WHY DOES FREEDOM MATTER SO LITTLE NOW?

AYN RAND BRIEFLY REVISITED

NOVEMBER 2, 2010.  When Ayn Rand exploded on the scene with her two massive novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), she was momentarily embraced by the political Right, until the discovery was made that she was an atheist.  Her underlying philosophy of the primacy of the individual had nothing to do with religion.

Oops.  There ensued an attack on her by William Buckley’s magazine, The National Review. 

Despite the ever-burgeoning legion of Rand readers, the centers of political debate in this country excluded Rand and her ideas. 

It didn’t matter that her dramatization of the individual versus the group was the deepest and most compelling in the history of American literature.

Then came the 1960s.

Eastern Thought was run through a spiritual meat grinder, reduced, grilled, and served on a bun to American and European youth; the message was fast-food happiness:

You are a unit of joy in the encompassing Cosmic Joy. 

Translation: the individual is nothing; the spiritual collective is everything.

“Self is a fiction.”

“The Universe has a plan.”

“If it didn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be.”

“It’s Karma, baby.”

And now, as a derivative of that brand of thought, we have December 21, 2012.  The last day of the Mayan calendar.  The end of time.  The apocalypse.  The entrance of New Everything For Everybody.

I personally don’t care what people believe.  Cosmic Beneficence, a pink bunny on Mars, soup for supper. 

But when beliefs marginalize the individual and his freedom and his power and creative force, then we are looking at spiritual collectivism. 

And politically, of course, there is a nice fit.  Witness the union-sponsored national riots in France, fomented because the government, teetering on brink of financial insolvency, wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to a savage 62 and move the full pension trigger from 65 to an unmerciful 67. 

It’s all about group entitlement.  What the herd deserves.  What the herd demands.

Well, group paradises always collapse.  And for good reason: the individual and freedom are pushed out.

Karl Marx preached a dictatorship of the Proletariat and then the glorious withering away of the State.  The dictatorship turned out to be the old-fashioned kind: iron fist, prisons, mass executions.  Nothing withered. 

Let’s face it.  Preserving freedom of the individual against what people long for—protection by the group—is tough sledding.  And now the sled is heading downhill fast and it’s out of control.

People have lost the thread.

They don’t remember what freedom is.

And if they did, would they be able to make their home there and expand its territory?

The lights are going out.

And yet…there is a primal urge for freedom that never goes away. 

No matter who the elites are and what they doing to squash it and contain it and regulate it and redirect it and distract it, it remains.  Even against people’s own “better judgment,” they sense that desire for freedom within themselves.

Ayn Rand has been praised, admired, attacked, reviled, spat on, accused, elevated, worshipped, pummeled, and read in private hours like a subversive text by people who fear discovery, as if the shame would be too great, the exposure too embarrassing, the punishment by peers too horrific.

Walk down the street with a copy of Atlas Shrugged in your hand, and sooner or later a sheep will approach you, remove his mask, and turn into a slathering wolf who’s after your flesh and bone marrow.

Howard Roark, Rand’s hero in The Fountainhead, was a brilliant architect who simply wanted to do his work.  He refused to compromise his vision for the sake of attracting clients. 

Roark knew.  He understood the dimensions of the war.  He was fully aware, although he didn’t parade his knowledge, that there was a growing expanding fungus of a collective that wanted nothing to do with freedom or the individual.  The collective needed lowest common denominators in every field of endeavor to survive. 

Guided by a slimy newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey, this apparition of an America floating through doors and windows like a death fog, obscuring the free man, demanded permanent status as an underclass of victims—glimpsing the very real possibility that their needs would be the new ruling standard of the nation.  Without end.

From that conflict, freedom versus the collective, everything in the novel flows.

Rand was not only dangerous to the political consensus, she was a distinct threat to the closed literary world, in which tiny personal quirks and clever moments and anarchic bellowing were the trading currency. 

Critics claimed her prose was wooden, her relationships stone-like, her depictions of sex outrageously violent.  They found many “problems” in her work, not the least of which was her adulation of the free individual—a cruel and bitter betrayal of humanity.

Almost no one in literary circles dared to compare the ideas of The Fountainhead with the founding principles of the American Republic.  That would have been very risky territory.

From the opening page of The Fountainhead, you are drawn into Rand’s war.  Roark, Peter Keating, Dominique Francon, Toohey, Gail Wynand—they force you into intense hate or admiration.  The emotions run as deep as the ideas. 

How free is freedom?  How free can the individual be, and what ideas and philosophy will sustain that freedom and expand it beyond any machinations of the demanding mob? 

I don’t believe an exploration in this direction is anything less than heroic.  But of course, we need to know what’s happening in the black hole in the center of this galaxy on December 21, 2010, and how it will change everything for everybody in the grand spiritual parade of the New Age.  Yes, we need to prepare for the external event that is going to dwarf all our ambitions and desires.  We need to empty our minds and stand on a cliff and create NOTHING.  We need to ready ourselves for the breakthrough destiny has unwrapped for us.  Because it is simply ego that has made us believe the individual can be free and enormously creative.  That was the old paradigm.  Now we can all join and experience the pulse of cosmic infiltration.  We can reject, each one of us, any pretension to power, because power is wrong, unless it is melted down and shared by the collective, braying: WE NEED.  WE NEED.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ARE CRAZY

NOVEMBER 1, 2010.  All over the world, we learn, massive numbers of people are saying their governments aren’t giving them what they need.

Or worse, governments are placing a boot to their heads.

We are presented with the prescriptive picture of governments that should be delivering benefits to enormous numbers of people.

Such populations are considered victims.  They are more or less a permanent victim class.

In order to assuage and take care of this ever expanding class, governments must become bigger. 

Government is looked to as the solution to a problem.

If we glance at the form and structure of the government established in the wake of the American Revolution, we see it was in no way created to solve the problem of widespread need.  That wasn’t the idea.  But since then, the flood has come; public needs, and their fulfillment, have become the standard by which government is judged.

And as that “modern revolution” has swept across the nation, a basic concept—in fact, the quintessential concept—has been evaporating like a stream in a drought.

Freedom.  Individual freedom.

The founders realized very well that the size and scope of government and individual freedom were two parts of the same formula.

To the degree that you grant government more power and solution-making function, to the degree that government becomes the source of all gifts, freedom diminishes.

Conversely, with more individual freedom, government shrinks in size and importance.

You can wiggle and tap dance and fraudulently reason from here to the moon, but you can’t alter those fundamentals.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from trying.

They haven’t had a difficult time of it, either, because they don’t care about freedom.  It isn’t one of their concerns.  In fact, many of these charlatans believe freedom is an illusion; it’s simply a con that was established to allow the powerful and greedy to overwhelm the masses. It was never important.

The original American Revolution had two phases.  The first was declaration of independence from the British crown.  The second, accomplished by the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, broke open the egg completely; and marvelously, it revealed the most profound idea: the individual was free.

This second phase built a government that, by law, would not be able to infringe on that freedom—because government was seen as the most dangerous intruder.

Now, in America, things have deteriorated to the point where government is seen as a parent.  The child wants to be able to do whatever he wants to, and he also wants to be financed in that endeavor.

To cap this approach, the child wants to position himself as an eternal victim, unable to sustain his existence by his own efforts.  With this story in tow, the child is able to make endless demands on the parent.  The child’s official status as victim ensures that “right.” 

Under the arrangement, freedom becomes distorted beyond all recognition.  It becomes the outraged twin of the victim.

“I want what I want when I want it, and I want to do whatever I want to when I want to.”

The advent of psychology as a legitimate and respected profession has added a further piece to the twisted prism.  “Victims are really only people whose present can be explained by their past.”  It’s so simple.  To end up in great need only the parental government can satisfy—to be a victim—means that what happened to you since birth conspired to put you in a situation where your options were drastically limited.

Anyone can cook up such a personal history.  And if the stated goal of therapy is to liberate a person from his past, well, it turns out that most people use psychology to remain in their mythical lock-up.

Note that the fairy tale which explains how the past shapes the present puts up walls against the pure notion of individual freedom.  Such freedom doesn’t really exist; it couldn’t exist.  The links in the chain of past-to-present causation preclude it. 

Consumerism, the vast mall of body, mind, and spirit, really takes hold when the advertising industry can tap into the individual’s perception of his own well-deserved need for thing after thing after thing after thing after thing, in perpetuity.    

“I want what I want when I want it.”

Consumerism, beyond a certain point, has nothing to do with freedom.  It has nothing to do with an individual who knows he is free and is acting from that basis to forward large goals.

Massive and unending material consumption is the territory of the person who has lost track of the fact that he can be free.

Now we get the conjoining of: victim; perpetually hungry consumer; and a government whose job it is to supply the means for acquisition by the children under its care.

Loans don’t have to be repaid.  It’s up to the government to figure out how to structure credit and money so this can happen.

In the future, everyone should have a boat, an island, and a plane.  If not, there will be war.

There are other myths and their spin-off consequences.  Because there are growing numbers of people who can’t secure the essentials of survival, the government must solve that problem.  It must solve it today, tomorrow, and forever.  In order to accomplish this, government must become larger and employ more helpers.

And if the retirement age for these government helpers is moved back two or three years, their pensions postponed, that justifies a national riot.  Because the government helpers are themselves victims.

When you come right down to it, we’re all victims.  And we have to give each other whatever we say we need.  Now.

On and on it goes.

Government, the great solver.

“To satisfy the victim-children, we’ll take your money and give it to them.”

“Wait.  I might be a victim, too.  Let me think about it for a minute.  I believe I can come up with something.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport has been working as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for homseschoolers and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

DOES FREEDOM EXIST?

OR DOES THE BRAIN RULE?

“With the flick of a chemical switch, researchers can now exert unprecedented control over the activating molecules that wire the developing brains of mice.  The new technique permits researchers to use drugs to switch the molecules on and off as precisely and reversibly as a light switch controls a lamp.”

Press Release, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, April 7, 2005

NOVEMBER 1, 2010.  Most Americans are brought up to think that practical questions with practical answers are the only ones that matter. 

And when it comes to philosophy, well, who has the time or inclination to worry about that?  Professors in ivory towers? 

Unfortunately, when everyone deserts the field where the philosophic questions are being asked and answered, the results can be devastating—and the after-effects of those earthquakes can sever the moorings of the Republic.  People may wake up, but it’s too late.

That’s the case with an item called freedom.  It turns out that scientists have been hacking away at it for a long time.   

The answer to the question, does freedom exist, would certainly be the cornerstone of any modern philosophy.

Contemporary thinkers who want to straddle the fence claim that a better understanding of the neurochemical processes of the brain will deliver us better answers.

One of those answers?  “You” are just a concept involuntarily generated by your brain.  There is no “you.”

People tend to blink when they hear that one.  But again, who has time to worry about such a bizarre idea? 

Meanwhile, we have a whole host of questions about freedom that impact society every day.  Should a convicted criminal be sent to a mental hospital for treatment because, in his childhood, he suffered abuse sufficient to render him incapable of choosing to live a lawful life?

This deterministic argument leads us into a massive social and political context, in which large numbers of people, given special treatment and assistance, claim they are not free to advance their lives on their own.  Freedom takes another hit.

In the scientific arena, determinism is leading directly to the assertion that the brain rules; it is the cause from which all human effects flow. 

But the brain isn’t free.  It’s a biological organ.  It operates on chemical/electrical pathways.  It’s remarkably adaptive, but it doesn’t choose.  It follows alternatives in the same mindless way a computer does—depending on what prime directives and software are guiding its actions.

Therefore, if we accept the premise that all our actions stem directly from commands the brain is dispensing, freedom is nowhere to be found.   

The 21^st century is the century of the brain.  If ongoing research has its way, preferred mental states will be defined for us by a psychiatric/neurological elite.  These mental states will be induced (as they are now) by chemicals and other means—but with far more precision.   

Behind this campaign, there is the assumption that freedom doesn’t exist, and life is simply of matter of inhabiting more pleasant states of mind (brain).

What we now see as instances where doctors and law-enforcement authority demand that citizens be treated with certain drugs—this will expand enormously into the engineered society.

FREEDOM?  WHO CARES?

WE CAN MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD.

THEREFORE, YOU MUST FEEL GOOD. 

A surprising number of people look forward to that day. 

Against them stand people who know they are free, who take great and powerful joy from their freedom, who build their lives on choices that reflect their highest and widest aspirations.

These are the sides in the battle that is both real-life and philosophical, and ignoring the intellectual aspect is not merely careless, it consigns us to a future in which, by default, scientists and their government partners will make our decisions for us, utilizing arguments that are vacuous and bankrupt.

The brain is not some holy grail.  Without a widespread understanding that individual freedom exists apart from any facts relating to the brain, we will find authorities dictating us into sedation.

I’ve long been warning, in a variety of contexts, about the onrush of the politicized Medical State.  Its ultimate victory would come if we abandon the ideas of Self and Freedom.  Casting aside these twin pillars, we would consider ourselves vague “pleasure apparatuses,” to be manipulated by experts for our own good.

I recall, as a young college student, studying the history of Western philosophy.  My hope was at the end of it, I would find answers, finally, to great questions.  I never really reached the end.  At the close of the 19^th century, Western thought reached an impasse.  There was science, which seemed to be reporting that the entire universe, including human beings, was merely the whirling action of tiny particles in motion.  Determinism.  Materialism.  Against that notion, there was the assertion of absolute Ideals, vague and other-worldly, non-material.  And there philosophy remained.  In a knot. 

It took me a while to wonder why the concept of individual freedom, expressed so brilliantly and powerfully in the founding documents of the American Republic, had been omitted from the philosophic debate.

Were we supposed to believe our Revolution was just an illusion?  Establishing individual freedom was merely jumping on to another synapse-highway of the brain, another comforting pathway to nowhere?

History is replete with examples of ruling elites rationalizing their control over the populace: the gods will it, kings are blessed with divine right, we must all submit to a specific higher power.  And now we have a pseudo-scientific framework claiming: the workings of the brain show us that individual freedom and self are passé superstitions.

Are you buying it?

More and more people are.  They prefer to leave the future to “brain science” and the chemicals it spawns.  They prefer to believe their only problem is Mood, how they feel at any given moment during the day. 

Was that what Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were all about?  Is that what we have left of their legacy?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for homeschoolers and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE STARFIELD REVELATION, REVISITED

OCTOBER 31, 2010.  In the summer of the year 2000, it was a bolt out of the blue.  The revelation.  I come back to it for various reasons—this time because I’ve been reading doctors’ attacks on the nutritional industry:  “fraudulent claims, quackery, unproven science, theft.”

You’ve heard all the accusations.

It’s interesting that these doctors don’t bother to examine their own profession.  If they did, they would fall through the deep hole, and they might never find their way back to the top.

On July 26, 2000, Dr. Barbara Starfield published her landmark study, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  At the time, Starfield was working at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.  She still is.

She is, as you can see, an insider.  You don’t have your papers published in JAMA if you’re not. 

Among her findings?  The annual figure for deaths caused by medical drugs in the US is 106,000.

THE ANNUAL FIGURE.

All those drugs were, according to her report, correctly prescribed and, of course, approved by the FDA.  No drug makes its way into the American market unless the FDA certifies it as safe and effective.  Both.

In a long, exclusive interview I conducted with Dr. Starfield earlier this year, she made it clear that, since the 2000 publication date, no federal agency had contacted her to consult on taking remedial actions, in the face of all these deaths.

It was also clear that the federal government had undertaken no massive campaign to cut down on the deaths caused by medical drugs.

And, of course, no mainstream news outlet has picked up the gauntlet and hammered on this ongoing mind-boggling tragedy. 

106,000 deaths a year.  That means, since 2000, roughly a million Americans have died as a result of ingesting medicines.  A million.

So when I see these little doctors attacking the viability and correctness and safety of vitamins and minerals, I wonder what foul planet they are living on.  I wonder what they think they’re doing.

You should try to remember this the next time a doctor or some self-styled expert tells you the nutritional approach to improving health is dangerous.

You should try to remember the enormity of the cover-up involved here—and also note that Dr. Starfield’s study, since its publication ten years ago, has gone virtually unchallenged. 

A million deaths.

Now, when it comes to fraud (a charge often leveled at the nutritional industry), think about this: how many studies carried out by drug companies had to have been fraudulent, to result in 106,000 deaths a year?

Because, for the FDA to have approved the lethal drugs as both safe and effective, to have examined the studies and clinical trials of those drugs prior to approval—there were obviously many lies in those pages.

As it turns out, several layers of fraud are involved.  First, the drug companies bury some of their own studies on a given drug, the studies that show health dangers or ineffective results.  Then we have the FDA panels, stacked with doctors who, because of their financial connections to the drug companies, give the green light to go ahead and market the drugs.  And then we have the chronic avoidance of FDA officials, who know about Starfield’s (and other researchers’) work, but refuse to undertake a sweeping investigation of the whole rotten, stench-ridden mess.

We also need to bring the medical journals into the picture, because they publish and comment on many of the studies that result in government approval of drugs.

These journals know the death figures I’ve cited.  But they don’t take radical corrective action, either.  Not the kind of action that will considerably reduce the annual body count of 106,000.

Of course, you would think medical schools, in light of the Starfield Revelation, would revolutionize their training of students.  This, too, is a pipe dream.

On every front, it’s business as usual.

And therefore, the medical cartel needs to point the public’s attention elsewhere.  The cartel needs a distraction.  What better area to single out than their main competitor: nutritional supplements.

When you—the FDA—allow a staggering pattern of ongoing death to develop year after year, decade after decade, and you do nothing about it, and you are in a position to do something about it, and you are legally mandated to oversee the actual area that is causing all the deaths, and you are covering up what you know—what do you call that?

I call it murder.  RICO felony, and murder.

I don’t see any other label that fits.

So I invite all critics of the nutritional industry to come my way, and let’s compare notes, and let’s see, in open debate, what’s what. 

What makes me think I won’t receive a shower of emails from experts seeking engagement on these terms?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for homeschoolers and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MEDICAL BRAINWASHING

OCTOBER 31, 2010.  I’ve spent almost 30 years documenting medical blunders and intentional deceptions.  But at the root of all this is the question:

ARE YOU FREE TO CHOOSE HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR OWN HEALTH? 

There is no statement in the Constitution that denies you that freedom or even suggests it is up for auction. 

However, as we all know, the government decided to ally itself with the conventional practice of medicine.  That alliance will not affect you if, in the privacy of your own home, you decide to ingest a nutrient to cure your lumbago, but it certainly does affect what health practitioners can offer you in their offices.

If they stray beyond the “codes of good practice,” as defined by government-supported medical boards, they can have their licenses yanked.  They can be made into pariahs.  If they go into court to challenge rulings against them, they can wind up paying millions of dollars to lawyers for an uncertain outcome.

There is another vector at work here, though.  Schools.  Schools and their presumption they can detect the psychological/physical condition of children.

Here is a chilling story of Diane Booth and her son Vincent, as told by Fred A Baughman, MD, in 2003.  So far, I’ve been unable to get an update on this case.  Diane Booth apparently has a website, but it’s either not operating or I can’t gain access from my computer.  

Excerpts from Dr. Baughman’s account:

“The ordeal of Vincent Booth and his mother, Diane, began as it begins in every case, in every school district in the US–with teachers diagnosing ADHD, presently the number one “disease” in the country.

“Teachers from the Sunnyvale School District decided, not only that 6-year-old son, Vincent, had ADHD, but that he needed Ritalin, as well. Not only did teachers, never having been to medical school, make the diagnosis, they presumed it was their right, duty, and competence, as well, to designate the medication he needed–in this case, an addictive, dangerous, sometimes lethal (200 deaths reported to FDA-Medwatch, 1990-2000) medication–Ritalin.

“When Diane, the natural, legal, mother rejected their diagnosis and treatment, they called in Child Protective Services, pronounced her ‘negligent;’ by order of the juvenile court made Vincent a ward of the State of California (case # JD 1110); institutionalized, diagnosed, and drugged him. Vincent was six years old, and, up to that point, healthy and normal.

“Vincent was held at the Eastfield Ming Quong, a locked, children’s holding facility at one time used to force social services on California’s Chinese immigrant children. Placed on Ritalin, Vincent developed tics–involuntary movements–a complication of Ritalin, never witnessed previously [in him]. He also had bruises and bumps–signs of physical abuse [suffered during incarceration].

“Diane complained, but to no avail. Next, she took matters into her own hands. In desperation, and at her son’s request, she fled to Canada with him on July 5, 2000, and applied for refugee status. Two months later the FBI apprehended them in British Columbia and tore Vincent from her side while he screamed for help that his mother wasn’t allowed to give him.

“For the past 2 ½ years Vincent has been a child of the State of California, held at the Eastfield Ming Quong, getting treatment for the multiple “diseases” psychiatry says he has with the multiple drugs psychiatry says he needs.

“Throughout the 2 ½ years no member of Diane’s family was allowed to have contact with Vincent, and Diane remained a fugitive until she tired of life on the run and turned herself in to authorities in Okanagan, Washington, in January, 2003.

“Diane has since been extradited to Santa Clara County where she has been unable to make bail and remains incarcerated at the (Diane Booth, BOOKING# 03007942, PFN# DPN183, P.O. Box 60910) Elmwood Correctional Center for Women, MILPITAS, CA 95036. While the FBI has seen fit to drop all charges against her, Santa Clara County, not wishing to be charged themselves, still presses felony, child endangerment and child stealing charges against her, that could result in up to 8 years in prison–all of it, mind you, for loving her only child, her normal son, Vincent.

“Diane began to correspond with me through my web site adhdfraud.com about two years ago when she was still in Canada, seeking refugee status there. Based on her description of events (a scenario repeated in every school, in every state, every single day) and medical records, there is no doubt that Vincent was a medically, neurologically normal child at the time psychiatric diagnosing and labeling began, and until the always-injurious, psychiatric drugging began. Vincent’s psychiatric incarceration, ordered by his new “parent,” Judge Leonard P. Edwards (parens patriae), assured it would always be thus.

“In the summer of 2002…Vincent was administered multiple psychiatric medications…each known to [be] brain damaging, none known to target a proven brain abnormality/disease.. They were Buspar, Zoloft and Risperdal, an antipsychotic–an especially potent brain poison. As of June, 2002 Vincent was said to display ‘tics (probably a persisting side effect of Ritalin, but Risperdal commonly causes involuntary movements, as well, known as tardive dyskinesia) severe anxiety, fearfulness, impulsivity, hyper-vigilance, poor adult-child relationships, tantrums and aggression toward staff and peers.’

“More worrisome by far, a case manager wrote: ‘Vincent is socially immature and often functions in a regressed, primitive, unsociable manner, sometimes at a 2 or 3 year level.’

“What if Vincent had been normal and free, living in the protective, loving care of his natural mother, Diane. What if he had been allowed to be the normal child he was, not imprisoned and drugged–a psychiatric patient-in-perpetuity?

“…Every American should know about the Diane Booth case, because, believe it or not, it is happening all over the country, in every school district, every day. In most instances, the coercion works; the insistence that the Ritalin is necessary, that your child can’t function without it–this ‘chemical balancer’ for his ‘chemical imbalance.’ I hear from parents hounded at work, hounded at home, evenings, threatened by the CPS-turned-Gestapo leaving no doubt of your negligence, no doubt juvenile court is the next stop.

“And yes, Diane was a single parent, but a good parent, and she was at her best loving and protecting her son, standing on her common sense. However psychiatry needed her son, not to help him, but, regardless of him, to make him a profit-point; to make him a life-long profit-point, and that is exactly what they will do to Vincent and to any child anywhere, in any US public school, and you-Mother and Father in the USA, you had better wake up to the fact that today it is Diane Booth, tomorrow it can be you, your child, grandchild, niece, nephew, for they find psychiatric ‘diseases’ in each and every child, normal or not.

“Lest you think I am some ranting fool, consider this from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health in Washington, DC [Practice Trends, Clinical Psychiatric News, May 2000, page 49.] Speaking of Vincent Booth, and millions like him across the country, they say:

End Baughman quote—

Well, taking the low figure of 2.1 million children, if that indeed represents diagnosed cases, it would mean the custody of roughly 400,000 children had been delivered over to the State.

Does this sound like freedom to you?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE FREE INDIVIDUAL

October 29, 2010.  As society and government and media produce more turmoil and junk information, it’s easier to forget there are first principles.  Well, most of the time, people can manage to forget first principles anyway.  Who needs them?  They just get in the way of a relatively smooth life, in which authentic thought plays a minor role.

One could say the prevailing philosophy is not to have a philosophy.  However, as it turns out, this takes more effort than one might suppose.  There is so much to forget, so much to ignore, so much to lay aside in a remote space in the cellar.

With the onset of a pseudo-philosophy called Pragmatism, designed for “the common man,” pundits declared they had found the key to America’s success.  Its citizens had unburdened themselves of all the unnecessary mental clap-trap that legislated against pure action.  Americans were stripped-down goal seekers. 

Of course, emptying the mind meant the founding principles of the republic went begging.  This was unfortunate collateral damage—but why worry about freedom when you were already acting on it, when you were already in the heat of the battle to bring the good life to fruition?

A specious argument—and we can see the results of it all around us. 

So let us return to principle…

The free individual is moral in the sense that he chooses—as seen through his own eyes—the highest work possible.  Therefore, he is not competing for a prize others seek.  He isn’t scrabbling for a fake pearl.  He isn’t contemplating crimes that will help him arrive at a destination before others can.    

And this notion of “the highest work possible” doesn’t involve leaving one’s desire behind, in order to become the servant of a cause.  One doesn’t suddenly develop an egoless and empty personality in order to “connect” with a goal that floats in a heavenly sector.

The psychology of the free individual is really no psychology at all.  It doesn’t hang on levers of past events.  It doesn’t depend on clandestine “negative motives.”

The free individual isn’t shaped.  He shapes. 

He doesn’t seek compromise.  He doesn’t begin with the possibility of public acceptance and rationalize his actions back from that hoped-for outcome. 

Meanwhile, the mob, the herd operates on debt, obligation, guilt, and the pretense of admiration.  These are its currencies.

The mob, while it seeks some reflection of its unformed desire, struggles to reach a group consensus that will construct a social order based on need—and that need will be supplied, through coercion if necessary, by those who already have More. 

This need, and the proposition that the mob deserves its satisfaction, creates a worldwide industry. 

Among the industry’s most passionate and venal supporters are those who, a priori, are quite certain that the human being is a tainted vile creature.  Such supporters, of course, are sensing their own reflections.

The great psychological factor in any life is THE DESERTION OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM.  Afterwards, the individual creates shadows and monsters and fears around that crossroad.  To vaporize them, he needs to choose his own freedom again.  That’s the long and short of it.

Freedom is the space and the setting, from which the individual can generate the thought and the energy- pulse of a great self-chosen objective. 

In that place, there is no crowding or oppressive necessity.  There is choice.  There is desire.  There is thought.

This was the starting point of the American Revolution.  It is still the starting point.

It doesn’t require consensus.  It doesn’t require legislation or any other form of permission.

“Being absorbed in a greater whole” isn’t an ambition or philosophical prospect for the free individual.  He sees that fixation as an abject surrender of self.

The Collective, whether envisioned as a down-to-earth or mystical group, promises a release from self.  This grand solution to problems is a ruse designed to keep humans in a herd. After all, how are you going to control and eventually enslave people if you promote the notion that each individual has freedom and free choice?  The abnegation of self is a workable tactic, as along as it is dressed up with false idols and perverted ideals.

The release from self is a fabrication.  At bottom, it is choosing another role in the play, the drama.  It is a character, called “non-self.”  It can be fleshed out and outfitted in a number of ways.

Traditionally, non-self envisions apocalyptic events that will change everything and bring ultimate rewards and/or punishments.  Non-self is wedded to “higher forces” because, since self has been rejected, there has to be a different causative principle. 

Self is fundamentally creative, dynamic, forward-looking, energetic, powerful, engaged.  The Collective looks for those qualities in the government as its source of survival.  In turn, the government takes whatever it can from the free individual, to supply the needs of the Collective.

This arrangement is a diminishing vortex that, in time, approaches zero output, like an engine running out of fuel.

But the free individual goes on.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

NICE GUYS FINISH LAST

AND THEN THEY WHINE

OCTOBER 22, 2010.  I’m going to say this as plainly as I can.  The American social and political attitude has a title: NICE, FRIENDLY, HAPPY, GENEROUS.  It’s a fake layer of baloney.  And it’s been encouraged and massaged and promoted, for a long time, for a particular purpose:

TO MAKE AMERICANS FEEL THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO HELP EVERY HUMAN FROM THE NORTH TO THE SOUTH POLE—AND IN THE PROCESS, ENTANGLE AMERICA IN ENDLESS FOREIGN ALLIANCES AND WARS THAT, FINALLY, WILL DESTROY AMERICA.

Every American is supposed to know that George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned about these entangling alliances.  He saw the future.  He saw that it would be all too easy to get wrapped up and strangled in such “friendships.”

And he was right.  This is where we are.  This is the insanity.

And these days, there is so much NICE and so much FRIENDLY going around, we are supposed to slide down the drain with a big fat grin on our faces.

Here is just a partial list of our obligations that spring from some crack-brained sense of GOOD WILL:

WE’RE THE SAVIORS OF ISRAEL.

WE’RE THE DEFENDERS OF ISLAM.

WE’RE THE ALLY OF PAKISTAN.

ENGLAND IS OUR GREATEST FRIEND.

WE LOVE ALL THE VILLAGERS IN AFGHANISTAN.

WE’LL NEGOTIATE WITH THE TALIBAN IN GOOD FAITH AND THEY’LL RESPOND IN GOOD FAITH.

WE’RE DEMOCRATIC BROTHERS WITH INDIA.

WE’RE HAPPY TO SUSTAIN A MONSTROUS TRADE IMBALANCE WITH CHINA.

ANYONE WHO WANTS TO COME TO AMERICA AND LIVE HERE IS WELCOMED WITH OPEN ARMS.

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE ALREADY ENTERED ILLEGALLY, WE’LL GLADLY EXTEND AMNESTY.  BECAUSE WE’RE NICE.

WE’LL SAVE THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF AFRICA FROM DEVASTATION.  NICE.

WE’LL UNSEAT SADDAM AND BUILD A DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ.

WE’LL CONTINUE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM IN FORMER YUGOSLAVIA AND KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON SOMALIA.

WE’LL FUND THE UN AND LEAD NATO.

WE’LL HELP DEFEND SOUTH KOREA.

WE’LL BOW DOWN TO THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY AND SUPPLY THEM WITH ENDLESS WEAPONS.

WE’LL SUPPLY HOTEL SUITES IN NEW YORK TO THE PRESIDENT OF IRAN SO HE CAN ADDRESS THE UN AND INDICATE OUR END IS NEAR.

WE’LL OPEN THE DOOR TO RUSSIAN GANGS.

IN A GRAND GESTURE OF FRIENDSHIP TO 225 OTHER COUNTRIES, WE’LL RE-BRAND OURSELVES AS A “MULTI-CULTURAL SOCIETY.”

IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVERY ATTEMPTED TERRORIST ACT ON OUR SOIL, WE’LL REFRAIN FROM OFFENDING “OUR FRIENDS” BY MENTIONING THE WORD “ISLAMIC.”

WE’LL PUT THE AMERICAN DOLLAR IN THE SAME BOAT WITH EVERY OTHER CURRENCY IN THE WORLD, AND SURF THE MONSOON SEAS, AND TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES.

Yes, and we’ll do all these things at the same time.  We’ll juggle all the balls at once.  We’ll save the world.

We’ll smile and be nice and friendly, too, because that’s what it’s all about.

And just in case you thought I’d forgotten about that other big smile that means, “I’m going to screw you in the next two seconds,” here is the other side of the coin—still sticking to the theme of our foreign obligations:    

WE’LL EXPORT AND DONATE TONS OF TOXIC PHARMACEUTICALS TO THIRD WORLD NATIONS AND DECIMATE PEOPLE THERE.

WE’LL GLADLY SEND OUR MEGA-CORPORATIONS INTO FOREIGN LANDS, TAKE OVER MAJOR RESOURCES, AND PROTECT OUR INTERESTS WITH MILITARY AND INTELLIGENCE ASSETS.

WE’LL USE THE IMF TO BANKRUPT FOREIGN NATIONS AND PUT THEM UNDER ECONOMIC CONTROL.

WE’LL SUPPORT HORRENDOUS DICTATORSHIPS BECAUSE IT’S GOOD FOR BUSINESS.

US foreign policy.  All in all, a wonder to behold.

Makes you re-evaluate the word ISOLATIONISM.  As well you should.   

You see, all this generosity and “hands across the water” and “let’s all get together” and “happy-happy” and “save all the victims” is a straight-out con.

You want to know how you help people?  You become as free and strong as you can, as a nation.  As self-sufficient and un-meddling as you can, as un-devious and un-slimy as you can. No foreign alliances or agreements.  No interventions.  No aid.  No free trade.  No exploitation.  No foreign adventurism.      

You build a REAL shining hill AT HOME based in individual liberty—with many, many, many free and powerful and prosperous citizens—and THEN you tell your neighbor countries: “You like this?  If you want it, we’ll show you how.  No strings.  It’s your house.  It’s up to you.  This isn’t a gift.  We can’t give it you like a stack of money.  You’ll get no aid from us.  Doesn’t work that way.  Can’t work that way.  You have to win it on your own.”

A lot of people don’t like that.  It sounds too harsh.  They want to stand in a big circle and give away everything to everybody and watch everybody magically go broke and then they want to whine.  That feels better.  That feels more religious.  That feels more moral.  That feels kinder and gentler.

Let me know how it works out.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

JUAN WILLIAMS FIRED BY NPR

BACK STORY

OCTOBER 21, 2010.  Juan Williams, whom I personally find to be an annoying defender of the Left—but whom conservatives generally like as “a good guy”—gets himself canned by National Public Radio.

Why?  He told FOX’s Bill O’Reilly he’d become nervous and worried if he boarded a plane and saw a Muslim in garb getting on the same plane.  Zang!  Juan is out at NPR.

“…remarks inconsistent with our policy of blah-blah…”

So I started thinking about NPR.  Haven’t listened to it in many years.  Hated All Things Considered and other smarmy precious shows there.

Remind me again?  Why does NPR exist on tax money?  Why is the government permitted to fund a radio network?

The government believes all other radio is deficient and the public deserves to hear “serious programming?”  Is that it?

And therefore, the government (taxpayer) will solve this problem and pick up the tab?

Following that logic, why doesn’t the federal government move into publishing novels, producing feature films, offering men a superior brand of condom?

How about government newspapers?  That industry is dying.  Don’t we need another sober daily paper distributed out of Washington to the masses?  PBS does a nightly television newscast.  How would government publishing a newspaper be any different?

I’ve been, in my day, to a number of sketchy dentists.  Let’s have the government train and turn out Federal Dentists. 

Anyway, NPR, the network who fired Juan Williams, was founded in 1970 by a 1967 law, the Public Broadcasting Act.  When Lyndon Johnson signed the Bill he remarked:

“It [the Bill] announces to the world that our Nation wants more than just material wealth; our Nation wants more than a ‘chicken in every pot’. We in America have an appetite for excellence, too. While we work every day to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act…It will give a wider and, I think, stronger voice to educational radio and television by providing new funds for broadcast facilities. It will launch a major study of television’s use in the Nation’s classrooms and their potential use throughout the world. Finally — and most important — it builds a new institution: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.

My, my.  Most importantly it builds a CORPORATION.  A government corporation.  Now THAT has to be illegal.  And apparently I was right.  The president and Congress decided the USA had had enough of shoddy programming, and it was time to step into the breach and provide enrichment to the spirit—and make the citizens pay for it. 

I mean, lions chasing antelopes around on the plains of Africa, this year’s remembrance of Doo-Wop, some guy with long hair and a smile that would melt a Twinkie as he plays a violin in the Roman Coliseum—I’m dying for that kind of uplifting.

And a few times a year, NPR and PBS can reach into the pockets of viewers for contributions.  What beats that?

To round off this story nicely, the CEO of NPR, Vivian Schiller, released a statement after Juan was fired.  She claimed he wasn’t kicked out because he voiced an opinion about a Muslim on a plane, but because it’s NPR policy not to allow their news analysts to state personal opinions of any kind on any media at any time.  Such utterances would undermine their credibility as analysts.

Really?  Juan has been working double time as a FOX TV panelist since 1997, and has offered literally thousands of opinions on various issues.  NPR could have canned him easily, but they didn’t—until he wandered into politically incorrect territory yesterday.

For example, here’s something Juan said on FOX in 2009 that didn’t get him fired:

“Michelle Obama, you know, she’s got this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.  If she starts talking…her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim.  If that stuff starts coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross.”

So let’s see.  What’s the difference between Juan skewering the president’s wife and claiming he’d be nervous if he got on a plane with a Muslim in garb?

I believe we can peer into the fog and see a few priorities on the scale of taboos vis-à-vis the American Left. 

It also tells us something about why American feminist groups aren’t going all out in condemnation of women being stoned, beaten, and raped, girls being subjected to clitoral mutilation, and daughters being killed by their families for marrying non-Muslims. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon Rappoport article archive:

www.blog.nomorefakenews.com

THE RIGHT TO BE WRONG

OCTOBER 21, 2010.  Since individual freedom has become an endangered species, we need to look at the propaganda that continues to erode freedom.

In particular, we must understand that so-called science and scientific evidence are being used to propagate the view that those who hold “the truth” in their hands have the right to force everyone else to go along.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of medical practice.

Against the secret and concealed background of 106,000 annual deaths in America, as a result of the effects of pharmaceutical drugs, public health agencies continually tell us they know what’s best for our health.  Why?  Because they are relying on good science about disease, diagnosis, and treatment.

We, the great unwashed public, know nothing.  We couldn’t know anything, because we haven’t done the research, we haven’t read the studies, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the studies even if we could find them.

So, based on what science, precisely, do we get, as an outcome, 106,000 deaths in the US, every year, from the effects of government-approved medical drugs?

Reporters never pose that question to public health agencies.

The presumption is, if you know the truth, you have the right to force people to toe the line of that truth.  In other words, they have no right to be wrong.

“We’re the experts.  We just diagnosed you with RFTYX-45, a dangerous condition that could result in the disintegration of your spleen and liver.  We’ve written the prescription for AbbaDabba, the only drug that could reverse this condition.  You’re refusing the drug, and you’re opting, instead, to drink a tea made from dirt.  You’re obviously insane.”

Does the patient have the right to eat dirt?

Let’s make it more severe.  Does the patient have the right to chew tobacco to cure his illness? 

Does the patient have the right to stand on his head in a snowstorm, naked, to cure his illness?

Does he have the right to lean up against a liquor store window and chant verses of regulations from the alcohol control board manual, in order to heal himself?

Does he have the right to sleep in a garbage bin for a month to cure himself?

Does he have the right to jump off a hundred-foot cliff to rid himself of his illness?

And the answer is yes.  He has that right.  He is free to choose.

It’s not a question of who has the best science, or who can present the best lies about having science.  That question, when it comes right down to it, is irrelevant. 

We have to understand this.

On the other side of the coin, you see, is the proposition that the government exists to protect everybody, everywhere, all the time.  And when you choose to enter that door, you give up your freedom.

The entire “sympathy industry” is built to allow “the experts” to help victims by, in essence, telling them what they must do.  That industry was also built to promote the gooey idea of an eternally meddling community of concerned people who descend on the rest of us, and advise us about our choices…

There are many reasons for freedom, and one of them is: you ultimately follow your own counsel and judgment, and you accept the consequences.  You don’t just do this once, you do it all your life.  It’s a road you walk. 

If the vast social and political agenda aimed at coercing people into “accepting help” wins out, freedom is gone.

We have been taught that every weird action a person takes, every strange choice he makes, every odd idea he voices has an explanation…and if we can dig up that explanation, we will understand how and why the person departed from the group and the norm and the acceptable path.  And then we can place a label on the person.  We can decide “he needs help.” 

This approach has been taken to such an extreme that many of us no longer really believe in that person’s freedom.  Instead, we think he is simply a slave to some distorted inner impulse, and we should do what we can to root out that impulse and return the person to sanity.

On this battlefield, freedom becomes the casualty and the sacrifice.  But of course we don’t recognize this.  We’re so busy trying to fix and patch and rebuild, we lose the thread.

Government does the same thing, except its attitude is cynical and manipulative.  Its day of paradise will come when the entire population is convinced that endless official help is necessary for survival.  Then the beneficent authority can carve up the human psyche into regions that respond to the stimulation of “gifts.”

Freedom and choice will become relics of a long-gone past.

“Oh, yes.  That dinosaur came and went.  Now we have share and care.  We’re really human in this day and age.  And we have the science to prove it.  Have you seen the recent study that was published by…?”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE THIRD CHOICE

October 23, 2010.  I guess we have to jump right into this question—are there ANY politicians in Washington who are honest, honorable, balls-to-the-wall Constitutionalists? 

Are there two?  Three?  Twelve?  Fifty?  A Hundred?

And don’t bother to get back to me with the name of Ron Paul, because that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m talking about the question of whether there are ENOUGH Constitutionalists in the Congress after the election to turn things around.  You know, turn the big oil tanker around.  Turn Washington around.  Because the label “Republican” certainly doesn’t do the job.

Individual freedom from government is the keystone of the Constitution.  That means, among other things, the government has no right to tax citizens to an excessive degree.  It also means government cannot continue to draft enormous budgets just because it decides “lots of people need government help.”

It means government cannot force citizens to buy a product—such as health insurance.

Government cannot rubber stamp a brand of fallacious science called “manmade global warming” and then impose cap and trade and massive lowering of industrial output.

Government cannot demand that companies that manufacture and sell harmless health remedies stop selling them because, in its estimation, such products might sway people away from “real medicines.”  Every person can decide how to take care of his/her own health and body—with absolutely no government interference.

Governments cannot permit corporations that do, in fact, produce and sell demonstrably injurious products to avoid severe punishment.

This is just an introductory short list that revolves around the principle of individual freedom—and so I ask you, how many members of Congress, after the election, will do their best to assure these freedoms are protected?

Because this is what we are dealing with: the freedom of the individual from government authority, the sufficient freedom to make a very wide range of choices in life.

In this regard, both major political parties are deficient and corrupt.  Any attempt to exonerate one party at the expense of the other, is undertaken blindly, or with the intent to deceive.

Politically and economically, we live in a very complex jungle of corruption, and the North Star to find out way back to sanity is the rediscovered principle of individual liberty.

Under the cynical cover of “an evolving Constitution,” the government of the United States has become an elitist, crony-packed, giveaway machine that takes wealth from citizens and delivers it to other citizens (and non-citizens).  In the process, a favored few make titanic profit. 

Whether you are talking about the bosses of the Republican or Democratic parties, you are looking at people who have no intention of giving up their inside positions as “benefactors of the people.”

The current sporadic debate about whether the US government has become a socialist entity is a joke.  A combination of socialism and state corporatism has been operating for a very long time, and although the current Washington administration has upped the ante, we have been un-Constitutional for decades and decades. 

Part of this criminal political program has depended on searching out, inventing, finding group after group that deserves special treatment by the government—sometimes on the basis that the group has been ill-treated in the past.  This operation features a principle that was never delivered in the Constitution: the enforced gift of “equality” substituted for “equal protection under the law.”  Apparently, most people are too ignorant to make the distinction between the uses of “equal” in those two very different scenarios.

In the former case, the word, when it is unburdened, means wealth redistribution.  Some presidents have followed this path with passive acceptance; others have tried to position themselves as prophets of a new Age. 

The essence of “share and care” injected into official policy has had, all along, an ulterior motive: the creation of larger and larger groups that depend on government for their survival, in order to exert top-down control over populations.  In other words, the notion of altruism, a potent idea, has been co-opted to permit elites to run the people of nations.  It worked with organized religions.  It would work with governments—and so it has. 

As a result, we have seen such a twisting of human psychology that the day is approaching when, armed to the teeth, an invading force at our shores—if they whined and complained enough about discrimination and prejudice and disrespect—would be welcomed in with open arms and given the largest free lunch possible by the federal government. 

When George Washington departed the scene at the end of his presidency, his warning about entangling foreign alliances was more than a casual criticism.  It was a prediction, and it has been borne out.  Through military-industrial-corporate-government-missionary allegiances, America was recreated as an empire.  It defaulted on its premise as a republic.  Rather than sticking close to the principle of individual freedom, individual power, and self-sufficiency, rather than becoming a shining example to the whole world in that regard, an example that could be emulated, it entered into the meddling game that has derailed every nation in the history of the planet.

And now we have internationalism and the global village and inter-dependency, concepts that are hawked and sold in every boardroom from Tierra Del Fuego to the North Pole.  It’s worth noting that this “new paradigm” is boosted to replace the principle of individual freedom and self-sufficiency.

Money itself, through powerful banks and their partner governments, has gone global.  Among other features of this designed corruption, American money can no longer operate independently of other currencies.  We all sink or swim in the same stench-ridden pool.

From the dawn of time on this planet, the LEADER has been faced with the same basic choices.  He can take his people into what amounts to a criminal existence, he can descend to the level of the mob, or he can stand clear of all this as a free man.  Rarely has the third choice been made.  It was made, to an extraordinary degree, with the founding of the American Republic.  That republic was never perfect.  The men who wrote and drafted its documents were no angels.  But they showed a path to something great.

That something has been pilloried, whenever possible, as isolationism, a term so heinous that no politician wants to be painted with it.  But, beneath the Constitution, what is now called isolationism was SELF-SUFFICIENCY.  There were enough human and material resources here to allow us to live out individual freedom and, in the process, build a nation that did not need foreign partners—and the full range of machinations and insidious activities that went with such alliances.

Who knows what innovations would have been made in order to bring that dream of national self-sufficency to fruition?  It’s a path that history didn’t take.

If it had, the people and government of the United States could have said to every people and government on Earth: “Here we are.  This is what we have done.  We owe you nothing.  We are free.  If you want to try the experiment for yourselves, we will offer you the necessary record of what we did.  The rest is up to you.”

Instead, our leaders and elites opted for internartional entanglements and the gradual surrender of our own liberty.  Of what use is that?  What kindness does that represent?

Do you stand above the crowd and offer them the lessons of your hard-won freedom and liberty, or do you sink down into the morass in order to be “more human?” 

Do you wrap their chains around your own neck, as a sacrifice to their primacy, or do you shrug off every tainted attempt to drag you down? 

Do you act out a life in which the dead-end dreams of the mob become your ticket to power over them, or you find a lucid place that is your own?

This is the story and fable of our time.  If we pretend that the mere exchange of the name of one political party for another is the grand solution, we are fools of the highest order.

But we are capable of discovering those who truly want freedom, who know what it means.

There is no telling what we can still do, even at this late date.  The middle ground of relative comfort and the vague misery of unfulfilled promise don’t have to be our fate.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com