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Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky Rules

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Creating Meaningful Social Change | Open Culture

by Josh Jones

Saul David Alinsky died 36 years before the election of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s first attempt for the presidency.

But many feverish reporters on social media, talk radio, and YouTube might have made one think he lurked behind these politicians like Rasputin. Spoken of by many on the right as a servant of the devil, “American Joseph Goebbels,” and “dangerous harbinger of insurrection,” Alinsky developed a reputation for insidiousness that may exceed his influence, considerable though it may be.

Alinsky’s 1971 manual of political warfare found its way into the hands of some of the same Tea Party organizers who had made his name synonymous with everything they despised about the left.

But Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals for his followers. From the 30s to the 70s, he organized poor, working people in Chicago and other cities and addressed countercultural and civil rights activists nationwide. The opening paragraph of the book makes it perfectly clear who his readers are:

What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelliwas an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political work “The Prince”, written in about 1513 but not published until 1532.

Machiavelli believed that public and private morality had to be understood as two different things in order to rule well. As a result, a ruler must be concerned not only with reputation, but also must be positively willing to act unscrupulously at the right times.

In other words, “The end justifies the means”

Alinsky’s reference to Machiavelli sets readers up for a high degree of ruthlessness and realpolitik, and the book does not disappoint.

If you’re looking for Anarchist Cookbook-level radicalism, you’d best look elsewhere. While Alinsky talked tough, in an honest Chicago way, he did not recommend violence in his manual.

In the Prologue, he denounces “parts of the far left who have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.” In recent revolutionary violence, he writes, “we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

Rules for Radicals recommends mostly working within the system—though in the twisted way Machiavelli is reputed to have done.

Alinsky’s list of 13 “Rules for Radicals,” offered with his limitation that political activism cannot be a self-serving enterprise: “People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.”

Here are his rules:

Power is not what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have” Power is derived from 2 main sources- money and people.” Have Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.

7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.

8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.

13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky’s rules can and have been used for anti-democratic designs. But he defines the U.S. as a “society predicated on voluntarism.”

His vision of democracy leans heavily on that of the keen outside observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher who “gravely warned,” writes Alinsky, “that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/democrats_believe_projection_plus_gaslighting_equals_victoryand_they_may_be_correct_in_that_assessment.html

By Eric Utter

Democrats believe projection plus gaslighting equals victory…and they may be correct in that assessment

What is Gaslighting? It is the psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.

So, let’s look at how one of Alinsky’s rules is being used by the Democratic Party.

Current Democratic Strategy: “We tell them that Republicans are semi-fascist authoritarians bent on destroying Democrats…and our nation. And that they are a ‘threat to our democracy.'”.

Alinsky’s applicable rules:

5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

Don’t believe me? Here is a direct quote from President Bidens speech on September 1, 2022:

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. …

But there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country. …

And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election, and they’re working right now as I speak in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.”

Want another example?

President Biden recently said there was “zero inflation” in July just hours after federal Consumer Price Index data showed an inordinately high annual inflation rate of 8.5%. The economy is doing great!

How about another.

The summer long riots of 2020 were “mostly peaceful.” (Don’t pay any attention to the looted stores, the burning buildings and police cars, or the innocent people being assaulted.)

“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.

Finally, one more.

January 6 was an insurrection and a catastrophe on the order of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, or the Civil War.

8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

Don’t you understand yet? You didn’t see what you saw, didn’t hear what you heard. And you shouldn’t believe what you believe.

You are an extremist, a semi-fascist, a terrorist, a threat to our democracy…and freedom everywhere..

Biden and his bunch have essentially decriminalized crime — and criminalized conservatism, traditional Christianity, and the founding values and principles of the nation they lead. It is they who have launched attacks on everything American, attacks on language, attacks on morality.

As President Trump has noted, it is an attack on you. It is an attack on me. And anyone with whom they disagree.

Ultimately, it is an attack on reality itself.

Biden and his party are following the teachings of Saul Alinsky.

Pay attention America, before it is too late.

Renaming our Military Bases

https://www.foxnews.com/us/defense-secretary-orders-renaming-military-bases-assets-honoring-confederacy

By Sarah Rumpf | Fox News

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday signed off on an independent commission’s recommendations to remove from U.S. military facilities, “all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederacy.”

“The installations and facilities that our Department operates are more than vital national security assets. They are also powerful public symbols of our military, and of course, they are the places where our Service members and their families work and live.” Austin wrote in a memo to senior officials on Friday.

“The names of these installations and facilities should inspire all those who call them home, fully reflect the history and the values of the United States, and commemorate the best of the republic that we are all sworn to protect.”

So, beginning on Dec. 18, 2022, the Department of Defense will begin renaming bases across the country, including hundreds of streets, buildings and other assets.

Among the changes is the renaming of nine Army posts: Forts Benning and Gordon in Georgia; Forts Lee, A.P Hill and Pickett in Virginia; Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Rucker in Alabama, Fort Polk in Louisiana and Fort Hood in Texas.

According to the commission’s report, Fort Benning will be named Fort Moore; Fort Polk will be renamed Fort Johnson; Fort Bragg will become Fort Liberty; Fort Gordon will become Fort Eisenhower; Fort Hood will become Fort Cavazos; Fort Lee will become Fort Gregg-Adams; Fort Pickett will become Fort Barfoot; Fort Rucker will be renamed to Fort Novosel.

Navy ships USS Chancellorsville and USNS Maury will also be renamed. Carlos Del Toro, the secretary of the Navy, will decide on the new names.

The federally mandated Naming Committee estimated the undertaking to cost as much as $62.5 million, according to Stars and Stripes.

The Rush to Destroy the Past

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/the_rush_to_destroy_the_past.html

By Gary M. Collier

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, apparently is in favor of renaming military bases named for Confederates.

Gen. Milley may be intimately familiar with the history behind the names of all military posts in all of the branches of the services, and in the case of those named for people, their individual histories.

That would put him into a pretty exclusive category: most civilians in the states where such bases are located don’t know much about the people for whom bases are named, even those who work on them.

The same can probably be said for many, if not most, of the military members stationed there, though they have a much higher likelihood of knowing at least the person a base was named after.

I’m pretty sure that most members of Congress don’t know who the bases in their districts were named for, though they no doubt have staffers who do, or can find out quickly if needed.

Even among people who might know full names, they probably couldn’t tell you much about them, what war(s) they served in, or whose side they were on if they even guessed “Civil War” correctly. Until a few weeks ago, nobody cared a whole lot.

History is what happened. It isn’t judgment, it is a statement of fact about events that happened at a time and place, and participants in those events. People decide, often later and in a different context, how to interpret those facts, if need be, and if they so desire, to judge for themselves what the facts “mean.”

Denying them doesn’t change the events; trying to erase or bury them doesn’t either.

It simply means that other people no longer have access to the facts about those people, places, and things that shaped the history that is examined by others at a later time (because once an event has occurred, every examination of it happens later, and is colored by the perceptions of those who do the studying).

Whatever might be learned — good, bad or indifferent — is lost once references to the past are erased, and as historian George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (often quoted in different forms, which is quite ironic).

The most repressive regimes in history like to destroy the past, so that people have no basis to refer back to in order to see if history is repeating itself, for better or for worse.

If you don’t know any better — because there isn’t anything to remind you — then you are pretty much forced to play along with whatever the current regime tells you.

Orwell’s 1984 was nearly prophetic in our modern era, as the past is erased or constantly rewritten, and the only thing we have is the present.

Anyone who thinks differently is guilty of wrongthink, and thoughtcrimes are to be punished as severely as possible. It seems as if this is happening widely, swiftly, and alarmingly.

If we are going to get rid of all symbolism that doesn’t conform to the current dogma and judge all past actions of everybody by the feelings of the moment, we will destroy society. Statues are being torn down; flags banned; alternatives to the National Anthem actively sought; institutions shuttered or defunded, and critical voices effectively silenced. A generation ago — a decade ago, even less — this would have been unthinkable. Now, it is wrong not to agree with such thinking, and one criticizes it at one’s own peril.

If we are going to engage in the rename game to cleanse society of any reference to anything the thought police find objectionable, military bases will be joined by almost anything else that has a name. Watch out, Jefferson City, MO! How about Lincoln, NE, or Jackson, MS? And let’s not forget the most egregious of all: Washington, D.C. (for District of Columbia!), which is a double whammy. The list is not endless, but it is extensive.

What should be done with our nation’s capital? Rename it Floydsville, District of BLM? How about renaming all offensively named cities for martyrs of whatever the popular movement of the day is? And doing it every few years as certain movements fall out of favor and new ones arise?

We probably need to rename anything that smacks of cultural appropriation, so anything that carries a Native American or other indigenous people’s name must be renamed. Goodbye Kansas City Chiefs!

If people can no longer buy a house with a “master bedroom” or “master bathroom,” what new terms will people have to learn for most things that could possibly have any sort of objectionable connotation? Finally, what shall our country be called, because “America” cannot be allowed to remain?

I don’t know when, or if, any wisdom will prevail, and the insane rush to destroy the past in favor of an ever-shifting present will subside, but I fear what the aftermath will be in either case.

I fear for the future, because a future with no foundation in the past, however sordid or insufficient it was, is not a future where I will have a place.

July 25, 2020

Rep. Gohmert goes full Alinsky to make Democrats play by their own rules

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/rep_gohmert_goes_full_alinksy_to_make_democrats_play_by_their_rules.html

By Andrea Widburg

Democrats are dismantling anything in America that has ever been connected with slavery.

Statues are felled, school names are changed, and institutions are rebranded. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and others are gone because of their connection with enslaving blacks.

Rep. Louis Gohmert from Texas had been paying attention,and gotten the message. The new rule is that slavery, which ended in America over 150 years ago, is so wrong that anything associated with slavery must be banned.

On July 23, 2020, Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) introduced a Privileged Resolution calling upon Congress to ban any political organization or party that has ever held a public position supportive of slavery or the Confederate States of America.

It also calls for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to remove from the House wing of the U.S. Capitol or any House office building any item that names, symbolizes or mentions any political organization or party that supported slavery or the Confederacy.

Rep. Louie Gohmert released the following statement:

“As outlined in the resolution, a great portion of the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism and hatred. Since people are demanding we rid ourselves of the entities, symbols, and reminders of the repugnant aspects of our past, then the time has come for Democrats to acknowledge their party’s loathsome and bigoted past, and consider changing their party name to something that isn’t so blatantly and offensively tied to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and the Ku Klux Klan.

As the country watches violent leftists burn our cities, tear down our statues and call upon every school, military base and city street to be renamed, it is important to note that past atrocities these radicals claim to be so violently offensive were largely committed by members in good standing of the Democratic Party.

Whether it be supporting the most vile forms of racism or actively working against Civil Rights legislation, Democrats in this country perpetuated these abhorrent forms of discrimination and violence practically since their party’s inception.

To avoid triggering innocent bystanders by the racist past of the Democratic Party, I would suggest they change their name. That is the standard to which they are holding everyone else, so the name change needs to occur.”

Gohmert has mastered Saul Alinsky’s Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” (Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971)

The resolution opens by noting that the House has voted to remove all statues from the building honoring people who “served as an officer or voluntarily with the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a State while the State was in rebellion against the United States[.]”

The resolution continues by saying these statues were just adjuncts to the real horror in the House. Even with the statutes gone, the House continues to contain:

[T]he most ever-present historical stigma in the United States Capitol; that is the source that so fervently supported, condoned and fought for slavery was left untouched, without whom, the evil of slavery could never have continued as it did, to such extreme that it is necessary to address here in order for the U.S. House of Representatives to avoid degradation of historical fact and blatant hypocrisy for generations to come.

What is this obscenity that lives on despite the statue purge? It’s the Democrat party itself. Gohmert details the horrific sins that the Democrat party committed against African-Americans, beginning with its 1840 platform and continuing to the Democrats’ 75-day-long filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the way the party lionized Robert Byrd, a onetime KKK recruiter. The resolution also references:

the 1856 Democrat party platform saying that there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent either existing or new slave states;
the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850;
the 0% support Democrats gave to the 14th Amendment, giving slaves citizenship, and the 15th Amendment, giving them the right to vote;
the 1902 Virginia Constitution that disenfranchised 90% of black men and nearly half of all white men, effectively suppressing Republican voters;
the 1912 decision Democrat President Woodrow Wilson made to segregate U.S. government employees; and
the 1924 Democrat National Convention in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which cheerfully hosted a massive KKK presence.

Given all the historic wrongs associated with enslaving and oppressing blacks, the resolution concludes that it’s only right and proper to resolve as follows (emphasis added):

1. That the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall remove any item that names, symbolizes or mentions any political organization or party that has ever held a public position that supported slavery or the Confederacy, from any area within the House wing of the Capitol or any House office building, and shall donate any such item or symbol to the Library of Congress.

2. That any political organization or party that has ever held a public position that supported slavery or the Confederacy shall either change its name or be barred from participation in the House of Representatives.

Folks, Representative Gohmert’s resolution is probably the best argument I have heard yet for preserving our history.

If we are going to purge all the bad things mankind has ever done throughout history, then it must apply to all.

Do so, and there would be no history left.

Have they all forgotten the words, “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”?

North Korea and Japan

An independent kingdom for much of its long history, Korea was occupied by Japan beginning in 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War. A war which Russia lost.

Five years later, Japan formally annexed the entire peninsula.

Following World War II, with the Japanese loss, Korea was split with the northern half coming under Soviet-sponsored communist control. The southern half under US control.

On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south.

This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf.

It was also the first war in which the United Nations played a role. When asked to send military aid to South Korea,16 countries sent troops and 41 sent equipment or aid.

China fought on the side of North Korea, and the Soviet Union sent them military equipment.

So, as far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled, and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them.

Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III.

Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war. The Korean peninsula is still divided today.

Unlike World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War did not get much media attention in the United States. The most famous representation of the war in popular culture is the television series “M*A*S*H,” which was set in a field hospital in South Korea. The series ran from 1972 until 1983, and its final episode was the most-watched in television history.

The U.S. sent about 90% of the troops that were sent to aid South Korea and spent around $67 billion on the war.

The US casualty toll was reported as 54,246 and there are more than 7,800 American soldiers still unaccounted for from the Korean War.

There has never been a peace treaty, so technically, the Korean War has never ended.

After failing in the Korean War to conquer the US-backed Republic of Korea (ROK) by force in the southern portion of Korea, North Korea (DPRK), under its founder President KIM Il Sung, adopted a policy of isolationism as a check against outside influence.

North Korea demonized the US as the ultimate threat to the people of North Korea.

KIM Il Sung’s son, KIM Jong Il, was officially designated as his father’s successor in 1980, assuming a growing political and managerial role until the elder KIM’s death in 1994.

KIM Jong Un, the guy in power now, was publicly unveiled as his father’s successor in 2010.

After decades of economic mismanagement , North Korea has faced chronic food shortages. They simply cannot produce sufficient food to provide for their entire population, so they have to buy it.

North Korea has a population of 25,115,311 people.

Instead of buying food, Kim Jong Un has spent what little money they have on military-related items; long-range missile development; WMD programs including tests of nuclear devices in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017; and weaponry for their conventional armed forces.

This is the threat we now face.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/north-korea-flies-12-warplanes-near-south-korean-border-prompting-air-force-scramble

By Anders Hagstrom | Fox News

Twelve North Korean warplanes flew in formation near the South Korean border in a simulation of an air-to-ground attack just last week, prompting Seoul, South Korea, to scramble 30 fighter jets of its own.

The South Korean military says it detected eight fighter jets and four bombers in the North Korean formation. South Korea’s flight of 30 warplanes did not engage the sortie, however, and only guarded the country’s airspace. The flight is only the latest aggression to come from Kim Jong Un’s regime, which has launched numerous ballistic missiles in recent weeks.

North Korea also fired a pair of short-range missiles early last week in further response to joint military drills between the U.S. and South Korean militaries. The U.S. Navy has deployed the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier to the region to participate in exercises.

The North Korean missile launch launch flew more than 2,800 miles, the longest flight from a North Korean missile in months, according to White House National Security Council coordinator John Kirby. The U.S. was still assessing the flight information to determine what kind of missile the regime fired.

Now here is the big problem folks.

These missile launches show that North Korea has the ability to hit Tokyo Japan.

Yes, Tokyo. Now why is this a huge threat to the US?

The US and Japan are allies and we have a huge military presence in Japan.

Here is a little history.

https://www.usfj.mil/About-USFJ/

The U.S. – Japan Alliance is the cornerstone of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the Indo-Pacific region. USFJ manages the U.S. – Japan Alliance and is the focal point for planning, coordinating, and supporting U.S. defense issues in Japan.

USJF Mission

USFJ manages the U.S. – Japan Alliance and sets conditions within Japan to ensure U.S. service components maintain a lethal posture and readiness to support regional operations in steady state, crisis, and contingency and that bilateral mechanisms between the United States and Japan provide the ability to coordinate and synchronize actions in support of the U.S. – Japan Alliance.

Now think about that. The mission of our US forces in Japan extends far beyond just protecting Japan.

In the event that China decides to take Taiwan, the response from our military forces will be launched for our bases in Japan.

So now you can see why these missile launches are a tremendous threat, not only to Japan, but to our military and our allies in the area.

Vision statement of the USFJ

USFJ enables USINDOPACOM’s efforts to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific. U.S. force posture in Japan provides a ready and lethal capability that deters adversary aggression, protects the Homeland, aids in Japan’s defense, and enhances regional peace and security.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-japan-security-alliance

Council on Foreign Relations

By
Lindsay Maizland and Nathanael Cheng

The alliance began during the U.S. occupation after World War II. The United States pledged to defend Japan, which adopted a pacifist constitution, in exchange for maintaining a large military presence in the country.
There are more than eighty U.S. military facilities in Japan. More U.S. service members are permanently stationed in Japan than in any other foreign country.

Forged in the wake of World War II, the U.S.-Japan security alliance is as important as ever to both countries’ interests in Asia.

So, a little more history.

How did Japan and the United States become allies?

Signed in 1951 alongside the Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended World War II, the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty was a ten-year, renewable agreement that outlined how Japan, in light of its pacifist constitution, would allow U.S. forces to remain on its soil after Japan regained sovereignty.

This early pact fit together with the Yoshida Doctrine—a postwar strategy crafted by Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida that saw Japan rely on the United States for its security needs so the country could focus on rebuilding its economy.

At the time, the United States was keen on using the alliance to bolster its strategic presence in East Asia. It faced a divided Korean Peninsula in the wake of the Korean War and a Cold War climate in which the Chinese and Soviet militaries were expanding their breadth and capabilities.

In 1960, the U.S.-Japan agreement was revised, granting the United States the right to establish bases on the Japanese mainland in exchange for a commitment to defend Japan in the event of an attack. The bases gave the U.S. military its first permanent foothold in Asia. Years later, the United States sparked protest in Japan by using the bases to support combat operations during the Vietnam War.

In 1967, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato established the Three Non-Nuclear Principles—no possession, production, or introduction—in part to allay concerns that the nuclear arms on U.S. bases in Japan would expose the country to attacks. Since then, Japan has relied on the U.S. nuclear umbrella to deter potential aggressors.

U.S. military forces are dispersed among 85 facilities located on Honshu, Kyushu, and Okinawa. Total acreage of U.S. bases is approximately 77,000 acres. USFJ bases and facilities range in size from several thousand acre training areas to a single antenna site.

On mainland Japan, there are seven different bases/posts. Yokota and Misawa, representing the Air Force; Camp Zama, representing the Army; Iwakuni; the Marine Corps; and Yokosuka, Atsugi, and Sasebo, the Navy.

UNITED STATES ARMY JAPAN & I CORPS

U.S. Army, Japan, consists of about 2,000 soldiers and is charged, during peacetime, with operating port facilities and a series of logistics installations throughout Honshu and Okinawa.

III MARINE EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

III MEF, which is under the operational command of Marine Forces Pacific, are garrisoned primarily on Okinawa and Southern Honshu.

Marine Corps Installations Pacific provides oversight of Marine Corps installations in Hawaii, Japan and the Republic of Korea. Specifically in Japan, MCIPAC consists of two air stations and 10 camps/housing areas throughout Okinawa and mainland Japan.

The total number of Marines in Japan is approximately 18,000.

COMMANDER, NAVAL FORCES JAPAN

Commander, Naval Forces, Japan, consisting of about 6,000 personnel, is responsible for maintaining and operating the port facilities and providing base and logistic support for those surface, subsurface, aviation and amphibious elements of the U.S. Seventh Fleet that operate from Japan as part of the Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF).

COMMANDER, U.S. 7TH FLEET

U.S. Seventh Fleet, which is under the operation control of Commander, Pacific Fleet, has about 13,000 sailors, 18 ships, and 100 airplanes operating from Japan as part of the Forward Deployed Naval Forces.

5TH AIR FORCE

The Fifth Air Force supports the Defense of Japan, advances United States (US) interests, and promotes broader Asia-Pacific security and stability by advancing bilateral air, space, and cyberspace operations capability and interoperability, enabling United States Air Force (USAF) forces and capabilities in Japan, and rapidly responding.

Now I am sure we have missile defense systems protecting our bases in Japan.

However, if a conflict were to break out in the region between the US and our enemies there, you can see, as a military strategist, that Japan and our military bases there would be number one on the target list.

This, my friends, is the reason why the recent missile launches coming out of North Korea are of grave concern.

Protests in Russia, Iran, and China

The Christian Science Monitor By Ned Temko

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2022/0927/In-Russia-and-Iran-autocrats-face-rising-resistance

In Russia and Iran, autocrats face rising resistance

Popular unrest in Russia and Iran may not foreshadow the end of their governments, but it is a reminder that autocracies carry within them the seeds of their own destruction.

Neither Vladimir Putin nor Iran’s ruling ayatollahs are necessarily nearing a Berlin Wall moment.

But the fall of the wall will be on their minds and not only as a reminder that even the most harshly policed of dictatorships can crumble. They will find it hard to ignore the broader similarities between their dictatorships and the former East Germany – indeed among nearly all modern autocracies.

One parallel, above all: that the very same forces that allow dictatorships to survive also hold the seeds of their vulnerability and, potentially, their collapse.

Fear is a critical part of their staying power, fear of their determination to use whatever force is necessary to quash overt challenges.

When that is gone, Mr. Putin and the ayatollahs well know, it’s only a matter of time before they are, too.

That’s one reason for the violent crackdown on the protests gripping towns and cities across Iran in the past week, and Russia’s move to squelch resistance to Mr. Putin’s call-up of hundreds of thousands of men to bolster his dwindling invasion of Ukraine.

But another hallmark of dictatorships will haunt the rulers of Russia and Iran even more.

It’s the unspoken social contract that keeps the great majority of their citizens from contemplating open dissent, much less rebellion.

It rests not just on fear, but also on a trade-off with those in power, understood by both sides.

Yes, people say, we’ll stay out of politics, even if we don’t like living under your regime. But you have to give us a reason, and space, to stay out of the fray: a decent living and a fulfilling life for us and our families. (Sound familiar?)

Now folks, I have to ask the question, is our current administration facing the same predicament?

In other words: We don’t mess with you, if you don’t mess with us.

Think about it. Things seemed to work for the common folk here in America as long as the government fed and housed the poor, protected our borders, educated our children, kept our economy booming, and made sure we had energy resources to heat our homes and run our cars.

Here in the US, those social norms are falling apart.

The social contract in both Iran and Russia is unraveling as well.

In Iran, it’s because of the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She was rounded up by the “morality police” for wearing her mandated headscarf with insufficient modesty – a transgression that can mean something as minor as a few wisps of visible hair.

Within days, protests erupted not just in her own Kurdish region in northwestern Iran, but around the country. There have been other bursts of unrest before, in 2009 over the results of a rigged election, in 2017 over economic grievances, and in 2019 in response to a sudden hike in fuel prices.

But in both their reach and their roots, these protests are different. The women of Iran raised their voices first, but they’ve been joined by men. Ms. Amini’s fellow Kurds cried out first, but they’ve been joined by voices across Iran’s ethnic, social, and economic dividing lines.

I find it fascinating that the latest protest movement is led by the women of Iran. It is similar to what we saw when the soccer moms here finally realized what was being taught in our schools and brought our attention to things like CRT and the 1619 project.

In Iran, the “unspoken pact” that provides the ballast for dictatorships has been broken. Millions of women – as their brothers, fathers, husbands or partners also know – have been stopped by the morality police. What happened to Ms. Amini has personally touched them all.

In Russia, too, this unspoken pact is under strain – because of Mr. Putin’s response to his army’s forced retreat in Ukraine.

Until the draft announced last week, the great majority of Russians had found it possible to tune out the conflict. They were encouraged by Mr. Putin’s public fiction that it wasn’t a war at all, just a distant “special military operation.”

Again, look at the similarities here. Most Americans had no idea where Ukraine was before the outbreak of war, and sadly, could care less. That was of course, until we started spending billions of our tax dollars to support Ukraine.

Even that wasn’t enough to get most people’s attention. Then, all of a sudden, gas at your local gas station went through the roof.

Wait a minute, I thought we were energy independent?

No, no, you silly fools. According to President Biden, the cost has skyrocketed because of Putin’s war.

Are you starting to see the similarities? Just like in Russia and Iran, our government is slowly breaking our unspoken contract between “We the People” and the federal government.

Now back to Russia. Just like us, many young, urban Russians were upset by the invasion and its diplomatic consequences – the West’s imposition of isolating sanctions on their country.

Thousands had voted with their feet, leaving for other countries. A small, vocal minority inside Russia has been criticizing the war, despite increasingly harsh penalties.

But with the call-up of 300,000 men – and possibly many more – the situation has changed. Just as Ms. Amini’s arrest and death reached deeply into the lives of millions of Iranians, the mobilization has brought the war home for many more Russians. Made it real. Immediate.

Their protests have been fueled by the rapid, often haphazard way in which the draft is being implemented. It has reportedly swept up not just the young militarily-trained men Mr. Putin said would be called upon to serve. It has taken untrained civilians and older men, fathers and grandfathers.

Let me give you one more example of this worldwide unrest, currently taking place.

It is happening, in of all places, China.

As I have said, try as they might, the world’s dictators can never hide their fear of their own people. For all the bluster and displays of power, they panic at the sight of protests.

The Washington Post Editorial Board

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/china-mortgage-protests-government-response-democracy/

Hundreds of bank depositors in Henan province have been increasingly restless about their accounts being frozen, demanding that provincial authorities help recover savings from at least four small “village” banks.

Many small banks in recent years attempted to compete with larger institutions by offering higher interest rates and signing up depositors online from far and wide.

The four Henan banks stopped withdrawals April 18. The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission has said a major shareholder of the village banks, Henan New Fortune, was under investigation for financial crimes in the way it raised funds.

Unable to retrieve their money, depositors started to protest online and in person.

On May 23, protests broke out before security services stopped them. The leaders of China’s party-state system, obsessed with maintaining social “stability,” reacted with alarm.

In June, many jilted depositors from around the country planned to converge on the capital of Henan province, Zhengzhou, in hopes of getting their money back. But before they could travel, they were blocked by software that the government uses to control the spread of covid.

The green code on their phones turned red. They could not travel.

Then, on July 10, more protesters from around China came to Zhengzhou, this time with green health codes, and assembled in front of the branch office of the nation’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China.

They unfurled banners alleging corruption, including one in English that declared “No deposits. No human rights.” Another banner read, “The Chinese dreams of 400,000 depositors in Henan have been shattered.”

According to a report in The Post by Christian Shepherd and Pei-Lin Wu, the demonstrations were met by dozens of uniformed police officers as well as heavyset men mostly wearing white tops. The blue-shirted officers stood by as the burly men in white shirts attacked the crowd.

Protesters were dragged down a flight of steps before being carried away. Some were loaded onto buses, bruised from the clashes.

A parallel wave of protests has swelled in recent weeks among people who took out mortgages to pay for apartments that developers never finished. They are threatening a boycott.

According to Reuters, Chinese censors have been blocking protest messages online and deleting videos of demonstrations.

Just another day in the life of what China’s government boasts is a “democracy that works.” What does not work is freedom to speak, to assemble, to protest or to change the leadership.

Even something as straightforward as a legitimate protest over lost deposits ends with beatings, bruises and arrests.

The immediate response to the protests, in both Russia and Iran, has been the use of force. That may work, for the time being. Those in power, and their security forces, still seem ready and able to crack down.

Now, once again, I have to interject.

In Russia, Iran, and China, if you speak out against the government you are simply arrested and put away for life.

In extreme cases, that life comes to an end very quickly. You have no day in court. There is no jury of your peers. Your neighbors simply wake up one morning and ask, “I wonder what happened to Professor Pasley?”

But the current protests in Russia, Iran, and China are different. While they may not bring either the Russian, Iranian, or Chinese regimes to their end, they should not be ignored.

For while the demise of a dictator’s rule can be long, twisting, and ultimately unpredictable, the final chapter, when it comes, comes quickly.

Are the protests we are seeing in the world todaya sign of history repeating itself?

Is a regime change coming in the near future for all of the countries we have talked about today, including the US?

Charter Schools vs. Public Schools

In the 2nd century A.D., Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius penned a series of personal writings and reflections known today as “Meditations.” In Book 1, the emperor shares some of his debts and lessons learned, and offers a glimpse at his experiences as a student. Even then, from the sound of it, we were still letting schools get in the way of our children’s educations.

From his great-grandfather, Catilus Severus, Aurelius learned “to avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.” And that was 1,800 years ago. The more things change…

The Federalist

Democrats’ War On Charter Schools Is Sending Families Into The Arms Of Republicans

BY: JENNIFER STEFANO

SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/23/democrats-war-on-charter-schools-is-sending-families-into-the-arms-of-republicans/

Democrats’ war on education opportunity is hurting them in public opinion, and it will hurt them in November.

There’s a war brewing in education — and this time, it’s not just against traditional public school parents. That fight hasn’t gone anywhere. Parents still must advocate for a say in what their kids are taught within the confines of district schools across the nation, but leftists have staked out a new enemy in recent months: charter schools.

Democrats declaring war on charters is particularly sinister considering the majority demographics these schools serve are low-income and minority students. These students often flee to charter schools because their normal district schools — the schools assigned based on zip code alone — are unsafe, failing, or both.

Nationwide, nearly 70 percent of the 3.5 million students served by charters are minority students, while two-thirds are low-income. In places like Philadelphia, more than 60 percent of the enrollment in charter schools are black children, as opposed to less than 50 percent in the district’s traditional schools. This was news to me.

Parents have made a clear choice to provide a better, safer future for their children, but too often, Democrats do not respect their decisions. And now, the opportunity to even make that decision is being threatened.

Consider Philadelphia, where the city’s school board hasn’t approved a new charter school since it took over charter authorizations. 85 percent of the charters closed by the Philadelphia School District since 2010 were led by people of color, including two schools that the district voted to close in June.

In Pennsylvania, 78 percent of eighth-grade students are not proficient in math and 47 percent are not proficient in language arts. Yet no one is demanding the closure of these schools; instead, government union executives are demanding more tax dollars to “fix” the problem. But more money won’t fix a systemic problem.

This isn’t isolated to Pennsylvania. Instead, it’s a nationwide coordinated attack by progressives — which includes the Democrat-funded teachers unions — to further limit competition in education at the expense of student outcomes.

Despite enrollment in charter schools increasing by nearly a quarter-million students in 2020-21, the Biden administration continues to fight the will of parents at every turn, most recently by slapping regulations on how charters qualify for federal grants.

The new rules — which require applicants to prove a need and community support for the school, among other nonsensical oversteps, prove Democrats are more concerned with meeting the demands of government union executives than those of parents. It’s no wonder parents are shifting support to Republicans when it comes to education.

That’s according to a poll released by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), which specifically looked at likely voters in congressional battleground districts.

Another poll commissioned by the American Federation of Teachers — the second largest teachers’ union in the nation — found similar results: Voters have more confidence in Republicans to deal with education issues.

And they should. Republicans are putting parents back in the driver’s seat of their kids’ education, while Democrats kowtow to the government bureaucrats running taxpayer-funded education into the ground.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on increased school choice, and the 56 percent of parents who supported him — in a state that President Biden had won by 10 points just a year before — sent a clear message: We will vote for Republicans when they give us more control of our kids’ education.

It’s a similar story in Arizona, where Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed the single largest expansion of school choice in the nation.

Arizona’s “Empowerment Scholarship Account” (ESA) program gives families direct access to around $7,000 in state education funding to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, curriculum, and other approved expenses. Unlike previous programs that restricted scholarship eligibility to students from low-income families or with special needs, Arizona’s program now offers universal eligibility.

Fighting against the will of parents — especially when it comes to the future of their kids — is a losing message. Yet Democrats seem hell-bent on clinging to it as they fight the expansion of charter schools and other school measures at every turn.

It’s not difficult to see why when you examine the relationship between government unions and the Democratic Party.

The American Federation of Teachers, for example, spent almost $20 million for the 2020 election, with nearly all its political contributions going to Democrats and left-wing groups. For the current election cycle, government unions have already spent $13.6 million on politics, with 85 percent of their political action committee donations going to Democrats.

The result? Our kids are failing. Parents have limited options, and in some cases, no options at all. Increasingly, they distrust the political party that continues to take their options away.

7 Exciting Education Reform Ideas Republicans Need To Try

BY: JOY PULLMANN

Author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates.

APRIL 27, 2015

https://thefederalist.com/2015/04/27/7-exciting-education-reform-ideas-republicans-need-to-try/

Revive The Good Ideas Already

“Testing” and its supposed synonym, “accountability,” are just not getting the job done, and we’ve been trying this brand of government monopoly for nearly three decades now. Conservatives need new ideas—or, rather, to stop mucking about in bureaucracy maintenance and finally recover some old ideas about educating children that have excellent track records.

Here are a few ideas I gleaned from the article:

Explicit Test Opt Outs for Kids

Perhaps the number-one exciting thing in education right now is the unprecedented wave of parents defying federal testing mandates to sign their kids out of these tests this spring.

It’s a protest measure against both the Common Core, as these tests are the first iteration of its new annual nationwide tests, and against the mechanisms of power that sprung it on the people unannounced.

(SAT and ACT tests are no longer used for determining college scholarships.)

We’re talking hundreds of thousands of kids refusing these tests this spring, whereas before Common Core trial testing runs last year, perhaps a few hundred have ever done so in any given year. In New York alone, estimates of the number of test refusals put the number at 300,000 kids and counting—nearly a third of all kids tested in that state.

At its heart, the opt-out wave is about individualism versus collectivism. As hundreds of thousands of kids refuse tests, many local school officials have told families that they’re not allowed to customize a public-school education by refusing bits of it this way.

Enrolling in public schools is a package deal, they say. As one Ohio administrator told a parent, if you don’t like the tests, homeschool. Many others have forced these young conscientious objectors to “sit and stare” at the testing screen all day, doing nothing, while their classmates dutifully fill out the computerized bubbles. Others have threatened parents with holding their kids back a grade if they don’t take the tests.

Enough. Either parents run education, or the collective does. State and national lawmakers who support parents and individual rights should give everyone the explicit power to accept or reject these tests, and any other component of public schools they find objectionable.

From a Missouri middle school teacher to parents.

“I wanted to send you an email to let you know that today students received back 2 formative assessments and entered their data into their data trackers which are located within google classroom.

With the middle school’s switch from a traditional grading scale to Standards-Based Grading, this means that grades will no longer be reported to you on a 100-point scale, but rather based on specific Priority Standards students are working on, and their scale on a value from 1-4.

Since this is a new process for both students and teachers, I wanted to reach out and explain the first assessment pieces you will see entered into SIS and also on your student’s data tracker.

1. Collaborative Conversations:

For this formative assessment, the target score being assessed was a “2′ – acknowledging new information expressed by others. As we continue to work within this standard, upcoming assessments will build on the skills to work toward proficiency in the 3 and 4 categories.

2. Analyzing characters, setting, and plot – Literary Devices

For this formative assessment the target score being assessed was a “1” – could students identify the meaning of commonly used literary terms.

As we continue to work within this standard, upcoming assessments will build on the skills to work toward proficiency in the 2, 3, & 4 categories.

Some assessments in ELA may target specific score levels, and some assessments may include questions for which a student could express their thinking and understanding which could score across multiple point-level categories.

As teachers, we are learning the ins and outs of Standards-Based Grading and are trying to find the best and most efficient ways to communicate your student’s progress to you.”

Opt-Out for States

A corollary to the above is allowing states to tell the feds “Thanks, but no thanks” to the feds’ use of state tax dollars to bribe states into activities those same state taxpayers may not support. The provision would allow states to get their education dollars back as a block grant while opting out of federal strings, as long as they promise to adhere to civil-rights laws and improve education for poor kids.

The argument for this is simple, and data-driven: Federal mandates have done nothing to improve education for the past sixty years, even for poor and minority kids. Their central function has been impoverishing states and shackling teachers to pad bureaucrats’ butts.

Support Supply-Side Education

Merely creating some sort of “school choice” program is not enough to encourage new entrants. Most existing school-choice programs and the general education field itself is so regulated that new voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs mostly fill existing empty seats in existing private schools.

Instead, private investors should seed new schools with startup grants. States need to axe their regulatory thickets that are built for incumbents rather than new entrants—for example, state scholarship amounts are typically too low to pay for the majority of the cost a student brings to a school, so current private-school students effectively subsidize choice students.

Here’s another: schools typically can’t participate in school-choice programs unless they’re accredited, but accreditation requires three to six years of operation before schools can apply for it. which requires new private schools to cater to an entirely different clientele to get to the point where they can reach more and poorer kids, and families who take that leap with them are often disqualified from getting any scholarships once the school can accept them because many states bar existing private-school students from choice programs.

In other words, starting a private school is a catch-22. Charters have worked through these sorts of things, and states need to import some ideas like provisional accreditation into the private choice sector if they ever want to encourage a startup rather than an incumbent culture. That’s supposed to be a central justification for school choice, but programs labeled “school choice” almost entirely ignore this fundamental set of problems.

Deregulate Private Schools

A companion to the previous point is that states need to deregulate private schools. It’s not currently very well-known, but states micromanage private schools.

Some have curriculum mandates, most have teacher credential mandates (although research shows that traditional teaching credentials are an utter waste of time and mostly Progressive brainwashing), and almost all have accreditation mandates.

It’s not very well-known, but states micromanage private schools.

In the first place, there’s nearly no proof that the things accreditation requires improves school quality.

“Develop a school improvement plan that incorporates all stakeholders,” blah blah blah. “Develop a sustainability and inclusivity plan that incorporates the whole community with a special focus on minorities.” How about reading, writing and arithmetic instead?

In the second, as in higher education, using accreditation as a condition of allowing taxpayer funding corrupts the accreditation process. It gives accreditors power to tell schools, “Nice little Christian school you got there. Be a sad thing if you actually taught your religion’s sexual ethics and therefore lost your ability to accept taxpayer aid.” Accreditation needs to be entirely privatized for private schools. End of story.

Further, the federal government, in all its wisdom, provides funds to “help” private schools by giving their teachers the same crappy “training” that helps public-school teachers perform so well. That can go, too, thanks.

End the Teacher Education Monopoly

People. The research says certification doesn’t produce better teachers. That’s probably because teacher certification and teacher degree programs are more about Progressive indoctrination than about academics or effective teaching.

Mostly, we have no idea why effective teachers are effective. So,we can’t teach it. We can only open more opportunities for more people to try, and quickly cut the ones who don’t rise to the occasion.

We can also deregulate education in general, because the education culture of “Mother, may I?” turns off smart people who can make big payoffs in other fields by busting their butts against far less mindless opposition.

It also attracts people who care more about self-esteem and box-checking than they do concrete achievement. The best box-checkers get promoted to principal, then superintendent. Now you know why education is such a mess.

State-mandated teacher credentials will always be terrible because they create a monopoly for whomever issues the credentials.

The certifiers alone get to say who can teach, who can’t, and can charge would-be entrants.

I taught college level courses in American and European history for 27 years, and yet I am deemed unqualified to teach at the K thru 12 level in Missouri.

End Curriculum Monopolies

It was Progressives who came up with the idea to “standardize” education along the lines of the “scientific management” of big business.

They’ve brought this general principle into all of education, and it deforms curriculum under the guise of “education standards.”

These are mindbogglingly stupid, unintelligible, politically correct lists of state (and now national) mandates for what teachers must teach in each subject in each grade.

Yes, I know Republicans as well have been gung-ho about curricular central planning since before Reagan. But it doesn’t work.

Research shows education standards have nothing to do with student achievement. Again, that should be no surprise, because monopolies destroy quality.

They create a power center that naturally attracts special-interest groups, whose inevitable dominance erodes self-governance, thought, and language.

So, it’s time for state and federal lawmakers to get out of the curriculum business.

Now folks, don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor of public education just as Thomas Jefferson was.

However, I am opposed to what it has become.

The ideas presented today should be adopted by our public school system. Break free of federal and state regulations and mandates and return the education of our children to “We, the people”.

If that cannot be done, then we should push for totally independent charter schools, free of federal and state mandates, funded by our tax dollars, hiring our local teachers at a good wage, and working with them to set our own curricula for our kids.

It is called capitalism. If public schools won’t comply, let them compete.

The choice is theirs.

Singularity

The Guardian

Singularity: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

KB, you have an expertise in broadcasting, I have an expertise in history, what would happen if we could combine the knowledge we both have instantaneously?

FUTURISM

3. 3. 17 by ROEY TZEZANA

Singularity: Explain It to Me Like I’m 5-Years-Old

Here’s how to understand the merger of humans and robots.

/ Artificial Intelligence / Artificial Intelligence / Ray Kurzweil / Singularity

Here’s an experiment that fits all ages: approach your mother and father and ask them about that time before you were born, and whether they dared think at that time that one day everybody will post and share their images on a social network called “Facebook”.

Or that they will receive answers to every question from a mysterious entity called “Google”. Or enjoy the services of a digital adviser that guides you everywhere on the road.

The truth is that very few thought, in those olden days of yore, that technologies like supercomputers, wireless network or artificial intelligence would make their way to the general public in the future.

Even those who figured that these technologies would become cheaper and more widespread, failed in imagining the uses they will be put to, and how they would change society.

History is full of cases in which a new and groundbreaking technology, or a collection of such technologies, completely changes people’s lives.

The change is often so dramatic that people who’ve lived before the technological leap have a very hard time understanding how the subsequent generations think. To the people before the change, the new generation may as well be aliens in their way of thinking and seeing the world.

These kinds of dramatic shifts in thinking are called Singularity – a phrase that is originally derived from mathematics and describes a point which we are incapable of deciphering its exact properties. It’s that place where the equations basically go nuts and make no sense any longer.

The singularity has risen to fame in the last two decades largely because of two thinkers. The first is the scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who wrote in 1993 that –

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

The other prominent prophet of the Singularity is Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil basically agrees with Vinge but believes the later has been too optimistic in his view of technological progress.

Kurzweil believes that by the year 2045 we will experience the greatest technological singularity in the history of mankind: the kind that could, in just a few years, overturn the institutes and pillars of society and completely change the way we view ourselves as human beings.

Just like Vinge, Kurzweil believes that we’ll get to the Singularity by creating a super-human artificial intelligence (AI). An AI of that level could conceive of ideas that no human being has thought about in the past and will invent technological tools that will be more sophisticated and advanced than anything we have today.

Since one of the roles of this AI would be to improve itself and perform better, it seems obvious that once we have a super-intelligent AI, it will be able to create a better version of itself.

And guess what the new generation of AI would then do? That’s right – improve itself even further.

This kind of a race would lead to an intelligence explosion and will leave old poor us – simple, biological machines that we are – far behind.

If this notion scares you, you’re in good company. A few of the most widely regarded scientists, thinkers and inventors, like Steven Hawking and Elon Musk, have already expressed their concerns that super-intelligent AI could escape our control and move against us.

Others focus on the great opportunities that such a singularity holds for us. They believe that a super-intelligent AI, if kept on a tight leash, could analyze and expose many of the wonders of the world for us.

Einstein, after all, was a remarkable genius who has revolutionized our understanding of physics. Well, how would the world change if we enjoyed tens, hundreds and millions of ‘Einsteins’ that could analyze every problem and find a solution for it?

Similarly, how would things look like if each of us could enjoy his very own “Doctor House”, that constantly analyzed our medical state and provided ongoing recommendations?

And which new ideas and revelations would those super-intelligences come up with, when they go over humanity’s history and holy books?

Already we see how AI is starting to change the ways in which we think about ourselves. The computer “Deep Blue” managed to beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997.

Today, after nearly twenty years of further development, human chess masters can no longer beat, on their own, even an AI running on a laptop computer. But after his defeat, Kasparov has created a new kind of chess contests: ones in which humanoid and computerized players collaborate, and together reach greater successes and accomplishments than each would’ve gotten on their own. In this sort of a collaboration, the computer provides rapid computations of possible moves, and suggests several to the human player. Its human compatriot needs to pick the best option, to understand their opponents and to throw them off balance.

Together, the two create a centaur: a mythical creature that combines the best traits of two different species. We see, then that AI has already forced chess players to reconsider their humanity and their game.

In the next few decades we can expect a similar singularity to occur in many other games, professions and other fields that were previously conserved for human beings only.

Some humans will struggle against the AI. Others will ignore it. Both these approaches will prove disastrous, since when the AI will become capable than human beings, both the strugglers and the ignorant will remain behind.

Others will realize that the only way to success lies in collaboration with the computers. They will help computers learn and will direct their growth and learning. Those people will be the centaurs of the future.

And this realization – that man can no longer rely only on himself and his brain, but instead must collaborate and unite with sophisticated computers to beat tomorrow’s challenges – well, isn’t that a singularity all by itself?

The Singularity Is Coming—Now What?

BY GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS

Technology pioneer and futurist Ray Kurzweil (who popularized the idea in his book The Singularity Is Near), put it this way: “Within a quarter-century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it.”

Even before we reach that point, Kurzweil and his peers foresee breathtaking advances. Scientists in Israel have developed tiny robots to crawl through blood vessels attacking cancers, and labs in the United States are working on similar technology.

These robots will grow smaller and more capable. One day, intelligent nanorobots may be integrated into our bodies to clear arteries and rebuild failing organs, communicating with each other and the outside world via a “cloud” network.

Tiny bots might attach themselves to neurons in the brain and add their processing power–and that of other computers in the cloud–to ours, giving us mental resources that would dwarf anything available now.

By stimulating the optic, auditory or tactile nerves, such nanobots might be able to simulate vision, hearing or touch, providing “augmented reality” overlays identifying street names, helping with face recognition or telling us how to repair things we’ve never seen before.

If scientists can integrate tiny robots into the human body, then they can build tiny robots into, well, everything, ushering in an era of “smart matter.” Nanobots may be able to build products molecule-by-molecule, making the material world look a lot like the computer world–with just about everything becoming smart, cheap and networked to pretty much everything else, including your brain.

It’s almost impossibly futuristic-sounding stuff. But even that scenario is just the precursor to the Singularity itself, the moment when, in Kurzweil’s words, “nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle.”

Imagine computers so advanced that they can design and build new, even better computers, with subsequent generations emerging so quickly they soon leave human engineers the equivalent of centuries behind. That’s the Singularity–and given the exponential acceleration of technological change, it could come by midcentury.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence

So, who is this guy Ray Kurzweil?

It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins and dietary supplements?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living forever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”).

Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to St. Louis.

They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognize a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.

And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live forever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google’s director of engineering.

That’s right folks, Director of Engineering at Google!

The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularized of “the singularity” – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.

But it’s what came next that puts this into context. It’s since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find.

It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an “undisclosed” but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2 billion on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind.

And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNN Research.

It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who’s probably the world’s leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was “a Manhattan project of AI”.

If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, “this will be the team”. The future, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine, will be Google’s.

There are no “ifs” in Ray Kurzweil’s vocabulary. Kurzweil does not do ifs, or doubt, and he most especially doesn’t do self-doubt. Though he’s bemused about the fact that “for the first time in my life I have a job” and has moved from the east coast where his wife, Sonya, still lives, to take it.

Bill Gates calls him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”. He’s received 19 honorary doctorates, and he’s been widely recognized as a genius.

He’s been making predictions about the future for years, ever since he realized that one of the key things about inventing successful new products was inventing them at the right moment, and “so, as an engineer, I collected a lot of data”.

In 1990, he predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov.

He predicted the explosion of the world wide web at a time when it was only being used by a few academics and he predicted dozens and dozens of other things that have largely come true, or that will soon, such as that by the year 2000, robotic leg prostheses would allow paraplegics to walk

(the US military is currently testing an “Iron Man” suit) and “cybernetic chauffeurs” would be able to drive cars (which Google has more or less cracked).

Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth.

So far, so sci-fi. Except that Kurzweil’s new home isn’t some futuristic MegaCorp intent on world domination. Kurzweil now works for Google and has worked with Google’s co-founder Larry Page on special projects over several years.

Kurzweil stated, “And I’d been having ongoing conversations with him about artificial intelligence and what Google is doing and what I was trying to do. And basically, he said, ‘Do it here. We’ll give you the independence you’ve had with your own company, but you’ll have these Google-scale resources.'”

And it’s the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google every single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global “brain”. Can it learn? Can it think? It’s what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, said recently that the company employs “less than 50% but certainly more than 5%” of the world’s leading experts on machine learning.

And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it’s in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, “consciousness”.

It was the Singularity University’s own robotics faculty member Dan Barry who sounded a note of alarm about what the technology might mean: “I don’t see any end point here,” he said when talking about the use of military robots. “At some point humans aren’t going to be fast enough. So what you do is that you make them autonomous.

And the woman who headed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the secretive US military agency that funded the development of BigDog? Regina Dugan. Guess where she works now?

Kurzweil’s job description consists of a one-line brief. “I don’t have a 20-page packet of instructions,” he says. “I have a one-sentence spec. Which is to help bring natural language understanding to Google. And how they do that is up to me.”

Language, he believes, is the key to everything. “And my project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you’re not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world’s information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that.

So, we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions.”

Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.

Once the computers can read their own instructions, well… gaining domination over the rest of the universe will surely be easy pickings.

So, what is driving all this? In a word, immortality.

If these new computers can map the human mind, it is only a matter of time that your brain can be digitized and downloaded to a microchip, much like the one in your cell phone.

When your cell phone wears out, what you you do? You go to your phone shop, buy a new phone, and install the chip from your previous phone with all of your information on it.

Take that concept and now think of humans and robots. When your body wears out, it may be as simple as downloading your brain and installing it in a new robotic body.

Hard for us to comprehend? Impossible you say? Maybe not for Artificial Intelligence.

Civil War

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state

RON ELVING

Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.

These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, but it also seems to suddenly be everywhere.

Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a “cold” civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state tosecede from the Union.

The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be “time to split the country.”

Researchers have found such downbeat assessments of America’s democracy are especially prominent among the young. Last month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School published a poll that found half of voting age Americans under 30 thought our democracy was “in trouble” or “failing.” A third also said they expected there to be “a civil war” within their lifetimes. And a quarter thought at least one state would secede.

The more one hears this particular drumbeat, the louder it becomes.

Late last year, the University of Maryland and The Washington Post produced a poll saying that one-third of Americans thought violence against the government was “sometimes justified” — a belief they found even more widely held among Republicans and independents. According to the Post, just about 1 American in 10 held that view in the 1990s.

Do the respondents in all these polls fully realize what these terms mean, or their answers imply? Possibly not.

What do people even mean by “civil war”?

The American Civil War cost the lives of at least 600,000 Americans and contributed to the deaths of many thousands more. It devastated the South economically and left most of those in the region who had been emancipated to lives of misery.

Moreover, it did little to settle the constitutional issue of “states’ rights,” a problematic point in our national conversation ever since.

Stephen Marche, Canadian novelist and author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, states, “The United States is coming to an end.

The only question is how.” That pretty much tells the reader where he stands – and it is hardly coincidental that the aforementioned book was published on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol “insurrection.”

Marche theorizes, “you now have another situation like in 1860 where you have two legal statuses of people in different parts of the country, and it just can’t hold.” But this idea of “two legal statuses” existing in different regions of the country is nothing new. Every American is subject to two legal statuses.

On the one hand, there are those laws the United States Congress has the authority to pass, limited to what Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution permits, and, on the other, there are the laws passed by the states.

When the Supreme Court struck down the federal government’s over-reaching protection of abortion, that was simply federalism at work – not a revolutionary threat to federal power.

In fact, as Liberty Nation Legal Affairs Editor Scott Cosenza points out, “It’s only when some states wished to exert their will over how things went in the other states that we got to civil war. Devolving power from the federal government to the states is an anti-civil war measure.”

If federalism were respected as the Founding Fathers originally outlined it, there would be almost no discontent with national policies because few would exist.

There would be no far-reaching executive orders, massive debt, spiraling inflation, or an alphabet soup of federal agencies.

Associated Press by David Goldman

“We already are seeing ‘border war’ with individual states passing major legislation that differs considerably from that in other places,” says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, and William Gale, a Brookings senior fellow in economic studies, who have written a pair of articles on the fraying of the American social and political fabric.

They note that conflicts between entire states are not the only way civil war may emerge in our time, or even the most likely. When and if the issue turns to violent confrontations between local citizens and federal officers, or between contentious groups of citizens, the clash might well take place far closer to home. As West and Gale write:

Today’s toxic atmosphere makes it difficult to negotiate on important issues, which makes people angry with the federal government and has helped create a winner-take-all approach to politics.

When the stakes are so high, people are willing to consider extraordinary means to achieve their objectives.

And what do these careful scholars mean by “extraordinary means”?

“America has an extraordinary number of guns and private militias,” they write. How many? They cite the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s estimate of 434 million firearms in civilian possession in the U.S. right now. That would be 1.3 guns per person.

“Semi-automatic weapons comprise around 19.8 million in total,” they add ominously, “making for a highly armed population with potentially dangerous capabilities.”

The geographical divides in our time are different from those of the 1860s.

But the most meaningful geographic separation in our society is no longer as tidy as North and South, or East and West. It is the familiar divide between urban and rural, or to update that a bit: metro versus non-metro.

Thus a “blue state” such as Maine has populous coastal counties that voted for Biden and sparsely populated interior counties that went heavily for Trump, enough to tip the majority to him in one of the state’s two congressional districts.

Conversely, in ruby red state Nebraska, one congressional district anchored in the city of Omaha went for Biden.

We have the same problem. St. Louis and Kansas City voted for Biden. Rural Missouri voted for Trump.

So now I must ask the question, would America survive a civil war?

https://unherd.com/2021/11/would-america-survive-a-civil-war/

BY MALCOM KYEYUNE

Historically speaking, empires on average last for around 250 years, after which they tend to either slowly — or very, very quickly — fall apart due to overreach and internal conflict. Somewhat ominously, the 250^th birthday of America is coming up in 2026.

2022 is a different world than 2015. Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill. It’s entering the fringes of polite society.

Some support this ‘national divorce’; others are opposed to it. Others claim they would actually prefer to declare war on their wayward countrymen rather than let them go their own way unmolested.

None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given the times. The year 2022 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another.

Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.

Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order.

Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a ‘troubles scenario’ really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with.

One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust.

Following a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarization.

From this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war, if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America.

The idea here is that the US military is so advanced, and has so many tanks, gunships, fuel air bombs, and drones, that the federal government is simply assured of victory.

As such, a civil war is an unlikely or impossible scenario, given the dramatic imbalance of power between the state and even a numerically large, dissatisfied internal population.

But this is a dangerous misconception. While the US military is indeed powerful and lavishly funded, it is a military designed to fight other countries.

Warfare between countries is bound by rules and regulations; it is based on consent.

This might seem a strange assertion to make, given that a country cannot just decline a war declaration from an enemy, but it holds true. There’s a formal or informal understanding of who is an actual combatant and who is not.

In contrast, warfare in primitive or tribal societies does not make any distinction between a civilian and a soldier. There are just enemies; ambushing and killing a 12-year-old girl drawing water at the creek is seen as normal as killing an adult warrior.

This is where the European habit of calling uncivilized peoples “savages” comes from; rather than merely being an expression of racist chauvinism, Europeans were in fact oftentimes shocked by the habit of Native Americans and other peoples to ‘not play by the rules’.

But playing by the rules is a fool’s game. An insurgency in America has about as much reason as the Native Americans once did to follow the rules of their enemies; they are under no compulsion to wear blinking strobe lights to make themselves easier for the drones to target. And that simple fact means that a counterinsurgency effort in the US is almost certainly doomed to fail.

In counterinsurgency warfare, everything that makes the US armed forces great — high-tech weapon platforms with immense destructive power — are not just useless, but counterproductive.

A tank parked outside a shopping mall in Idaho will either spend its time shooting at nothing or be at a very high risk of killing innocent American civilians for the high crime of ‘looking suspicious’.

Droning American weddings, like Afghan ones, does very little to advance the goals of a counterinsurgency. If anything, it only makes the relatives of the dead more likely to fight.

The US armed forces are also at least an order of magnitude too small to do the job effectively.

During Operation Banner, the British military deployed at most 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland to keep a lid on that wayward province.

The US armed forces consist of about 1.3 million active-duty personnel, but this is spread out over five branches (Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard), and only a small minority of military personnel are actually combat troops.

It is thus very unlikely that the armed forces could scramble more than 100,000 regulars willing to do the job of holding an M4 carbine and patrolling down the main street of Anytown, Texas. To put that into perspective, Northern Ireland is about 2% the size of Texas.

Then there’s the fact that the most significant political split in America is between rural areas and coastal cities, and the armed forces are reliant on the very areas it would be tasked with policing as far as recruiting soldiers goes.

Red America is overrepresented within the armed forces, and this won’t change. As such, the US doesn’t just have too few soldiers, it has potentially unreliable ones, and the more brutality is used against unruly red states, the more these soldiers will be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family — a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.

Finally, there is an even greater elephant in the room. In the case of an American drone pilot accidentally blowing up a wedding in Afghanistan, the Afghan relatives of the slain have very little recourse.

If an American drone pilot blows up an American wedding, however, that drone pilot and his or her family lives in the United States. Given the likely unreliability of some significant parts of the armed forces, the names and addresses of the most hated butchers are unlikely to stay a secret for long.

In Northern Ireland, for example, the provisional IRA not only attacked soldiers; they made a habit of assassinating the officers, commanders and politicians both for revenge and as a display of might.

From Lord Mountbatten to a near-miss against Margaret Thatcher herself, to a score of less well-known targets, the IRA illustrates just how difficult it is to protect against an enemy that can simply choose to not wear a uniform before their enemies visit.

Now, with that all that said, how likely is it that there will be some sort of civil conflict in the near or mid future for the United States?

Unfortunately, the correct answer here may very well be that it is not terribly unlikely.

What is significant about America today is not that it’s nearing its 250^th birthday, but rather the clear and advanced signs of sickness in the body politic.

The ranks of America’s military are now brooding and battered after 20 years of failed nation-building, while its higher officer corps is increasingly alienated from the world of its grunts, mirroring that same cultural, economic, and social divide that is currently poisoning civilian life in the US.

Folks, if a civil war were to break out, we here in Missouri would be in the same mess we were during the last one.

Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis would all side with the Federal Government and its forces. Martial law would be declared.

Citizens would be forced to choose a side. Those opposed to Federal control would challenge that occupation and fight a long, and extremely bloody, guerrilla war.

Bear in mind, during the last civil war, the Union had to station 80,000 troops in Missouri to fight guerillas like, Quantrill, the James Boys, and the Younger Brothers whose forces numbered only in the 100’s.

Why? The federal government waged war, not only on the guerillas, but on the citizens of Missouri as well.

I pray it never comes to a civil war because all you must do is look at our history.

More US casualties were suffered in our civil war than in any other conflict in our history, including WWI and WWII.

The said thing is, despite those losses, we find ourselves fighting today over the same issue. Federal vs. State power.

Fascism

thehill.com

BY BRAD DRESS – 08/28/22 11:45 AM ET

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) on Sunday called for President Biden to issue an apology after the president compared the “Make America Great Again,” otherwise known as MAGA, wing of the Republican Party to “semi-fascism” last week.

Sununu told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that the president’s comments were “horribly insulting.”

“The fact that the president would go out and just insult half of America [and] effectively call half of America semi-fascist,” Sununu said. “He’s trying to stir up controversy. He’s trying to stir up this anti-Republican sentiment right before the election. It’s horribly inappropriate.”

At a Democratic National Committee fundraising event in Bethesda, Md., last week, Biden said the U.S. was seeing “either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy.”

“It’s not just [former President] Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” the president said.

Biden has previously criticized the MAGA wing of the GOP, saying that “this is not your father’s Republican Party” and calling it a “different deal.”

Sununu conceded there are “elements of fascism and white supremacy” in the U.S. but explained it’s also not true that “all the Democrats are communists.”

“When we allow ourselves just to talk in these extremes, we polarize the country,” Sununu told CNN on Sunday, adding that Biden on the campaign trail had “said he was going to bring everybody together.”

“And then to call half of America fascists?” the GOP governor asked. “He owes an apology. That’s not appropriate. That isn’t leadership.”

Well folks, I thought it might help if I provided some insight as to what a fascist is. If half of the US is made up of fascists,, we need to know what they stand for.

Let’s start with what life is like under a fascist regime.

Fascist governments control the way people live.

Those who criticize the government or do not obey are punished. They must leave the country, go to prison or are often executed.

Wait, isn’t that what Biden just did by calling his pollical opposition fascists?

Fascist leaders want to make their state strong and powerful. They claim that only the strongest and fittest in the population can survive. With the help of a strong army they go to war and expand their territory.

(BLM and Antifa?)

School teachers show children that only the state is important. Pupils must exercise to stay healthy. Young organizations are often created in which children admire the state and learn slogans and songs. They are trained to march and follow the beliefs of the ruling party. (Critical Race Theory and gender studies for grade schoolers?)

Fascist governments try to give all people work, mainly in the industries they need. (Solar panels, and electric cars?)

They build roads, hospitals and industries which help them rise to power.

In fascist countries no other political parties are allowed. The government controls newspapers, radio and television. (national media)

There is no freedom of speech (social media censorship)

What am I missing here? Is not the very thing Biden is accusing the MAGA Republican of, the very same thing he and his party have been doing since he took office?

You would think that the president would steer as far away from the word fascism as he could.

Why in the world would anyone ever turn to fascism? All we have to do is look at history for the answer.

People in Europe lost faith in democratic forms of government following World War I.

They began to look for alternatives that would bring them out of the devastating world depression, rebuilt their failed economies and weakened militaries. (runaway inflation, supply line shortages, open borders, crime, the Afghanistan fiasco, threats by China and Russia?)

Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany promised to return their countries to

greatness. Once in office, however, these Fascist dictators suspended all civil rights and began a program of terrorism against their own citizens. Italy and Germany then helped the Fascist leader Franco gain power in Spain in hopes of solidifying their strength in Europe.

As stated earlier, the world experienced a severe economic depression after World War I. In Europe, the Great Depression caused many citizens to lose faith in their democratic governments Recent polls show that many Americans have lost faith in our government.

In many countries, people turned to extremist political groups. Some

turned to communism; others turned to fascism. People began looking for new leaders to help them solve their problems and rebuild their countries.

Often these new leaders became dictators, or rulers with complete power and control over their countries. Many of these dictators believed in denying people civil rights. Fascist dictators eventually rose to power in

Italy, Germany, and Spain.

Fascism was a new political movement that emphasized autocratic and nationalist policies. The Fascists believed that the state, or nation’s government, must be all powerful.

Rights of the individual were less important than those of the state.

That is what we are seeing with the protests over the Supreme Court decision to turn the abortion issue back to the states and therefore, the people.

It is also clear to see that the federal government thinks they know what is best when it comes to immigration and therefore, they ignore the concerns of the border states and the people who live there.

Do we even need to discuss education? Obviously, the Federal Government thinks they know what is best when it comes to educating our children.

Folks, the list goes on and on.

Benito Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany, and Francisco Franco in Spain were three such Fascist dictators that gained control of their countries.

When their reigns ended, Hitler and Mussolini left their countries in near ruin.

Millions of people had died, and the world had fought its second world war.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being compared to these three simply because I don’t agree with the policies of Joe Biden.

Fascism

After World War I, Benito Mussolini, organized the Fascist movement. He derived the word Fascist from the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces-a bundle of rods surrounding an ax.

This picture was meant to suggest the power of a strong central government uniting all its people in one goal. Fascists favored dictatorship and nationalism; they opposed democracy and communism.

Fascists believed that democratic governments were weak and inefficient.

Fascists supported the seizure of power by force and violence. They believed that dictatorship was a strong and efficient form of government

Under fascism, the government would control every aspect of human activity. This is called a totalitarian state.

Fascists exaggerated the accomplishments of their nation. Biden: 0% inflation)

They supported imperialism so their nation could develop and rule an empire. They glorified war and claimed that military might was proof of the nation’s strength and vitality. Only superior nations would have power in the world.

The Fascists opposed the Communist ideals of Marxism. They did not

support the idea of a classless society or a worldwide revolution of the working class and peasants. They believed that having a property-owning class and a worker class would maintain a stable and healthy economy. (Maybe I am a fascist)

So, let’s review where we are.

Fascism is any system of government where the people have what they consider a mainstream state-of-the-art government compatible with their culture – and then make one additional modification. They install a leader who gives them such hope and unity that they entrust him to make occasional exceptions to the law for important and pragmatic reasons.

(Sound familiar?)

Fascist regimes can vary widely because the whims of the leader tend to result in a changing and somewhat incoherent mishmash of rules – like a new parent with a 2 year old. Also, fascism can develop in diverse cultures with unique problems.

Another difference in fascist regimes is that early stage fascism, where the leader has made only a few popular exceptions to the law, looks significantly different than late stage fascism, where the leader’s will has entirely supplanted the law.

Although fascist regimes have several common characteristics, the only principle common to all fascist regimes is unity, everything else can vary depending on the will of the leader, which is a triumph of practicality over principles.

Some characteristics of each fascist regime are more common than others. For example, the probable path to fascism is likely to begin when the people feel convinced that they are all in agreement on the direction their government should take, and when they also feel that they are currently faced with an overwhelming crisis for which their system of government lacks the authority or the will to manage effectively.

For the good of everyone, the leader must have the power necessary to fix any problem as well as the power to unite everyone. Therefore, any threat to the leader’s will is thus a threat to the people themselves. Therefore, any form of repression is reluctantly accepted as justified.

(I am struggling here. Is it Trump or Biden that is the fascist?)

Fascism tries to respect state-of-the-art government such as the right to private property, private business, and self defense, but these increasingly become illusions because all wealth and all activity by any individual or any organization becomes increasingly regulated and controlled for the good of everyone as the leader sees new ways to optimize the use of money and labor and to eliminate opposition.

The obsession of the people with unity tends to result in peer pressure to conform and thus anyone who engages in political dissent will be bullied.

(You bunch of MAGA loving deplorable fascists!)

As the fascist regime matures, such bullying is likely to become extreme.

Faith in the government and especially in the leader increasingly becomes cult-like as competing sources of faith, hope , and unity, such as religion, are supplanted by government.

Fascism tries to respect the rule of law and due process, but the rule of law and due process increasingly become illusions as the law increasingly gives way to the will of the leader.

However, the will of the leader might increasingly be interpreted as the law, and the leader tends to overturn existing law only for very important and pragmatic reasons, which thus maintains the illusion of the rule of law when in fact it is the opposite of the rule of law.

Well, there you have it folks. I don’t know about you, but I am confused.

Based on the research I have done, I don’t know who the fascists in this country are? Is it the Trump following, Maga Republicans? Or maybe it is the Far Left Woke gang of four led by Ocasio Cortez?

Maybe it is just all Republicans, or all Democrats. Where do Bernie Sanders and the Libertarians fit in?

You know what I think? I don’t think it is any one of these groups.

I think our founding fathers had it right.

Unfortunately, over the years, the federal government itself, held at different times, by all political parties, has become the fascist behemoth controlling all of our lives.

Perhaps the answer is to start fresh. Set the clock back to 1789. Go back to the limited federal government that our founders designed and leave the damned thing alone.

Student Loan Bail Out and Huey Long

By ERIC MAUS, opinion contributor, The Hill

Thehill.com

President Biden has announced that the federal government will forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for Americans making less than $125,000 annually as well as extend the student loan repayment moratorium.

This plan is estimated to cost taxpayers $330 billion and should be seen as the most unfair, outrageous, and disgraceful decision in many years. The president is telling Americans that they do not have to bear any responsibility for their voluntary obligations in borrowing money or going into debt.

Forgiving student loans disproportionately benefits those with higher incomes. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, more than 70 percent of the debt forgiveness would be given to households who are in the top 60 percent of income distribution.

I somewhat disagree with this statement and will explain later. (scamming the system)

The president’s proposal will force middle and low-income Americans who have paid off their student loans or never attended college in the first place pick up the tab for higher-income Americans who decided to take on substantial student loan debt and have not yet fully paid off their loans.

Republicans and conservatives are not the only ones concerned about this fiscally reckless proposal. Larry Summers, an economic adviser to former President Barack Obama and secretary of the Treasury under former President Clinton, said “the student debt relief is highly regressive as higher income families are more likely to borrow and to borrow more than lower income families.

Adults with student loans have much higher lifetime incomes than those without.” Former Obama Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman, said that forgiving student loan debt benefits recent college graduates at the expense of both the rich and poor.

He tweeted that it would be reckless to add gasoline on the inflationary fire and the loan forgiveness would go beyond the president’s campaign promise of $10,000 in student loan relief while violating his promise his proposals would be paid for.

In April 2022, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that President Biden does not have the power to forgive student loans. She is correct.

The White House’s plan to forgive student loan debt is just another example of Democrats completely shunning fiscal responsibility.

Almost immediately upon taking office, President Biden and Democrats in Congress authorized $1.9 trillion in the unnecessary and wasteful American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), which was followed by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

Just two weeks before his student loan forgiveness plan was announced, Congress passed and President Biden signed into law the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which authorized $433 billion in new government spending and raised taxes by $739 billion.

I must ask. Are they simply trying to buy votes?

The unfairness of student loan forgiveness was highlighted in a series of articles that demonstrated the personal sacrifice made by tens of millions of Americans who took the responsibility to pay off their loans.

I did. I worked two jobs, while raising a family, and paid my own way through undergrad and graduate school. I graduated with no debt.

I was not alone. The article cites Michelle Schroeder-Gardner, who accumulated $40,000 in debt to obtain her master’s degree from the University of Missouri, and paid off her loan in eight months by working beyond her 40-hour weekly job.

Rutgers University graduate Pathik Oza had $70,000 in loans and started a used book business to earn enough income to pay it off within two years.

And a Florida couple who had a combined $203,000 in student loan debt set up a budget system that allowed them to pay it all off in 27 months.

Instead of congratulating and imitating these hard-working Americans who have demonstrated fiscal, personal, and moral responsibility, the White House is spitting in their faces along with everyone else who has paid off their loans or their children’s loans.

Citizens Against Government Waste has long been arguing against student loan forgiveness, including naming both Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as Porkers of the Month for their support of this terrible idea.

This regressive plan would force those who never attended college or have paid off their loans to bail out those higher-income Americans who have failed to pay off their completely voluntary debts.

President Biden’s decision is both pandering to progressives and pushing for votes in the congressional elections in November 2022 and presidential election in 2024.

Well folks, let’s talk about something the previous article failed to mention.

Some people will say, fine, as long as they got a degree, I am ok with helping to pay for it. After all, we pay for public education even after our kids have graduated and continue to pay for k thru 12 for kids we will never know.

Well, that is a fine argument, but what if your money isn’t going to help someone get an education?

What Can You Use Student Loans For?

Written by Rebecca Safier, Ben Luthi, Jolene Latimer

Studentloanhero.com

Chances are, nobody is going to be watching your bank account to ensure you’re spending your loans on education expenses. That’s right, some students spend student loan money on things other than education.

In fact, A Student Loan Hero survey found that 20% of students use their student loan funds for travel and 26% use them for clothes. Only 10% use student loan funds just for tuition.

Students must have a place to live, food to eat, and a way to get to school; but they don’t need to spend an extravagant amount on entertainment, meals out, or trips with friends (spring break).

Students have been known to spend their student loan money on vacation travel, automobiles, clothes, expensive drinks and meals, business expenses, and even as a down payment on a home.

How do they pull this off? First you sign up for your student loans.

When the money is approved, it is put in the student’s account when classes start.

After classes start, the student can access the account. They then show up for the first week of classes and drop them.

They have met the obligation of attending class and now split with the money.

Now it is true, they still owe the money, but after pulling this scam for several semesters, they simply disappear with no intention of ever paying the loan back.

The key here is that college financial aid offices don’t actively monitor (or have the means to track) the student’s use of student loan funds.

What is a real shame is that many schools only have a limited amount of federal financial aid to dole out to its student body, which includes federal student loans.

If you are scamming the system, that could mean there’s less student loan funding available for a student who truly needs that money to pay for tuition.

How big of a problem is this?

Federal student loans make up the vast majority of American education debt—about 92% of all outstanding student loans is federal debt.

The federal student loan portfolio currently totals more than $1.6 trillion, owed by about 43 million borrowers. (Forbes.com)

I simply have to ask. How many of the people who took out student loans over the years simply saw it as free money and a way to cheat the system knowing they would never pay it back?

The second question I have is, Is the government simply using this tuition bailout to buy votes?

Well, how about a little history?

Huey Long

Huey Pierce Long Jr., nicknamed “the Kingfish,” was an American politician who served as the 40th governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and as a United States senator from 1932 until his assassination in 1935.

Share Our Wealth

In 1933, Long introduced a series of bills in the Senate that he called the “Share Our Wealth” program. Only a handful of senators supported the program, and Roosevelt did not. But public support for Long’s ideas began to pick up steam.

Seeking to build on that interest, Long mounted a nationwide campaign to promote what was essentially his alternative to the New Deal. Heorganized a networkofShare Our Wealthclubs that millions joined. He competed over the radio with Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats.” In mid-1934, he was getting more mail than the president.

By early the following year, Long had spelled out more fully what Share Our Wealth would mean for the ordinary American. He was calling for benefits such as:

a “fairly comfortable house,” car, and radio
$5,000 guaranteed minimum wealth (about $90,000 in today’s dollars)
a minimum annual income of about $2,500 (about $50,000 in today’s dollars).
free education for every child through high school; and for anyone qualified, free college or vocational school
a guaranteed job for all who could work

Economists soon pointed out flaws in Long’s plan. Share Our Wealth depended on taxing wealthy capitalists. But there were not enough millionaires in the U.S. (about 20,000 households in 1933) who would be the only ones taxed to fund Share Our Wealth.

The growing popularity of Long’s Share Our Wealth plan convinced him to challenge Roosevelt, a fellow Democrat, for the presidency in the 1936 election.

By the spring of 1935, Long was touring the country, drawing large audiences to his speeches.

On September 8, 1935, Long arrived in Baton Rouge to take part in a special legislative session when he was approached by Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Benjamin Pavy.

Pavy stood to lose his position during the session after Long revived a rumor about black children in the Pavy family to discredit him professionally.

Weiss shot Long at close range. Long’s bodyguards shot back at Weiss, killing him, while Long was rushed to the hospital where he died two days later of internal bleeding at the age of 44.

One can only imagine what might have happened had Long defeated FDR in the Presidential election of 1936.

FDR won that election by a landslide 523 to 8 Electoral votes over Alf Landon, the Republican candidate form Kansas.

Was Huey Long buying votes? You bet he was, and it was working.

Are Biden and the swamp buying votes? I will leave that up to you to decide.

Thomas Malthus

Article by Laura Hollis

Townhall.com

https://townhall.com/columnists/laurahollis/2022/07/21/the-green-globalist-elites-will-make-serfs-of-us-all-n2610576

What do you call an economic system where a relative few individuals own all the land and most of the people who live on that land do so at the sufferance of the landowner?

It’s feudalism.

This was the economic system in most of Europe during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of the population was born into, lived and died in poverty. There was little hope for upward mobility unless one opted for a career in military service or the clergy.

The rise of mercantilism and the guild system in northern Europe brought major changes to European feudalism. Poor youth could be apprenticed to merchants and artisans where they learned a skill and a trade.

After a time, apprentices could establish shops of their own. This system eventually created a middle class, and the economic power achieved by the guilds and their members soon translated to political power as well.

Russia, however, lagged hundreds of years behind the rest of Europe. Tsar Alexander II finally freed the country’s serfs in 1861, when the rest of the world had already entered the Industrial Revolution.

The same wealthy Russians who had owned the farms soon owned the factories. The Russian poor went from being feudal peasants on rich farmland to half-starved factory workers in city tenements.

Despair and hopelessness created by centuries of exploitation laid the groundwork for the appeal of Karl Marx’s writings. Russia’s failure to include its poorest citizens in the advances of industrialization was among the driving forces behind the revolutions that would thrust Russia into communism for the next 70-plus years.

America’s trajectory has been quite different.

Our country was founded by men of faith with knowledge of history, politics and economics. We rejected monarchy and nobility.

Our founding documents incorporate principles of universal human dignity and individual rights that not only formed the basis for a republican government elected by the people but also supported the notion of free enterprise.

Unlike Russia (and plenty of other countries) where capitalism and the means of production have been controlled by a small group of wealthy people who use their political power to limit access to others, the United States has had a system of entrepreneurial capitalism. Anyone — even noncitizens — could come here and start their own business. And millions have.

America’s system of entrepreneurial capitalism has been the breeding ground for the American Dream. It has done for this country what the guild system did for northern Europe, and then some.

It has spawned unprecedented innovation, facilitated the creation and distribution of wealth, transformed the law of business enterprise and the widespread use of corporations, made investment and ownership of property and land accessible to the average person, and launched America’s middle, upper-middle and even upper classes.

One would think that this extraordinarily successful system would be sought to be replicated around the globe. But that is not what appears to be happening. Instead, we have a new class of globalist elites who believe that they should control the planet and the lives of everyone on it. Economically secure and politically independent people are difficult to control, so we find ourselves in a situation where our economic security and our political independence are being threatened by those who have made their fortunes in the system they now seek to undermine.

There is no security without food. Global efforts to control farmland and farming, therefore, are creating worldwide worries.

Protests have erupted in the Netherlands in response to “green” regulations to reduce nitrogen emissions, which come mostly from farmers, by half. (Similar regulations imposed in Sri Lanka destroyed that country’s agricultural output and its economy.) The Dutch government has stated that “there (will not be) a future for all farmers” to continue to operate, and EU politicians are calling for a certain percentage of farms to be closed or sold. “Solidarity” protests are now taking place in Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain.

China owns more than $2 billion in U.S. farmland. Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates is now the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, with more than 270,000 acres. Just this month, he acquired another 2,100 acres of farmland in North Dakota. The purchase was originally blocked, but the state’s attorney general ultimately permitted the sale to go through because the farmland “will be leased back to farmers.”

Owning land is quite different from leasing it. A lease is just a contract. Contract terms can be changed. And contracts can be breached, at which point the nonbreaching party must bring a lawsuit for enforcement — assuming that he or she can even afford to do so. Imagine a tenant farmer going up against the attorneys Gates can afford to pay.

In other words, you’re on the land at the sufferance of the landowner. Sound familiar?

Gates is an active member of the World Economic Forum and a zealous advocate of their so-called green policies to avert “climate change” disasters. Gates is pushing for wealthy countries to move to eating “synthetic meat.” (And he is, unsurprisingly, a major investor in the companies that would produce it.) Of course, if plastibeef isn’t your thing, his climate change compadres insist that we eat bugs. And this is without mentioning the push to end private ownership of cars and suburbs with their single-family homes and green yards, forcing the public into densely populated concrete high-rises and onto public transportation.

But will Gates & Co. live this way? You’re joking. They’ll still have their multiple homes, their yachts, their chauffeured limousines, private jets and their meals of Wagyu beef. They will be able to afford everything because they will own everything.

Don’t take my word for it. In 2016, the WEF posted a video on Facebook and Twitter, titled “8 Predictions for 2030.” The video states, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. Whatever you want, you’ll rent, and it will be delivered by a drone.”

Translation: “We’ll own everything, and you’ll be a serf.”

Thomas Malthus on Population

Population Growth and Agricultural Production Don’t Add Up

Bottom of Form

By Matt Rosenberg

Rosenberg, Matt. “Thomas Malthus on Population.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/thomas-malthus-on-population-1435465.

Updated on March 10, 2019

In 1798, a 32-year-old British economist anonymously published a lengthy pamphlet criticizing the views of the Utopians who believed that life could and would definitely improve for humans on earth. The hastily written text, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, was published by Thomas Robert Malthus.

Thomas Robert Malthus

Born on February 14 or 17, 1766 in Surrey, England, Thomas Malthus was educated at home. His father was a Utopian and a friend of the philosopher David Hume. In 1784 he attended Jesus College and graduated in 1788; in 1791 Thomas Malthus earned his master’s degree.

Thomas Malthus argued that because of the natural human urge to reproduce human population increases geometrically (1, 2, 4, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc.). However, food supply, at most, can only increase arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.).

Therefore, since food is an essential component to human life, population growth in any area or on the planet, if unchecked, would lead to starvation.

However, Malthus also argued that there are preventative checks and positive checks on the population that slow its growth and keep the population from rising exponentially for too long, but still, poverty is inescapable and will continue.

Thomas Malthus’ example of population growth doubling was based on the preceding 25 years of the brand-new United States of America. Malthus felt that a young country with fertile soil like the U.S. would have one of the highest birth rates around.

He liberally estimated an arithmetic increase in agricultural production of one acre at a time, acknowledging that he was overestimating but he gave agricultural development the benefit of the doubt.

According to Thomas Malthus, preventative checks are those that affect the birth rate and include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality.

Malthus, a religious chap (he worked as a clergyman in the Church of England), considered birth control and homosexuality to be vices and inappropriate (but nonetheless practiced).

Positive checks are those, according to Thomas Malthus, that increase the death rate. These include disease, war, disaster, and finally when other checks don’t reduce the population, famine.

Malthus felt that the fear of famine or the development of famine was also a major incentive to reduce the birth rate. He stated that potential parents are less likely to have children when they know that their children are likely to starve.

Thomas Malthus also advocated welfare reform. Recent Poor Laws had provided a system of welfare that provided an increased amount of money depending on the number of children in a family.

Malthus argued that this only encouraged the poor to give birth to more children as they would have no fear that increased numbers of offspring would make eating any more difficult. (sound familiar?)

Increased numbers of poor workers would reduce labor costs and ultimately make the poor even poorer.

He also stated that if the government or an agency were to provide a certain amount of money to every poor person, prices would simply rise and the value of money would change.

As well, since population increases faster than production, the supply would essentially be stagnant or dropping so the demand would increase and so would price. Nonetheless, he suggested that capitalism was the only economic system that could function.

The ideas that Thomas Malthus developed came before the industrial revolution and focused on plants, animals, and grains as the key components of the diet.

Therefore, for Malthus, available productive farmland was a limiting factor in population growth. With the industrial revolution and the increase in agricultural production, land has become a less important factor than it was during the 18th century.

Thomas Malthus printed the second edition of his Principles of Population in 1803 and produced several additional editions until the sixth edition in 1826.

Malthus was awarded the first professorship in Political Economy at the East India Company’s College at Haileybury and was elected to the Royal Society in 1819.

He’s often known today as the “patron saint of demography” and while some argue that his contributions to population studies were unremarkable, he did indeed cause population and demographics to become a topic of serious academic study. Thomas Malthus died in Somerset, England in 1834.

Darwin’s theory of evolution and its social, economic, and political impact on American society.

In any given area, more life forms come into existence than the environment can possibly support. (Thomas Malthus)

From the moment of their birth, no two organisms are exactly alike.

In the struggle among individuals, those differences which are advantageous, however minute, will enable their possessors to survive.

The winners in the struggle for existence will transmit their characteristics by heredity.

Impacts:

Social: Poor are poor because they are “less fit” (natural selection). Also, brought about racism.

Political: Winners in war are more fit than their opponents.

Economic: My business is more fit than your business, so it is ok to drive you out.