RAPPOPORT INTERVIEWS FITTS

MAY 24, 2010.  This week, I’ll be interviewing economic insider and guru, Catherine Austin Fitts, on the financial meltdown.

Former Wall Street and federal executive, Catherine brings a unique perspective to the whole economic scene.  She left the Inside when she became troubled by her findings on what makes the economy really tick. 

My radio show airs every week at 4PM Pacific Time.  To listen live, go to www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

To pick up shows from the archive:

http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

LOGIC AND DECEPTIVE WORDS

By Jon Rappoport,

Author of the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS COURSE

MAY 21, 2010.  When a report is issued that contains vague words, it turns out to be a mess.  However, much of the time, people don’t ask for clarification of these terms.  They allow words and phrases to float by like wispy clouds.

Even bigger trouble ensues when words seem to be straightforward but really aren’t.

As a medical reporter, I spent years rooting out such deceptive terms.

A few examples:

“Hundreds of people have TESTED POSITIVE for the disease.”

“Healthy people should avoid INFECTED patients if possible.”

“The patient who died was PREVIOUSLY HEALTHY, underlining the virulence of the virus in his body.”

On the surface, these words seem clear.  But they usually aren’t. 

What test was being used, after which hundreds of people were said to be positive for a disease?  Was the test useful?  Was it relevant?

I frequently discovered the test measured a certain response of the immune system—and this positive response traditionally meant the patient was healthy.  But all of a sudden, the core meaning of the test had been turned on its head.  It was now taken to mean the patient was ill, or would soon become ill.

It was such a boggling reversal I had trouble believing my eyes.  And yet, there it was.  It was as if medical researchers were saying, with no reasonable justification, “Healthy equals sick.”

Many people assume the word “infected” means sick.  However, it often means “tested positive”—and then when “tested positive” was tracked down, it fell into the same bizarre trap I just described.

In a number of cases, where patients were reported to have died from a fast-acting viral infection, and were said to have been “previously healthy,” this turned out to be a complete fiction.  The patients had long medical records listing other diseases, and the drugs that had been used to treat those diseases were demonstrably toxic and injurious.  On top of that, some of the patients had a considerable street-drug history.  Therefore, the notion that they were just fine until the marauder virus attacked them was totally false.  Their immune systems, in fact, had been hanging on the ropes for a long time.

The deception in the terms “tested positive for the disease,” “infected,” and “previously healthy” required some investigation before they could be rightly understood.

I’ve seen many journalists who, when a “new epidemic” is announced, buy right into the official statistics on “infected” and “positive” people—without ever questioning what those terms actually mean to the medical bureaucrats who throw them around.

This is really a matter of logic, because deceptive terms torpedo the reasoning process.  It’s like driving with faulty brakes and a hole in the gas tank.  At some point, bad things are going to happen.

Many people can spot obviously vague words—but words that seem specific and official often escape notice.  It takes work to dig below the surface and discover the words are being used deceptively.

Needless to say, schoolchildren aren’t shown these things.  And most adults don’t learn about them, either. 

I’d take this a step further.  Very large numbers of people don’t even realize there is a reasoning process taking place.  They don’t see that some press reports, for example, are trying to use information to come to a logical conclusion.  Therefore, the whole question of whether certain key terms are being used in a deceptive fashion doesn’t concern them. 

I call this ignorance “apple-pie state of mind.”  You know, people say you can use apples unfit for eating and still make a good pie.  Well, maybe.  But in the realm of rational reasoning, if you have bad apples, you’re going to come to a bizarre and misleading conclusion.

This is one reason I created the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS course.  I had to start somewhere.  Education is the right place.  Minds need to be sharpened.  People need to understand what the reasoning process is all about, and how it can go right and how it can go wrong.

There are many ways it can go wrong.  For both schoolchildren and adults, discovering these factors comes as a revelation.  The clouds part and the sun illuminates the landscape, at last. 

Just as many lawyers—who are taught a little logic—use their skills to argue any side in any case without a shred a conscience, many journalists use whatever reasoning skills they have to tell a good story, regardless of the truth.  Governments and corporations sell their cases to the people, while obscuring the illogic of their presentations.  We’re inundated with twisted logic, and it should be a central part of educational system to reveal this and root it out—with great specificity.

Recently, a Supreme Court decision was handed down concerning the extent to which children could be punished for very violent crimes.  In its declaration, the Court majority opinion cited “international standards” on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.  This seemingly obvious phrase has broad appeal to people who want to “harmonize” the laws of nations.  But it was a bizarre moment, to say the least.  On what basis could the US Court refer to the laws and customs of other countries in deciding an American case?

Where is the detailed justification for such a move?  Where is the detailed judicial debate that unearths and examines the acceptable method for making Supreme Court decisions?  In other words, where is the logical argument that would lay out how the Court is supposed to deliberate and not supposed to deliberate? 

The press covered the case in its usual fashion—these experts say this, and those experts say that.  End of story.  Move on.

It’s precisely this attitude that undermines a society. 

Creating a demand for explicit and complete logic has to start in rooms of education.

Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for high school students and adults.  He has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years.  Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.  He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles.  At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy.  Mr. Rappoport can be reached at qjrconsulting@gmail.com  His work can be found at www.nomorefakenews.com and www.insolutions.info      

By Jon Rappoport,

Author of the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS COURSE

MAY 19, 2010.  In this piece, I’d like to focus on one factor.  When governments spend more than they have, they become debt-based governments. 

This is like saying, if the river rises over its banks there will be a flood.  It’s so obvious, why bother to mention it all? 

Well, because many people don’t really understand what debt means.  It means, among other things, that you can’t keep borrowing indefinitely to pay off what you owe. 

In other words, at some point, the lenders are going to dry up.  They’re going to run screaming into the night and they won’t leave a forwarding address for you.  You owe too much.  They don’t want to have anything to do with you.  If they were bookies, you would have already had your knees cracked with a baseball bat.

Governments, however, have some kind of misplaced faith that, if they keep funding programs “the people want,” the day of reckoning will never come.  They can allot money for this and that and this and that, and because this and that are deemed to be worthwhile, it doesn’t matter.

If you try to figure out where this attitude came from, you won’t find it in the Constitution.  You’ll find clues in the notion that politicians get elected by promising goodies, though. 

A close analysis indicates that “freedom,” which is delineated in the Constitution, is not the same as “free stuff.”

We now see that governments all over the world are realizing they can’t live forever as debt-based entities. 

So what’s next? 

I believe we will observe a growing Voice that asks for a global currency.  One currency for all nations.  This is no revelation.  It’s been coming for a long time.  However, it helps to have a debt crisis that seems to require the one-currency-fits-all answer. 

And in the process of shifting to a single planetary currency, there will be “debt eradication.”  This will be folded into the plan—because somehow the insupportable financial obligations of governments have to be dealt with. 

Such a plan will have to involve corporations.  Why?  Because companies like Goldman Sachs presently underwrite government debt.  Meaning?  These companies guarantee that the bonds which governments float, in order to keep borrowing, are, well, OK.  The bonds are “good.”  The bonds are safe.  The bonds can be bought without an unacceptable risk.

And what on earth gives Goldman Sachs the idea that such bonds deserve to be guaranteed?  I asked several “experts” that very question.  The answer I got was this: Governments tax the people; the taxes keep rolling in; governments have a reliable income stream.

That’s it?  That’s the answer?  It didn’t add up to me, because, despite raking in money by taxing citizens, governments are spending far more than they should.  In fact, that’s why they have to keep issuing those bonds. 

It seems to me this is yet another one of those crazy schemes, like selling mortgage-backed derivatives, that lasts as long as people don’t ask too many questions.  It’s a rain-soaked cliff waiting to collapse, and people are still spreading out blankets and having picnics on the cliff, and developers are building condos and roads there.

The shift to a single world currency would be a complex affair, and banks, investment houses, national treasuries, governments, and tons of lawyers would have to work it all out.

Something would have to be done to accommodate the global currency-trading markets, too, where presently gargantuan sums are flowing every day, as gamblers speculate on the value of the dollar versus the pound, the yen versus the dollar, and so on.  That whole market would be destroyed if these national currencies disappeared. 

No doubt the one-global-currency scheme has been on the drawing board for some time. Major players have been working on how it would be accomplished, and who would get what payoffs.

Insupportable government debt and the inability to provide the panoply of government services would be one reason given for The Great Money Revolution.

It’s a little like this.  You’re out on a field where you play baseball on a regular basis.  Your team is losing every game, on and on.  So one day, in the fifth inning of a game, you take your bat and your ball, and you say, “This is a bad thing.  Baseball is bad.  We have to make a change.  We’re not going to keep score the same way anymore.  We’re going to have a new game…”

A few people call you a bad loser.  And you say, “You’re wrong.  I just want to make things more fair, more equal.” 

We already have a model for debt eradication.  The IMF, the International Monetary Fund.  It tends to go into Third World countries and relieve a bit of pressure on their monstrous government debts—with  conditions attached.  These governments will basically have to sell off many of their functions, like water and electric utilities, to outside corporate interests.  Privatization.  In the process, rates are hiked.  Government budgets are downsized.

It’s possible that a new world currency would entail some of the same “austerity measures,” from Nome to Tierra del Fuego.  A general lowering of the standard of living.  An ever-widening gulf between the rich and the poor.

And of course, with the institution of one global currency, money would become much easier to track and tax.  Money would become much more “public.”  Or to put it another way, only favored individuals and groups would be able to fly under the radar and transfer and launder billions and trillions. 

I make all these points to illustrate how far such a plan would bring us from the notion of Constitutional government laid out at the beginning of the American Republic. 

That long road has been paved and constructed with debt.  Debt becomes the reason why the road to a Brave New World has to end up with an overall global management system that is both economic and political.

Therefore, as many have pointed out, those men who long for exactly such a global management system would conclude: Any strategy to pile insupportable debt on governments is a good strategy. 

Under the rubric of “more free services for more people,” debt is easy to create.  Along with war, it’s a slam dunk.

You may have noticed that, in America, more and more people are talking about limited government these days.  People are realizing that the Framers of the Constitution weren’t just whistling in the dark. 

The people who are now defending limited government are, in fact, willing to discuss these First Principles.  But the other side is doing everything it can to avoid that discussion.

Why?  Because a fundamental debate would open up the, yes, underlying philosophy by which these Big Government advocates operate.  The debate would expose the various levels of transference—in which freedom becomes free stuff.  And free stuff becomes un-payable debt.  And un-payable debt becomes the familiar face of friendly fascism.

Finally, it’s always a good idea to audit governments, to actually see the books, all the books, so you can find out their true financial status.  I mention this because governments invest money they drag in from taxing the citizenry.  Through pension funds, for example, they are major investors in the stock market.  Do we know how well such investments have been performing?  Is it possible that some state governments are swimming in cash and are falsely crying poor?  If that turned out to be the case, then the notion of “insupportable government debt” becoming the lever for a new currency would take on additional meaning.  It’s an issue that shouldn’t be ignored, and I don’t see governments releasing comprehensive financial reports that any citizen can read and understand.       

Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for high school students and adults.  He has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years.  Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.  At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy.  Mr. Rappoport can be reached at qjrconsulting@gmail.com  His websites are www.nomorefakenews.com and www.insolutions.info       

MAY 18, 2010.  Over the years, I’ve written several articles about my consulting practice.  I’m now in a position to make clearer distinctions about this work.

In telephone sessions (usually once a week), I consult clients in four basic categories:

business;

discovering buried goals/desires;

imagination and creative action;

energy for greater health and power.

Before embarking on a series of consultations with a client, we determine which one (or more) of these paths we are going to take.

BUSINESS

The whole effort here is to construct a roadmap that takes the client from where he is to where he wants to go.  Normally, this process is done with entrepreneurs, but I’ve had a number of clients who were working for other people and wanted to advance their careers.

I have accumulated a whole series of check-points and questions that will make the designing of the map complete.     

The roadmap is as specific as possible.  Once it’s built, I help ensure the client executes all the indicated steps (actions) along the map.  So this isn’t just a theoretical exercise.

Real-world success is the objective—and traveling the full distance, as indicated in the road map, is the way to get there.  In sports, this is called executing the game plan.  The plan needs to be a series of specific steps, and the person has to take those steps.  And of course, the game plan has to be correct—following it has to bring the person to the success he’s seeking.      

DISCOVERING BURIED GOALS/DESIRES

Some clients are confused about what they truly want in life.  Therefore, we focus on that area.  Through dialogue and key exercises I’ve developed during many years of experience, the client comes to discover the “buried treasure.”

This in itself is a major accomplishment.  At that point, the client can choose to continue working with me to build a road map that will enable him to achieve his goal/desire in the real world.

IMAGINATION AND CREATIVE ACTION

For those people who feel a pull toward “new frontiers and undiscovered territory,” who believe they truly want to live a creative life, I focus on helping them gain greater and greater access to their own imagination.

This is very challenging and rewarding work.  It involves philosophy, education, and techniques by which clients come to use their innate capacity to invent, innovate, improvise, and build their dreams into reality, as fact, in the world. 

ENERGY FOR GREATER HEALTH AND POWER

Behind many breakthroughs in alternative health research sits the single factor of energy.  With enough available live energy, a person will find his health naturally improves and expands. 

There is no ceiling on the amount of energy a person can produce and access.  The objective in this area of consulting is…more.  More energy.

To accomplish this, I employ a variety of techniques, some of which I’ve adapted from Tibetan practices that go back more than a thousand years.  When indicated, I also utilize what I call guided-imagery excursions, to reduce stress.  Stress tends to put a damper on energy; it blocks energy.

ABOUT TECHNIQUES AND EXERCISES           

Some of the techniques I employ in my consulting work are done with the client during our sessions.  All the techniques can be done by the clients between sessions, and after our consulting work is done.

These techniques are always tailored to the specific needs of the client. 

I’ve been teaching and practicing these exercises myself for at least 15 years—in some cases, longer.

HEALING AND BEYOND

In working with clients, I’ve noticed that achieving success in any of the four areas I focus on brings about a kind of healing—by that I mean a sense of wholeness and confidence.  However, this is just a prelude to something greater: wider-ranging action that breaks new ground in life and literally invents the present and the future.  The person truly goes where he has not gone before.  The excitement and adventure that ensue can’t be overstated.

I welcome inquiries.

JON RAPPOPORT

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com          

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of the innovative 18-lesson course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS

MAY 17, 2010.  What we call science has always had a pragmatic approach to reality.  Science wants to translate, sooner or later, into results.

However, logic pressed science into a framework that clarified it and squeezed out less useful findings.

Here is how.

Let’s take a very simple formulation.  A) If it snows, there are clouds.  B) There are clouds.  C) Therefore, it is snowing?  No.  Therefore, nothing. 

Explanation: Although every time it snows there are clouds, the presence of clouds doesn’t guarantee there is snow.  You can have cloudy days without snow.

Using that simple logical format, we can present a pattern for scientific hypotheses. 

For example: If matter and anti-matter collide, there will be a huge explosion.  Let’s start with that.

The first part of the statement assumes there is such a thing as anti-matter.  It also assumes anti-matter has certain properties.  That’s quite a mouthful.  That’s saying a lot. 

And then we go on: When anti-matter particles encounter particles of matter, an explosion occurs.

So suppose we now say: In such and such place, at such and such time, there is an explosion.  Therefore, anti-matter and matter must have collided.  Is that valid reasoning?

Of course not.

Explosions can occur for many reasons that have nothing to do with the supposed collision of matter and anti-matter.

Just as with the snow and the clouds, the reasoning is invalid.

Okay, let’s try to get a little more specific.  For example: We believe that in Galaxy ABC, four million years ago, anti-matter and matter collided in the vicinity of a black hole.  We believe there was anti-matter in that location, because of factors Q, R, and S.  We of course know there was matter in the vicinity of that black hole.  So it’s quite possible that four million years ago, some particles of matter and anti-matter ran into each other there.  If they had, what would have happened?  An explosion.  Was there, in fact, an explosion there four million years ago?  Yes.  We know there was.  We know it because we can see the evidence through telescopes, which show us what was happening at distant times in the past.  It’s in the past, because the light from faraway places takes a long time to arrive here and register on these telescopes.  Therefore, four million years ago, in that location near the black hole, matter and anti-matter collided. 

Now, that seems somewhat convincing, doesn’t it?

But it isn’t.  It’s the same invalid and illogical pattern of reasoning.  The explosion near the black hole four million years ago could have been caused by other factors.  Igniting gases, for example.  Factors that had nothing to do with the collision of matter and anti-matter.

Now here is the really interesting thing.  ALL OF SCIENCE IS BASED ON THE SAME ILLOGICAL FRAMEWORK.

That’s right.

And here is that general framework: If hypothesis X is true, result Y would follow.  We do have Y.  Therefore, hypothesis X is true.

WRONG.

When logic made this point, scientists (those who understood logic) had to go back to the drawing board.  They had to refine their understanding of science.  And they did.

Here is what they came up with.  The framework of the scientific method really has to do with usefulness, not logic, and to make science useful, it has to PREDICT THE FUTURE.  That’s what we want out of science.

We want experiments based on hypotheses, and we want to be able to predict the outcomes of those experiments correctly before they happen.  We want technology based on hypotheses, and we want that technology to work exactly as we think it will, every time.

So then we have to ask: Will a given hypothesis allow us to predict something useful and important before it happens?  If so, it’s science.  If not, it’s not.

We can refine this even further.  Will your hypothesis allow us to predict something useful and important PRECISELY?

Okay. 

Maybe it seems like I’m splitting hairs and engaging in empty semantics here, so to prove I’m not, let’s take a real-world example.

If the hypothesis about manmade global warming is true, we should be able to make precise predictions about global temperatures on Earth a year up the line, five years up the line, ten years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years.

You see?  Science is about useful and precise predictions.  It’s not about explaining the past.

So let’s apply the test.  So far, has the hypothesis about manmade global warming yielded accurate climate predictions?  The hypothesis has been around for at least, what, 15 years?  During that time, have scientists been able to make precise predictions about Earth’s climate changes? 

I’m not even going to answer that question.  I’m going to let you answer it.  And with your answer, you’ll be able to see whether the manmade warming hypothesis ranks, so far, as science.  Is it science, or is it possible-maybe-could-be science? 

You’ll be able to see the answer clearly, because once upon a time logic forced science to define itself and its core and its objectives more specifically.

And that’s a good thing.

Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for high school students and adults.  He has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years.  Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.  He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles, and has tutored extensively in remedial English at Santa Monica College.  At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy.  Mr. Rappoport can be reached at qjrconsulting@gmail.com  His work can be found at www.nomorefakenews.com and www.insolutions.info      

MAY 17, 2010.  For some strange reason, the link to my new Facebook page was crunched, truncated, and published incorrectly by the WordPress machine.  I don’t know why, and I doubt I will ever find out.  Anyway, I’m going to give it another try.      

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1575072240&ref=profile#!/pages/Jon-Rappoport/108820229160887?ref=search&sid=1575072240.1879589821..1

You can find some of my articles and videos there.  Over time, we’ll add more to the page.  Feel free to spread the word.

Jon

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

APRIL 27, 2010.  First of all, I want you to know I’m doing a FREE conference call on May 4, at 6:30PM Pacific Time—and everyone interested in home-schooling is invited.  There is no sign-up required.

The subject of the conference call is my new home-school course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  I’ll lay out the details and take your questions.  PLEASE get the word out to anyone you know who is a home schooler or is connected to a home-school association.

To get into the call, you use this phone number: 1-219-509-8111.  Then you enter the passcode: 5730661.  That’s all you have to do.

Help me get the word out.

There is a limit of 150 people for the call.  First come, first served.

Okay.  So now I want to discuss a few issues in which logic has taken an extreme back seat.  This is crazy stuff.  The American people are dealing with it right now.  Immigration reform, the new Arizona law, the equating of Tea Parties and militias and violent bomb throwers.  The recent statements of Bill Clinton.  It’s quite a mish mash. 

What I offer isn’t a strict logical analysis, but rather an editorial that expresses my frustration with the lack of logic in these swirling issues.  However, I will point out a few instances of wild non-logic—here we go.   

Bill Clinton is one of those men who thinks he knows a great deal more than he does—and then, on top of that, to show you he isn’t too, too proud about owning deep, deep wisdom, he affects the air of a studious professor who’s just relaying truth in small chunks, because, well, it’s his solemn duty to fill in the blanks for you, especially now since he’s discovered that the Tea Party is very much like a slow-motion version of the Oklahoma bombing—and who wouldn’t want to know that…after all, if we’re possibly going down in a welter of bombs thrown by these Tea Partiers, we at least need time to try to call the FBI and alert them, we need time to get out the vote for the Democrats next November, we need time to insist police protect us in our homes against the mindless assaults of these Tea People, and it will have to be the police, because we don’t own guns, we know the Second Amendment has nothing to do with personal defense, so thanks, Bill, for the warning. Thanks for the wisdom.  Where would we be, Bill, without your towering knowledge?

Bill is the guy, you might remember, who parlayed the OKC bombing of 1995 into a victory in the 1996 election.  He exhorted all Americans, after the Murrah Building disaster, to “come home to the government.”  He was Big Daddy, and a sufficient number of Americans slurped up his syrup to swing the presidential race. 

Bill’s “come home” jive played well because, at the time, there was an invoked fear that six or seven militias were going to make war against the US military and win.

Switching gears…Yesterday, on C-Span, I watched several authors at a book fair explain to their audience that immigration reform—disallowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter or stay in the country—is a horrendous program of veiled racism and nothing more.  It couldn’t be anything more, because (by indisputable logic) the KKK was once strong, and eugenics in America was once alive and well, and, by implication, now, ANY attempt to bar ANYONE from ANYWHERE from coming to the US and living here and enjoying full government benefits is white redneck racism—and also a form of terrorism—and all these Tea People should be jailed or stripped of citizenship.  Something like that. 

Obama warns Arizona that they can’t just decide what’s good for their state.  No, this is a federal problem, and the feds will solve it.  How?  No word yet.  Possibly by declaring a universal amnesty forever.  Yes, that would do it.

So…the Democrats have begun their 2010 election campaign in earnest. 

One small point: Actual conservatives make an argument for limited government, in line with the Constitution.  Let me know when any Democrat appears who is willing to engage in a true debate about that issue, who is willing to defend, overtly, big, big government as legitimate and legal and just and Constututional.  I’ve never seen it. 

The Tea People state they want limited government.  As usual, the best way to rebuke that position is by attacking the people who are standing on it.  Who cares about logic or truth or reason?

No, let’s just listen to Bill Clinton tie all this up in a nice bow.  Forget fundamentals.  Forget philosophy of government.  Tea Party=racism=bombs=militias=Murrah Building.  Easy.  Nothing to see here, just move along.

And as far as the thinking on immigration goes, it emerges this way: It’s illegal to make illegal immigration illegal, even thought it’s already illegal.  Only bomb-throwing racist Tea Party people posing as concerned citizens would want to declare illegal immigration illegal.  The 70% of Arizona citizens who favor their new law are all relatives of Tim McVeigh.

And if this isn’t comprehensive enough, here’s a further analysis that might excite you: The United States isn’t a real country, because everything we now have came from conquest and destruction, and therefore the Constitution is a worthless piece of scribbling—whereas, I guess, there are nations somewhere that grew from nothing without any conflict or war and nobody was killed, and peace and love naturally evolved into a benign government.  If not, no true nations exist anywhere, and therefore we may as well take and grab and rob and steal and plunder whatever we can get our hands on, because it doesn’t matter.  May as well have a billion people living in the US or Canada or England or France.  Whoever can get here can live here.  Let’s all go down with the ship.  We don’t deserve better.

I’m just trying to find the logic behind some of these arguments about law, immigration, Tea Party, racism, and the like.  I’m trying.          

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

(To join our email list, click here.)

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15. The IRS has seized the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. This comes in the wake of Bush saying that the US government will now make ties with religious groups.

ADD: I can’t remember the last time the feds seized a church. Oh yeah, Waco. Anyway, I’m not a churchgoer, and I don’t go at this issue from the viewpoint of a religionist. The issue is not taxes here, either. The Church apparently owes no taxes.

ADD: The IRS is steamed that the church allows its ministers to pay their own taxes, and doesn’t withhold part of salary for that purpose.

ADD: That’s it? Apparently so. For that violation, the government is willing to use force and render a church a seized asset.

ADD: The church did do one thing. In 1986, it stopped being a 501c3 non-profit organization, and it became…just a church. I think that is the key. The feds get nervous when someone says he is neither profit nor non-profit. The feds believe either of these two categories makes you owned by them. Makes you theirs. See, if you’re not one category or the other…that makes you smell like an independent entity, almost like your own country.

ADD: Suppose there was an inch square of land somewhere in Dakota that magically was not owned by anyone or anything. That could infect consciousness itself, right? Like a disease of sheer independence. And who knows what THAT would bring?

ADD: Story today also ran on the Mother Jones wire about a former raid on Lakota Indian territory by the feds. They destroyed a whole commercial crop of industrial grade hemp. Lakotas were heading toward economic independence. Their hemp isn’t pot. It has 1% THC, instead of the high THC content of smokable pot. But industrial grade hemp, used to make clothes or wallboard or rope or a million other things, is illegal to grow in the US.

ADD: Some people just wake up in the morning hating freedom. It smells like death to them. And they’re right. It would be death. To their Enterprise. No surprise, the pol left and the pol right in Washington did NOTHING to protest that seizure on Lakota land. Gutless to very end when it comes to that strange thing called independence.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15. CNN has to run a raft of health stories every day, so they search for something to fill space. Today, it’s Camilio Gomez, a doc from the U of Alabama, and his very aggressive strategies for dealing with stroke. These include cooling down the patient’s body slightly, and also implanting coils in the brain.

ADD: Hello? Somebody tell Dr. Gomez to talk to Dr. Paul Harch out of Louisiana State U. Harch has seen some astounding results with the use of hyperbaric oxygen administered in a standard chamber. This form of medicine has been around for a long time. If Gomez really wants to do something….check out hyperbaric. Does it work in all cases? No.

ADD: Does it work? Yes. Did anyone from CNN offer even an anecdote about Gomez’s results? Not unless the version of the story I just read was cut off prematurely.

ADD: Of course, hyperbaric can be dangerous to the health of the medical cartel. It’s dirt cheap to deliver (unless the providers gouge the patient, which they tend to do in hospitals and some offices) and no patents are available. Because it’s oxygen.

ADD: Sidebar. Drinking water has been reported to cure some infections too, but that’s a big no-no, unless one of the big chem companies decides to genetically engineer the water and patent it like engineered corn. Coming to your supermarket soon.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15. Language alert. I have been seeing stories recently attacking vaccine-activists who point out the dangers of these compounds. One strategy? Explain why these activists are carrying out their “misguided efforts.”

ADD: It usually goes this way: “Parents who believe their children have been hurt by vaccines are becoming activists.” Of course the key word is “believe.” Rather than “saw” or “know” or “observed.”

ADD: Here’s a prediction, and you can take it to the bank. Somewhere down the line, the medical boys will invent a disorder which is characterized by “a compulsion to criticize successful medical treatment.” It will have a half-cocked name, and it will be floated out there. There will be remedies for it, and they will be psychiatric drugs.

ADD: There is of course a real disorder buried in all this. It is the maniacal aim to discredit all opponents of mainstream medicine. I hereby label this disorder Terminal Corruption of the Mind, Soul and Heart (TCMSH). There is no treatment for it. It can only be cured by the onset of a slight fraction of morality in the face of white-hot abominable arrogance.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15. Okay, get ready for a rant. Rumors have been circulating for awhile about two feature films in production, or about to go into production–on the subject of cancer. One, directed by Oliver Stone (he could use something like this after his really silly goofy molasses film on pro football, Any Given Sunday, which was a cartoon of a cartoon of the NFL). The other, about a young doctor who discovers a cheap cure for cancer, and the ensuing medical cartel pressure to stop it from being made available.

ADD: Some years ago, I wrote a short book which was a long poem called Kill the Monster. It was about a man who finds a blue herb that cures all disease, and his capture by the establishment, and the beginning of an attempt to control his mind.

ADD: Here and there in TV land we see attempts to mount shows which mirror reality but then go beyond that and reveal how stultifying societal problems can actually be solved.

ADD: West Wing is one of those. Last season on the show, there was an episode in which Martin Sheen, the prez, decides it’s time to be honest with the American people and throw caution and polls and surveys and doublespeak to the four winds. His people are inspired and energized in a quick second…and the whole show seems about to take off into a new dimension.

ADD: Regardless of whether one agrees with the Prez’s agenda, going for honesty would have been quite something to see played out over several seasons. But no…all that vanished and the show now deals with the usual scheming and compromising to attain limited goals and avoid crushing defeats by the opposition party. Amid smarmy yuppified dialogue.

ADD: The District, starring Craig Nelson as the new chief of police in Washington DC, also began as an attempt by a driven cop to end crime in the capitol. A fascinating idea–but it too has ended up in soap opera territory. A complete mess and a waste of a terrific actor.

ADD: A simple question. Why not actually show on TV the triumph of justice or honesty in an otherwise crumbling world of petty idiots who run things?

ADD: Why the hell not? Believe me, I know and you know the answer to that rhetorical question. But anyway…how about a show that features a school set up by parents who are sick of the public school system run by bureaucrats? A school that really educates kids to see through the lies perpetuated by the media, etc., etc., a school that does more than raise whitebread kids? Why not?

ADD: How about unleashing Nelson on The District so that he actually revolutionizes the whole damn city? How about a show that features a Congressman who exposes his colleagues as captive pawns all the way to the bone? How about a show that stars a healing doctor who takes on, with the support of his patients, the whole money-grubbing death machine of pharmaceutical medicine….and wins.

ADD: Would these be fantasies? Was Star Trek a fantasy? So what?

ADD: How about a PI lawyer who takes down, over three seasons, an entire criminal transnational chemical giant? How about a soldier who goes up against the Pentagon and uncovers the real truth behind Gulf War Illness, and obtains the support of thousands of US Army guinea pigs who suddenly realize they have been used in cruel and unusual experiments?

ADD: How about a show called Saving Private Ryan, in which Ryan turns out to be a rebel who discovers that major American slime bigwigs are supporting Nazi Germany behind the scenes and thereby killing US troops by the thousands? (See yesterday’s piece on ITT)

ADD: How about a show called The Fugitive, in which a doctor is being pursued by a family whose son the arrogant doctor killed with a raft of FDA-approved toxic drugs?

ADD: How about a show in which a relentless US prosecutor discovers and exposes massive computer election fraud in presidential elections, and blames rightly both parties and the shadowy people behind them?

ADD: How about a show called Depopulation, which reveals week by week the strategies of the intell and med cartels who use vaccines and other drugs to destroy a third of Africa?

ADD: How about a show called The Martians, in which a band of ETs from the red planet arrive on Earth and target every brand of organized corrupt institution for elimination through undeniable exposure of their projects and plans?

ADD: How about a show about a TV network which suddenly, after drinking some kind of weird water in all water coolers, decides to be merciless and tell the truth and fire their million-dollar anchors who are strangely resistant to the water?

ADD: How about a Serpico who actually wins and then becomes mayor of NY and then doesn’t sell out? How about Monica, a series in which a young White House intern discovers she has been set up by the CIA to scandalize a president–so that the Prez is never investigated again for his much more serious crimes, some of which are linked to the CIA, which has been more or less running said Prez as its personal man on the Washington scene?

ADD: How about a show called JFK, which, week after shattering week, traces the multitudinous layers of conspiracy behind the assassination?

ADD: I’ll tell you this. If the TV networks really cared about ratings, they could launch any one of these shows into the galaxy of super numbers. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it, and even the networks, with a little reflection, know it. They have no BALLS. No matter how much Viagra they’re ingesting.

ADD: How about a weekly series on CNBC called Market BS, featuring a silver-haired fox who does BS stock advice…and then discovers the whole game is rigged from top to bottom, sells his BMW, sells his house in Scarsdale, and with the help of a few internet geniuses begins to publish the truth…causing the market to implode. How about a show on the Bloomberg channel called Fed Reserve, in which six gold bugs blackmail half the banks in NY with a threat to publish secret documents revealing that the Fed Reserve is actually a private consortium and not part of the government…the gold bugs record the blackmail deal on video and then play it on 5000 websites on a Thursday afternoon…causing the Fed Reserve to sink like a stone into the muck of NY sewers.

ADD: How about a show called Air Force Won, in which an old Pentagon hand gathers up a hundred military retirees and, in the first episode, holds a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Building, during which the 100 guys expound on buried government documents relating to a UFO coverup? The 100 obtain protection from other ex-military guys all over the US…and from several major gangs who have incidentally decided to give up drug dealing and have opted for massive urban organic farming in inner cities all over America and have opted for real private schools in those inner cities which actually teach something and have opted for funding real small businesses and for supporting thousands of inner city artists…the urban farms are attacked by CIA backed chemical spraying, of course, because real progress in the inner cities is a no-no….and renegade Air Force choppers begin to patrol the air space above those farms and gardens to protect them…

ADD: How about a show called The Racists, which reveals that both sides in this set-up conflict are funded by cold-blooded and very rich lunatics who want to perpetuate violence?

ADD: How about ALL OF THE ABOVE SHOWS ON YOUR TV SCREEN EVERY NIGHT?

ADD: How about The Young and the Restless, in which Victor Newman is actually a member of the inner core of the cartels who run this planet? Victor and his apple-pie son, Nick, along with wife Nicki, and daughter Victoria—-the Vic and Nick show—are trying to take over four African countries, and the going gets tough when Carter, the counter-man at Nick’s coffee house, discovers secret memos outlining a plan to decimate Africa with a new vaccine against AIDS.

ADD: Well, how about it?

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15. Regular readers have seen pieces on the use of tax dollars by governments to invest their way into massive hidden profits. Take a tax dollar, invest a tax dollar, make a profit and hide it and cry poor. That kind of thing. May be one of the biggest scandals in the country.

ADD: Here is just one angle on it. Do you or your friends belong to a pension fund or a retirement fund run by a local, state, or national government? Has a part of your salary been going into that fund?

ADD: Well, I want you to think about a few things and then, God forbid, DO a few things. Think about this. Where does the pension fund get its money? First of all, from you. From others with government jobs. Okay, then what do they do with all that $$? They invest it, right?

ADD: Come on, admit it. The fund INVESTS that money. They put it someplace where it will hopefully make more money. So your job is to find out where your fund puts its money. Exactly where. After all, as a contributor, you have that right to know, don’t you? This isn’t NATIONAL SECURITY, is it?

ADD: Just ask to see a list of investments. Interest-bearing accounts, bonds, stocks, real estate projects…whatever they are, ask to see the whole list. If they deny you access, you are looking at criminal behavior. If I privately invest in a mutual fund through my broker, and then I demand to know where the fund is putting my money…I can find out, right?

ADD: You are actually working for the entity (the government) which is investing that money. You really have a right to know.

ADD: Once you have the complete list of investments, then you also want a complete accounting of all monies (profits) realized from those investments–to the penny–over the last few years. Then you want to know EXACTLY HOW MUCH OF THOSE PROFITS WERE GIVEN TO PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO PUT $$ INTO THE FUND, AND HOW MUCH WAS KEPT FOR OTHER USES.

ADD: The other uses will be illegal. Because a government of any kind was never organized to make profit. A government cannot make profit. That would be illegal.

ADD: Am I saying finding out all this information will be a piece of cake? No. If you’re a robot will you do it? No. Is it all right to not be a robot? Yes.

ADD: Of course, the pension fund will have overhead, and some $$ will go to running the fund. But not too much. Check around, get curious, and send me the results. Details.

ADD: Remember the scandals that plagued the Teamster Union pension fund? Money was secretly loaned out to criminals. Gosh o gee.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14. Tim McVeigh is asking for a publicly televised execution. This is the man who, after killing 168 people in the bombing of the Oklahoma City fed building, allowed himself to be arrested on a lonely country road by a state trooper, for carrying a concealed weapon. Ninety minutes after the bombing, McVeigh told the trooper he was carrying a loaded glock. He was disarmed and taken to a local jail.

ADD: This case smells to high heaven.

ADD: The bomb in the Ryder truck was never verified as an ammonium nitrate device by the FBI lab. The lab simply relied on reports from field agents. This lunacy covered up what actually happened in the bombing.

ADD: Based on photos of the damage to the building, a single-source bomb is ruled OUT as the cause of the 168 murders.

ADD: The very likely scenario was: a diversionary truck bomb producing a very loud flash and bang, and an almost simultaneous series of explosions from WITHIN the federal building, caused by the detonation of charges which had been placed on structural columns.

ADD: In which case, we are talking about a very professional operation, whose perpetrator, McVeigh, became the dupe holding the bag for other criminals.

ADD: A great deal of time and effort has gone into covering up the other participants.

ADD: Why is McVeigh not talking about the other criminals? What is going on?

ADD: Amazingly, no one appears to have seen the building as it exploded and went down. No witness has come forth. The odds against that are huge.

ADD: Well, there was one witness, according to Ann Defrange, a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman. She interviewed him. His name is Peter Schaffer, who worked at a nearby health food store. According to Defrange, Schaffer told her the building fell in on itself–like a demolition. Which would signify charges that went off INSIDE the building.

ADD: I interviewed Schaffer, and he denied seeing anything like this. He said he hadn’t seen the building go down at all. I got back to Defrange with this denial, and she said this was absolutely not true. She remembered very well what Schaffer had told her, and she stuck to her story. I believe her.

ADD: During the initial Grand Jury hearing which eventually indicted McVeigh, a whole variety of interested explosives experts were NEVER called. They would have testified that a truck bomb, especially an ammonium nitrate bomb, could never have caused the extent or the profile of the damage sustained by the building.

ADD: Among many vital statements made to me by Ray Brown, a geophysicist at the U. of Oklahoma at Norman, was this: “My first impression was, this was a demolition job. Somebody who went in with [bomb] equipment tried to take down the building.”

ADD: Brown’s boss, Charles Mankin, head of the Geologic Survey at the U. of Oklahoma, told me this: “[Federal Building] columns on the east side were shattered badly. There is exposure all the way into the rebars [interior steel rods]…Rebars are the only reason some of these columns were left standing at all. This was an extremely powerful explosion. Material in the building was pulverized.”

ADD: Again, such complete destruction of building material legislates AGAINST the idea that a truck bomb, an ammonium nitrate bomb, did the real damage to the building.

ADD: I’ve rarely investigated a case with so many lies…and what I’m giving you here is only the beginning of it all.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14. CNN is reporting that the World Health Organization (WHO) is starting up an infectious disease center in Paris. Doctors from developing countries will be taught how to combat epidemics such as cholera and Ebola.

ADD: I’m waiting for some bright and brave doc from an African country, brought to Paris for this charade, to stand up in class one day and say, “The whole problem is no food. The people in my country have no food. And the water supply is contaminated. No one will be able to treat epidemics until THAT is wiped out. Until THAT is wiped out, any germ under the sun can cause an epidemic…this is all a lie. You are all liars and thieves and murderers, or else you are complete idiots. No amount of training here is going to make a shred of difference…”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 14. Another big corp, this time IBM, has been accused of helping the Nazis during World War 2. Its punch-card technology was sold to the Nazis for use in assigning people to concentration camps.

ADD: Where are the US veterans’ groups, as one corp after another is revealed? In Charles Higham’s devastating and tightly checked book, Trading With the Enemy, Higham reveals a staggering collusion on the part of the giant corp, ITT.

ADD: Read the following quote and think about how many American lives were lost…

ADD: “After Pearl Harbor, the German army, navy, and air force contracted with ITT for the manufacture of switchboards, telephones, alarm gongs, buoys, air raid warning devices, radar equipment, and thirty thousand fuses per month for artillery shells used to kill British and American troops. This was to increase to fifty thousand per month by 1944. In addition, ITT supplied ingredients for the rocket bombs that fell on London, selenium cells for dry rectifiers, high-frequency radio equipment, and fortification and field communication sets.

ADD: “Without this supply of crucial materials it would have been impossible for the German air force to kill American and British troops, and for the German army to fight the allies in Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, for England to have been bombed, or for Allied ships to have been attacked at sea…

ADD: “Whether or not a trading [with the enemy license] was issued [to ITT by the US government], the trading was continued with the assurance that neither the State Department nor the Department of Justice would intervene.” IN OTHER WORDS, WITHOUT THE HELP OF ITT, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO WAR TO SPEAK OF.

ADD: For people who are in US veterans’ groups, why not put together a case against ITT for a level of destruction and treason that is almost unimaginable. Show the truth. Show how ITT and other US bigwigs fought on both sides of World War 2, quite happy to side with the winner, whoever that would be. The evidence is there in Higham’s book and in many other texts.

ADD: Show how the power game is played: wars are won or lost, people are killed fighting for one flag or another, and meanwhile the controllers are egging everyone on with the materials to fight the war on both sides…to the American Legion: DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS FOR THIS ONE OR ARE YOU CONTENT TO SIT BACK AND LET ALL THE HEINOUS AND UNIMAGINABLE CRIMES DRIFT OUT OF HISTORY INTO OBLIVION?

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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13. There is taking a drug because you want the experience, and there is taking a drug because you believe you are ill in the head, and your imagination is slurry and slow and without daring.

ADD: Out here in no-no land, where the doctors rule, we are being treated to a desperate feast of decay, the meat of the brain rotting on the banquet table. “It’s good for you, take it.”

ADD: Everybody wants in on a little of the spurious action of being a doctor, and every time you reach for the pill bottle you think you’re closing in on that elegant status. “I am the Man for this moment as I open the bottle and shake the pills out and give myself a pill. I understand the working of the mysterious brain just a frank little bit.”

ADD: Priesthood by implication. A moment or two of it. It’s quite a fantastic joke. Everybody wants to rule the world. You want a surface of that white coat reality dust rubbing off on you. “Give it to me.”

ADD: Now both avaricious and dull political parties support the delusion of the Treatment so sedate it stands in for any other kind of reality. In their subconscious landscape they see no other solution. Medicate everything that moves. Establish a new world order of illness perfect in its definition, perfect in its treatment. Then we will have an authority where none other exists. It is the only possible authority left, seeing as we’ve left all the others behind baking in the dust.

ADD: Now we even have a definition of death: incomplete treatment. We can accept that. We can get with that. We can slow everything down to a pill crawl. Life as the precise Nazi measure of white dust doing everything but creating.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13. How does the medical cartel avoid exposure of the toxicity of its drugs? By refusing to rely on doctors’ or patients’ reports whenever possible.

ADD: By saying that these reports are unreliable, by saying that short-term studies are a better way to gauge a drug.

ADD: Understand this strategy. When Dr. Andrew Wakefield in England made the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, he did so by actually listening to mothers who told him their babies had changed drastically, for the worse, soon after the shot was administered.

ADD: Others doctors would have said, “These reports from parents are all wrong because we know the vaccine is safe.”

ADD: One doctor’s survey, which leaked through the protective cartel barrier, appeared in Lancet on January 18, 1997. Dr. Robert Bourguignon, a Belgium MD, sent out letters to 500 Belgium docs asking for their experience using Prozac with patients.

ADD: 11 out of 500 answered that they had witnessed serious problems. The patient adverse effects included “a feeling of going to die,” “great nervousness,” panic attacks, “paranoid psychosis,” aggressiveness, “barely controllable suicide attempts,” and convulsions. The numbers of adverse reactions were completely unacceptable for a licensed drug.

ADD: Of course, Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, opposed these unpleasant findings. Which were too real, too direct, too honest, too shorn of scientific babble. The reports were the unvarnished truth. Which is yet another reason drug companies want to avoid actual patient stories. To believe them is to give up the high ground, from which the med pro can say, “These patients are all crazy, they can’t accurately convey their experiences, and their doctors aren’t much better (unless they agree the drug in question is safe).”

ADD: Now listen. If we had to rely on official studies of the effects of the MMR vaccine, we would never know that many, many children’s lives have been destroyed by it. Never. Know.

ADD: To listen to patients is to discover the massive poisoning across the board by medical drugs.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13. Over the weekend, I gave a talk to an audience in Colorado. After the talk, a member of the audience came up to me and said, “You believe that far too many medical drugs are being given to people. But these people are diagnosed with illnesses, and the drugs are to treat them.”

ADD: It’s the most succinct statement of the current med mind control operation I’ve heard in some time.

ADD: To break through that mind control, one has to see that diseases are being invented by the truckload, to justify the drugs.

ADD: I strongly suggest, for starters, that you go to a library and browse the DSM-IV, which is the psychiatric Bible (cookbook) of current mental illnesses. In a few hours, you will see that these so-called diseases or disorders are welded together from a list of disparate symptoms or behaviors, none of which imply organic illness.

ADD: Making someone feel he has an illness makes that person feel less free, less in control of his life. That is an intentional strategy, not only devised to sell debilitating drugs, but to reduce the inner sense of freedom. It is the abolition of the Bill of Rights by non-political means.

ADD: It’s like an added tax on life itself.

ADD: Over the last 20 years, I have seen many people reject a diagnosis of an invented disease, and in every such case, the person emerged with a new sense of his own freedom. It’s an interesting fact.

ADD: As I have written before, the aim of the medical cartel is to establish planet Earth as a gigantic hospital, where people bow down to the authority of doctors who are handing out diagnoses like candy. Pity, sympathy, “understanding”–these are the medical attitudes which make people believe they are in good hands. Fraudulent medicine becomes, in effect, a substitute for love. The diagnosis of a disease becomes a badge of prestige for many millions of people: “Oh yes, my doctor said I have…”

ADD: Looking for love in all the wrong places. At some level of the psyche, people yearn for order. For a system that will relieve them of the need to strike out on their own self-created adventure. The current medical framework is just such an expanding system. There is a deep need in people to find someone to trust. Who better than the doctor?

ADD: Projecting that trust in doctors, people find they initially feel better. They feel enhanced in a way, because they are creating that trust, and it gives them a larger emotion, an emotion they long for. An emotion they find lacking in every day life.

ADD: I watched my father use that trust to blind himself to non-mainstream health options. He simply couldn’t betray that trust he had created to turn away from the useless advice of his own doctor. So he went for the diagnosis and the drugs and the estimates of his beloved physician. It was a love affair, and it led him down the garden path to his own slow decline.

ADD: At one point, I had an acrimonious exchange of letters with that doctor. I asked him to suggest some real options that might restore my father’s health, aside from the drugs which would only debilitate him further. The doctor went into a towering arrogant rage, and asked how I could possibly question his program when he had done so much good for my father.

ADD: I answered, “I question what you have done because I know what these drugs do. I know you are holding yourself back from admitting that there are other solutions. You say that if alternative methods had any validity, they would have been tested at major universities. You and I both know this is not true. Mainstream medicine has a vested interest in keeping workable natural methods out of the university research arena. So don’t expect me to react like an ignorant person.”

ADD: That was the end of the correspondence. My father, to the end, believed he was being treated by a saint in a white coat. I knew better, and I know better.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13. On my recent trip, someone handed me a copy of a full-page ad that ran in USA Today on July 7, 2000. It was paid for by We The People Foundation for Constitutional Education.

ADD: The ad charged that the 16th Amendment, which established the income tax in 1913, was never really ratified. This was not an off-the-cuff pronouncement. It was based on laborious research.

ADD: In fact, as the ad indicates, a court case was filed on this matter in 1986. US vs. Stahl, 792 F2D 1438. The court’s ruling is quite an incredible cop-out: “[Defendant] Stahl’s claim that ratification of the 16th Amendment was fraudulently certified constitutes a political question…we could not undertake independent resolution of this issue without expressing lack of respect due coordinate branches of government…”

ADD: Who besides a court could possibly rule on such a matter? In fact, various Congressmen have refused to consider this question of fraudulence, saying that the US Supreme Court would have to be the ultimate arbiter. It’s called passing the buck. Literally.

ADD: Back and forth.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13. The Ottawa Citizen is reporting massive problems in Canada stemming from genetically modified (GM) canola plants. These GM plants have cross-bred with non-GM canola plants to form “superweeds” that are showing up in wheat fields and “and other areas where farmers don’t want them…”

ADD: Experts at the Royal Society of Canada are fuming. They are saying that careful farming methods are clearly not enough to prevent this random spreading of GM plants into the ecological landscape.

ADD: The result? Down the line it is obvious we will see significant changes in nature. Inserting genes in plants to increase their strength is not a simple matter. The genes cannot be stopped from drifting. The biotech companies who are designing these food plants are, of course, saying there is no problem…but we are witnessing an across-the-board reshaping of plant life on the planet.