Author: admin

Well folks, I know a lot of you would like me to do something on the inauguration.

The problem is, I try to give you only the facts and, in some cases, a historical perspective as to what is happening.

Unfortunately, facts right now are hard to come by.

Even the European news is in a “wait and see” mode.

So that is what I am doing. I am going to wait until events play out and then research the facts.

That having been said, I have decided to tackle a topic that I can back with research and facts.

If you will remember, I warned everyone months ago that the rest of the world is watching the internal strife that is taking place in the US right now.

This leaves us wide open to our enemies worldwide.

Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China are enjoying sitting on the sidelines watching us destroy ourselves and are just waiting for the right time to take full advantage of our stupidity.

So today, let’s start with China.

I found a really good article by Chris Pleasance for the Daily Mail  

published in September 2020. 

In it he states,

China has poured billions of dollars of investment into the Caribbean while signing tax and trade deals to wrest the region out of the West’s sphere of influence and bring it under the sway of Beijing.

The Chinese government has invested at least $7 billion in six Caribbean nations since 2005, records show – building roads, ports and the five-star Baha Mar casino and resort in the Bahamas – though the true figure is thought to run well into the tens of billions.

While some of the money arrives as part of trade and investment deals, much of it is offered as ‘soft loans’ for infrastructure projects that are harder to track and typically come with requirements to use Chinese contractors for the work. The loans also provide long-term leverage for Beijing over the cash-strapped island nations. 

The Daily Mail investigated China’s growing influence in the region after Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the UK’s foreign affairs committee, accused Beijing of ‘playing a large role’ in Barbados’s recent calls to drop the Queen as the Head of State.  

In addition to the loans and investments, eight countries in the Caribbean have signed on to Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, including Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, with agreements in place to deepen trade ties along with building bridges and airports, and improving energy and telecommunications networks.   

Mr Tugendhat told the London Sunday Times: ‘China has been using infrastructure investment and debt diplomacy as a means of control for a while and it’s coming closer to home for us.

‘British partners have long faced challenges from rivals seeking to undermine our alliance.

‘Today we’re seeing it in the Caribbean. Some islands seem to be close to swapping a symbolic Queen in Windsor for a real and demanding emperor in Beijing.’

In the past, China has been particularly generous with nations that have agreed to cut relations with Taiwan – a country in the East China Sea which Beijing claims as a province – and establish ties with Bejing instead.

In 2005, China rewarded the island of Grenada, which has an annual trade of just $1.8billion, with a brand new $55million cricket stadium after it cut relations with Taiwan.

Similarly, in 2018, the Dominican Republic received Chinese investments and loans thought to have topped $3 billion after it also cut ties with Taipei.

Beijing has largely stepped away from vote-buying projects in recent years, however, and now largely focuses on economic deals aimed at providing work for its citizens, acquiring resources such as rare earth materials and food, and providing long-term trading and economic benefits.

In 2018, leaders from the region and South America – as part of a trading bloc known as CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States} – signed up to a 2019-2021 roadmap with China that aimed to deepen political and economic ties, including in trade, agriculture, infrastructure and science and technology, among other areas.

More recently, a Chinese firm took full control of Jamaica Kingston Freeport in April this year, the island’s largest container port and one of the largest in the Caribbean. 

China has also invested heavily in Cuba, helping to modernize the country’s second-largest port – Santiago de Cuba – with a new shipping terminal opened in 2019.

Chris Bennett, managing director of The Caribbean Council, a London-based trade organization, told Mail Online: ‘Over the last 15 years, China has steadily acquired control of strategic assets necessary for its trading interests across the wider region. 

‘It controls two of the largest container ports in the region, has acquired large amounts of land in Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname, multiple oil and gas blocs and large-scale mineral deposits of bauxite and gold.

‘By tying concessional finance to the use of Chinese contractors and Chinese imported labor, China has forced out many Western contractors who cannot compete with the cheap Chinese credit being offered.’

For example, British construction firm Kier was forced to exit both the Caribbean and Hong Kong three years ago, at an estimated loss of £72million, in part because of competition from China.

Meanwhile in Guyana – which China has taken a prominent interest in since large oil deposits were discovered there in 2014 – is currently accepting tenders to rebuild the Demerara Harbour Bridge in its capital, Georgetown.

Originally built with British assistance in the 1970s, seven of the 11 contracts that are now bidding for the rebuilding job are Chinese.

Barbados, meanwhile, has received at least $490million, mostly as investment in the tourist sector, but is also thought to be benefiting from private deals.

The country has established beneficial tax deals with Beijing in recent years to make itself a hub for Chinese financial firms looking to invest in South America.

In 2019, a permanent branch of Invest Barbados was established in Beijing to help attract this investment.

Also last year, Barbados signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China, making it part of the country’s Belt and Road initiative – otherwise known as the new Silk Road.

The agreement promises development of Barbados’s shipping, aviation, infrastructure, and agriculture sectors.

However, not everyone has welcomed China’s increased presence in the region. Trade and investment with the likes of Belize, St Lucia, St Kitts, Haiti and St Vincent is still non-existent, largely due to their recognizing Taiwan.

Meanwhile resentment is also growing among locals who have seen large construction projects handed to Chinese laborers, under the terms of loan deals, starving them of income.

While most laborers return to China once the work is completed, some have stayed behind – establishing businesses, particularly in retail, which often out-compete locals, furthering the resentment.

Barbados has maintained strong relations with Britain even after gaining independence in 1966, but last week announced it would become a republic in 2021.

Buckingham Palace has said Barbados’ intention to remove the Queen as head of state and become a republic is a ‘matter’ for the Caribbean nation.

Downing Street said it was a ‘decision for Barbados and the Government there’ but that Britain would continue to ‘enjoy a partnership’ with the Caribbean island nation as members of the Commonwealth.

The country gained its independence from Britain in 1966, though the Queen remains its constitutional monarch.

Most Caribbean countries have kept formal links with the monarchy after achieving independence.

Barbados would join Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, and Guyana if it proceeds with its plan to become a republic.

Now folks, some of you are old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis under President Kennedy when Russia built missile sites in Cuba capable of hitting the US.

If all of these Caribbean Nations are selling land tonand are heavily indebted to China, are we not setting up a similar situation?

So, what is this Belt and Road Initiative?

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.

Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives stretches worldwide, significantly expanding China’s economic and political influence.

Some analysts see the project as an unsettling extension of China’s rising power, and as the costs of many of the projects have skyrocketed, opposition has grown in some countries.

Meanwhile, the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development and military expansion.

Under President Donald J. Trump, Washington has raised alarm over Beijing’s actions, but so far, nothing has been done.

So, what was the original Silk Road?

The original Silk Road arose during the westward expansion of China’s Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), which forged trade networks throughout what are today the Central Asian countries of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as modern-day India and Pakistan to the south. Those routes extended more than four thousand miles to Europe.

Central Asia was thus the epicenter of one of the first waves of globalization, connecting eastern and western markets, spurring immense wealth, and intermixing cultural and religious traditions.

Valuable Chinese silk, spices, jade, and other goods moved west while China received gold and other precious metals, ivory, and glass products.

Use of the route peaked during the first millennium, under the leadership of first the Roman and then Byzantine Empires, and the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) in China.

But the Crusades, as well as advances by the Mongols in Central Asia, dampened trade, and today Central Asian countries are economically isolated from each other.

They are also heavily dependent on Russia.

What are China’s plans for its New Silk Road?

President Xi announced the initiative during official visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013. The plan was two-pronged: the overland Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road. The two were collectively referred to first as the One Belt, One Road initiative but eventually became the Belt and Road Initiative.

Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia.

Xi subsequently announced plans for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road at the 2013 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia.

To accommodate expanding maritime trade traffic, China would invest in port development along the Indian Ocean, from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa and parts of Europe.

China’s overall ambition for the BRI is staggering. To date, more than sixty countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so.

In total, China has already spent an estimated $200 billion on such efforts. Morgan Stanley has predicted China’s overall expenses over the life of the BRI could reach $1.2–1.3 trillion by 2027, though estimates on total investments vary.

Now, a listener contacted me about this topic and several others stated that they also heard China was buying farms in Oklahoma.

So I found another good article by Casey Wilson, Associate Editor, Money Morning • July 7, 2017

The article states,

Shuanghui Group, the largest pork producer in the world and the largest meat producer in China, dominated headlines in 2013 when it purchased U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. for almost $4.7 billion.

Back then, the focus was on the livestock.

Forbes called the purchase “a game changer for pork trade.”

“No other combination [of companies] has such a great opportunity,” Zhijun Yang, managing director of Shuanghui, said to The Washington Post that same year.

But here is what the mainstream media missed: Shuanghui didn’t just acquire the livestock. The Chinese conglomerate also snatched up more than 146,000 acres of farmland across the United States, worth a staggering $500 million, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture Data.

Here is why they did it – and what it all means for American farmers.

China is in dire need of both food and farms.

While the country may look huge on a map, only 11% of Chinese land can be farmed. When you combine that with China’s huge population of over 1.3 billion people, you have got a recipe for a food disaster.

“There could be massive social unrest if they screw up the agriculture industry,” said Erlend Ek, an agriculture expert at the China Policy research firm.

Now, with few options left, China is investing in the best agricultural technology and best farmland – regardless of where it lies – to feed its citizens.

And the United States, with six times more arable land per capita, is the perfect contract farmer.

Since 2011, Chinese businesses have made dozens of transactions for U.S. farmland, according to USDA data.

Indeed, as of 2015, China owned $1.4 billion worth of U.S. farmland… and now, it’s likely to buy a lot more.

China is expected to increase its holdings of U.S. agricultural land in coming months as the China National Chemical Corporation, or ChemChina, just completed a $43 billion takeover of Swiss-owned seed producer Syngenta.

Citizens and lawmakers alike are concerned.

“The more control foreign interests have in our food system, the less control we have, obviously,” said Tim Gibbons, a director for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, based in Columbia.

“When foreign entities buy farmland, my assumption is that we’re never going to get that farmland back,” added Gibbons. “They’re going to keep it forever.”

The sudden rise in Chinese foreign investment even prompted Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to speak out on the matter.

“As we think about the future and the growing global population, it’s important to consider who will control the food supply,” Grassley said in a statement. “Today, there may not be a food shortage in the world, only distribution problems that are more the result of politics and not logistics, but in the decades to come, it may be a different story.”

So, instead of buying food from farmers who work their own land, Chinese companies want to own and control these American farms themselves – as well as the livestock barns and slaughterhouses – just like the way the poultry industry operates.

You see, chicken and turkey “growers” are paid to raise the birds on their private property. They also receive pay for the expensive poultry houses (some costing more than $1 million), labor, and maintenance. But it’s the major poultry companies who own the chickens and turkeys – as well as the hatcheries, slaughterhouses, and feed.

“It’s at the expense of the farmer because the farmer’s not the one making money.

Many farmers are feeling stuck, cheated, and angry with the foreign contract investments.

So folks, there you have it. While we continue to argue amongst ourselves over the green new deal, antifa, BLM, social media, and impeaching a president who will be leaving tomorrow, China is slowly taking control.

I warned everyone that the rest of the world was watching us and they see all of our internal strife as an opportunity. Obviously, China has been listening.

No protesting the government? No immigrants allowed in? No freedom of the press. Lawmakers jailed? Is this the story of the Soviet Union during the Cold War?

No. It describes the United States in 1798 after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In one of the first tests of freedom of speech, the House passed the Sedition Act, permitting the deportation, fine, or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or publishing “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the government of the United States.

The 5th Congress (1797–1799), narrowly divided between the majority Federalists and minority Jeffersonian Republicans, voted 44 to 41 in favor of the Senate-passed bill.

Federalists championed the legislation out of the desire to hold the majority in Congress and to retain the White House, then occupied by Federalist John Adams.

In an era when newspapers served as political parties’ chief organs, the Republican press was particularly vicious in its attacks on Federalists and the Adams administration.

“Liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man,” noted one of the bill’s supporters, John Allen of Connecticut. “It leads to the dissolution of every bond of union.”

Republicans defended the First Amendment protecting free speech and press. “What will be the situation of the people?” James Madison of Virginia demanded. “Not free: because they will be compelled to make their election decision between competitors whose pretensions they are not permitted by act equally to examine, to discuss and to ascertain.”

Signed into law by Adams on July 14, the law proved immensely unpopular with the public and the President lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson in 1800.

Under the incoming Republican administration, the Sedition Act eventually expired on March 3, 1801(Note: Federalists enacted it only long enough to be in place through the next presidential election).

These laws known collectively as the ALIEN AND SEDITION ACTS. 

They  included new powers to DEPORT foreigners as well as making it harder for new IMMIGRANTS to vote. Previously a new immigrant would have to reside in the United States for five years before becoming eligible to vote, but a new law raised this to 14 years.

Clearly, the Federalists saw foreigners as a deep threat to American security.

As one Federalist in Congress declared, there was no need to “invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all the world, to come here with a basic view to distract our tranquility.” Not coincidentally, non-English ethnic groups had been among the core supporters of the Democratic-Republicans in 1796.

The most controversial of the new laws permitting strong government control over individual actions was the SEDITION ACT.

In essence, this Act prohibited public opposition to the government. Fines and imprisonment could be used against those who “write, print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government.

Now folks, does this sound familiar?

Under the terms of this law over 20 Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were arrested and some were imprisoned.

The most dramatic victim of the law was REPRESENTATIVE MATTHEW LYON of Vermont.

His letter that criticized President Adams’ “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and self avarice” caused him to be imprisoned.

While Federalists sent Lyon to prison for his opinions, his constituents reelected him to Congress even from his jail cell.

The Sedition Act clearly violated individual protections under the first amendment of the Constitution; however, the practice of “JUDICIAL REVIEW,” whereby the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of laws was not yet well developed.

Furthermore, the justices were all strong Federalists. As a result, Madison and Jefferson directed their opposition to the new laws to state legislatures.

 The Virginia and Kentucky legislatures passed resolutions declaring the federal laws invalid within their states. The bold challenge to the federal government offered by this strong states’ rights position seemed to point toward imminent armed conflict within the United States.

So what were these resolutions?

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (or Resolves) were political statements drafted in 1798 and 1799, in which the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures took the position that the federal Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional.

The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to declare unconstitutional any acts of Congress that were not authorized by the Constitution.

That’s interesting isn’t it?

In doing so, they argued for states’ rights and strict constructionism of the Constitution.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 were written secretly by none other than Vice President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively. Not a couple of crackpots.

The principles stated in the resolutions became known as the “Principles of ’98“. Adherents argue that the states can judge the constitutionality of central government laws and decrees.

The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 argued that each individual state has the power to declare that federal laws are unconstitutional and void.

The Kentucky Resolution of 1799 added that when the states determine that a law is unconstitutional, nullification by the states is the proper remedy.

The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 refer to “interposition” to express the idea that the states have a right to “interpose” to prevent harm caused by unconstitutional laws. The Virginia Resolutions contemplate joint action by the states.

The Resolutions had been controversial since their passage, eliciting disapproval from ten state legislatures.

George Washington was so appalled by them that he told Patrick Henry that if “systematically and pertinaciously pursued”, they would “dissolve the union or produce coercion”.

Enormous changes had occurred in the explosive decade of the 1790s.

Federalists in government now viewed the persistence of their party as the equivalent of the survival of the republic. Again, sound familiar?

This led them to enact and enforce harsh laws. Madison, who had been the chief architect of a strong central government in the Constitution, now was wary of national authority. He actually helped the KENTUCKY LEGISLATURE to reject federal law.

By placing states rights above those of the federal government, Kentucky and Virginia had established a precedent that would be used to justify the secession of southern states in the Civil War.

The Atlantic

Rosa Inocencio Smith

7:30 PM / May 16, 2016

One hundred and 2 years ago years ago, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it an imprisonable offense to criticize the federal government or U.S. military involvement in World War I. The legislation, which expanded the Espionage Act of 1917, came at the height of wartime fear and anger:

Violence on the part of local groups of citizens, sometimes mobs or vigilantes, persuaded some lawmakers that the [original] law was inadequate.

In their view the country was witnessing instances of public disorder that represented the public’s own attempt to punish unpopular speech in light of the government’s inability to do so.

Amendments to enhance the government’s authority under the Espionage Act would prevent mobs from doing what the government could not.

It was in this political climate that James Harvey Robinson, in the December 1917 issue of The Atlantic, addressed “The Threatened Eclipse of Free Speech”—a foreshadowing of the Sedition Act.

Robinson argued that in times of national hardship, dissent is not only natural but necessary:

When we see khaki uniforms all about us … when coal runs low in the cellar and sugar in the kitchen; when we … are consciously grateful for a boiled potato; when we note the lowering of the exemption limit of the income tax, and are suspected of being a scoundrel if we do not invest in government bonds, the mind is quickened as never before. We would seem to have a right to suspect that many things must have been fundamentally wrong in the old and revered notions of the State, of national honor, even of patriotism, since they seem at least partially responsible for bringing the world to the pass in which it now finds itself.

Robinson (who took care to assure his readers that he, too, supported the war effort) sought to calm people on both sides of the free-speech debate: those worried about the dangers posed by dissenters and the dangers posed by suppression of speech.

But some parts of his argument are more unsettling. In this passage, he considers why free expression can be so incendiary and concludes it’s because the beliefs we express—and those we react to—are not rational:

Strangely enough most of us most of the time are quite indifferent to truth, and are using language in the old, primitive way as a signal of agreement or disagreement. We become partisans before we realize it. We get pledged to beliefs we know not how, and they become dear to us by reason of their familiarity and associations. When they are questioned, we are outraged, and rush to their defense in the name of truth. Our hypocrisy is too deep and impulsive for us to detect.

It’s a frightening idea—but fortunately, this problem of free speech contains its own solution.

In 1919, two years after Robinson’s article, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions of four men who had been prosecuted under the Sedition Act for publishing pamphlets critical of the war effort.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes veered from the 7-2 majority and issued “the most powerful dissent in American history,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen. Here’s Holmes:

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system, I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.

So, let’s summarize.

Sedition is, roughly speaking, the crime of either rebelling against the government or inciting other people to do so.

It is the sort of crime that weak governments enforce against their citizens when the government is facing an existential threat — or thinks it is.

Let’s face it, the 1798 Sedition Act was used in a nakedly partisan manner by John Adams’s Federalist administration to prosecute Republican newspaper editors.

Dozens were jailed and fined. Although the law was never formally struck down by the courts, it has come to be a model of the kind of law that violates free speech.

The Sedition Act of 1918 was not much better.

Along with the Espionage Act of the previous year, the Sedition Act of 1918 was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson.

The Espionage Act, passed shortly after the U.S. entrance into the war in early April 1917, made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces’ prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies.

Aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists, the Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts.

Those who were found guilty of such actions, the act stated, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. This was the same penalty that had been imposed for acts of espionage in the earlier legislation.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

Wait. What? They used it against someone running for president?

After delivering an anti-war speech in June 1918 in Canton, Ohio, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act.

Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled Debs had acted with the intention of obstructing the war effort and upheld his conviction.

In the decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the earlier landmark case of Schenck v. United States (1919), when Charles Schenck, also a Socialist, had been found guilty under the Espionage Act after distributing a flyer urging recently drafted men to oppose the U.S. conscription policy.

 In this decision, Holmes maintained that freedom of speech and press could be constrained in certain instances, and that the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Debs’ sentence was commuted in 1921 when the Sedition Act was repealed by Congress.

Major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of United States law to the present day, although the crime of sedition was largely eliminated by the famous libel case Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), which determined that the press’s criticism of public officials—unless a plaintiff could prove that the statements were made maliciously or with reckless disregard for the truth—was protected speech under the First Amendment.

The current version of sedition law is the Smith Act, which became law in 1940 and was used well into the 1950s. It prohibits advocating for the violent overthrow of the federal government.

Its targets were mostly communists, with the occasional anarchist or fascist prosecuted, too.

The law generated a highly problematic Supreme Court precedent, Dennis v. U.S., in which the justices upheld the law as applied to the senior leadership of the Communist Party USA.

The really important lasting opinion from that case is a dissent by Justice William O. Douglas pointing out that the Communists were being punished for espousing ideas.

To prosecute protesters for sedition today would require showing that they engaged in conduct aimed at the overthrow of the government and was likely to cause imminent harm.

Is that what Parler was doing? I think that is quite a stretch.

Have we lost our First Amendment rights and traveled back in time to 1798?

Last night at 3 am on the Capitol floor, Republican Andy Harris of Maryland and Democrat Collin Allred of Texas nearly came to blows over a speech being given by a colleague and had to be physically separated. Good Grief!

With the storming of the capitol yesterday and now this, what comes next?

Now the national media says that only two previous incidents compare to what happened yesterday.

The burning of the capitol by the British during the War of 1812, and the attack by Puerto Rican Nationalists in 1954.

They are partially correct. Has it ever been this bad? The answer is yes.

America’s seat of government has endured bombings, a presidential assassination attempt, and even its destruction by foreign forces. There have also been attacks from inside—including a near-fatal attack on one lawmaker by another.

The U.S. Capitol was still under construction when it was torched by British troops who had invaded Washington, D.C. in one of the most famous skirmishes of the War of 1812. The troops “ignited a giant bonfire of furniture” in the Hall of the House of Representatives that was so intense it destroyed Giuseppe Franzoni’s life-size marble statue of Liberty. Another bonfire was set in the Supreme Court Chamber, which at the time was housed in the Capitol building.

Upon surveying the damage, several members of Congress called to move the federal government to Philadelphia or another city that they thought might be more secure.

On January 30, 1835, a thirtysomething British immigrant named Richard Lawrence attempted to assassinate President Andrew Jackson while he was leaving a congressional funeral at the U.S. Capitol. Fortunately, Lawrence’s attempt failed—twice. When the powder from his first pistol failed to ignite, Lawrence raised a second pistol but missed his target and was tackled by bystanders. It was the first known attempt to assassinate a U.S. president.

On May 22^nd, 1856 Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech slamming the Kansas / Nebraska Act and its impact on Kansas. He called it “The rape of Virgin Territory”, claiming that Kansas was being raped by Missouri pro slavery forces and attacked his colleague, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina. Shortly after that speech, Butler’s cousin, Congressman Preston Brooks, assaulted Sumner on the Senate floor.

Sumner was sitting at his desk writing a letter when Brooks attacked him with his walking cane. Brooks said he would have challenged him to a duel, but duels were for gentlemen and Sumner didn’t qualify so the only thing to do was to thrash him like the dog he was.

Brooks beat Sumner to unconsciousness, and it took 3 years for Sumner to return to his duties in the senate. For weeks after the event people sent canes to Brooks and said please beat a senator for me.

As the nation headed into the Fourth of July weekend in 1915, a former Harvard University professor named Erich Muenter exploded three sticks of dynamite in the Senate Reception Room. Muenter later explained that he was angry that American financiers were aiding the U.K. in World War I despite America’s official neutrality at the time. There were no injuries—the Senate was out of session—but the New York Times reported at the time that the explosion had shattered a chandelier, damaged the plaster on the room’s ceiling, and blew open doors—including one to the office of the vice president.

This brings us to the attack by Puerto Rican Nationalists mentioned by the news analysts yesterday.

In 1954, long before the Capitol had higher security, including metal detectors, four Puerto Rican nationalists entered the House gallery, took out guns, and began firing indiscriminately.

One waved a Puerto Rico flag. Five House members were wounded in the protest aimed at independence for the commonwealth, which the United States seized from Spain in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. The attackers served long prison terms, which were commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 after an international campaign.

The violent antiwar Weather Underground planted a bomb in a bathroom on the Senate side of the Capitol. The explosion in the early hours of March 1, 1971 caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, but no casualties.

1983: Bomb goes off on the Senate side

There were no casualties either when a bomb hidden under a bench outside the Senate Chamber exploded, blowing the hinges off the door to the office of Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. A group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit carried out the attack to protest the military’s actions in Grenada and Lebanon. Seven people were charged in the attack.

So, as you can see, attacking the capital as a way to protest is not unique in our history.

The big question now is. How do we move forward.

Here are my concerns:

We are a nation divided, Lincoln himself stated, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Can you substitute the phrase “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free”. With “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half democrat and half republican?”

It is a very good question.

The world sees that we are divided. Does that make us vulnerable to attacks from other countries? I think it does.

Next, how do you rule a divided country? The Democrats may control the House, Senate, and Presidency, but you can make all the rules and laws you want. It won’t matter if half the country refuses to obey them.

This brings me to my third concern. Violence has become the norm in our society. Gone are the days when people could sit down and argue out their differences.

You see it everywhere. Hate mail, bullying in our schools, tearing down statues, road rage, the anti-police movements and yes, the burning of our cities and the storming of the capitol.

For the past two years we have seen protests in the streets of places like St. Louis, Chicago, Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Detroit.

Bricks were thrown at law enforcement defending a federal courthouse.

The media said these were peaceful protests and even referred to one as a summer of love.

Folks, the media has a huge impact on the people of this great nation. They have programmed us all to accept things that just 50 years ago would have been totally unacceptable in our society regardless of what you party politics were.

So it comes as no surprise to me that things turned ugly yesterday. They have been ugly for a long time and the national media is having a field day with all of it.

Sensationalist news sells.

Frederic Remington, the famous artist who brought to life American images of the west was hired by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to illustrate the revolution erupting in Cuba. He wrote back to Hearst one day in January 1897:

“Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.”

Hearst sent back a note: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

Well, nothing has changed. I don’t care what party you are, the national media is loving all that has happened over the past two years leading up to, and including yesterday.

They are promoting the hate and violence we see today.

Don’t believe me? Do any of you hate the Ayatollah of Iran? How about Osama Bin Laden or Sadaam Hussein?

You say “Of course”! Did you ever meet any of these people? Have you ever talked to them? Then why do you say you hate them?

The answer is easy. The media. Now I any not saying I in anyway think these are good people. But, the only thing we have to go on is what the media has told us. Period. Therein lies the problem.

We trust the media. Even worse, we now trust Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Unfortunately they are no better than Randolph Hearst. Sensationalist media sells.  The more the better.

In a nation of 328 million people, it is easy to find whatever sensationalist story you want on any given day. Especially with our advanced technology.

Want a story about a black man shot by a cop? We will find one.

Want a story about a cop shot by a criminal? We will find one.

How about a corrupt polititician? No problem. Democrat or Republican?

Missing child? What age? What location? Ethnicity, background, single parent? We will find one. 100’s of kids go missing in the US every day. Ever wonder why one particular kid makes the national news and others don’t?

 Bottom line is, the national media could care less about the impact they have on all of us. They are no longer journalists.

The truth does not sell. Exciting stories about crime, corruption, wars, and disasters do.

So folks. We are now at a crossroads. There is a huge burden now put upon the ruling party and Biden who is so fond of quoting Lincoln now needs to quote Lincoln’s inaugural address or it is all over.

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
—Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861

Callers? What do you think? Can cooler heads prevail or are we going to continue being led down a path of destruction by people who are in it just to make money?

Folks, a lot of people don’t know this, but in addition to my teaching career, I also worked for the state for over 20 years. First at the Department of Transportation as their Director of Training, and the later for The State Emergency Management Agency.

When it comes to bureaucracy, I have seen it firsthand.

Over the years, I began to see how the system really works. Every four years we held state elections and a new administration would come in. Inevitably the new Governor would hand pick his appointees to become the directors of all the various state offices.

Very rarely did a Director from a previous administration survive.

As such, every four years, as state employees, we were faced with a new set of marching orders.

Some were good, but many were bad to the point of being ridiculous.

Eventually I found myself having to deal with some these new ideas coming from “on high”.

On one occasion, I was being told to implement a program being offered by a consultant, that I knew was simply a way to pay back a political favor. It made no sense and would cost a fortune.

This is where I had my enlightenment.

I took the problem to our Assistant Director and explained what was happening. His response was, “Sit on it”.

I said “What?”

He said, “Listen son, here is how things work in government. First, you never want to become Director. Always shoot for Assistant Director. Directors are replaced every 4 years because they are appointed by the Governor. Assistant Directors, however, are Merit System employees and it is almost impossible to fire them. They are the people who really run the government”.

You know what, He was right. Shortly thereafter our Director was replaced, and the problem went away. Yet, the Assistant Director remained in office for the next 20 years. 

Just last week I was doing some research and ran across a fascinating article that really opened my eyes.

The article was by Marty Robinson, posted December 3, 2019 in a newsletter published by St. Paul Research.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this issue before, based on my past experiences.

I knew I just had to share it with you today.

Throughout history, both citizens and statesmen have discovered they are often ruled and governed from the shadows.

Not by those who sit upon the Throne, or in the House of Lords, or the Halls of Congress…

But instead by unelected leaders and powerful men hidden from public view whose names are never to be spoken aloud.

Sir William Pitt, the 1^st Earl of Chatham may have said it best in a speech before the British House of Lords on March 2^nd, 1770…

“There is something behind the throne greater than the King himself.” ¹

Britain’s first prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Coningsby stated:

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” ²

And former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, proponent of the Federal Reserve and the League of Nations, confessed in his book The New Freedom published in 1913…

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ³

Our 35^th President, John F. Kennedy, may have ultimately paid with his life for not just revealing those who ruled from the shadows, but by openly opposing them.

And today, our 45^th President, Donald Trump, and the nation itself face a similar threat.

A threat from those who rule from the shadows…

Rulers far different from the personages imagined by the people…

Whose names are rarely, if ever spoken…

Who are protected by a now weaponized mainstream media…?

Who wield power far greater than the throne, or the Presidency itself…?

A power so feared, critics had better not speak of it above their breath…

Just as written about by Wilson, Disraeli and Pitt.

Is this not where we find ourselves and our nation today? The swamp we hear so much about.

On day one of Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) had this to say in his opening comments:

“Though executive branch employees are charged with implementing the policies set by our president, who is elected and responsible to the American people, elements of the civil service have decided that they, not the president, are really in charge.” ⁴

Those “elements of the civil service” that Rep. Nunes is referring to, are the “SES.”

Members of The Senior Executive Service, the most powerful 3-letter agency in government you have never heard of.

More powerful than the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.

In fact, it is so powerful it has its own seal and its own flag.

And no, it’s not the FDA, the SEC, or the IRS.

And it is not part of Homeland Security or FEMA… Although its tentacles reach deep into every one of those agencies.

The mainstream media rarely mentions it by name…

So, most Americans have no idea it even exists.

But thanks to an obscure executive order and the secretive actions by former President Barack Obama it has become the hidden force behind the coup of a duly elected president and the ongoing “complete transformation of America.”

And only by exposing it and bringing it out of the shadows, will it ever be stopped.

You see, on December 15^th, 2015, six months after Donald J. Trump declared his candidacy for president and began to rise in the polls former President Barack Obama signed what at the time, appeared to be a harmless executive order.

However, Obama’s intentions were much more complex and sinister.

Because with that single executive order, Barack Obama launched an accelerated purge of thousands of American patriots from virtually every government agency — including our intelligence services and the military —while replacing them with party loyalists and political operatives loyal not to the country and the Constitution, but to him and his globalist and progressive-socialist agendas.

It was a purge of patriots and a takeover of government that began early on in his first term.

A purge that began by transforming an obscure federal agency hidden deep within the bowels of government, into what soon became a private, stay behind army.

An army of political operatives committed to two things:

The complete political, cultural and economic transformation of America as promised by Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.

And the overthrow of a Donald J. Trump presidency.

So how was the swamp/deep state we hear so much about, created?

The Senior Executive Service, or “SES,” was created on September 19, 1979 during the Carter administration.

It was originally formed to professionalize career civil service, while attracting the nation’s best and brightest to improve and modernize the management of the federal bureaucracy.

A position within the “SES” is considered the equivalent to general officer or the flag officer ranks in the U.S. Armed Forces.

For that reason, they are often referred to as our “civilian generals.”

Their pay scale starts above the top level of civil service (GS-15), with base salaries ranging from a minimum of $127,914 to a maximum of $192,300.

Ostensibly, the SES was to be a corps of non-partisan, career managers who serve as the executive management of federal agencies…

Their job being to implement policy, not create it.

At least it was until then President Barack Obama changed that with a mere flick of his pen…

Making SES members nearly impossible to fire, once hired. He basically made them Merit Employees.

To say Obama’s transformation of the SES into an army of political operatives was effective would be a gross understatement.

There are more than 2 million federal government employees. And at the top of that pyramid are approximately 8,000 SES (Senior Executive Service) employees who serve as the professional managerial class linking our political leaders to the civil service rank and file.

And Barack Obama as president, replaced more than 6,000 members of the 8,000-member SES during his two terms, assembling what became a stay-behind army of political operatives…

It was a brilliant move. Bear in mind, we aren’t talking about the Directors. We are talking about the Assistant Directors, career federal emplyees.

So how pervasive is the SES?

Here is a list of the number of SES employees that were embedded in the following government agencies at the end of Obama’s 2^nd term in 2016:

• Department of Education – 86
• Department of Housing & Urban Development – 115
• Department of the Air Force – 182
• Department of Labor – 200
• Department of State – 204
• Department of Transportation – 231
• Department of Interior – 258
• Department of the Army – 261
• Department of the Navy – 326
• Department of Veterans Affairs – 357
• Department of Agriculture – 361
• Department of Commerce – 425
• Department of the Treasury – 458
• Department of Health & Human Services – 468
• Department of Defense – 478
• Department of Energy – 490
• Department of Homeland Security – 639
• Department of Justice – 821
• All Other Agencies (all non-Cabinet level agencies) – 1,796

And it wasn’t just a purge of patriots from governmental agencies…

Obama’s purge of the military was especially damaging to our national security, as he literally gutted the command structure of the U.S. military.

Not to mention the demoralization of the ranks due to his policies of radical political correctness.

In all, Obama’s patriot purge included 9 Senior Commanding Generals, 2 Nuclear Commanders, 197 high ranking Senior, General and Flag Officers, along with thousands of non-commissioned officers…

General Carter Ham was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command because he defied Obama’s “stand down” orders to not mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.

And as damaging as Obama’s purge of the military was, it was his takeover and transformation of the Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and the Intelligence Agencies that raise the greatest threat to America today.

Because instead of being tools for implementing the policies of the president and the United States government they have become the defacto 4^th Branch of Government and are now dictating and carrying out their own policies, while openly subverting and sabotaging those of a duly elected president.

You see, the coup has already taken place.

It took place during the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency…

When Obama purged our military, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., our intelligence agencies, and virtually every major government agency of patriots loyal to America and the U.S. Constitution he replaced them with career technocrats and bureaucrats who have been educated, groomed and prepared for the day when America would be “completely transformed,” and finally merged into a progressive-socialist state that would submit to global governance under the United Nations.

These are the people we should be concerned with. Not the big-name politicians.

This is a dream the progressive left has been working towards for nearly a hundred years, from their failure to implement the League of Nations, to their successful formation of The United Nations…

– James Warburg, Vice-Chairman Bank of Manhattan and FDR adviser. Feb. 17, 1950, appearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated:

“We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.”

Do you remember Strobe Talbot, Asst. Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton? He stated in Time Magazine, July 20, 1991:

“In the next century, nations as we know them will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.” ⁶

Today, over 74 years after the formation of the United Nations, the reality of a one-world, global government is now firmly within the grasp of the progressive left…

But, before we go any further, please understand this…

Barack Obama was not the architect of these changes, merely the frontman in charge of carrying them out as the Deep State and Shadow Government’s placeholder president.

And that was the root of President Trump’s problems.

You see, in the post 9/11 world, we transferred far too much power to the office of the president.

And that created a very big problem for the Deep State and our Shadow Government.

Because the one thing they can no longer ever allow to happen is to have an outsider not under their control, become president.

And Donald J. Trump was definitely an outsider who was not under their control.

That’s why they launched their “insurance policy,” before President Trump was even sworn into office.

You remember their “insurance policy,” don’t you?

The one orchestrated by Obama’s secret stay behind sleeper cell…

Located on the 7^th floor of the Truman building in Washington D.C.

The “insurance policy” that Peter Strzok (the FBI’s Chief of Counterespionage), referred to in the now infamous text he sent to FBI attorney Lisa Page.

It was “Plan B,” just in case Trump was elected.

It’s what the Steele Dossier, the Mueller Investigation, the entire Russia-gate hoax and their current impeachment witch-hunt was all about…

Because as far as the Deep State and our Shadow Government are concerned…

The office of The President of the United States of America as we know it, no longer exists.

The government is indeed run by the deep state. So folks, there it is.

The SES. Something I had never heard of. Here we have been focusing on the politicians when, in reality, the true problem is the government itself.

Have we been focusing our attention on the wrong target?

If so, what can be done to fix the problem?

For decades, it has been obvious that there are irreconcilable differences between Americans who want to control the lives of others and those who wish to be left alone.

Which is the more peaceful solution: Americans using the brute force of government to beat liberty-minded people into submission or simply parting company?

In a marriage, where vows are ignored and broken, divorce is the most peaceful solution. Similarly, our constitutional and human rights have been increasingly violated by a government instituted to protect them.

The chairman of the Texas Republican Party appeared to float secession after the Supreme Court shot down a lawsuit led by the Lone Star State seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election.

Texas GOP Chairman Allen West rebuked the high court in a statement, saying that “law-abiding states” should “form a Union” after the decision throwing out the lawsuit from Texas.

Seventeen other states and 126 House Republicans had backed Texas’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four key states that secured President-elect Joe Biden‘s win.

The court’s ruling, which said that Texas lacked the legal right to litigate over how other states conduct their elections, represented a devastating blow to efforts by President Trump and his allies to challenge the election results.

“The Supreme Court, in tossing the Texas lawsuit that was joined by seventeen states and 106 U.S. congressman, has decreed that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its own election law resulting in damaging effects on other states that abide by the law, while the guilty state suffers no consequences,” West said after the ruling. “This decision establishes a precedent that says states can violate the U.S. constitution and not be held accountable.”

“This decision will have far-reaching ramifications for the future of our constitutional republic,” he continued. “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”

Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University wrote an interesting article about secession. In it he states:

Some people have argued that secession is unconstitutional, but there’s absolutely nothing in the Constitution that prohibits it.

What stops secession is the prospect of brute force by a mighty federal government, as witnessed by the costly War of 1861. Let’s look at the secession issue.

At the 1787 constitutional convention, a proposal was made to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state.

James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, rejected it, saying: “A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”

On March 2, 1861, after seven states had seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that said, “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the Union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”

Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession. Here’s my no-brainer question: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?

On the eve of the War of 1861, even unionist politicians saw secession as a right of states. Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, “Any attempt to preserve the Union between the States of this Confederacy by force would be impractical, and destructive of republican liberty.”

The Northern Democratic and Republican parties favored allowing the South to secede in peace. Just about every major Northern newspaper editorialized in favor of the South’s right to secede.

The New York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860) stated: “If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Million of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”

The Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861) wrote: “An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil — evil unmitigated in character and appalling in content.” The New York Times (March 21, 1861) went on to say: “There is growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.”

There’s more evidence seen at the time our Constitution was ratified. The ratification documents of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island explicitly said that they held the right to resume powers delegated, should the federal government become abusive of those powers. The Constitution would have never been ratified if states thought that they could not maintain their sovereignty.

The War of 1861 settled the issue of secession through brute force that cost 600,000 American lives.

Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but author H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, “It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.”

Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”

Think about this folks. George Washington was a traitor to his country, England. The American Revolution was a secessionist movement. Our country was founded on the act of secession and this is why it’s always an available option.

So, just how would one approach the task of dividing up the world’s leading superpower?

I found an interesting article written back in 2013 by Joshua Holland, a fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

It’s easy to write about how out of touch with real America those liberal, socialist coastal elites are, or how backward the South’s gun toting, bible thumpers can be, but I’m not sure either side has paused to consider the details of exactly what it would take to secede.

Making it a truly amicable divorce would have to be the primary goal.

A scenario in which two powerful new states with a shared border and a degree of mutual hatred that might at any minute end up at war, would be the last thing anyone would want.

This also isn’t the 19th century – like it or not, we live in an interconnected world, and we’d still share 200-plus years of common history.

An amicable separation would require creating something like a North American Union, with each country maintaining sovereignty over domestic policy while establishing some cooperation through binding treaties. Let’s consider some of the sticky points.

First, Where Do You Draw the Borders?

Texas could just secede, or the United States could dissolve into regional blocs with similar political cultures.

You might have the Pacific States of America, the Southwestern States of America, the Northeastern States, etc. But most Americans like living in a large, powerful state, and size – market size and military might – matters on the international stage.

If one were to divide the country in two, a quick glance at a map reveals that there’s no clean way to sever the “red” and “blue” states into two contiguous territories.

In previous elections, North Dakota went for Romney by 20 points, but it would have to be part of the “Northern States of America.” New Mexico, which Obama won by 10 points, would end up being one of the more liberal states in the “Southern States of America.”

It gets trickier when you consider the political and cultural differences within states.

A farmer in Southern Illinois once told me, “We consider this area to be Northern Kentucky.” You would have to hold a county-by-county referendum to determine exactly where to draw the line.

Think about it. Would Camden County want to join with Columbia, St. Louis, or Kansas City?

Second issue, The Military

This gets sticky. How do you split up the most powerful military on the planet? Ideally, you wouldn’t; you’d create a NATO-style common defense force, with a central chain of command, and it would be dedicated to protecting the territory formerly known as the United States.

This would avoid a situation in which the world’s leading military powers shared a common border – a scenario that could lead to all sorts of ugliness.

But here’s the problem: the two new countries would want the ability to set their own foreign policies and determine their own levels of military spending.

Presumably, the “blue” states would want to spend a little less on guns and a little more on the Green New Deal (or a lot less on guns and a lot more on The Green New Deal).

One possible solution would be to separate true “defense” from military spending.

We could agree to a treaty that sets common defense spending at, say, half of current levels for a dedicated North American Defense Force, and then allow the two new countries to maintain their own “expeditionary forces,” based overseas, that would be barred from operating in North America.

If one of the new countries wants to play World Police, it can do so and bear those costs.

What to do with our 700-plus foreign bases? I guess you’d divide them up like common assets in any other divorce.

Third Issue, Trade and Borders

If the idea is to pursue different ideas about the role of government in society, why would we want to give up the advantages that come with being the world’s second largest economy?

The best scenario would be to retain one big economic zone along the lines of the EU – two countries establishing their own domestic affairs, in a union with some common policy that facilitates the free exchange of goods, services and people.

This would give citizens the opportunity to vote with their feet if they don’t like living with their new model of governance.

But there are two problems here. First, we’d have to avoid having the red states become an economic zone, with cheap labor and lax environmental regulations that blue state firms could take advantage of to manufacture products for sale in their domestic market.

The second problem would be contraband goods flowing back and forth – what’s the point of stricter gun laws in the North if a constant stream of AR-15s flows up from the South? (The opposite would be true if the blue states legalized marijuana and the red states maintained its prohibition.)

The first problem might be answered with some sort of tariffs that equalize labor costs and regulatory burdens, creating an even playing field for firms to compete without engaging in a race to the bottom.

The second problem is stickier. Would we want a high-tech, heavily guarded border with limited crossing points like we now have with Mexico?

In the EU, people move freely across borders. Perhaps checkpoints could be established on the most heavily trafficked routes. Random vehicle searches – with penalties for trafficking in contraband goods – might be enough to manage the problem, at least to a significant degree, without having formal border crossings.

The Fourth Issue: Taxes and Benefits

This is a big one. It’s safe to assume that the blue states would tax their citizens more and offer better benefits in return. How would we deal with these differences if we maintain an open-border policy, and people spend time living and working in both new countries?

The European Union might again provide an answer: a bilateral tax treaty. In the EU, people who spend more than half of a year working outside their home country are considered tax residents of that country.

Those who spend less than half a year working in another country only end up paying taxes on their income in that country.

As far as retirement and health benefits go, as in the EU, you’d accrue benefits in the country where you worked, or, if you’ve worked in both countries, then you would be eligible for retirement benefits in both countries according to what you’ve paid into the system during your career.

Living on social Security, I have no idea how you would manage the transition of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security payments for those of us living in a state that seceded. That would be a huge point of negotiations in an amicable split.

Fifth Issue: Currency/Monetary Policy

Ideally, we’d maintain a common currency and avoid a lot of the hassles the EU has had by having a single central bank overseeing monetary policy (most of the EU has a single currency but no common fiscal policy, which has caused a lot of problems). No more Federal Reserve?

In the past, Virginia legislators approved a plan to study the feasibility of the state minting its own coins in order to survive the inevitable collapse of the federal government. And distrust of the Federal Reserve would probably make a common fiscal policy all but impossible.

Issue Number Six: Minority Rights

Liberals would no doubt worry about minority voting rights in Alabama and conservatives would be equally worried about the right of Missourians to own firearms.

One way to address these concerns would be to have both new countries adopt our existing Constitution. If they want to amend it, they can do so through a constitutional convention, or by passing an amendment with a super-majority in both chambers of Congress and then having it affirmed by three-quarters of their states.

This is a high bar, which means that only constitutional changes with very broad support would be possible. It may not be ideal, but it would go a long way toward protecting minority rights in both new countries.

They would also have independent Supreme Courts, and over the years those courts would no doubt come to very different interpretations of the Constitution. That’s probably a good balance; significant change would eventually be apparent, but absent new amendments, its core principles would remain intact.

I would like to add one more major issue to consider.

Number Seven: Unity

In order to pull off any secession movement you must have one key element. Unity.

Throughout history, the failure of secession movements has not been military domination by one side over the other, it has always been a lack of unity among the participants.

In the Russian Civil War, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power, those opposed to communism rose up. The problem was Lenin had a solid following known as The Reds who wanted communism. The opposition, known as The Whites were made up of people who wanted the Czar back, people who wanted a King, people who wanted a parliamentary government, people who wanted no government, and people who wanted a system like ours. They were not unified. Lenin’s people were.

So, think about that. Can Conservatives all agree on what type of government they want and the direction it would take on the world stage?

Better yet. We already see the turmoil within the Democratic party trying to figure out where they are headed when it comes to domestic policies yet alone how they will act in the theater of foreign relations. Again, no unity from within spells disaster.

So folks, there you have it. These are just a few of the issues that would have to be resolved if we went the secession route.

Bear in mind, these huge problems would have to be resolved if we decided on a friendly separation.

Can you imagine how difficult it would be following a violent Civil War in which millions would perish at the hands of fellow Americans?

What do you think? As difficult as it would be, is secession the way to go?

Having just received a  presidential pardon, former national security advisor Michael Flynn has called on President Trump to suspend the constitution and declare martial law for the military to run a new election.

The retired general tweeted out a full-page ad that ran in The Washington Times that claimed the extraordinary executive actions were necessary to avoid the alternative of an imminent “shooting civil war”.

The 1,500-word article invokes Abraham Lincoln’s extraordinary use of presidential authority to suspend habeas corpus (bring the body) as it compares  to the more widely-known civil war with Antifa and Black Lives Matter attacking major cities with their anti-American agenda.

“Then, to advance their cause, these socialists are acting to “Defund the Police,” creating chaos and suspending the rule of law that protects millions of average, and particularly minority, Americans,” the ad says.

“The results being massive increases in violent crime and deaths in our cities and the destruction of small businesses orchestrated by those politicians and leftist groups, many funded by domestic and international communists. We are literally under attack from within!”

 “When the legislators, courts and/or Congress fail to do their duty under the 12th Amendment, you must be ready Mr President to immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote,” the ad said.

“Only then can the winning candidate be accepted as legitimate by a true majority of We the People who must give our consent to be justly governed!

 Unfortunately we are at a point where we can only trust our military to do this because our corrupt political class and courts have proven their inability to act fairly and within the law.”

Folks, did you catch that last part? “We can only trust our military to do this”.

Quite frankly that scares me to death.

Why? History.

I agree that something needs to be done. But folks, there is no such thing as limited martial law. History, especially in Missouri, has proven that.

Let me explain. If you watched the Kansas City Chiefs game last weekend, they said there were 22,000 fans there.

I have a question. How many fo the fans were democrats, and how many were republicans? Don’t know? Me neither.

That is why you cannot have limited martial law. Martial law must be applied to everyone. Liberal and conservative, black, white, hispanic, rich, poor, young, old, everyone.

That is the very problem Lincoln had imposing martial law during the Civil War. How do you tell Union folks from confederate folks? You can’t, so everyone must suffer. That is exactly what happened here in Missouri between 1861 and 1865.

Let me tell you a story.

On August 30, 1861 General John Freemont declared martial law In Missouri and set up his HQ in Jefferson City. He was staying in the Dulle House by the old St. Mary’s hospital. Why there?

Because under martial law, the military become judge jury and executioner.

He and his men simply walked up to the door of the Dulle home and told Mr. Dulle they had 24 hours to get out. The Dulle’s had no recourse. All local law enforcement and civil courts had been suspended and replaced with a military tribunal.

Bear in mind, they never asked Mr. Dulle if he was Union or Confederate. They just wanted his house for Union headquarters and took it.

So, what is martial law?

 Well, the first thing that you need to know is that the U.S. Constitution is “suspended”.

In other words, you would suddenly have no rights at all.

There would be no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly and you could be arrested at any time for any reason whatsoever.

For the duration of the “emergency”, the military would be in control.  There would be troops in the streets, a curfew would almost certainly be imposed, and armed checkpoints would be set up.

If the “emergency” lasted long enough, we would probably see authorities go house to house confiscating firearms, ammunition and food supplies.

And perhaps most troubling of all, “dissidents” and “subversives” would likely be rounded up and imprisoned. Again, how do you tell? (Conservative or liberal?)

Now I know what you are going to say. That could never happen here.

Well, unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to your ancestors here in Missouri during the Civil War.

For all the skeptics out there, let me give you the facts.

Let’s start with General Order # 32  issued by Union General Halleck Dec. 21 1861.

Anyone caught in the act of sabotage will be immediately shot. No quarter, no trial.

Now a lot of Missourians wanted nothing to do with the war. We were a slave state, but voted 135,000 to 17,000 to stay in the Union.

Truth  is, less than 1% of our population owned slaves. Our issue was state’s rights. We simply wanted the Federal government to stay out of our business. Sound familiar?

So most Missourian just wanted to remain neutral and be left alone to work their farms.

Well, that quickly ceased to be an option when Union General John Schofield issued  General Order #19 :

“every able bodied man capable of bearing arms and subject to military duty is hereby ordered to repair without delay to the nearest military post and report for duty. The order went on to say that its purpose was to exterminate the guerrillas that infest our state.

Now let’s look at that one. Applied to the current situation, does that mean that the military could come in and tell me I must fight for Trump? If not, I am a traitor. This works both ways folks.

Let’s say Trump enacts martial law, the courts rule against him, and Biden takes office while we are under martial law. Now he becomes commander in chief over the military.

He could then use martial law to demand that  every able bodied man must now join the military and fight for Biden.

See why I am scared? Martial law is a terrifying tool.

So, lets proceed. You can no longer be neutral. You must join the military. This makes it easy to see who is with you, and who is against you.

Wearing a uniform, with us. Not wearing a uniform, a traitor. Simple.

Another clause of General Order #19 stated that to arm the military, The Union forces had the right to seize all guns.

This offered an excellent excuse for Union forces to enter private homes and take what they wanted. Can you say illegal search and seizure?

Shortly thereafter, on August 12, 1862, General Schofield issued General Order #9  which stated that while the Union army was in the field, they could help themselves to any supplies they needed from any citizens they felt were not loyal to the union.

Who determined loyalty? You guessed it, the military. Again, how do you tell? Unionor Confederate? Today, Republican or Democrat?

This brings us to what was known as the Palmyra Massacre in Palmyra, Missouri on October 18, 1862.

Ten Confederate prisoners of war were executed in retaliation for the abduction of a local Union supporter, Andrew Alsman. The officer who ordered the execution, Colonel John McNeil, was later known as the “Butcher of Palmyra”.

Col. John McNeil commanded the Union’s 2nd Missouri State Militia in Palmyra.  (yes, as a divided state, we had both Union and Confederate Militias). Also stationed in Palmyra was the Provost Marshal General for Northeast Missouri, Col. William Strachan, military commander for the whole area.

 One of Strachan’s local informants was 60-year-old Andrew Allsman.

Col. McNeil published a notice in the Palmyra Courier demanding the confederate guerrillas return Allsman unharmed to his family within 10 days.

If he failed to do so, 10 of the men jailed at Hannibal and Palmyra would be shot. Bear in mind, these ten men were citizens deemed traitors by the military. No trial, no jury. No habeas corpus under martial law. When the 10 days passed with no word from Porter, McNeil directed Provost Marshal Strachan to compile a list of 10 prisoners to face a firing squad. The execution was scheduled for Oct. 18.

Shortly past noon on Saturday, Oct. 18, three government wagons arrived at the Palmyra jail. One carried four rough wooden coffins and the other two carried three each.

The prisoners were led out of the jail and each man was seated on a coffin. The wagons were taken to the amphitheater of the fairgrounds, where the coffins were unloaded and placed in a row with the lids removed. About a hundred spectators gathered.

After a prayer by a local Baptist minister, the 10 men sat on the foot of their coffins about 30 feet from the firing squad.

Shortly after 1 p.m. the Baptist minister gave each man a final handshake, followed by Strachan.

Maj. Isham Dodson, in charge of the firing squad, called them to attention and gave the orders: “ready, aim—thus perish all traitors to their country’s flag—Fire!”

The bodies were placed in the coffins and the lids nailed shut. The wagons took the coffins back to the town square to be claimed by relatives.

Col. McNeil left Palmyra before the executions and went to St. Louis to give a newspaper interview explaining his actions. The interview was published in several newspapers, and the executions were condemned in the New York Times and a number of international newspapers.

 To stop the criticism and show his support for McNeil, Col. Lewis Merrill, commander of the Union District of Northeast Missouri, relieved Strachan as Provost Marshal General, claiming the position was no longer necessary. Col. McNeil was then promoted to brigadier general of volunteers.

Now just about the time you think that things can’t get any worse, along comes Brigadier General Thomas Ewing , Commander of Union forces in the western half of Missouri.

He decided that the guerillas couldn’t be defeated as long as the citizens kept helping them, so he now went after the citizens of Missouri.

Again, how do you tell if someone is Union or Confederate? Or today if someone is Conservative or liberal?

You all know the answer. When you yourelf are risking death by being labeled, the smart thing to do is cooperate with the military by pointing out the traitors in the community.

This happened throughout the war. Bear in mind, no jury, no trial. Just the word of your neighbor.

Great way to get rid of that noisy neighbor and his kids!

So back to General Ewing. He can’t seem to root out all the rebels in Missouri, so what did he do?

He started by arresting and imprisoning the wives, moms, and sisters of the rebels. They were rounded up and put in makeshift jails in KC.

Gen Ewing soon realized he didn’t have enough jail space for all of them so he now proposed the removal of all rebel families from Missouri.

On August 14, 1863 an old building on Grand avenue in KC, being used as a prison, collapsed killing the rwives and sisters of many William Clark Quantrill’s men. (the now famous Confederate Guerrilla of Missouri)

On the same day the prison collapsed, General Ewing issued General Order # 10 stating “ The wives and children of known guerrillas and also women who are heads of families and are willfully engaged in aiding guerrillas will be notified by such officers to remove out of this district and out of the state of Missouri forthwith.”

This was the final straw for Quantrill and his men. They now mounted up and headed for Lawrence Kansas and conducted the now famous sack of Lawrence on August 21, 1863.

All the male citizens of Lawrence were killed and the town was burned to the ground.

In response, General Thomas Ewing now issued General Order # 11. On August 25, 1863 which called for:

The forced removal of all Missouri citizens in Jackson, Bates, Cass, and ½ of Vernon county.

You have 15 days to get out or you will be shot.

Did you catch that? ALL MISSOURI CITIZENS! Didn’t matter if you were union or not. Your husband could be fighting for the Union and you still lost everything. Again, no recourse. Military is judge, jury, and executioner.

For hundreds of miles every home, barn and structure was then burned to the ground and all the fields set afire. For years after the war, these 4 counties were know as the burnt district.

Again, you as a citizen had no recourse, no compensation, just pack your stuff up and get out. What about our right to private property? Forget it. The Constitution has been suspended.

Bear in mind, General Order #23 had been established back in December 1862 to implement martial law. It created a Provost Martial General in St. Louis, and District Provost Marshalls throughout the state.

Provost Marshall had complete authority to arrest and imprison people at their will. They alone became judge, jury, and executioner and answered  to no court.

Provost Marshalls now also came up with a system of loyalty oaths. You had to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union and post $1000 bond.

Can you imagine having to swear an oath of loyalty to Trump or Biden at the risk of losing everything and being thrown in jail? That is martial law folks.

Don’t have the money? No problem, we will take the deed to your home and hold it as bond.

Now it is simply the Provost Mashall’s word vs. yours if you are loyal to the union and you could lose everything.

In April 1863  The KC Journal stated that the provost marshall held bonds totaling over 27 million dollars. (roughly $558 million in today’s dollars)

If you didn’t take the oath, you were arrested and imprisoned.

If you broke the oath, you were shot.

Remember, no jury trial, no representation.

Some entire towns vanished because everyone was arrested.

In June of 1863 General Schofield issued general orders stating that for every union soldier killed, $5000 would be assessed and collected from the people living in the community where the death occurred.

Opposition to the union cause by utterance or through the press was forbidden between 1861and 1865. Orders were sent out that all newspapers had to be sent to the military for inspection prior to publication and all newspaper editors were to take an iron clad oath of loyalty to the US. Think the press is bad now?

On Sept 17, 1863 General Schofield issued General Order # 96 that basically stated that it was against the law to incite rebellion through published materials and if you are found guilty of doing so, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment and the paper will be shut down.

So, between 1861 and 1865 in Missouri, we saw the federal government impose martial law, establish military commissions, arrest and imprison people at will, seize their property and their guns, banish people from the state and eliminate the people’s right to free speech.

Did it work? Of course not. It simply poured more fuel on the fire.

There is no limited martial law. It is all or nothing, so tread lightly when you call for it.

By the way, did you once hear me mention the word slavery?

For Missouri it was all about state’s rights and a federal government out of control. Our current federal government has become too powerful folks, regardless of who serves as president.

We need to return to the system created by our founding fathers as stated in the 10th amendment to the Constitution, ” Powers not granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution belong to the states or the people.

Breitbart News Article by James Delingpole

Build Back Better. This is the slogan of the New World Order – aka the Great Reset.

You hear it often these days referred to by everyone from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Prince of Wales to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and, inevitably, Joe Biden who has adopted it as his campaign slogan.

About the only leader you won’t hear using it is Donald Trump because he recognizes its true significance. Build Back Better is the code phrase for one of the most terrifying and dangerous, globally coordinated assaults on liberty and prosperity in the history of mankind.

If the plan succeeds, the world you inhabit will be unrecognizable, your children will have no prospects and your life will barely be worth living.

 Build Back Better means totalitarian rule by a global, technocratic elite – as constrictive and miserable as life under fascism or communism. This hideous New World Order is the Great Reset.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory but the people behind it are perfectly open about it. Why else would they dedicate a special issue of Time magazine to outlining their master plan?

Interestingly enough, many websites have been taken down by authorities claiming it is nothing but a conspiracy. My question is, If there is no truth to it, why are websites being censored when they speak of it?

One essay – titled ‘It’s 2023. Here’s How We Fixed the Global Economy’ – imagines a world where things all started getting better with the ousting of Donald Trump.

The author states,

The U.S. began to change its approach after Nov. 3, 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election and the Democrats held the majority in both houses of Congress.

So how do Biden and his Great Reset pals fix the global economy in this apparently desirable future?

Simple: Big Government takes care of everything, only not on a national scale this time, but a global one. It will be managed by a technocratic elite over whom you will have no democratic control.

Under the Great Reset, jobs and high minimum wages will be guaranteed; shale oil and gas will be replaced by solar; businesses — in return for massive bailouts from the government — will agree to be run more like communist worker co-operatives; car lanes on freeways will be replaced by cycle lanes; companies are no longer driven by profit by ‘public interest’ and goals like sustainability. Oh — and you needn’t worry about your mortgage repayments any more — because private property will be abolished.

(And yes, they’re serious about abolishing ownership. Here’s their website (World Economic Forum) boasting about their plans written on 11 Nov 11th, 2016 by Ida Aukin, Member of Parliament, Parliament of Denmark:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly.

Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes.

We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

OK. Let’s stop there for a second. Everything is order in? What are we going to be eating in the future under this great reset? Well guess what? I found another article on the World Economic Forum website, written by Tim Benton Professor of Population Ecology and UK Champion for Global Food Security, University of Leeds

The title: What will we eat in 2030.

In part, here is what it says:

….. The growing human population, with a significantly increasing global middle class, will be the engine of increasing global demand. Historically, increasing wealth has led to changing consumption patterns, particularly more meat and other resource-intensive foods like cheese and eggs. The question is the extent to which historical trends will play out in future.

This is for two prime reasons. First, on a global basis more people are now of an unhealthy weight than a healthy weight. At the same time, the historical “hunger challenge” is slowly receding, while malnourishment is increasingly associated with excessive weight and obesity, creating a new challenge for food systems.

This is creating a new policy interest in “food for health” which has the potential to help shape diets and thus food systems.

Second, the Paris climate agreement pledges to keep climate change to well-below 2 degrees C. Given that food systems – growing food and feed, making and transporting food, cooking, eating and throwing food away – accounts for just under a third of greenhouse gas emissions, food alone has the potential to use up the entire Paris agreement’s carbon budget. As many people have written, the most potent way to “decarbonise” the food system is to reduce the amount of greenhouse-intensive food we produce – notably meat.

So what might we eat in 2030? The author thinks demand will be shifting and more people will want to eat a healthy diet, one that is less intensive (and wasteful) of resources.

The increasing emergence of, wholefoods, organic, artisanal and “real food” movements is a sign of this – at least for the rich and dedicated. So our diets may be more vegetables and fruit, whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives (soya products, or perhaps insects or artificial meat), and less fried and sugary things.

We’ll still eat meat, but, perhaps more like our parents and grandparents, who saw it as a treat to savor every few days.

Scary huh?

Now back to our original article.

So carry out will be the norm. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability.

Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being.

In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people.

The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs.

Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

Now does all this seem far fetched folks?

Well, here is another World Economic Forum article posted on Twitter on June 23rd, 2020 titled:

The Great Reset after #COVID19 must put people first. 

It states: The founder of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab has written a book — several books in fact — on his masterplan.

His latest, called Covid-19: The Great Reset, makes no bones about the fact that the chaos of the Coronavirus pandemic represents the perfect opportunity to accelerate the entire world towards a ‘new normal’.

At the time of writing (June 2020), the pandemic continues to worsen globally. Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory.

Got that? As far as your new globalist overlords are concerned, you are NEVER going to get your old life back, however much you might wish it. Also, be clear: this is being done for your own good because your old way of life was based on a ‘broken’ model.

Such is the author’s conviction that the new normal is what we need and should want, he scarcely bothers to pretend that Chinese coronavirus is anything other than a handy pretext.

Unlike certain past epidemics, COVID-19 doesn’t pose a new existential threat.

Schwab is clear in his book that coronavirus is not so much a crisis as an opportunity to be exploited – a chance to accelerate the birth of the New World Order he calls The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Radical changes of such consequence are coming that some pundits have referred to a ‘before coronavirus’ (BC) and ‘after coronavirus’ (AC) era. We will continue to be surprised by both the rapidity and unexpected nature of these changes.

This might all seem pie in the sky — the demented ravings of a German so sinister-looking and sounding that he would have made an excellent Blofeld in the Bond movies — were it not for one major problem: lots of world leaders, billionaire businessmen and other masters of the universe are totally onboard with the project. This includes, if we’re very unlucky, possible future President Joe Biden.

Because it all sounds like something out of a dystopian novel in the manner of Nineteen Eighty-Four, many people are under the illusion that the Great Reset is a conspiracy theory they can safely ignore.

However, ‘It’s not a conspiracy when they tell you what they are doing.’

Slowly people are waking up. One of them is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, formal Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who has written an open letter to President Trump warning him of the threat posed by the Great Reset.

It still has had remarkably little coverage in the media. One of the few MSM outlets to address it has been Sky News Australia, whose Rowan Dean described the Great Reset as ‘an anti-democratic enterprise designed to destroy your job, steal your prosperity and rob your kids of a future.’

Health care journalist Peter Barry Chowka was blunt, calling the COVID/Climate “solution” linkage “a flu d’état.” “A takeover of our supposedly democratic political process by unelected & unaccountable administrative state medical bureaucrats,” Chowka warned, noting that all of the COVID solutions were virtually the same as the Green New Deal “solutions” to the purported climate “crisis.”

“Overnight, our society is doing what radical leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her fellow Green New Deal fanatics have demanded: An almost total end to air travel; personal automobile travel down to a trickle; promises of free health care for all quickly becoming the new status quo; and the ability of people to sit at home without working and receive a paycheck from the government. The Democrats want that to continue indefinitely,” Chowka wrote.

Also definitely worth a view — if you don’t mind being greatly depressed — is this explainer from  Dave Cullen (aka Computing Forever), who says:

‘You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy…Sounds an awful lot like global communism.’

So there you have it folks.

The Great Reset. Is it true or just a conspiracy? I don’t know.

As always, the intent of my show is to share the research I have done. Draw your own conclusions.

Right now, I don’t know what to think or who to believe.

Callers?

In July of 1864 the Confederacy was in real trouble. The Union had driven deep into the south. So the Confederacy decided to launch a very risky plan.

General  Sterling Price had convinced Jefferson Davis that the south should launch a raid into Missouri and capture St. Louis.

From there , the south could cut off Union supplies being shipped down the Mississippi and then cut across Illinois and head south to attack Union forces from behind putting them in a two front war.

It was a great plan, but it all hinged on taking St. Louis.

In the meantime, William Clark Quantrill and his guerillas were to cause as much havoc as they could in the western part of the state to draw Union troops there, opening up the eastern part of the sate for General Price’s invasion.

They now attacked places like Booneville and Rocheport.

Columbia was afraid they would be next and formed their own union militia called the Tigers.

The president of boone County Bank took all the money out of the bank and buried it under fence posts on his farm where it remained until the war ended.

Next, Bloody Bill Anderson and his men wiped out Centralia in the now famous Centralia massacre.

The plan worked. St. Louis dispatched every available soldiers to the western part of the state, opening up the path for Sterling Price and the Confederates to invade Missouri and take St. Louis.

Price now crosses from Arkansas into Missouri with a rag tag force of 12,000 men.

Like I said, this is a last ditch effort. The men have been living on limited rations of hard tack and the reigns of their horses were made of grape vines cut from the surrounding trees.As they headed  north from Sikeston and approached Cape Gerardo, They were spotted by 2 Union soldiers on horseback high on the hill just north of town.

Price’s scouts rode back to tell him about the Union soldier and Price immediately stopped the march and called together his Generals to get their thought on how to proceed.

Price’s generals included General James Fagan, an Arkansas politician, Maj. General John S. Marmaduke, West Point Grad and future Governor of Missouri, and Brigadier General Joseph O. Shelby a great calvary leader and one of the toughest fighter of the war.

Price told the generals that he feared Union soldiers were part of a scouting party for the main Union force in Missouri and that if the reported back that they saw the confederate forces advancing northward toward St. Louis, the element of surprise was lost and they would never be able to take St. Louis.

It was then agreed that Price was probably correct, so they made the decision to abandon their plan to take St. Louis and instead head for Jeff. City and capture the capitol.

This was a terrible decision that may have changed the entire outcome of the war.

The two Union soldiers were indeed from St. Louis. However, they were bored and missed their girlfriend who lived in Cape. So they decided to sneak out of camp in St. Louis for a few day and go see their girlfriends.

As they approached Cape Gerardo, they came to the top of the hill and there, spread out below them was a line of 12,000 Confederate soldiers!

It looked like the entire Confederate army, so they turned tail and fled back north to St. Louis. Along the way they agreed that neither of them would tell anyone what they saw. If they did, they would be shot for going AWOL, so they returned to camp and told no one.

So, bottom line, the course of history was changed by 2 guys sneaking off to see their dollies! Even worse, St. Louis was only being protected by a Union force of 4000 men.

Things for Price now got even worse. As they were heading toward Jeff City they came to the mining town of Pilot Knob.

The scouts asked Price if he planned on attacking the Union Fort there. Fort  Davidson.

Price initially said no, the priority was Jeff City. Then the scouts told him who was in command of Fort Davidson.

It was none other than General Thomas Ewing. Thomas Ewing had previously been in command in Kansas City and had issued the infamous General Order #11 which forced all Missourians, regardless of allegiance, out of their homes. They had 15 days to comply or be shot.

Ewing and his troop came in, took everything, and burned all 4 counties to the ground.

Needless to say. General Ewing was the most hated man in Missouri and Price simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to capture or kill Ewing.

So Price gave the order to attack the fort.

Ewing had a total force of 1000 men at the fort. 400 Missouri Militia and 600 Iowa Union soldiers. Price had a force of 12,000.

Upon comin to the fort the confederates surround it and immediately ayyacked.

Unfortunately. unbeknownst to the rebels, the fort was surrounded by a moat.

Form outside the fort it just looked like a dirt berm, but on the back side of the berm was a six foot deep ditch, half filled with water.

As the Confederates attacked from all sides they climbed up and over the berm then slid into the muddy ditch with no way out.

The union soldiers shot them like rabbits in a trap and in just 20 minutes over 1000 of General Price’s forces were killed.

Seeing what was happening, Price called off the attack.

Being late in the day Price ordered hi men to make camp surrounding the fort. He then told his artillery to take their canons up to the high groundsurround the fort and prepare to blow the fort into oblivion the next morning at first light.

Meanwhile, Union General Ewing gathered his men and regrouped inside the fort. He could see they were still surrounded by 11,000 rebels and he was running low on ammo.

So he came up with a bizarre plan. He issued orders to his men to change into their street clothes. He then stated that as soon as it was dark, his men should pair up and, two at a time slip out of the fort under cover of darkness.

Bear in mind, the confederates were a rag tag army with very few having uniforms. So Ewing told his men, don’t run thru their camp. Just walk from one campfire to the next making idle conversation as you make your way to the perimeter. Then we will all meet on the Rolla to St. Louis Road tomorrow morning.

Unbelievable, the plan worked. Men snuck out all night long two at a time. The last two, lit a long fuse that ran to the powder magazine. At sunrise the powder magazine blew and the rebels, thinking the Union accidentally blew themselves up, charged the fort only to find there was no one there.

Ewing and his men had escaped.

Totally disgusted Price now regrouped and headed to Jeff. City.

General Sterling Price and his force of 11,000 men now arrived on the outskirts of Jefferson city on October 2, 1864. They made camp on Greenberry Road, just southeast of where McClung Park now stands.

Price immediately sent his scouts out to survey Union fortification and troop movements in the city.

After several hours the scouts returned with their report. It was not good.

Jefferson City had been held for the past 3 years by Union forces and was now heavily fortified.

Back in 1861, General John Fremont made the decision to make sure the confederates could never take the capitol of Missouri. He set up his headquarters in the Dulle house (brick house by old St. Mary’s on the hill, Grant stayed there as well when he helped fortify the town.)

He then set up fortifications with canons:

Miners Hill – State Surplus Property Area by the prison (covered river and road to St. Louis)

East Fort – Immaculate Conception Church Area

Millers Hill – Simonson School Area

Dunklin Fort – North side of Dunklin Street

College Hill – By Mo. River Bridge and City Water Works

Southern Hills- Jeff City High School Area

Koch’s Hill  – Jefferson Street  Helias High

Swifts Hill – Swifts Highway Area

Dulle’s Hill – St. May’s Hospital Area

So, the scout having reported what they saw, now left Price and his generals with a decision to make.

Do we try and take the town? Marmaduke and Shelby both pointed out the fact that all of the fortification were set up to put any invading force into an immediate crossfire, regardless of where they launched their attack

They also estimated that there were roughly 4000 troop station in the town.

Price, having  just faced a slaughter of his men at Pilot Knob, running low on supplies and not wanting to destroy his remaining troops, made the correct decision and decided to pull camp the next morning and head for Booneville where they would be welcomed by confederate sympathizers and the Missouri guerilla forces.

Many say he made the decision because, having lived in Jeff as Governor, he knew the people and did not want to subject them to battle and the destruction of their city.

That may well have been part of his decision, but he was a military man, and I think he made the decision based on military tactics.

So why the history lesson?

Last month, the Jefferson City Council voted 8-2  in favor of a resolution to remove a monument donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy on the site where Sterling Price and his men camped in the story I just told you.

In the dark of night, the city council had the monument removed the next evening.

Council members and city commission have recommended it be replaced by something that “more accurately” tells the story of Jefferson City’s role in the Civil War.

So what did this monument say that was so offensive?

Bear in mind, it isn’t even a statue. It is a rock with an inscription on it.

The Sterling Price marker on Moreau Drive was erected on April 6, 1933 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The monument honors General Sterling Price of the Confederate Army.

“Deciding against attack, the Confederate Army under Gen. Sterling Price turned from Jefferson City October 7, 1864,” the plaque reads.

The two dissenting votes in the 8-2 council decision were from Councilmen Mark Schreiber and Ron Fitzwater.

During the discussion Fitzwater presented an amendment to the resolution that would not remove the monument, but add storyboards, explaining its context. That motion failed in a 2-8 vote, Fitzwater and Schreiber voting in favor.

“Again I do not condone what the daughters stood for,” Fitzwater said. “But I think we can use it as an opportunity to educate.”

Council members who voted for the removal said that it lacks historical context and was placed there for the wrong reasons, including Laura Ward.

“I’ve heard it be called a symbol of peace, a maker of peace, a monument of peace. It is not that, it was not put there for that reason,” Ward said.

The monument has been a topic of conversation and debate after the Jefferson City Human Relations Commission and the city’s historic preservation commission sent letters to the city council expressing concerns in late August.

The letter from the Human Relations Commission said the marker leaves out the context of the decision and that it offers a different version of historical events. The chairperson for the commission said in the letter that the panel is not simply calling for removal, but hopes for more context or a replacement.

Some members of the community have said that removing the monument would erase historical events. People on the other side have said the monument’s message is misleading and that Price had no choice but to turn away given the federal strength in the state capital.

Now folks. I just told you why I think Price decided not to attack Jeff City. However, removing this monument is a travesty to both sides. The monument should have remained there, just like all the other monuments being torn down throughout the nation.

I hope that what  I have demonstrated today is that a monument cannot tell the whole story. The purpose of any monument is to get people to remember their history.

Think of monuments as bookmarks. They are there so you can go back and review the story. From there, I don’t care what conclusions you draw. That is your business.

But when you remove the bookmark, you find it much harder to go back and find the information. In some cases, you may never find it again.

Is that what we want when it comes to remembering our nation’s history?

I say absolutely not!

Callers, based on the story I provided you today, should the Sterling Price Monument have been removed or should it have stayed?