Tag: drones

Today, from the desk of Dr. Ron Paul: [Please share widely]

“America is over $16 trillion in debt. The “official” unemployment rate still hovers around 8%. Our federal government claims the right to spy on American citizens, indefinitely detain them, and even assassinate them without trial.

Domestic drones fly over the country for civilian surveillance. Twelve million fewer Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008, yet political pundits scratch their heads.

It’s not hard to see why, though.

To go along with endorsing a never-ending policy of bailouts, “stimulus packages,” and foreign military adventurism, the establishment of neither major party questions the assaults on Americans’ liberties I’ve named above.

As my campaign showed, the American people are fed up. Many realized heading into Tuesday that regardless of who won the presidential election, the status quo would be the real victor.

GOP leadership is now questioning why they didn’t perform better.

They’re looking at demographic changes in the United States and implying minorities can only be brought into the party by loudly advocating for abandoning what little remains of their limited government platform and endorsing more statist policies.

My presidential campaign proved that standing for freedom brings people together.

Liberty is popular – regardless of race, religion, or creed.

As long as the GOP establishment continues to not only reject the liberty message, but actively drive away the young, diverse coalition that supports those principles, it will see results similar to Tuesday’s outcome.

A renewed respect for liberty is the only way forward for the Republican Party and for our country.

I urge all my Republican colleagues to join the liberty movement in fighting for a brighter future.”

–Ron Paul

Talking about my generation

My generation is now experiencing first hand the fall out of bad governance, crony corporatism, special interests, and interventionism.

My generation is growing up into an encroaching police state. Our country is completely divided, while some people cling to the left, and some people cling to the right. But the problems lie much deeper than that.

Our currency is now completely off the gold standard and is now backed by nothing. This fiat currency loses more and more value every day. Never in human history has a country survived on fiat currancy alone. Our 41’st anniversary with fiat currency just went by.

To go along with the fiat currancy, we also have an unprecedented amount of debt. Never in human history has a country accumulated so much debt. And all nations that do not resolve their debt problems go into decline.

Wars are expensive. Not only are they bloody and brutal, but the costs of maintaining them always drags down a nation’s wealth and resources. As of right now, we have over one hundred military bases around the world, and are engaged in a number of conflicts. Including the war in Afghanistan, and using drones and hellfire missiles to kill people in Pakistan and many other middle eastern and African countries.

Our elections are now completely fraudulent. In the 2000 presidential election we caught our first taste of this. And during the primaries this year, there have been many reports and law suits filled over the GOP’s handling of the nomination process. There are accusations of Ron Paul’s votes being counted as Romney’s, and counties that weren’t even allowed to vote. It seems that the GOP can’t even play by its own rules.

With my generation the buck stops here. We are no longer able to tollerate the charade of political deception being played by the establishment and enshrined in the media.

When I came to this country, I learned a lot about freedom and individual liberties. It’s the kind of knowledge that once you know, you don’t forget. In fact, once you know it, you begin to espouse it, and you can’t stop talking about it. Once you know what true liberty and freedom is, it gets stuck in your veins, and you’ll fight to maintain it.

When I first moved here, and after the 2008 elections, I tuned in to fox news and discovered Glenn Beck. Up until the beginning of this year I loved the guy and everything that he stood for. But then things stopped adding up. Something seemed wrong to me. Some of the actions he was taking and things he was saying didn’t make sense, they didn’t add up. I felt like he was going against the very principles he stood for. After discovering these things, I came to the conclusion that he is either completely miscalculating with the information he receives, or that he is an agent of misinformation, here to take our thoughts and upsets at the government, and flip them right back around to continue the establishment, to further their agendas. The problem with people like Glenn Beck is that while they are right in most aspects. They are also wrong in many others, and this leads us into a false dichotomy, and does nothing to help our reasoning skills. Always take what you hear from others with a pinch of salt, don’t take it as prophesy.

One of the biggest problems we have is that our media establishment is completely bias. I’ve heard the Tea Party and Glenn Beck complain for years now that the liberal media is bias. Now where I don’t dispute that, I would point out that FOX News and many of the other ‘conservative’ news channels are bias also. In fact all the liberal and conservative channels are all geared toward the big government and big brother agenda in one way or another. All they have to do is get you to argue about trivial issues, and you end up missing the point entirely.

Corruption is rife in this country. Of course no country is void of it, but you see it even on a local level here. There are very few politicians in power who do not accept lobbying from one group or another. Congress is now no longer concerned with our well being, but completely concerned with furthering their own interests, their own profits and their own convoluted agendas.

The corrupt politicians, the crony businessmen, the sold out media, and all the special interests groups are all working hand in hand for their own agendas, while looting the wealth of the nation. This is a cycle that cannot continue and will collapse in on itself, taking many innocent people with it. If we cannot put a stop to it, we will go down as a nation, whether we self destruct as a police state, or fall into total anarchy, our future looks extremely bleak, if we continue on our present path.

So where do we go from here? And what can we do about it? How can we fix these problems?

For all their current faults I still admire The tea party. I like it when groups of people get together and try to hammer out solutions to pressing problems. The local tea party groups in my area have had much success at the state and local level.

I believe that the future of this country is to build from the ground up at local levels. To elect new congressmen and new senators. To go across the isle and vote for both democrat and republican candidates, based on their knowledge of the constitution and their explanations of how they would roll back government.

And finally, the best thing you can do as an individual is to speak out and build a better tomorrow. If more voices come into the fray, then our debates get livelier, and we can weed out the ideas that don’t work and find more common ground.

The problems that face my generation are unprecedented in our country’s history. It is no longer a simple case of voting for one side or the other. It will take a great deal of effort and awakening by the older generations to help steer our country back onto the path of liberty and prosperity.

Learn about the constitution, and have the guts to stand up for what is right, don’t just go along with the crowd or the establishment. The stance that you make and show to the younger generation will make a lasting impression. Remember that the future is always built, by the up and coming generation. So together, lets make sure we make it a good one!

Military Police and Drones

When asked the question ‘how on earth could you do that?’ is asked. Their answers are all the same; ‘I was just doing my job’ or ‘I’ve got bills to pay’. They were just doing their ‘duty’. The problem with collectivism, is that it is so rampant, and so widespread, that it affects everyone’s lives. It is easy to hide behind, and is the cause of millions of deaths and suffering in the world.

Portrait of a Drone Killer: ‘I Have a Duty, and I Execute My Duty’

One wonders if drone pilot Col. D. Scott Brenton listens to Louis Armstrong in the suburban Air National Guard Base in Syracuse from which he murders people 7,000 miles away.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton tells the New York Times. Drone operators see their intended targets “wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” explains Dave, another high-tech murderer who killed from an office cockpit at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base and who now trains new recruits to the cyber-killer corps at New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base.

When instructed to kill someone he has stalked from the air for a prolonged period, “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” Brenton insists. I have a duty, and I execute my duty.” When the deed is done, he points out, nobody “in my immediate environment is aware of anything that has occurred.”

“There was a good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it in my head over and over and over,” insists another drone operator named Will, who — like Dave — served a deskbound “combat” tour at Creech and now trains others to do likewise at Holloman Air Base.

 

Like the soldier Bates in Henry V, it’s sufficient for Will — and others of his ilk — to render obedience to their Leader, confident that “if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” The more concise and notorious formula, of course, is: We are only obeying orders. Besides, drone operators (who insist on being called “combat pilots”) are carrying out an indispensable function by picking off Afghan “militants” — or at least those “suspected” of such tendencies — who unreasonably resent the presence of foreign military personnel in their country.

The New York Times profile is part of a campaign by the state-aligned media to “humanize” the state functionaries who murder by remote control — and to normalize this mode of mass murder as drones become part of the domestic apparatus of surveillance, regimentation, and repression. Readers are invited to share the anguish of these conflicted people, who for reasons of duty have to do terrible but necessary things.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt offered a glimpse into the mindset of SS personnel who were given a somewhat similar assignment. To carry out their killing errand, she explained, something had to be done “to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering.”

“The trick used by Himmler … was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self,” Arendt recounted. “So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Not everybody attached to the Regime’s Cyber-Killing Corps is haunted by the horrors he has inflicted on defenseless people halfway around the world. In a 2009 U.S. Naval Academy lecture, Dr. P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution made reference to what he called “predator porn” — footage of drone attacks proudly circulated by the people who committed those acts. In a typical offering, Dr. Singer relates, “A Hellfire missile drops, goes in, and hits the target, followed by an explosion and bodies tossed into the air.” Singer described one clip of that kind, sent to him by a joystick-wielding assassin, that “was set to music, the pop song ‘I Just Want to Fly’ by the band Sugar Ray.”

“It’s like a videogame,” one deskbound drone jockey told Singer. “It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s f****g cool.”

Singer describes asking a drone pilot “what it was like to fight insurgents in Iraq while based in Nevada. He said, ‘You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car and you drive home. And within 20 minutes, you’re sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.” Meanwhile, somewhere in Iraq (or Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, or another country yet to be identified), other families are desperately looking through the rubble of their own homes in search of survivors.

Although drone strikes occur daily, most Americans pay little heed to them — beyond occasionally taking inconsolable offense when a dissident publicly describes them as acts of murder, and insults the Dear Leader by daring to compare him to less prolific killers.

This may change soon: As the Times points out, the Pentagon — driven by “a near insatiable demand for drones” — is training hundreds of operators to join the corps of more than 1,300 currently stationed at more than a dozen bases across the country. Surveillance drones operated by domestic police agencies are already plying the skies above us. Those robot aircraft can be upgraded to airborne weapons platforms, and they soon will. The people being trained to feel “no emotional attachment” to foreigners designated enemies of the state will feel no particular burden when ordered to kill fellow Americans on that list. I’m sure that the “combat pilots” who murdered U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman would testify to that fact — that is, if the “heroes” who committed those acts were man enough to acknowledge their deeds in public.

Evil men and their puppets are able to hide behind technology now, but it is harder for the police ‘on the street’. The evidence of militarized build up of police forces is now rampant. The problems arise when innocent people get shot by cops who cross the line, like the events in Anaheim a few days ago.

The people who protest against police brutality and the militarization of police forces are heroes. Now how exactly is this young man threatening anyone?

‘Tempers continued to flare in Anaheim on Sunday afternoon as a group of about 250 protesters stood directly in front of the Police Department, the latest demonstration the city has seen after two fatal police shootings last weekend. Heavily armed and militarized forces were patrolling the streets and nine people were arrested including this man.’

Why is it, in a civilized nation, that we need the police force to become militarized? Is it because we are heading straight toward total anarchy? Or a total police state? I would say we already have a police state. There are security cameras being put up at new intersections all over the country. The police have become militarized, and the TSA has become an ever increasing parasite, including not only airports now, but bus services, and road checkpoints. This country truly is becoming the spitting image of Nazi Germany of the 1930’s.

When you hear news pundits talk about the ‘greatness of America’ and of patriotism and ‘serving your nation’. They are talking of serving the state, for the sake of the state, and not for the responsibility of liberty. Freedom comes at a cost, but not in wars over seas. We have lost more freedoms since our armed forces have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, than any other point in our nation’s history.

Take a look around you, what do you see? Is this still the home of the brave and the land of the free? Or do you notice the 450 million rounds of ammunition going to homeland security, an agency that didn’t exist a few years ago. And do you see all the horrible constitution denying documents that are being passed by congress?

Nazi Germany came about slowly over the course of a decade, in a similar way to this country over this previous decade.

What is your definition of patriotism? Do you support and defend the Constitution and your own individual liberties, or do you support the nation state and the collective?

At what point should the police and military stop taking horrific orders? Will they stop at the sight of Americans themselves being killed? Or is their training so ingrained that they will go along with whatever their masters tell them to?

And what will you do? How far will you go? Will you stand up and stop this from happening? Or will you go along with the nation, for the greatness of the nation state?

As Yoda said in star wars; “you must unlearn, what you have learned”