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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 809, February 15, 2015 The only reason Obama wants to control the Internet is to shut us up.
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise Consider the most well-protected man in the world— You may remember the headlines. The knife-toting 42 year old Marine vet, Omar J. Gonzalez, who made it over the White House fence, through the front doors, and deep into the heart of the presidential mansion. Despite the Secret Service and five levels of security. Then there were the Nov. 2011 rifle shots fired into the White House but only discovered five days later. And the armed ex-con who shared an elevator ride with the Prez in Atlanta last September. No need to mention Lincoln and JFK. Next Consider the Boston Marathon bombing. Despite the wall-to-wall cops—and that the authorities were well acquainted with the bombers—the FBI admitted they couldn't stop them. Clearly, the FBI was right. And then there were all those guns, some loaded, smuggled in Delta carry-on luggage for five years, conclusively proving that those annoying delays to allow TSA's minions to poke, prod, and image you—and smell your feet—were moot. Despite the Main Stream Media trying not to scare the kids, some folks have been warning us of this unsettling situation for a long time. Like this for example: ~"There is no way to stop a dedicated terrorist who is willing to pay the price." --Desert Storm General Norman Schwartzkopf, Ret., MSNBC ~"The asymmetrical advantage a terrorist has is that he can strike any place at any time, using any conceivable method of attack, and this is impossible to defend against." --U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CNN Late Edition "It's impossible to have a police officer every place. That would be unrealistic and it would change the nature of a free society." --NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, quoted by Brian Jenkins, CNN Live Even if we followed Giuliani's self-nixed prescription of having "a police officer every place," the Boston Marathon bombing proved even that wouldn't do the job. The insurmountable problem is, as economist Ludwig von Mises, seminal quantum physicist Niels Bohr, and even Yogi Berra all agree, ~"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." Since, as Rumsfeld revealed, they can "strike any place at any time, using any conceivable method of attack"—there's no way to predict how, when or where. So, even if they have good intentions, they can't protect you— The list of vulnerabilities is perilously long in Baltimore, as it is just about everywhere in the United States. ... "So how would you defend against frogmen blowing up half the harbor?" I asked [Sgt. George] McClaskey. ... The sergeant shrugged uneasily. "Honestly," he confessed, "I don't think it's possible." ...Now factor in the 276,000 natural gas wells in the U.S., the 1.5 million miles of unprotected pipelines, the 161 oil refineries, 2,000 oil storage facilities and 10,400 hydro, coal and gas-fired power generating stations --"Fortress America", The New York Times Magazine, February 23, 2003, By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI And they know they can't— "Any community that fails to prepare—with the expectation that the federal government can come to the rescue—will be tragically wrong," HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a speech April 10. -- U.S. Plan For Flu Pandemic Revealed, Ceci Connolly, Washington Post ...it is important to understand that the goal of defending against bioweapons is not primarily public protection--which is largely impossible.... It is rather "to allow the military forces of the United States to survive and successfully complete their operational missions..." --Anthrax Attacks Pushed Open an Ominous Door, Times Headlines, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg Heck, they don't even give good advice! You probably know about Katrina—but how about Hurricane Rita— Three days before landfall, [Hurricane] Rita bloomed into a Category 5 and tracked toward the city. City and Harris County officials told Houstonians to hit the road, even while the population of Galveston Island was still clogging the freeways. The evacuation itself wound up far more dangerous than the storm: 110 people died during the effort, while the eventual Category 4 storm killed nine. --Ike whips up waves as it steams toward Texas, Juan A. Lozano, AP And 9/11— For more than four years ... civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. ... The report confirms a chilling fact ... After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. ... Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. ...In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do. --Question Authorities: Why it's smart to disobey officials in emergencies, www.wired.com, Issue 13.06—June 2005 In addition to not being able to protect us in the first place, legally they don't have to. And they're not really very interested anyway. As historian Howard Zinn put it, "The interests of the government and the interests of the people are not the same. ..." Think of all those 'undisclosed locations' they hide in when they screw up. But what about all those terrorist attacks the Authorities prevented? Well, the bad news is that those were nearly all concocted—by the Authorities. In fact, 376 of 399 "terrorist" cases (94.2%) logged by the U.S. "Justice" Department were concocted, that is, they were either so-called "preemptive prosecutions" or "entrapments." Like this one for example:[Quazi Nafis] case drew claims of government entrapment after the FBI supplied the inert explosives, the van used to carry them, the detonator and even the storage facility where an agent helped Nafis assemble the fake bomb. --Man Sentenced to 30 Years for Bid to Attack Federal Reserve with Fake Bomb, Democracy Now! You can find more details on how that all works here: The Handschu Scam and here: The FBI's Greatest Hits. And those $52.6 billion per year NSA etc. taxpayer-funded spying programs? They were involved in, at best, only one of even those faux busts. To be fair, though, you don't need a lot of sophisticated spying when it's your own dupes planting the fake bombs you helped them assemble. I like to think they do it for the kids. AND of course, to enhance the reputation of the law-and-order industry—and to keep their budgets plush. And then there are those concocted entrapments that go horribly wrong and/or were, perhaps, "false flag" operations using classic Operation Northwoods as a template. The Oklahoma City bombing, for example. And the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993—which some folks call "9/11, the First Generation." It blew a 90 foot hole in a key basement pylon of World Trade Center North Tower, killed six, and injured 1,042. It seems that FBI informant Emad Salem failed to provide the FBI's dupes with fake explosives that time and they improvised. Extremely well— And, of course, lots of folks think 9/11 itself was an inside job. After all, as the neocons from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) cleverly observed before the attacks, the U.S. couldn't have been converted into Orwellistan without "a new Pearl Harbor." And the Anthrax attacks right after 9/11?—It was U.S. anthrax. But all those laws they passed. The U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act for example. Surely they stopped terror attacks. Right? Well, not exactly. As you can tell from above, they're mostly not used against real terrorists. As ACLU head and NYU law prof. Nadine Strossen pointed out a long time ago, "There is no connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and what is in this legislation [the so-called 'Patriot Act']. Most of the provisions relate not just to terrorist crimes but to criminal activity generally. This happened, too, with the 1996 antiterrorism legislation where most of the surveillance laws have been used for drug enforcement, gambling and prostitution."--Police State, Kelly Patricia O'Meara, Insight Magazine, Posted Nov. 9, 2001 We now know that Ms. Strossen was an incurable optimist. See, it's not just non-approved drug users, gamblers, and prostitutes. Like the now wimpy-by-comparison former spy-champs, the East German Stasi, NSA's gargantuan Utah database will enable whoever's twerking the levers of power to "leverage" (blackmail) just about anyone. You, for example. Because, unknowingly, you likely commit three felonies a day. And although you don't know, NSA has likely recorded the evidence. Glenn Greenwald describes this as the universal Panopticon, a surveillance-chilled Orwellian state where we are constantly looking over our shoulders, afraid that what we're writing, texting or even thinking and saying may be recorded and used against us.Osama bin Laden put it this way: "...freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people—and the West in general—into an unbearable hell and a choking life." --October, 2001 On the bright side—but apparently having learned nothing from his disastrous fourteen-year experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s—Uncle is still trying to protect you from yourself. With his ~$40 billion/year taxpayer-funded "War on Drugs," he and his relatives are making it a little more difficult for you to score non-establishment substances. Marijuana for example. Also, by inadvertantly protecting non-establishment drug dealers from normal market forces, he's made these drugs a lot more expensive. Because of those high prices, two out of three chances you have of getting robbed or burgled are because folks who decide to use non-establishment drugs often have to steal to support their otherwise affordable habit. By comparison, few folks engage in whole-sale larceny to afford cigarettes so far. And two of three of the record number of folks you support in jails and prisons are folks who sell—but mostly use—those non-establishment drugs. Also, there are the two of three cops, prosecutors, judges, prisons, guards, etc. you pay to put and keep them in prison. Also, using extra-judicial "civil asset forfeiture," the cops often steal your stuff. Trying to protect you from yourself is very expensive. And dangerous: Cops have killed more Americans than were killed in the Iraq "War." In fact, according to Global Research, you're 29 times more likely to be killed by an American cop than by a "terrorist." Maybe that has to do with the two-thirds of those ~40,000 "knock and announce" SWAT raids per year that are non-establishment-drug related, quite often at the wrong address. And then they use plea-bargain, A.K.A. "plea-blackmail" to avoid expensive jury trials and coerce you into pleading guilty even when you're not. This blackmail is so effective, only about three cases out of one-hundred go to a jury in the U.S.. And we get equivalent "protection" in other areas too. Food and drugs for example, where the USDA and the FDA (half its budget comes from Big Pharma) etc. "protect" us from Thalidomide, acetaminophen (Tylenol) liver poisoning (37 years late and counting), inexpensive and effective cancer treatments, sanitary milk, and they even protect us from "mad-cow" tested beef, etc. You read that right; the USDA prevented Creekstone Farms from testing their beef for the bovine form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, A.K.A. "Mad Cow Disease." And, lulling us further into a false sense of security, the SEC protects us from heinous mini-insider traders like Martha Stewart—but protects mega-scammers like Bernie "Ponzi-scheme" Madoff from dangerous whistle-blowers like Harry Markopolos. For about a decade. And then there's the highly vaunted but mis-respected FAA—which "regulates" airlines. Mary Schiavo, The Inspector General of the NTSB , revealed that insiders call FAA the "Tombstone Agency" because it never changes until people die. Shortly thereafter, Congress forced her to resign for "airing dirty laundry in public."
And, of course, your fiat money and economy are protected by the Einsteins at the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve. You know, folks like FED Chair Ben Bernanke, Treas. Sec. Hank Paulson, his right-hand man Neel Kashkari, NY FED chief (and later Treas. Sec.) Tim Geithner, etc., even though they admit they had no idea what the F they were doing. Stick with me here, it gets better—and there's a solution. Besides false flags, blackmail, entrapments, non-establishment drugs, murder-by-cop, fiat faux-pas—and dangerous whistle-blowers like Harry Markopolus—here are a few of the other things folks worry about. First, the nukes: OMAHA, Neb. (AP)—Investment guru Warren Buffett offered a bleak prediction for the nation's national security, saying a terrorist attack on American soil is "virtually a certainty." ... "We're going to have something in the way of a major nuclear event in this country," said Buffett ... "It will happen. Whether it will happen in 10 years or 10 minutes, or 50 years ... it's virtually a certainty." --Billionaire Predicts Nuclear Attack, JOE RUFF, Associated Press BLOOMINGTON, Ill. State Farm, the nation's largest auto and residential insurer, is changing its car insurance policies to clearly exclude claims stemming from nuclear explosions or radioactive fallout. The Bloomington-based insurer ...says nuclear blasts or radioactive damage are not normal road hazards, whether the incidents are accidental or intentional. --State Farm Cuts Nuke Damage From Coverage, AP And don't forget Dave Barry's "Big Trouble"—the movie that was postponed because it was too realistic. It stars a backpack nuke smuggled into Florida— OK, forget about the nukes. But before you do, remember that ABC news team which, to test U.S. defenses, toted depleted uranium into the U.S., definitively proving pissed-off folks could smuggle nukes into the heartland? They did it twice, once through the premiere checkpoint in the Port of New York and then, the following year, through The Port of Los Angeles. Without getting busted. Until they published their Los Angeles story, which apparently scared the kids—and made the law-and-order-industry look bad and fear for their plush budgets. So then the ABC news team got busted. O.K. So, one way or another, we're gonna get nuked. But forget the nukes. No, seriously this time. And also forget flying planes into buildings, weaponized anthrax, weaponized Ebola, direct invasion, etc.. What else could pissed-off folks—and/or the law-and-order industry—do? How about a little low-tech instead? How about the beltway snipers, firing out of a hole in the trunk of their Chevy Caprice, for example. Thirteen shot, ten killed. Twenty-one days of terror in the states around D.C. that crippled their economy for three weeks. Multiply by ten other cities. Or twenty. And the snipers don't give themselves away by demanding ransom— And then there were those unknown gunmen who deliberately shot the insulators off a key sub-station's transformers—and nearly shut down a large chunk of the West Coast grid. Or how about starting massive fires during the dry season, or causing train derailments by pulling spikes out of railroad tracks? Etc. And then there's this guy—and he didn't even mean it— A man who had been drinking shot the [trans-Alaska] pipeline with a hunting rifle in what the governor called "a harebrained act of violence." The pipeline, which carries about 17% of the nation's oil production, had to be shut down. --Crews Get Temporary Fix on Ruptured Pipeline—LA Times Or the latest to make the 6 O'clock News: Ebola-infected ISIS suicide sneezers infiltrate the southern border. Which reminds me, "we" may even scare ourselves to death. By inadvertantly bringing things to a standstill with, say, a unique advertising campaign. Or the flu, or a woman blowing chunks just outside the Pentagon. Some avant garde military thinkers suggest some of these might be "fourth generation warfare" probing sorties, setting up later full-scale attacks.And they're worried about so-called "self-radicalized lone-wolves." Maybe it should be "truth radicalized" instead—some folks don't get all their info from the mainstream media after all. In this case at least, the law-and-order-industry leaked that these truth-radicalized folks are difficult to "prevent." On the other hand, with the "popularity" of our politicians—and law-and-order-industry expertise at entrapment—maybe they regard the entire country as a "target-rich environment." And just a reminder. As former Colorado Governor Bill Owens admitted, channelling Schwartzkopf, Rumsfeld—and Giuliani—"If we had to protect everything all the time, we simply couldn't do it." And no, relax, I'm not giving them any ideas, at least no new ones. Clearly, since "our" antagonists have apparently tried most of these—or watched the FBI dupes try them—they've already figured most of this out. Hopefully, so has the FBI, CIA, NSA, HLS, etc. Maybe they'll take a little time off from their busy entrapment schedule to watch out for the real thing—and then collect evidence afterwards. Also for the other even more inventive things "a dedicated terrorist who is willing to pay the price" might do. Unfortunately, hierarchies are at an extreme disadvantage when dealing with this sort of fourth generation warfare. The best defense is a forth generation defense—that is, an armed and alert population—but even that isn't going to stop most serious incidents since approximately two of three "terrorist" attacks succeed, even in war zones. So the big picture reveals about the only thing governments protect fairly well are large established interests which hire lobbyists and make huge campaign bribes. And what they protect them from is markets and competition. Sorry kids, but we're sitting ducks, and no amount of posturing or pretending—trying not to scare you—will help. Here's the main reason why we're sitting ducks— "You could kill all the terrorists in Afghanistan, all the terrorists in the world. You could hang Osama bin Laden in sight of the White House. You still wouldn't have solved the problem because you will have created a whole new generation of terrorists." --Col. Richard Dunn, October, 2001 It's 2015, the age of ISIS, and thirteen years since Col. Dunn made that embarrassingly obvious observation—and your Uncle Sam is still busily creating more terrorists daily with no end in sight. Aside from abducting, torturing, bombing, droning, invading, and occupying folks all around the world, he's got other plans for the future as well. He's Hollywooding it up, re-stocking Our Childrens' Childrens' War with Syria, Iraq again—and possibly Ukraine and even Russia. This all stimulates the militaryindustrial complex (MIC) of course, maintaining the tradition of "military Keynesianism" that's been a mainstay of the U.S. economy since the cessation of official U.S. warfare on September 12, 1945, when Mountbatten signed the treaty with Japan, ending WWII. Do you suppose it's not "our freedom" folks hate us for? If not stopped, this monumental idiocy will haunt our kids, grand kids and the yet unborn for generations to come. There's one other consideration: The trajectory. As Ayn Rand noted, "The legal hallmark of dictatorship has always been Preventative Law..." And U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft inadvertantly verified the U.S. foot was officially on that path when he admitted on October 16, 2001 on CNBC, "Preventing crime before it happens is new to us and we must adapt. Prevention is now our top priority." And so we have those misnamed "preemptive prosecutions." And entrapments. And all the blackmail possibilities built-in to those NSA data bases— And, even though they—and now via history, Mises, Bohr, common sense, and even Yogi—we know almost the only folks they can usually "prevent" are their own dupes, the Law-and-Order Industry is only too happy to continue the farce. And here's the bottom line— "The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts. And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors." --Plutarch (46 A.D.-127 A.D.) Historian of the Roman Republic It sure looks like Uncle's going for the brass ring doesn't it? Paraphrased, the proposition was suggested by Benjamin Franklin: Will you sacrifice essential liberty for a little protection? So with that proposition in mind, maybe now's a good time to tally up all that "protection" we're getting. Take a deep breath: First, the "Authorities" can't and don't protect you and legally they don't have to. The cases they concoct—and the false flags—further endanger you—and may be the main terrorist-related danger you face. So far. Cops and the drug war have killed more of us than the Iraq "war." The laws they pass are used primarily against you, not against terrorists, and the NSA etc. spying programs and databases undermine privacy, chill writers, you, and free speech—and make you and everyone else a sitting duck for blackmail. They use civil asset forfeiture to steal your stuff and plea-blackmail to coerce you into pleading guilty even when you're not. All this has morphed America into Orwellistan—just as bin Laden said it would. Because of the FDA and USDA, our food and drugs are less safe, the SEC protects scammers like Bernie Madoff, the vaunted FAA "Tombstone Agency" keeps air travel more dangerous, and the U.S. FIAT dollar has at least one foot on a banana peel. Further, D.C. foreign policy ticks folks off all over the world, is creating and stoking "Our Childrens' Children's War." and, especially if continued, will almost certainly instigate real terrorist attacks—possibly including nukes—for decades to come. So here's the bottom line: How much essential liberty are you willing to sacrifice for all that "protection?" Speak up! And keep in mind governments claim to protect you and make you safer, not endanger you. That's their main excuse to exist. The solution? You know what it is. I didn't say it would be easy— L. Reichard White [send him mail] taught physics, designed and built a house, ran for Nevada State Senate, served two terms on the Libertarian National Committee, managed a theater company, etc. For the last few decades, he's supported his writing habit by beating casinos at their own games. His hobby, though, is explaining things he wishes someone had explained to him. You can find a few of his other explanations listed here.
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