after the resulting purge. Tiberius rolled up the Sejanus plot in a typical Roman blood letting, but neither Pilate and Cornelius were not implicated. So, my guess is that it was after 33, because that date fits elements of the crucifixion better than 30 independent of Roman politics. Using this intellence from the Q Source, Tiberius proposed that the Senate elevate Jesus to a legal deity status, but the Senate was feeling surly from the insult to the Senate's illusionary sovereignity of the purges and refused.

As a consequence, the nascent Roman military communion remained covert until the Milvian Bridge, but they were like Gideon Bibles.

All 4 Gospels draw heavily from the Q Source: John Mark seems to become something of an archivist for the records.

In contrast, The Acts of the Apostles has very little Q Source material in it, except, of course, for Acts 10, the source of the Q Source, Cornelius, in particular, and the Praetorian Guard, as the larger Roman military context. There was somebody like George Smiley in the Rome headquarters of the Praetorian Guards that the Gospel of Mark was prepared for. My candidate is Theophilus and he is my candidate for the author of Hebrews and Hebrews is the Magna Carta of the Roman Catholic Church.

A difference between the Judaism of Moses and the Judanism of Jesus is that Jesus replaces all the laws and rituals before the meal and replaces it with the communion before the meal. The Shema remains sancrosanct and grace after meals fulfills the Trifecta of celebration and thanksgiving of The One as described in Revelation 4:2 and required of Moses.

The fact that Bart Ehrman might deny these probabilities is expected, but the fact that this probability has obvious never occurred to  Peter J. Williams, N.T. Wright, Gary Habermas or Dan Wallace either. I don't have any explanation why I am the only one in history to have made this connection: I blame it on the Holy Spirit. I had an epiphney reading Barclay's commentaries on the Gospels regarding the connection between Mark and Cornelius in 1990 and it's been something of a hobby ever since.

But the arguments of anti-theist like Ehrman and Richard Carrier and Ken Humphreys irritate me in the same way the southern white male Republican bigots like Moscow Mitch, Mick Mulvaney and Matt Gaetz irritate me when they propose to continue to run America on the basis that there was no quid pro quo. I get tired of the same old Fascist sophistry no matter its source.

The Gospel of Mark was transmitted to Rome around 40 CE. By the time Claudius conquered Britain, manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark were beginning to be produced by John Mark and his community of copyists. According to Dan wallace, 90% of the manuscripts we have from before the 4th century came out of Alexandria.  After that, Constantine shifted the center of gravity to Antioch.

Bart Ehrman just wants to be popular and wealthy and evangelican anti-theism fills the bill.

The communion before meals connects the dots for the Romn author of Hebrews with the bread and wine of Melchizedek by way of the ethic of  Socrates and the secular humanism of Jesus.

None of this would have happened without resurrection. And it happen at the moment in recorded history when recorded history was being invented. The timeline of the Gospel of Mark is probably as slavishly obeyed as a modern scientific and/or academic protocol for observational journalism: Margaret Meade would have approved. The Romans did everything by the numbers: the timeline of the Gospel of Mark is as stable as the grid system of an archeological dig. It is a very coherent  and congruent presentation of data. It is not a Greco-Roman biography or the novel genre of the time.  And it may have been briefly part of the oral tradition when it was captured in the Q Source, it is not an example of a mature narrative of the oral tradition. Among other things, there is very little mythology in the narrative. Matthew is provided the dots to connect in the dots of the Jewish constellations reflected in the fushion of the narrative of the Hebrew Bible with the career of Jesus as the instrument of epistemology in the flesh.

The fact that Ehrman has spent his entire life engaged in this narrative, it puzzles me how he could have missed these things, except that he approaches the biblical text as a mechanical construct and deconstructive history and not as literature. It's a little bit like being color blind, culturally.

So, it's possible that Ehrman actually believes his bullshit: there really is no quid pro quo. He's not apostate: he never was "Born Again".

[republicstandard]

Earth 2070: A Glimpse at One Possible Future

Back in 2019, having a sense of what was to come, select Frenchmen, Spaniards, and their European kin started to move in small numbers back into the old medieval haunts of their ancestors. Motivated by an instinct never articulated for sure imprisonment, these prescient few lived as they had done, raised their families, and carried on as before, but with the knowledge that, at the very least, there was one extra protection against that day they knew in their bones would eventually arrive. Their countrymen were too paralyzed by fear or too deluded by utopian visions to see that an old, weary continent, but for the far-sighted few, had already surrendered.

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Not that this ennui was limited to Europe, no. Across the Western world the painted-faces of tolerance and inclusion happily abolished their borders, and if it was an ocean that separated them, that, too, was abolished, as the ships streamed in to port and planes landed and more vibrant colors were sewn into the rich tapestry of humanity in New Zealand and Australia and Nova Scotia. Backward as they were, and heaped with scorn, the prescient ones quietly rejected these “gifts”; some of their progeny stayed, some left for the vibrant big cities, but their numbers were replaced by others sensing where the river of history was flowing.

There was much global congratulations on the release of the French census one year that showed they had finally joined their enlightened cousins in demographic transformation. It hadn’t been easy. French President Jean Loumont was a veritable rock star at the Annual Global Diversity Summit sponsored by the United Nations in Dubai. Most memorable, perhaps, was the embrace shared by Loumont with UK Prime Minister Raheem Sahel, with German Prime Minister Hidayet Gülden looking on approvingly in the background. After a series of contentious trade disputes, the notorious near-miss of Brexit and the full re-integration of Britain in an arduous process into the European Union, the moment reminded the global community that progress doesn’t just happen on demand. It is a difficult process, hard-won through activism and political change and education, but it seemed, finally, that humanity was ready to embrace this new, long-heralded future. Almost everyone, anyway.

Notably absent at the Summit were heavy-weights Japan, the Russian Federation, and the United States, always behind the curve it seemed. Chinese President Xi Xiu had drafted a resolution condemning the three nations—as well as the other abstainers in the Visegrad Union, the Balkan League, the Baltic Defense League, Ukraine, Belarus, Argentina, and Uruguay—which was co-signed by every other major international political leader present. Some of these so-signers, like Italian Prime Minister Giorgio Sentorini and Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Fernandez, did so with great reservation, but under immense pressure from their home populations. Sentorini, with yet another election looming, was backing off some incendiary comments he had made a few months prior regarding the root cause of a crime wave across southern Italy.

The Summit was a perfect chance for healing and reconciliation for those nations present. After an introductory speech by Gülden that featured a standing ovation for his commitment to stronger sentencing for those convicted of hate speech and Holocaust Denial, and praising the contributions of his fellow Turks in transforming Germany from a nation stained with shame from the Holocaust to one at the vanguard of demographic change, the keynote address by South African President Prince Malusi-Iwoh Buza really set the world on fire. After the first two-thirds of the internationally televised speech drew polite applause and much nodding of heads to President Buza’s social justice boilerplate, Buza shifted gears, calling for the “abolition of whiteness,” which has been such a uniquely destructive and pernicious force in human history. After citing well-documented examples of oppression, racism, enslavement, and genocide, Buza put the exclamation mark on the speech by rising to a crescendo with the immortal words of Susan Sontag:

“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself!”

The gallery exploded in applause, and around the globe, Buza quickly became canonized, surpassing in just one evening his countryman Nelson Mandela as the patron saint of justice and equity.

It was not a good night for everyone around the globe, however. Riots in Milwaukee, Baltimore, Memphis, and St. Louis in the United States claimed a total of 138 lives, and the banlieues of Paris burned for three days straight. Across the entire planet, Buza’s words stirred a ferment in the breast of those victimized by whiteness, by colonization, and by systemic oppression. In Sydney, three teenaged girls walking home from school were raped and decapitated by an agitated mob of Aborigines. A Leftist demonstration in Amsterdam turned violent, and seventeen civilians and eight police officers were killed. The world-renowned Mullah Ishaq Azam led a demonstration in Copenhagen that turned violent, with twelve of his followers killed by police. In Durban, South Africa, a white woman was accused of uttering that most unholy of words—kuffar—and was lynched from a streetlamp. Toronto, Frankfurt, Brussels, Stockholm, Oslo, and Auckland all witnessed major unrest, but the worst violence of all was the horrific massacre in central Cameroon of an entire village of Christians.

Despite all of the forward progress toward a unity of all peoples, civil unrest became the norm for the next few months. Already unwilling to enter the notorious “No-Go Zones” of Europe for fear of their lives, police in major European cities—along with first responders—began to restrict their patrols even further. The neighborhoods bordering these No-Go Zones became increasingly victimized, and fires often burned out of control. One firetruck dared to try and put out a fire raging on the outskirts of Rinkeby, in Sweden, and the firemen were brutally assaulted, the truck stripped for parts while several apartment buildings went up in flames. Eighty-nine people died that day.

Buza’s world tour was met with a dramatic spike of violence in every city he landed in, but the global press was essentially eating out of the palm of his hand. His speeches, all generally variations on a theme, advanced the abolishment of whiteness as the singular aim of his administration, as the single greatest good mankind could commit to in order to secure an equitable future for all. The constitutional land expropriations in South Africa, already decades in the books, had reduced the few remaining whites in the country to abject poverty, and the general outcry at fast-tracking thousands of white farmers out of that South Africa in 2018 by the Australian government was a blow that nation was never quite able to recover from. Ostracized by most of the global community for its explicit racism, Australia had tried to make amends by increasing its acceptance of refugees and loosening its immigration laws, and the youth vote galvanized by this naked racism pushed the Australian government hard to the Left. Their sweeping legal changes in 2022 regarding hate speech and racist speech were still not enough to remove their scarlet letter in the eyes of the world, and despite her presence at the Global Diversity Summit, Prime Minister Andrea O’Hara was treated a bit like a leper. Never mind that her nation was far ahead of France in equity, justice, and demography, the stain was still there.

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The world was moving forward, coming together under the aegis of globalism—diversity, equity, and inclusion; the abolition of borders; the rise of socially-conscious megalopolies driving social change; supra-national entities and banking syndicates determining fiscal and immigration policy—in short, much of the world was finally in the hands of those who truly knew what was best for its people.

It was truly the dawn of a Golden Age.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2P2mDlu via IFTTT

[politicalfilth-blog]

Is Your Government a Democracy or a Totalitarian State?

We Are Change

Article via The Daily Sheeple

The USA is already a Totalitarian State with a Ministry of Propaganda that works overtime to generate a flimsy illusion of “democracy.”

Is your “democracy” (or republic) actually a Totalitarian State? That is, is it a “democracy” or “republic” in name only? To find out, take this quick quiz.

1. Does your government (federal, state and local) seize citizens’ assets without due process? In other words, the rule of law is dead; the state is the law. If the answer is yes, Your “democracy” is already a Totalitarian State. The answer in the USA is a definitive “yes.”

2. Does your government impose tyranny by complexity? If so, the average citizen lacks the wealth and connections needed to fight the seizure of private property without due process or recourse.

In the USA, the answer is “yes,” the government is a tyranny by complexity.

3. Is your government essentially “for sale” to wealthy elites? If the answer is yes, Your “democracy” is already a Totalitarian State–or more accurately, a fascist Totalitarian State.

4. Does your government spy on its entire citizenry? If the answer is yes, Your “Democracy” is already a Totalitarian State. The answer in the USA is a definitive “yes.”

Well, you have your answer: the USA is already a Totalitarian State with a Ministry of Propaganda that works overtime to generate a flimsy illusion of “democracy.” Please read the following links if you seek documentation of these systemic abuses of centralized power.

Orwell and Kafka Do America: How the Government Steals Your Money–“Legally,” Of Course (March 24, 2015)

Government in the USA is expropriating the private property of its citizenry without due process on a vast scale. I have provided documentation of this extraordinary reality many times over the years.

The various levels of government have a variety of “legal” (haha) means to steal your property without due process or recourse: civil forfeiture, absurdly expensive traffic fines that lead to jail sentences in the local debtors prison-gulag, forfeiture of assets, including land, should government agents find the marijuana plants they planted on your property (surprise!), the state steals your money in a bank account and notifies you after the fact that the state suspects you owe it taxes, though they have zero evidence of that claim–and on and on.

The courts place no limits on the central state’s power, for they are simply one side of the same statist coin, and so we have a totalitarian kleptocracy that in true Orwellian fashion claims it is a functioning “democracy”:

Criminalizing Poverty For Profit: Local Government’s New Debtors Prisons (October 20, 2009)

“Upholding the Law” or Simply Theft by Other Means? (October 26, 2009)

Theft By Other Means II: When the State Steals Property, Is It Not Theft? (November 10, 2009

State Over-Reach: Stripmining the Citizenry for Fun and Profit (November 13, 2009)

Death of Donald P. Scott (Wikipedia); (source):

“In October of 1992, millionaire recluse Donald Scott and his bride of two months, Frances Plante Scott, lived in a storybook wooded valley in the mountains high above Malibu, Calif. Trails End Ranch is almost completely surrounded by state and Federal park land, and the neighboring government entities had made numerous attempts to buy out Scott and annex his property.

Stymied in their attempt to buy the Scott ranch, government officials hit on an alternative plan. Contending an officer had seen “marijuana plants growing under the trees” during a drug-seeking overflight, agents from various jurisdictions gathered quietly outside the locked gate to the ranch in the morning mists of Oct. 2, 1992.

After greedily studying the maps of the 200 acres of prime land they were told they’d be able to grab under federal asset seizure laws should they find as few as 14 marijuana plants, they cut the chain on the gate with bolt-cutters and raced a mile up the dirt drive to the ranch, complete with police dogs.

Frances Scott was in the kitchen, brewing her morning coffee, when dozens of men in plainclothes and brandishing guns — no badges or warrants in evidence — came swarming in. Understandably, she screamed for her husband, still asleep upstairs.

Donald Scott, 63, came hurrying down the stairs, a handgun held over his head. The officers shouted for him to lower his weapon. He did. They shot him dead.”

Your government in action–completely legally, of course. I hope you approve. The irony of tragedies like this is that when young Americans faced similar “law enforcement” tactics in the late 1960s and early 1970s via COINTELPRO and other blatant violations of constitutional rights, we were written off as radical hippies who were a threat to something (certainly not democracy, but “something.” Like perhaps an illegal war and an out-of-control secret government?)

Now that average citizens are facing similar tactics, they might find it interesting to study the COINTELPRO campaign of the FBI and other “law enforcement” officials against the anti-Vietnam War movement three decades ago.

According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:

1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

2. Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used a myriad of other “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.

3. Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

4. Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten, or eliminate, dissidents and disrupt their movements.

I’ve published many first-hand accounts of the kleptocratic predation of the state of California. I invite you to read this carefully:

Welcome to the Predatory State of California–Even If You Don’t Live There (March 20, 2012)

First the state steals the $1,343 and authorizes its parasitic predatory bag-“person” Wells Fargo Bank to steal another $100 for handling the state’s theft.

A week or two later the citizen is notified of the theft as a fait accompli. Now the onus is on the law-abiding citizen to attempt to reclaim his own money from a distant, all-powerful Kafkaesque state agency. How can this be legal in a nation supposedly operating under rule of law?

Let’s be very clear about what happens here in America on a daily basis:

1. The state (or other agency of government) steals citizen’s money without due process.

2. Then, in a move akin to the executioner making the condemned buy his own death bullet, the state authorizes the “too big to fail” corporate bank which received billions in taxpayer bailouts to steal $100 from the citizen for the digital theft of his money by the state.

3. If the citizen needed that money to pay rent, buy medication to stay alive, etc., tough luck, Buckwheat, the state of California has your money before they notify you of the purported tax liability and now you enter the Kafkaesque insanity of pleading for a “refund” of your own money from an agency designed to thwart transparency and the reclamation of your own money.

So if you get evicted and are living in a cardboard box and pass away due to inability to buy your meds, hey, the State of California’s political class and special interests couldn’t care less: they want your money and the rule of law doesn’t apply to them.

If you understand that a purported tax liability is one issue and due process is another far more important issue, then you understand that we now live in an totalitarian nation where “rule of law” is only invoked at the convenience of the political and financial Elites for propaganda purposes.

The state of California has three basic methods of looting law-abiding citizens:

1. The old “you didn’t pay a $25 filing fee, the fine is now $499 which we took from your bank account.” Never mind you have the cancelled check endorsed by the state, proving they received it and cashed it; the Board of Kafkaesque Authority claims “we didn’t get the check” and loots your account for the $499 (true story.)

2. “Fishing expeditions” where companies and citizens are dunned for taxes and fees they might owe, though there is no evidence they do in fact owe fees and taxes. I received many emails describing these fishing expeditions, for example, merely having a license is “evidence” that you must have unreported income.

3. Enforce all sorts of dubious claims, most importantly:

A. That anyone collecting a pension from work performed while residing in California is liable for California taxes on that pension, regardless of where they live;

B. Any income resulting from something invented in California must be reported as income in California, regardless of where the income is derived from or where the inventor now lives.

In other words, residency has no meaning. Any income remotely connected to California–for example, you had the idea while residing in the state–obligates you to pay California income tax on that idea in perpetuity.

You know the dominant emotion that the government at every level generates in law-abiding, taxpaying citizens? Fear. And for good reason.

Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 1: Our One Last Chance to Preserve the Bill of Rights (March 26, 2012)

Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 2: Law-Abiding Taxpayers Are Treated as Criminals While the Real Criminals Go Free (March 27, 2012)

“I received a letter last year that we owed the state of California’s Franchise Tax Board $90,000 for taxes in the year 2008. We replied to the Franchise Tax board in a similar manner as RT stating that:

— Did not reside in California in 2008

— Did not file a State income tax return in California in 2008

— Did not have any outstanding tax issues with California in 2008

— Did no business in California in 2008

— Owned no property in California in 2008

The CA Franchise Tax board responded by putting a lien on us in the state – fortunately, our banks and assets have no business in CA or I am certain our accounts would have been robbed as well.

After a great deal of uncertainty and angst, I found an accountant in CA who advised us that we needed to file a complete CA tax return for 2008 even though we did not owe any tax. We filed the return and received a response that we owed the state $625 to cover the State’s collection fees. We paid the fee and within two weeks received a “refund” check for the $625.

On reflection, we felt as if we had been “held up” by some powerful gangsters and if it had not been for an honest tax accountant we would have suffered much financial damage.”

Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 3: We had to Destroy Democracy in Order to Save It (March 28, 2012)

Welcome to the United States of Orwell, Part 4: “Consumer Protection” Just Another Federal Reserve Power Grab (March 29, 2012)

The Dodd-Frank bill, like Obamacare, is tyranny by complexity. Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, at 37 pages in length, and the 2,319-page monstrosity of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

If you still doubt the government is the tool of elites, please read this:

The Purchase of Our Republic (by Y. Falkson) (June 5, 2014)

Centralization and sociopathology are two sides of one coin: the central state:

Centralization and Sociopathology (May 21, 2013)

At the lower levels of the kleptocracy, employees of the government enrich themselves by legalizing their own looting.

Pay Our Pensions Or We’ll Throw You in Jail: the Legalization of Looting (March 19, 2014)

“Improving Public Safety” and Theft By Other Means (January 15, 2010)

What happens to once-legitimate governments that devolve into totalitarian kleptocracies? They lose their legitimacy (“the Mandate of Heaven”) and fall.

Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic authoritarian government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

This article was originally seen at TheDailySheeple.com and was authored by Charles Hugh Smith

The post Is Your Government a Democracy or a Totalitarian State? appeared first on We Are Change.

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