The Absurdity of the System

The level of corruption in governments around the world (both State and Federal) is reaching a boiling point.  This isn't the first time, and it certainly won't be the last.  Unless, that is, we decide we've had enough.  And I don't mean enough of the current team in power, I mean the government-by-force paradigm in its entirety.

While their intentions may (or may not) have been noble, the Framers of the Constitution created the potential that has led to the absurdity we see today.  The only thing worse than being made into a criminal for owning a previously legal high capacity magazine is being made into a criminal for refusing to purchase health insurance.  As if to add insult to injury, President Obama is showing his true colors by celebrating his great "victory" of forcing millions of people at the barrel of a gun to buy health insurance.  This kind of celebratory behavior is what you might expect from a dictator looking down on those he has subjugated.  Then again, if you consider how Obama crassly jokes about murdering people with predator drones, this type of celebration seems right in line with his personality.

Only in a system as absurd as this do hundreds of millions of dollars per year get funneled into combating a drug which has never killed anyone in all of Human history while the pharmaceutical industry produces one pill after another that regularly kill over 38,000 people per year in the US alone.  In fact, roughly 50% of people in our overloaded prison system (which is largely private and for-profit) are there for non-violent drug related offenses.  Related: The legal alcohol and tobacco industry kill a cumulative 518,000 people per year in the US.

Only in a system as nonsensically absurd as this does the government spend untold billions on fighting a faceless "War on Terror" while leaving the Southern border of the country wide open to potential terrorists and illegal immigrants.  Mind you, I don't have any problem at all with people freely traveling this planet, so long as they do so in peace.  What is absurd is that the United States government would have you terrified of some shadowy threat they can't really define so that they can keep taking your money and limiting your growth.  In short, so that you never have time to stop and question the validity of their claims, or the validity of the fact that they exist at all in the capacity in which you think they do.

Only in a system as patently absurd as ours does Congress abdicate its responsibility to create money to a private bank, then borrow from that bank at interest.  The debt our government owes to the Federal Reserve has grown so far out of control that virtually every penny of your Federal income taxes go directly to paying the interest alone.  That's right: Your income taxes do not pay for the services you expect.  Instead, they pay for the interest on a debt our government only owes because it gave up its duty to create its own money.

Only in a system as absurdly corrupt as this do the same people creating genetically modified foods also get to set the safety regulations for those foods.  These same people are also authoring legislation that prevents any sort of cease-and-desist order being filed against them even if it is found that their "foods" are causing harm to humans or the environment.

Only in a system as ridiculously absurd as America's can you be sent to prison for not paying taxes - where you can't earn more to pay off your "obligations" even while costing taxpayer money for your stay - without absolving you of your tax debt.  If tax collection were about revenue generation, the last thing the government would do is lock you in a cage at the expense of tax dollars.  But taxation isn't about revenue.  It's about control at the barrel of a gun.  The situation is literally no different than when a common street thug holds a gun to your head and demands "Your money or your life."  The number of thugs and caliber of the gun being held is of no relevance to this scenario - they are identical.

While we are on this topic, it is worth revisiting a heavily self-evident fact: The initiation of aggression is inherently illegitimate.  Even if you believe your friend should behave a certain way, you know it is unacceptable for you to threaten violence against them to illicit the behavior you want.  You also know that if you choose to initiate violence anyway, your friend is fully justified in using violence against you in their own self-defense.  You live by this Non-Aggression Principle every day you interact with others without harming them.  If this is the standard applied to individual people, should it not also be applied to governing bodies?  Anything that must be done at the barrel of a gun - taxation, drug law enforcement, Obamacare - should be seen by all as inherently illegitimate because it removes the element of voluntary interaction.

It's time for everyone to see government for what it is - a concentration of force which uses threats of violence and ultimately the promise of death to obtain compliance.  Having "slightly less stealing and threats of violence" isn't good enough.  If Liberty is truly to thrive, we must remove the ability of any single person to legalize whatever brand of aggression they see fit.

Reading words like these might make you feel uncomfortable.  They seem to be calling you out to you directly to change some subtle thing in your life, something you know would work towards making our existence what it could be.  And I wonder - will you answer this call?  Or will you continue to live your life as if there is nothing wrong?  Because as Grant says in The Iron Web, "Some of us are done trying to help you.  If you crave servitude and can't live without it, by all means, keep it.  But leave us the hell alone."

"When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence."

The Many Lies of the Commander-In-Chief

I have a confession to make: In 2008, I voted for Barack Obama.  At the time, it wasn't a hard choice to make.  He was promising to deliver the "Hope and Change" America truly needed.  He was promising to bring an end to unconstitutional behavior and laws within government.  He was promising to zealously protect our rights.  He was promising an end to the death spiral our economy was in.  He told us exactly what we needed to hear after we were utterly molested by the Bush Jr. Administration.  And if we're being honest, I didn't think McCain's heart could handle the stress of a victory.  And yes - the fact that Obama is half African American also played into it: America needed a drastic change, and he was the very embodiment of this change.  So of course I believed in Obama - he promised to be everything a President was supposed to be and drastically change the direction of our country's path to destruction.

I supported Obama for a while.  After all, he'd inherited what I could only describe as a "train wreck" from Bush, and he deserved the chance to set it right.  Like most Americans, I stopped paying attention to what he was doing and went about the endless cycle of bills and trying to keep my head above water, confident that he would deliver on his promises.  At the next election, I came up for air and examined what he had actually done during his first term.  To put it simply, the Liar-in-Chief has lost every bit of support he once had from me, and my vote went to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.  Let us count the promises Obama made and the ways in which he has broken them:

• Guantanamo Bay will be closed, unconstitutional activities like warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention without a trial will be put to an end
• Obama has decided it is "probably impossible" to close Gitmo due to political barriers, and instead of closing it, its use has been expanded.  In signing the NDAA, Obama has expanded the practice of indefinite detention without trial of anyone (including U.S. citizens) he deems a threat.  Under Obama, use of the drone program has exploded, and drones have been used to murder American citizens without a trial, along with at least 360 innocent children overseas.  Warrantless telephone monitoring has exploded to encompass the entire country under new NSA programs, and under PRISM, all electronic communications are now monitored as well.  Tying into this: Obama has knowingly supported terrorists by sending arms and financial assistance to Syrian "rebels," who have been publicly noted as pleading allegiance to Al-Qaeda.  By Constitutional definition, this is Treason.
• The Bush era tax cuts on the wealthy will be allowed to expire
• While Obama at least appears to have put up a fight for this one, the tax cuts for the wealthy were extended under his watch.  What's worse: Due to the 2% increase in the payroll tax, the "bottom 98%" have seen a tax hike under Obama to the tune of about $1,000 per year, and that's for lower income families.
• There will be a foreclosure prevention fund established to aid people who cannot get a bank loan
• While the fund has been created (using money from the Wall Street TARP bailout fund), it has not delivered as promised.  The program was supposed to help 3 to 4 million families keep their homes, but to date, only about 500,000 mortgages have been adjusted.  Even among those "helped," this program has been a failure.
• Our immigration process will be reformed and the illegal immigrant problem will be addressed
• This one has received only token efforts.  Obama has instead opted to push all his political clout towards jamming healthcare nobody wants down everybody's throat.  The efforts that have been seen have been ridiculous at best, with the sacred "Path to Citizenship" placed far above the actual problem of people crossing our borders illegally.  In short: Obama is pushing amnesty for people who have broken our laws.
• Lobbyists will be restricted from serving in government positions
• There are currently 18 different people from Monsanto alone (let alone any other lobbying group or corporation) serving in government positions.  This helps to explain why Obama has passed legislation that prevents legal action against the GMO-Giant, even if they are proven to be committing crimes against humanity.
• The Iraq War (which was based on lies) will be ended within 16 months
• Troops were not fully withdrawn until December 2011, 35 months after Obama was sworn in. 
• I will not take your guns
• Obama has danced in the blood of the innocent Sandy Hook victims more joyously than even Dianne Feinstein.  He has led an outright assault on the Second Amendment, pushing for as much gun control as he can without crossing the dangerous line (wide-scale confiscation) that would wake the sleeping masses.  His most recent push is the signing of the U.N. Small Arms Treaty, which would grant the "legal" precident to disarm the American populace.
• Everybody will have affordable healthcare; your premiums will go down, and you can keep your current provider/doctor if you like them
• Under Obamacare, it is estimated that 30 million Americans (a full 10% of the nation) will still not be covered.  Families are seeing their premiums jump up to 72%.  We are only seeing reductions in premiums in a select few cities such as New York and Los Angeles due to their preexisting health plans.  Across the country, large insurance providers of small businesses and individuals are pulling out of the market because they cannot comply with new mandates, causing millions to lose their existing coverage.  As if this wasn't bad enough, it was decided in early August of 2013 that Congress and members of the White House will have their Obamacare premiums covered by the government, which means We the Taxpayers get to pay for the increased costs to our "leaders" as well as to ourselves.  I still cannot understand how it is legal for our government to fine us an increasing amount of money each year (starting with at least 1% of your income) for not buying something they think we should have.  I can only hope that multitudes of people do not comply with this totalitarian mandate.

Most of these tie into the biggest broken promise of all: Obama's Oath of Office.  He did not vow to eradicate terrorism.  He did not vow to keep us safe.  He did not vow to provide healthcare for all.  He vowed to protect, defend, and preserve one thing: The Constitution of the United States of America.  This is Obama's charge, and he has failed.

I don't know about you, but I'm done blaming Bush for Obama's shortcomings.  It's time to accept that Obama is not the man he promised us he would be.  No amount of elaborate speeches are going to change that fact.  It's time to hold the right President's feet to the fire.  It's time for We the People to create the Hope and Change our dying nation so desperately needs.

Gun Control

 In this day and age, comparatively few law abiding  citizens choose to carry (or even own) a firearm.  It's easy to understand why: Having a weapon is a huge responsibility that could have disastrous and tragic consequences.  It also seems likely that a constant anti-gun agenda that has been blasted out by the mainstream media has played a part: Because of what they see on a regular basis, many people believe at their core that "guns are bad."

If someone bombs a building, do we blame the bomber or the bomb?  If someone stabs a person to death, do we blame the stabber or the knife?  If a motorist runs over a pedestrian on the sidewalk, do we blame the driver or the car?  Why is it that when someone loses their mind and shoots innocent people, we blame the gun?  Something tells me that if you were to load a gun and set it out, it would not get up and start killing people of its own volition.

People do not need guns to kill other people.  If you were to look at the crime statistics on fbi.gov, you would see that more people are killed every year by hands and feet than are killed by the dreaded "assault rifle."  Far more people are stabbed to death.  In fact, if you rule out the leading diseases (many of which can be attributed to genetically modified foods and chemicals) and unintentional injuries, the number one cause of unnatural death in the country - which kills twenty to forty times as many people each year as all firearms combined - is medical malpractice.  The bottom line is this: Guns do not kill people.  People kill people.

In 2011, there were about 11,500 total deaths attributed to guns in America.  Of those, about 325 were caused by an "assault" rifle (which, incidentally, is a misused and misleading term).  This means that an "assault" weapons ban would address less than 3% of the problem.  Every single year, it is estimated that anywhere from 800,000 to 2.5 million violent crimes are prevented by the legal use of firearms.  In other words, on the lowest end of the scale, nearly one hundred times more crime is prevented every single year by law abiding citizens than the total deaths caused by guns.  The argument for an assault weapons ban is disingenuous at best.

Lets say you don't agree with any of that and you still want guns to be banned and confiscated.  Getting all the guns off the streets would clearly curb violent crime, right?  You're forgetting one self-evident fact: by their very nature, criminals do not obey laws.  If every single law abiding person were to willingly disarm themselves, we would not see a reduction in violent crime.  History and current events prove that we would see the exact opposite.  Citing the fbi.gov statistics: Over the last 20 years in America, there has been a steady increase in gun ownership and a corresponding decrease in all crime.  The United Kingdom and Australia recently banned guns and they have seen increases of up to 40% in violent crime.

If you saw a gazelle being chased down by a cheetah in the Sahara desert, you would not argue that the gazelle should have to lay down and be eaten.  The argument that the gazelle should not use its horns and hooves to fight for its life simply cannot be made.  Gun control is akin to removing the gazelle's horns and expecting the cheetah to be less likely to attack it because it is now less able to defend itself.  It is a nonsensical argument that does not stand up to even the slightest bit of logic.

Gun Free zones are another example of how laws do not deter criminals.  On the day 26 innocent people were killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the shooter broke 41 different laws.  How would passing another law prevent this type of thing from happening?  Obviously, the shooter had no regard for the laws already on the books; what would breaking one more be to him?  What do you think would have happened that day if every single teacher in the school had been carrying a concealed weapon?  All mass shootings in recent history have happened in these "Criminal-Safe" zones.  Instituting a gun free zone is like advertising to a psychopath that there are fish in a barrel inside, just waiting to be terrorized.

Lets say that you still don't buy any of it.  Guns are still bad and you don't like them.  Okay, that's fine - don't own one.  But don't try to tell me that just because you don't want a gun, I can't have one either.  I don't tell you you're not allowed to have that Obama-Biden sticker on your car, do I?

Another issue to consider is the intent behind the Second Amendment.  This law was created at a time when severe government oppression from England prevented the colonists from so much as defending themselves against said oppression.  The Framers of the Constitution created this law so that a corrupt government would never again have a monopoly of power.  The Second Amendment exists as a last line of defense against an out-of-control government, which is exactly what we have today [1][2][3].

Even if you don't see where we are headed right now, you need only look at the history of gun control in the 20th century to understand why it's a bad idea to leave the monopoly of violence in the hands of a corruptible few:

Soviet Union: 1929 - 20 million dissidents exterminated
Turkey: 1915 - 1.5 million Armenians exterminated
Germany: 1938 - 13 million Jews (and others) exterminated
China: 1935 - 20 million dissidents exterminated
Uganda: 1970 - 300,000 Christians exterminated
Cambodia: 1956 - 1 million exterminated
20th Century Post-Gun Control deaths: 55,800,000

I'll leave you with this: Which sign would you rather a criminal see when considering entering your space?



















"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong

Monsanto: A Corrupting Corporation at its Finest

Because of the phenomenally successful March Against Monsanto, almost all rank-and-file citizens in the country now at least know the term "GMO" and the name "Monsanto."  If you don't know what a GMO is and the risks they pose, check out my other article, You Are What You Eat.  What you may not be aware of is the lengths to which Monsanto has gone in order to seize control of both our democratic process and the global food supply.

Monsanto is an agricultural corporation that got its start by producing chemicals like the infamous and horrendous Agent Orange (which was used as a biological weapon in the Vietnam war and is still killing people today) and the pervasive Roundup weed killer.  As I had mentioned previously, Roundup itself has been directly linked to diabetes, autism, obesity, heart disease, cancer and more.

Monsanto is an organization that has proven, time and time again, that their corporate profits are far more important than trivial issues like the sanctity of human life and the health of the planet.  Here are a few quotes that demonstrate this in a nutshell:

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food...Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible.  Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."  -Phil Angell, Monsanto director of corporate communications

"Ultimately, it is the food producer who is responsible for assuring safety." -FDA

"The hope of the industry is that over time the market is so flooded [with GMOs] that there's nothing you can do about it.  You just sort of surrender." -Don Westfall, biotech industry consultant

"If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." - Norman Braksick, president of Asgrow Seed Co., a subsidiary of Monsanto

Look, we all want to make money.  I get it.  But genetically modified crops are largely untested for potential long-term consequences. Even the New York times is attacking Monsanto's "science" on GMO safety as a fraud.  More studies are regularly surfacing that prove GM foods cause cancer, massive organ failures, grotesque tumors, and early death.  Scientists who formerly spoke in favor of genetic modification have switched stances.  Thierry Vrain, a scientist whose job it was to reassure public groups that GM foods were safe now says "… I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of course that they are safe to eat."

Genetically modified foods can be summed up with one simple word: Poison.

With the legitimacy of GM foods up in the air, you would think that at the very least, there would be mandates in place that would require labeling of any food with genetically modified material in it.  Without labeling, the entire populace becomes unwitting lab rats in a massive GM experiment.  What you might be interested to learn is that not only is labeling not mandated anywhere in the United States, but also our own government officials have passed legislation critics call the Monsanto Protection Act.  In a nutshell, this legislation means that even if GM foods are found to be dangerously unsafe, production and distribution of the "food" cannot be halted by law.  This piece of legislation was quietly attached to the budget deal that was passed in March of this year.

Everything you have read so far demonstrates the symptoms of blatant systemic corruption in our government.  To the right is a list of 18 Monsanto personnel and their corresponding appointed positions in our government.  This is not acceptable.  This is something We the People must work to correct.

For the best advice on how to get involved, see my article "Fear nothing. Question everything. Stand up for your rights."  In this case, getting involved with or at least informed on the March Against Monsanto (linked above) is also a great start.  Beyond that: Talk to your friends and family.  Educate a complete stranger.  Attend and speak up at your local City Council meetings.  Write your representatives in government.  Make your voice heard.  You cannot count on your elected representatives to make this right on their own.  It's up to us.

“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” -Henry Kissinger

A Message to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - California)

You can send Senator Feinstein a message of your own at https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me.

Dear Senator Feinstein,

I've seen you officially denouncing Edward Snowden as having "violated his Oath to defend the Constitution."  Can you please explain how you can credibly make claims about any other person violating this Oath?  Isn't this the same Oath you took when you were sworn into office?  Yet you have done everything you can to completely void the 2nd and 4th Amendments to the Constitution, not to even mention your support of grossly unconstitutional legislation like Obamacare.  To use your own words: "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in!" and "It's called protecting America."

There are a few things I'm not sure you understand.  Firstly, when you swore your Oath to defend, protect, and preserve the Constitution of the United States of America, this did not mean you got to pick and choose which parts you liked and which you wanted to sweep under the rug.  This meant you swore to defend, protect, and preserve every single part of it.  Secondly, subjecting all Americans to an unprecedented spy state and regularly violating our 4th Amendment Rights is doing anything but "protecting" us.  Thirdly, in regard to your stance on "Mr. and Mrs. America," the hypocrisy of your efforts is blatant and offensive.  It is yet another issue in which you have zero credibility; how is it that you can have your own permit to carry a concealed weapon and a repertoire of armed security personnel, but you would deny this Constitutionally guaranteed right to those you clearly view as your subjects?

Ma'am, If anyone here has violated an oath, it is you.

I feel I must add: I am happy I no longer count myself among your Californian constituents.  Unfortunately, the efforts you continue to make in government still have a negative impact on me.

The moral of my message to you today is this: We the People see you for what you are.  We the People will no longer be subjected to your particular brand of tyranny.  We the People have had enough, and our voices will be heard.

Good day to you,

Jordan Suwinski

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin