A Shocking Reminder

Not new by any means…but still as relevant today as it was when it was released…

Wagging The Dog

I’ve said before that I generally have little use for most of what comes out of Hollywood but there are rare exceptions and “Wag The Dog” is one of those exceptions & for the same reason that allows “Idiocracy”  to make the cut…it is some of the best fictional “truth” that’s out there. As I’ve been feeling the rumble of the War Pigs’ drums getting steadily louder and louder lately, this movie has come to mind more than once. Ordinarily it is easy to tell where the spark will ignite but right now, there is too much noise in the wind to look just in one direction.

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I ask myself over and over…is any of it even REAL? Does N. Korea really want to blast us into oblivion? If so…why…and I mean, really WHY, not the Faux or CoNN news scare versions of why, thanks. If they don’t really want to attack us, how would ‘We The Peons’ know that?  Or…maybe it’s Syria that wants to take us out..? Oh but wait…I saw mention about how going to war with China would be a bad thing…so maybe it’s them we should fear?? And of course, we cannot forget those scary folks down in Mali who…well, I don’t know what their beef is exactly, but by gawd…America will be there, standing strong!!!

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I know I did not list all of the places our government is currently chest-thumping with but it still makes the point…there is too much being thrown out too quickly – and without full background, details or key information so that the average citizen has no damned idea what is going on and what, if any, real threats there are. So much of what I’ve been seeing reads like propaganda and rhetoric…but is it? How can I be certain? Are we intentionally being spun about in all directions so that when something does finally trigger even more massive scale war, we will be so confused as to believe anything our ‘protectors’ tell us?

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Related Videos:

Wag the Dog: Media blamed for covering Libya unrest with fog of war

Will NATO Try a Wag-the-Dog Provocation Against Syria to Keep Sarkozy in Power After May 6?

Wag the Dog: Is China’s Philippines Aggression Merely a Diversion?

Why More SWAT-Style Raids?

“I’m very concerned that, on a national basis, police organizations are looking more and more like combat troops and less and less like community police officers.” 

- Robert Wadman, emeritus Weber State University criminal justice professor-

Excerpt, Standard Examiner – “Law enforcement officials agree: Police execute a “door kick” somewhere in Weber County, on average, once every week.

The forced entries range from a welfare check, when neighbors become concerned as newspapers pile up on someone’s porch and the family car is parked in the driveway.

At the other end of the spectrum are the full-on, SWAT-style raids with helmeted officers battering down a door unannounced, such as the Sept. 16, 2010, entry that left the suspect, Todd Blair, fatally shot.

Officials point to the frequency of door kicks, in police parlance, that occur without publicity or complaint as proof they’re benign — only a small percentage go awry. They steadfastly maintain they are crucial, the swift deployment necessary for officer safety and to keep suspects from destroying evidence.

Commando tactics concerns

But there are critics concerned about the increase in the commando-style entries, also known as a breach.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently announced a nationwide investigation of the “militarization” of police departments, simultaneously filing 255 public records requests in 24 states on March 6.

Among 18 Utah agencies whose records were requested are the Ogden, Roy and Brigham City police departments and the Weber and Cache county sheriff’s offices.

The agencies have been asked to provide data on SWAT team deployments and injuries during the deployments, weaponry used, and the level of funding for armament and equipment from the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

The ACLU decried militarization as an erosion “of civil liberties encouraging increasingly aggressive policing.”

In the wake of high-profile, lethal-force incidents involving officers, police brass and prosecutors have defended the strong-arm tactics as necessary in an increasingly violent world.

“Officers plan for the worst and hope for the best,” said Ogden Police Lt. Will Cragun. “It’s easy to second-guess after the fact, but you need to get down in the dirt with us to know what’s going on.”

Officials typically point to recent mass shootings around the country as a constant reminder to officers to be on their guard.

Roy Police Chief Greg Whinham noted the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, where 12 students and a teacher were killed and 21 injured, moved him to make his department the first in the state to put A-4 automatic rifles in the trunks of all patrol cars.

“I will always err on the side of getting my officers home at the end of their shift,” he said.

In an earlier news story about the ACLU records request, Weber County Sheriff’s Deputy Chief Klint Anderson said the problem is “the militarization of our criminals.”

Anderson said law enforcement is seeing “criminals who have military experience and military training.”

“They are better armed, better trained and more dangerous than before.”

Jim Retallick, veteran Ogden public defender, and other defense attorneys argue there are other ways to serve search warrants than the military-style door kicks.

“Hell yes, it’s getting dangerous,” Retallick said. “For seven people to get shot over marijuana is ridiculous.”

He is referring to the Jan. 4, 2012, forced-entry raid on the Ogden home of Matthew David Stewart. Six officers were shot, one fatally. Stewart was also wounded, hospitalized and jailed and now awaits trial, facing the death penalty…” Full Article Here

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***Warning: Video Contains Graphic & Heartbreaking Footage***

 

DHS Tanks In My Backyard

How nice to get a full video demonstration of the newly retrofitted ‘light armored’ tanks ready for deployment in New Mexico and W. Texas…yippeefreakingkayay!

Welcome to the Wild West, DHS style…

The Department of Homeland Security (through the U.S. Army Forces Command) recently retrofitted 2,717* of these ‘Mine Resistant Protected’ vehicles for service on the streets of the United States. *An earlier version of this post included a figure of over 2,700 vehicles, as cited from the original RT link. This figure likely comes from a press release from Navistar Defense, mentioning delivery of 2,717 to the U.S. Marine Corps. A DHS Spokesman confirmed with Business Insider that they have only 16 nationwide.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/homeland-security-serving-warrants-mrap-2013-3#ixzz2MpOHQ35e

For those of you who may be wondering…yes, I absolutely feel 100% safe and secure living here now that I know DHS is so well equipped as to be able to pluck us off the roadways (while not even having to worry about those pesky street mines!) as they drive…

…Oh…and if you actually believe me? Well…I’ve got some nice ocean front property for sale, too..!

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Related -

Homeland Security Is Serving Warrants Using Mine-Resistant Vehicles

Hundreds of Children Detained, Tortured

I swear…the whole fucking world has gone insane…absotively, posolutely, infuckingsane.

Why do we hate children so much? (Or hate each other so much, for that matter?)

Torture? Imprison? Hang? Electrocute?

CHILDREN??

Here, there and everywhere – humans seem to have lost all ability to reason or feel compassion.

Why…just…why?!

There is no reason for this; no reason for so much of what is going on in this world that rattles my brain so hard I swear it is going to scrape it’s way out of my skull and run away screaming…Ugh.

Here’s the story from The Independent

“Almost all the children I know of who were arrested after 25 January have been tortured…”

“Hundreds of children – some as young as nine – have been illegally detained and in many cases tortured by the Egyptian police following the protests which erupted after the second anniversary of the 2011 uprising.

In what lawyers and activists say is a retrenchment of state brutality akin to the worst abuses of power during Hosni Mubarak’s regime, large numbers of children have been unlawfully imprisoned in camps used by Egypt’s central security forces.

Rights groups say that many of those detained have been subjected to cruel mistreatment, including beatings, electrocution and “hanging” torture. Others were forced by their tormentors to strip naked before being drenched with cold water.

One lawyer said he believed that up to 400 children, many of them barely teenagers, may have been rounded up during police operations following the outbreak of street clashes on 25 January, the anniversary of Egypt’s rebellion two years ago.”

If you can stomach it, the full story can be found Here.

Building The Global Special Operation Forces Partnership

This is…well…unnerving…and chilling.

 

ISOF (Photo credit: United States Forces – Iraq (Inactive))

 

(May 2012) Military assault demonstrations at the ISOF 2012 conference in Tampa bay, Florida. The participating SOF teams came from 10 allied nations: Australia, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Jordan, Norway, Poland, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and included American SEALs, Green Berets, Air Force Combat Controllers, and US Marines. This year ISOF’s theme is “Building the Global SOF Partnership.” This is composed of mutually supporting partners working to identify and preemptively address problems, and helping to defeat the appeal of violent extremism.

 

 

 

Like A Phoenix: Power Beyond The Fall

So…you want a revolution, eh? Pissed off…fed up…you know bad things are going bump in the night but don’t know which way to turn for help when officers are murdering people – and pets – all over the place. Your government representatives have gone deaf and blind. Your online activity is not only not private, but can and will be used against you in court…doors are getting bashed in, your milk is no longer legal, your neighbors can vanish and be indefinitely detained & families are being terrorized by armed and masked SWAT men in the middle of the night…

It is time to do something…NOW!!

Enough is enough!! Our founding fathers would not have stood for this and neither should we!! 

The time for a revolution is at hand…!

Or is it..?

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No one can deny that we are in dire straits both as a nation and as part of the global community of human beings…things are not good and changes absolutely must be made before we all end up in darker times and conditions than most of us could ever dream of living in – or even surviving. But…since it is premature to jump into a revolution…and it is obvious that we cannot continue on the path we’re on without serious negative consequences, where does that leave us? 

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I wish I could drop a big, happy rainbow here and say that there is no reason to worry, our leaders will all come to their senses soon and everything will be hunky-dory. I’d be a liar if I did. I honestly don’t think that things are going to be “okay” in the sense that we want for a long time to come still. The price of…everything…has risen so it seems. It’s not actually that prices are any higher – it’s that the dollar is lower, worth less…bottom line either way is that you get fewer items for more Monopoly Money than ever before. There is no denying the rise of the police state and ever tightening laws that are strangling us on every level from personal to business. The war machine is rolling over countries left, right and sideways; it is the Hexxus of Fern Gully, out of control and oozing death and destruction everywhere it goes. We find it acceptable to imprison citizens in order to satisfy corpo-political pigs and keep them all feeding at the trough of profit via human slavery…

The Relentless March of the U.S. Police State

Excerpt from The Independent Institute – By Robert Higgs 

Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, wrote recently:

An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will. . . . Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.

Turley does not say much in this article about the other rail of the Police State Railway that Americans are riding to hell: the drug war, with its massive arrests, prosecution, and imprisonment of people charged only with victimless crimes and its militarization of the state and local police all over the country. (On the militarization of the police, see especially this research paper, a revised version of which will appear in the spring issue of The Independent Review.) This massive bloating of police power and legalized oppression and the corresponding suppression of individual rights have brought down to the lowest level the threats to life, liberty, and happiness that the war on terrorism has created in what most people view as a more remote and less threatening venue—”out there” somewhere, in drone-istan.

Each day, the U.S. police state grows larger, more powerful, more pervasive, and more menacing. When will the majority awaken to the realization that this threat has nothing to do with party politics, that it makes no difference whether a Republican or a Democrat occupies the presidency while our freedoms are demolished? Read Full Article Here

A Moment Of Clarity by Lee Camp…

How To Combat Modern Slavery

“If the rule of law is sound, it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable. But if corruption creeps in and people don’t have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law, then if you can use violence, if you can use violence with impunity, you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery…”

In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales* explains the business of modern slavery, a multi-billion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research — and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.

Highlights from the transcript which can be viewed in full Here on TEDTalks

“So, I began to do a research project of my own. I went to five countries around the world. I looked at slaves. I met slaveholders, and I looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime. People do not enslave people to be mean to them.They do it to make a profit. And I’ve got to tell you, what I found out in the world in four different continents, was depressingly familiar…

…And I want to be very clear. I’m talking about real slavery. This is not about lousy marriages,this is not about jobs that suck. This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It’s real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history…

…We’re also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo;destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. It’s a pretty harrowing linkage between what’s happening to our environment and what’s happening to our human rights.

Now, how on Earth did we get to a situation like this, where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010? That’s double the number that came out of Africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade. Well, it builds up with these factors. They are not causal, they are actually supporting factors. One we all know about, the population explosion: the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years. Being numerous does not make you a slave. Add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world, caused by civil wars, ethnic conflicts, kleptocratic governments, disease … you name it, you know it…”

* Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25 years.

Brazilian Troops Bulldoze Homes; Leave Thousands Homeless

I am not really familiar with the current politics of this region but all sides of politics aside, this story is very disturbing and seems very, very wrong. I do know that several multi-national corporations have been working to force their way in to pillage the country for every possible resource…the most disturbing of which would be the human resources required to keep the new Brazilian Private Prison Corporations fully supplied and happy.

If people who were unjustly evicted from their homes decide to do something like…oh…riot or protest…the Intn’l Corporate Police will be there to *assist* and *put down* the riots.  Who knows exactly how many corporations are standing behind this land-grab or what their intentions really are…I just have that chilling kind of hunch that this is bad…very bad, for the people and future of Brazil.

Excerpts from WND

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While the press was barred from documenting much of the battle, local news reports showed the true extent of the human tragedy. Many critics have said it constitutes forced relocation, a crime against humanity under international agreements.

“Thousands of poor Brazilian families are living in wretched conditions at make-shift refugee camps after being evicted from their homes at gunpoint by federal forces, some of whom were sporting United Nations logos, according to sources.

The massive operation, which left an estimated 7,500 or more people, including thousands of children, homeless was justified by authorities under the guise of creating an Indian reservation.

Towns literally have been wiped off the map, and no compensation was offered to the victims. About 400,000 acres of land were expropriated in the latest operation.

Residents in the Siua-Missu area in the state of Mato Grosso battled heavily armed federal police and military forces for weeks using sticks, rocks, Molotov cocktails and other crude weapons.

In the end, however, the powerful national government forces were overwhelming.

Virtually all of the residents have now been displaced, living in squalor, packed into school gymnasiums in nearby towns. Others are living on charity under plastic tarps propped up with sticks with no clean water or sewage services.

Leaders of the feeble resistance, meanwhile, are being hunted down by authorities for punishment…

…“The conflicts between the productive sector and Indians are assuming greater proportions,” he added. “Countless non-governmental organizations have appeared, many from abroad, to involve themselves in the question.”

Authorities also told WND that the U.N. was not involved in the eviction efforts but that the organization’s logos were on the military equipment and personnel because they had recently returned from “peace-keeping” abroad.

“The evicted victims are now living at schools in Alto da Boa Vista and camps, with some being sheltered by relatives,” Naves Bispo, a local resident and victim of the land-grab scheme, told WND, adding that the situation was dire and deteriorating…

…Like other victims and analysts who spoke with WND, Bispo was unsure about why Brazilian authorities had decided to create an Indian reservation on land that was never occupied by Indians and was already lawfully owned.” Full Story on WND

DARPA: Falling…Upward?

“The UFP concept centers on developing deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they “fall upward.”

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As with most projects DARPA manages, this one leaves me feeling uneasy and not trusting that this technology will not be used as a weapon or cause harm…

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DARPA already intends to set a drone ship out to sea, and now it’s revealed plans for undersea payloads that lie dormant for years and launch themselves to the surface when remotely commanded. Dubbed Upward Falling Payloads, the containers will carry non-lethal cargo such as small UAVs or networking hardware, and take advantage of the “cheap stealth” their position underwater grants them. Article Here

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DARPA News -

Today, cost and complexity limit the Navy to fewer weapons systems and platforms, so resources are strained to operate over vast maritime areas. Unmanned systems and sensors are commonly envisioned to fill coverage gaps and deliver action at a distance. However, for all of the advances in sensing, autonomy, and unmanned platforms in recent years, the usefulness of such technology becomes academic when faced with the question, “How do you get the systems there?” DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads program seeks to address that challenge.

The UFP concept centers on developing deployable, unmanned, distributed systems that lie on the deep-ocean floor in special containers for years at a time. These deep-sea nodes would then be woken up remotely when needed and recalled to the surface. In other words, they “fall upward.”

“The goal is to support the Navy with distributed technologies anywhere, anytime over large maritime areas. If we can do this rapidly, we can get close to the areas we need to affect, or become widely distributed without delay,” said Andy Coon, DARPA program manager. “To make this work, we need to address technical challenges like extended survival of nodes under extreme ocean pressure, communications to wake-up the nodes after years of sleep, and efficient launch of payloads to the surface.”

A proposer’s day is scheduled for Jan. 25, 2013, in the DARPA Conference Center. For details, visit: http://go.usa.gov/4CqC.  

DARPA seeks proposals in three key areas for developing the program: Communications, deep ocean ‘risers’ to contain the payloads, and the actual payloads. DARPA hopes to reach technical communities that conduct deep-ocean engineering from the telecom and oil-exploration industry to the scientific community with insights into signal propagation in the water and on the seafloor. Since the program will emphasize the use of ambient pressure containment with its risers, there is no need for specialization of payloads to accommodate the extreme pressures of the deep sea. Communities with technical background in unmanned platforms; distributed sensors; networking; sensor packaging; information operations; electronic warfare; anti-submarine warfare, etc. may all be able to play a role.

Almost half of the world’s oceans are more than four kilometers deep. This provides considerable opportunity for cheap stealth. The vastness and depth make retrieval costs prohibitive.  Despite this, the UFP program is specifically not a weapons program, and the risks to losing any single node will be minimal. 

Depending on the specific payload, systems would provide a range of non-lethal but useful capabilities such as situational awareness, disruption, deception, networking, rescue, or any other mission that benefits from being pre-distributed and hidden. An example class of systems might be small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that launch to the surface in capsules, take off and provide aerial situational awareness, networking or decoy functions. Waterborne applications are sought as well. 

“We are simply offering an alternative path to realize these missions without requiring legacy ships and aircraft to launch the technology, and without growing the reach and complexity of unmanned platforms,” said Coon.

The DARPA broad agency announcement describing the specific capabilities sought is available at http://go.usa.gov/4Cjh.

Testing, Testing…

It truly boggles my mind that there are still people around who do not believe that our government can, has…and likely will in the future…use people as lab rats for whatever variety of war-ish science they happen to be studying in any given decade. And when folks insist that there is no way our government would allow harmful toxins to be sprayed over our heads…without our consent…I am torn between the urge to laugh…or to cry.

Wake up, folks!

Please..?

Politics, Genetics & Propaganda

Last year, IBM’s Watson, an artificial intelligence, understood natural language well enough to whip the human champion Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. As we write this, soldiers with bionic limbs are returning to active duty, and autonomous cars are driving down our streets. Yet most of these advances are small in comparison with the great leap forward currently under way in the biosciences—a leap with consequences we’ve only begun to imagine…

Excerpt from Politico – “The pending sale of a major American gene-mapping company to a Chinese firm is sparking yet another dust-up over what sensitive industries the rising Asian power ought to be allowed to dominate in the United States.

A key question — as it has been with Chinese involvement in aviation, cloud computing and telecom hardware — is whether there are national security concerns attached to allowing a company largely funded by the Chinese government to have access to human DNA being decoded for doctors, researchers and pharmaceutical companies.”

Is this a legitimate concern…or a red-herring argument designed to keep the average American feeling threatened by our (rather sudden) Chinese ‘competition’.

When I was a kid, we were told that the Russians wanted to nuke us all and steal our Levis…and well, we all know how true THAT turned out to be. Every one of the current news stories I read about China seem to have the same theme and feel to me…”Evil foreigners want your freedom, your life, your Starbucks, your Levis…your DNA… “

More from Politico - “A technical adviser to both Complete Genomics and BGI Shenzhen who supports the transaction suggested that raising the specter of terrorism and exploiting the national appetite for China-bashing is a cover for Illumina’s real motive — to buy Complete and achieve market domination for itself.

“They want to destabilize this field,” said genetics pioneer George Church, director of the Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT and the National Institutes of Health’s Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard. “They do not want that kind of competition. If I were Illumina, I might do the same thing. But this is a beautiful illustration of why our politicians and CEOs should be a lot more educated about technology.”

In A Mad World: Shooting To Kill…A Double Amputee

Sometimes it is a real struggle to articulate the thoughts that fly through my brain as I skim the morning headlines. There are some stories so bizarre that I cannot even fully register them. I read something; it’s obviously true. Events unfold and human dramas play out billions of time each day. Some snapshots of events gets stuck in my head until I can untangle the mess of questions that might surround them. Some things I cannot make sense of no matter how hard I stare at the photograph in my mind.

Headline from the Houston Chronicle this morning:

“ Houston police officer shoots dead double amputee in wheelchair

Cop was cornered by disabled man, says police spokesman”

To start with, the headline is poorly written and leaves doubt as to whether a man was shot dead or if a dead man was shot – to be clear, a man was shot dead by police. But the sloppy headline isn’t what has my thoughts jammed and bent; it’s the events that are described and the questions they leave me with that are so irritating…

How is it that a fully mobile man with a weapon (or multiple weapons) could possibly perceive an unarmed, one-armed, one-legged, mentally ill man bound to a wheelchair as so much of a threat that he is left no choice but… to shoot to kill?

What are we to make of the fact that this is the second time this officer has shot and killed someone? Does it matter that the first man was also not armed with a gun but a knife?

How can something like this happen? What is the root of the problem?

Is there one singular root or multiple off-shoots springing up from an ailing tree? 

As a former volunteer with our local police department I cannot believe that all officers are prone to excessive use of force; I know far too many who are not. So why are there so many stories like this day after day detailing how officers over-react to situations and unarmed or poorly armed ‘suspects’? Why so many instances of unjustifiable force being used against citizens in recent years?

What happened to the concept of “Peace Officers” – the idea of men & woman wanting to protect and serve their communities and the people (their friends and neighbors) in the community?

Is the problem in the training? The hiring process? Are ‘bad eggs’ not being vetted properly?

Is the problem something more creeping and sinister..?

With the increased funding for high-tech equipment, weapons and protective gear are we creating more of a barrier that separates officers from other humans…and their humanity?

If we gear them up like Robo-Cops, isn’t it logical to assume they will end up acting as such? Dr. Phil Zombardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment makes a pretty strong case for creating evil.

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Is this what has happened to our police? Instead of “officers” we have “forces” now. Instead of walking among members of their community, AS members of the community – officers are now being set apart from their communities. More shields, more weapons, more masks to hide behind…more distance between human beings.

What do we expect to happen if not the dehumanization of everyone living within such a system?

All of the questions and unexplained snapshots of our world that are stuck in my head leave me with a melancholy Sunday morning mood that feels like this…

And the only thing I do know for certain is that we live in a very mad world indeed.

A President Of Peace

With insanity spreading and riots raging around the world, I want a candidate with a rational mind and a heart of peace leading this country for a change. Gary Johnson IS that man. No fear-mongering, no desire to expand our war-mongering ways.

I want a leader capable of representing the citizens of this country rather than the lobbyists of this country. I truly believe that Johnson is the only candidate who will hold the best interests of this nation as a whole above the interests of the War-Pig lobbyist groups. His desire is to bring our troops home and place our money where it is most needed and can do the most good – right here in the USA.

 

“Republicans are Thelma. The Democrats are Louise. Together they are taking our nation over a cliff. We have a President and a majority in Congress who insist on endless war. But a majority of Americans are insisting on Peace. As our President, I will end the wars and bring our men and women home — where we will rebuild and renew our broken nation together.

We the People will have PEACE.“

“Maintaining a strong national defense is the most basic of the federal government’s responsibilities. However, building schools, roads, and hospitals in other countries are not among those basic obligations. Yet that is exactly what we have been doing for much of the past 10 years.

Given trillion-dollar deficits, America simply cannot afford to be engaged in foreign policy programs that are not clearly protecting U.S. interests. There is nation-building and rebuilding to be done right here at home.

Our military should remain the most potent force for good on Earth. To do this, we should resort to military action as the last option and only as provided in the Constitution.” ~Gary Johnson~

His common sense is highlighted here in this outstanding article on All Voices Sept. 13th, 2012

Excerpt from, “Johnson more presidential than Romney in response to Middle East violence“

 ”Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, who served two terms as New Mexico governor and currently has­­ more executive-level experience in government than Romney and Obama combined, on Thursday released a statement about the tragedy.

Johnson had no time for petty partisan jabs and blame games; he was too busy asking an important question that neither Romney nor the president seem to be capable of asking: Does it serve our national interest to be in places where we are not wanted, not appreciated and targeted for violence by American-hating extremists?

Johnson’s statement read, in part:

It is tragic when Americans serving their country are murdered, and we both mourn their loss and honor their service.

Part of honoring that service is to ask the obvious question: What U.S. interest is being served by putting our people – and our money – in places where U.S. personnel can be killed by extremists over a video?

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Protecting America with a strong national defense and a rational foreign policy is our leaders’ most basic responsibility. But let us not confuse national security with senseless intervention where our interests are clearly not being served.

As Romney spews nonsense about Obama standing by a statement that sympathized with the killers, his words are all the more reason for voters unsatisfied with the choice between the two major party candidates to take a long, hard look at their alternatives. By any reasonable standard, Johnson represents the best alternative a non-major party has had to offer since former President Teddy Roosevelt ran on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912…”

Read Full Article Here

PEACE.

Demand it.

Donate to it.

Elect it.

Protect it.

Related articles

• Gary Johnson: Libya, Afghanistan and the Middle East — Why Obama and Romney are Both Wrong (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ron Paul on Gary Johnson: He Certainly Has A Lot Of Libertarian Views (txwclp.org)
• Disillusioned Democrats should support Gary Johnson for President (libertarianreview.us)
• Gary Johnson News Update (roninsjourney.wordpress.com)