Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Approaching The Tribulation (VII)



Again, we go where the news takes us, and today, once again it's all about creeping tyranny as we approach the Tribulation:




Personally, I have suspected this all along. And we can also take note that no one has been punished or fired (really) for these offenses:


To be clear NOTHING is ever done to stop the ongoing rape and pillage of individual rights in Obama’s Amerika.



“We are Watching You” is the new mantra of the day.  It is what the government wants you to think.
Where is President Barack Obama when the privacy of private citizens is being raped and plundered?  Playing the rich playboy in Ireland, with his wife searching for their “Irish roots” on their way to a $100-million South African trip that bests the Queen of England for most money spent on any single trip.

Deliberate Marxist misery wants you to know that Big Government is watching you.

Does it look to anyone else like Edward Snowden is the agent sent out to deliver Obama’s message?



The desired outcome? See below:






Back in the ’80s when, on a couple of occasions, I visited the Soviet Union, I always wondered what was it really like to live in that godforsaken place. But it didn’t much matter. For all the creepy spying that was going on, I realized I’d be out of there in a week or two.
Now I know what it was like. It’s come home.

I live in fear.
I don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. Every phone call I make, every email I send, every text I message, every article I write including this one, I imagine being bugged or recorded.
1984 is here and it’s not pretty.
It infects everything we do.
For example, I want to criticize the IRS with every breath I take, but in the back of my head I worry — what if they come after me? What if I’m audited and have to spend the next few years and untold dollars on accountants and attorneys? Is this fair to my family? Is this how I want to spend my life?
Just today I was going to follow up on some information about the wretched prevarications surrounding Benghazi and hesitated. Should I email the source? Telephone? Send a letter? Snail mail would take too long.
What about buying one of those throwaway phones at Radio Shack? But then I would be compromising the recipients of my calls. I would be implicating them.
A few weeks ago CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson phoned me to ask about my Benghazi contacts. I assumed the call was being recorded. Now I read that her computer is bugged. It turns on and off by itself in the middle of the night.
Mine doesn’t. At least I don’t think it does. I tend to be asleep at three a.m.
Still, I live in fear. And I don’t think I’m the only one. I think a lot of people do now, in various degrees. They want to think they don’t, but they do.
It’s not a terrified fear. I don’t cower under my desk. It’s a nagging fear, a trepidation. Something that never goes away.
Someone is watching me, monitoring whatever I do. If I make a mistake, I will pay for it. My future will be bleak.
Basically, I am being silenced. And so are you. Purposefully or not, they are trying to shut us down and shut us up.
They say they’re not, but they are.
They don’t believe they are, but they are.
They have protective mechanisms in place, but who knows if they function?
We have to rely on the beneficence of our overseers, but how can we believe in that?
How can we believe in anything? Everything is too big. We are just cogs in the wheel. Winston Smith had it better than us. The technology was not as efficient in his day (1984).
So I live in fear.
And here’s the big problem: it’s hard to see how it’s going to get better.







It’s the question on everyone’s lips: "Why is Edward Snowden in China?”
The implication is that spookiness is the only plausible explanation for why the NSA whistleblower would have absconded to Hong Kong. “Why flee the country?” is the accusation du jour. “I'm deeply suspicious obviously because he went to China,” said the man-most-likely-to-accuse-you-of-being-a-spy, Dick Cheney.
CBS’s Bob Schieffer accused Snowed of cowardice, taunting: “I don’t remember Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks running off to China.” 
Let me suggest an alternative explanation: Bradley Manning.

The trial of the man who handed over classified information to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a cautionary tale for all wannabe whistleblowers. While being held for nearly three years before his trial finally began, Manning—who had committed no acts of violence—was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes, and stripped naked at night. More than 250 U.S. legal scholars signed a letter of protest, arguing that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" were illegal and unconstitutional. Human rights groups protested


Here’s another possible answer to the accusation-cum-query: Thomas Drake.
Drake is another NSA whistleblower, who did exactly what the insiders are claiming Snowden should have done. He followed the rules. He went through the “proper channels.” He paid dearly for it. Wrote Drake in The Guardian, “I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.” Drake shared everything he knew with Congress only to see it go nowhere. He says that after he shared nonclassified info with a reporter, the FBI raided his house, he was threatened with jail for the rest of his life and he was under government surveillance. Writes Drake: “Snowden can expect the worst; he knows that. He went preemptively overseas because that at leastdelays the prying hand of the U.S. government.”
Sadly, the first impulse of the government and their defenders seems to have remained consistent over time: don’t address the critical information that has been leaked. Instead, dig up dirt and destroy the whistleblower’s credibility and if possible, life.




Another interesting twist on this story:









Edward Snowden kicked off the session by describing the targeted campaign by the US government to paint him as a traitor, “just as they did with other whistleblowers.” The smear campaign, he argues, has destroyed the possibility of a fair trial at home. In this regard, his decision to leave the United States was not based on any desire to evade justice, especially since he believes he can “do more good outside of prison.”


Regarding the former tactic, Snowden argues the fourth estate can verify the veracity of government claims by analyzing how and if the government’s massively expanded powers have resulted in the actual prevention of terror plots.
“Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”

Snowden said the “draconian” campaigns against Manning, NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and William Binney, , and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou would result in even more anti-corruption and government transparency advocates aspiring to greater acts of boldness.
“Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.”
Incidentally, Binney told RT last December how the FBI was engaged in widespread surveillance against the bulk of American citizenry, including members of congress.







In recent months, as this administration has been rocked by self-inflicted scandal after self-inflicted scandal, a vibrant, three-dimensional picture of Mr. Obama has begun to emerge. So obvious and outrageous are his abuses of power that many of his sycophantic holdouts are finally taking a second, less-jaundiced look at their Dear Leader.
For example, after it was learned that the Obama IRS was intentionally targeting conservative, Christian and Jewish organizations and individuals for harassment and political intimidation, Jon Stewart, liberal comedian and host of "The Daily Show," did a scathing spot in which he told the president, "You've vindicated conspiracy theorists."
More recently, in response to the IRS and NSA scandals, "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno joked of "Snoop Obama": "We wanted a president that listens to all Americans," he said. "Now we have one."
Both the liberal New York Times and hard-left filmmaker Michael Moore have similarly opined that the Obama administration has "lost all credibility," while left-leaning Politico observed that, "Nothing brings the left and the right together quite like government snooping."
Each of these scandals (Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS-gate, spying on the media, NSA spying on the American people, et al.) are, ostensibly, grievous enough, when taken alone, to rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Oh what a difference a couple centuries make. While Benjamin Franklin famously warned, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," President Obama - with his hand caught in your information cookie jar - now assures us that Franklin had it all wrong: "[O]ne of the things that we're going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy," he said, "because there are some tradeoffs involved."
Yikes.











Top NSA whistleblower William Binney – the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program – has repeatedly explained that just because you “haven’t done anything wrong” doesn’t mean you can’t be severely harmed by spying:
The problem is, if they think they’re not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does.
Binney explains that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn’t like).
And he notes that the government will go after anyone who is on its enemies list:
If you ever get on their enemies list, like Petraeus did, then you can be drawn into that surveillance.

Binney recently held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:
We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state
Similarly, in response to the question, “why should people care about surveillance?”, the whistleblower source of the Guardian’s disclosures on phone and Internet spying – Edward Snowden – said:
Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude … to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody – even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.













Tuesday, June 18, 2013

EU: Right On Schedule

Just as we would expect:




This article actually comes from the NYTimes and is worth printing in full below. Bolded parts are mine:




Stanislav Zvolensky, the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Slovak capital here, was thrilled when he was invited to Brussels three years ago to discuss the fight against poverty with the insistently secular bureaucracy of the European Union.



European Commission
The European Commission at first ordered Slovakia to revise its monks-in-halos design for a commemorative euro coin.

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“They let me in wearing my cross,” the archbishop recalled.
It therefore came as a rude surprise when, late last year, the National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from special commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer.
The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands but have instead become tokens of the faith’s retreat from contemporary Europe. They featured two evangelizing Byzantine monks, Cyril and Methodius, their heads crowned by halos and one’s robe decorated with crosses, which fell foul of European diversity rules that ban any tilt toward a single faith.
“There is a movement in the European Union that wants total religious neutrality and can’t accept our Christian traditions,” said Archbishop Zvolensky, bemoaning what he sees as rising a tide of militant secularism at a time when Europe is struggling to forge a common identity.
In a continent divided by many languages, vast differences of culture and economic gaps, the archbishop said that centuries of Christianity provide a rare element shared by all of the soon-to-be 28 members of the fractious union. Croatia, a mostly Catholic nation like Slovakia, joins next month.
Yet at a time when Europe needs solidarity and a unified sense of purpose to grapple with its seemingly endless economic crisis, religion has instead become yet another a source of discord. It divides mostly secular Western Europe from profoundly religious nations in the east like Poland and those in between both in geography and in faith like Slovakia.
In nearly all of Europe, assertive secularists and beleaguered believers battle to make their voices heard. All of which leaves the European Commission, in charge of shaping Europe’s common aspirations, under attack from all sides, denounced by atheists for even its timid engagement with religion and by nationalist Christian fundamentalists as an agent of Satan.
Asked about such criticism, Katharina von Schnurbein, the commission official responsible for outreach to both religious and secular groups, smiled and said, “I can assure you that the European Commission is not the Antichrist.”
Europe is suffused with Christianity, or at least memories of its past influence. The landscape is dotted with churches, now mostly empty, and monasteries, its ancient universities are rooted in medieval religious scholarship, and many of its national crests and anthems pay homage to God.
Even the European Union’s flag — a circle of 12 yellow stars on a blue background — has a coded Christian message. Arsène Heitz, a French Catholic who designed the flag in 1955, drew inspiration from Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown with 12 stars. The same 12 stars appear on all euro coins.
The very idea that Europe should unite began with efforts to rally Christendom in the ninth century by Charlemagne, the first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.
Throughout its modern history, however, the “European project,” as the Continent’s current faltering push for unity is known, has sought to keep religion and the unruly passions it can stir at arm’s length. The 1957 Treaty of Rome and other founding texts of what is today the European Union make no mention of God or Christianity. The Brussels bureaucracy, in its official account of Mr. Heitz’s religion-tinged flag, ignores the Virgin Mary, stating instead that the 12 stars “symbolize the ideal of unity, solidarity and harmony among the people of Europe.”
“There is a general suspicion of anything religious, a view that faith should be kept out of the public sphere,” said Gudrun Kugler, director of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians, a Vienna-based research and lobbying group. “There is a very strong current of radical secularism,” she said, adding that this affects all religions but is particularly strong against Christianity because of a view that “Christianity dominated unfairly for centuries” and needs to be put in its place.
Ms. von Schnurbein dismissed accusations of an anti-Christian agenda. The European Union, she said, “is often seen as trying to eliminate religion, but that is really not the case.” She added, “We deal with people of faith and also people of no faith.”
Obliged by treaty to consult with religious and secular groups, the European Commission, said Ms. von Schnurbein, attaches “great importance” to this dialogue, which she described as “unique” for an international body.
The commission’s monetary and economic affairs department that ordered Slovakia to redesign its commemorative euro coins says it had no real problem itself with halos and crosses and demanded that they be deleted in the interest of “religious diversity” because of complaints from countries that also use the euro.
Leading the charge was France, which enforces a rigid division of church and state at home, and objected to Christian symbols appearing on Slovak money that would also be legal tender in France. Greece, where church and state are closely intertwined, also protested, apparently because it considers the Greek-born monks Cyril and Methodius as part of its own heritage.
For the European Union’s most strident critics, the dispute has been a godsend, buttressing their argument that Brussels is an alien, meddling and sinister force. “I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party.
The view that the European Union serves Satan has become a popular theme for some extreme Christian fundamentalists, who cite the Bible’s Book of Revelation as proof that dissolving national boundaries signals an approaching apocalypse.
Yet, several of the union’s most senior figures are themselves Catholics, as were most of its founding fathers, including Germany’s first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Germany’s current leader, Angela Merkel, the daughter of a pastor, has been outspoken in defending Christianity, telling supporters worried about the increasing number of Muslims that “we don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity.”
The Brussels bureaucratic apparatus, however, is “uncomfortable with religion,” said Lucian Leustean, a scholar at Aston University in Britain and the editor of a 2012 book, “Representing Religion in the European Union: Does God Matter?”
This is partly due to the rise of well-organized secular groups that pounce on any hint that Christians are being favored over other religions or nonbelievers. But a bigger reason, said Mr. Leustean, is a shift in demography and public attitudes.
Church attendance is falling across Europe as belief in God wanes and even cultural attachments wither. The Continent’s fastest-growing faith is now Islam. In Britain, according to a poll last year, more people believe in extraterrestrials than in God. In the European Union as a whole, according to a 2010 survey, around half the population believes in God, compared with over 90 percent in the United States.
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe slowed the secular tide somewhat as the European Union began to admit new and sometimes deeply religious countries like Poland and Romania. Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission in the 1990s, kicked off a debate on the “soul of Europe” and held informal meetings with church and other religious leaders.
But when Europe set about drafting a constitution in the early years of the last decade, demands that Europe’s Christian heritage be mentioned ran into bitter resistance and were eventually dropped. The religious question resurfaced again with the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, which skipped any reference to Christianity and instead paid tribute to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe.”
It mandated dialogue with religious groups. But it also ordered equal treatment for “philosophical and non-confessional organizations,” which include groups whose principal philosophy is hostility to organized religion.
Archbishop Zvolensky of Bratislava predicted that efforts at European unity are doomed unless the union gives a bigger place to God. “Religion should be the inner strength of the union,” he said.
He does see one encouraging sign: Slovakia’s national bank has decided to stick with its original coin design and abandon plans for a halo-free minting in honor of Cyril and Methodius.
The European Commission has gone along with this, and the commemorative coins will finally be minted next month — two months later than originally planned — but with halos and crosses.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 18, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. It was 1957, not 1951.





In The News:






G8 Exposes Rift Among Leaders On Syria


Deep differences over Syria’s fierce civil war clouded a summit of world leaders Monday, with Russian President Vladimir Putin defiantly rejecting calls from the U.S., Britain and France to halt his political and military support for Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s regime.

But there were also fissures among the three Western nations, despite their shared belief that Assad must leave power. Britain and France appear unwilling — at least for now — to join President Barack Obama in arming the Syrian rebels, a step the U.S. president reluctantly finalized last week.

The debate over the Syria conflict loomed large as the two-day summit of the Group of 8 industrial nations opened Monday at a lakeside resort in Northern Ireland. The lack of consensus even among allies underscored the vexing nature of the two-year conflict in Syria

Obama and Putin, who already have a frosty relationship, did little to hide their differing views on the matter while speaking to reporters following a one-on-one meeting on the sidelines of the summit Monday evening. The two-hour meeting marked the first time the leaders have met in-person since last year.

Perhaps signaling another fight to come between the U.S. and Russia, the foreign ministry in Moscow said Russia would veto a motion to set up a no-fly zone if the U.S. sought authorization from the United Nations Security Council.







NATO and a number of European governments, most significantly the UK, have started airlifting heavy weapons to the Syrian rebels poised in Aleppo to fend off a major Syrian army offensive, according to DEBKAfile’s exclusive military sources. They disclose that the first shipments were landed Monday night, June 17, and early Tuesday in Turkey and Jordan. They contained anti-air and tank missiles as well as recoilless 120 mm cannons mounted on jeeps. From there, they were transferred to rebel forces in southern Syria and Aleppo in the northwest.

Our sources report that the first weapons reached rebel-held positions in Aleppo early Tuesday. More than 2,000 Hizballah troops are standing by to enter the decisive contest between Assad’s army and the opposition for control of Syria’s second most important city.


The hardware for the rebels is coming in from three sources:
1. NATO stores in Europe, which have been filling up in the past year with arms evacuated from Afghanistan. These weapons have been in operational use and are not new.
2. The Libyan black market.
3. The Balkan black market, chiefly Serbia and Montenegro.

Monday, Syrian President Bashar Assad cautioned Europe it would pay the price for delivering arms to rebel forces in Syria. In an interview to in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he said: “If the Europeans deliver weapons, the backyard of Europe will become terrorist…”

The volume of the new arms airlift to the Syrian rebels may be estimated by the number of airfreight flights from Libya to Turkey:  27 aircraft landings were counted in the last few days, according to our intelligence sources.

This major Western policy reversal on the arming of the Syrian opposition – combined with the Obama administration’s decision last week to provide the rebels with military aid - was graphically registered in the glum miens of Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin at their meeting Monday on the first day of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. Beyond exchanging bare courtesies, neither concealed the deep rift between them on Syria – even in the presence of reporters and TV cameras.

However, in Syria itself, all the signs portend the lengthening of the conflict: Russia is expected to respond to Western arms supplies to the rebels by ramping up its own military assistance to the Assad regime.
The word from Moscow Tuesday was that if the West does try to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, Russian flights will continue, in defiance of any such restrictions.







For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?
The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a "red line" Obama had set down as a "game changer." Defied, his credibility challenged, he had to do something.
Yet Assad's alleged use of sarin to justify U.S. intervention seems less like our reason for getting into this war than our excuse.
For the White House decided to intervene weeks ago, before the use of sarin was confirmed. And why would Assad have used only tiny traces? Where is the photographic evidence of the disfigured dead?
What proof have we the rebels did not fabricate the use of sarin or use it themselves to get the gullible Americans to fight their war?

Yet, why would President Obama, whose proud boast is that he will have extricated us from the Afghan and Iraq wars, as Dwight Eisenhower did from the Korean War, plunge us into a new war?


He has been under severe political and foreign pressure to do something after Assad and Hezbollah recaptured the strategic town of Qusair and began preparing to recapture Aleppo, the largest city.
Should Assad succeed, it would mean a decisive defeat for the rebels and their backers: the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. And it would mean a geostrategic victory for Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who have proven themselves reliable allies.
To prevent this defeat and humiliation, we are now going to ship arms and ammunition to keep the rebels going and in control of enough territory to negotiate a peace that will remove Assad.
We are going to make this a fair fight.
What is wrong with this strategy? It is the policy of an amateur. It treats war like a game. It ignores the lessons of history. And, as it continues a bloodbath with no prospect of an end to it, it is immoral.
What is the likely reaction to our escalation from humanitarian aid to military aid? Counter-escalation. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are likely to rush in more weapons and troops to accelerate the progress of Assad's army before the American weapons arrive.

And if they raise and call, what does Obama do?
Already, a clamor is being heard from our clients in the Middle East and Congress to crater Syria's runways with cruise missiles, to send heavy weapons to the rebels, to destroy Assad's air force on the ground, to bomb his antiaircraft sites.
All of these are acts of war. Yet under the Constitution, Congress alone authorizes war.
When did Congress authorize Obama to take us to war in Syria? Where does our imperial president get his authority to draw red lines and attack countries that cross them?
Have we ceased to be a republic? Has Congress become a mere spectator to presidential decisions on war and peace?
As Vladimir Putin seems less the reluctant warrior, what do we do if Moscow answers the U.S. escalation by delivering on its contract to provide S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Damascus, which can cover half of Israel?
Obama has put us on the escalator to a war already spilling over Syria's borders into Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan, a war that is now sundering the entire Middle East along Sunni and Shia lines.
He is making us de facto allies of the Al-Qaida-like al-Nusra Front, of Hamas and jihadists from all across the region, and of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi just severed ties to Syria and is demanding a "no-fly zone," which one imagines the United States, not the Egyptian air force, would have to enforce.
At the top of this escalator our country has begun to ascend is not just a proxy war with Iran in Syria, but a real war that would entail a disaster for the world economy.
If the ouster of Assad is what the Sunni powers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt demand, why not let them do it?
Anti-interventionists should demand a roll-call vote in Congress on whether Obama has the authority to take us into this Syrian war.




Also see:






[This article is worth reading in full. Below is the intro and conclusion only]


There seems to be a lot of confusion about what the NSA is actually doing.  Are they reading our emails?  Are they listening to our telephone calls?  Do they target American citizens or is it only foreigners that they are targeting?  Unfortunately, the truth is that we aren’t going to get straight answers from our leaders about this.  The folks running the NSA have already shown that they are willing to flat out lie to Congress, and Barack Obama doesn’t exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to telling the truth.  These are men that play word games and tell lies for a living.  So it would be unrealistic to expect them to come out and tell us the unvarnished truth about what is going on.  That is why it is so important that whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden have come forward.  Thanks to them and to the brave journalists that are willing to look into these things, we have been able to get some glimpses behind the curtain.  And what we have learned is not very pretty.  The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should 


Benjamin Franklin once wrote the following
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”