Category: Uncategorized
The Reds Are Right About Assange
The Chinese communists are hoisting the U.S. government on its own petard, at least with respect to Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who, with WikiLeaks, disclosed war crimes committed by the U.S. national-security establishment.
For decades stretching back to the Cold War, U.S. officials have reveled in leveling condemnations and criticisms of Red China for its human-rights abuses and denial of civil liberties.
What has always amazed me is that the Chinese haven’t responded by pointing out the rank hypocrisy of the U.S. government, given the horrific human-rights abuses and denial of civil liberties long exercised by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, especially with their assassination program, torture program, kidnapping program, indefinite detention, denial of speedy trial, denial of trial by jury, and secret mass surveillance.
That’s all changed with the case of Julian Assange. The Reds are no longer silent. They are going on the attack with condemnations and criticisms of the U.S. government with respect to Assange.
Take, for example, this video presentation by Yonden Lhatoo, the chief news editor of the South China Morning Post. It is entitled “The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Western Governments Hell-Bent on Destroying Julian Assange.” It’s worth watching. Lhatoo skewers U.S. and British officials for their persecution, prosecution, and mistreatment of Assange for telling the truth about war crimes committed by the U.S. national-security state.
Now, mind you, as a Hong Kong media outlet, the South China Morning Post is not technically owned by Red China’s communist regime. But with the way things are going in Hong Kong, it is a virtual certainty that the Morning Post is being closely monitored, if not indirectly controlled, by the communist regime. In fact, according to Wikipedia, “Since the change of ownership in 2016, critics including The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Atlantic have alleged that the paper is on a mission to promote China‘s soft power abroad. According to critics, it is moving away from independent journalism and pioneering a new form of ‘propaganda.’”
Lhatoo points out that if Assange had been a Chinese citizen who had disclosed truthful evidence of war crimes committed by China, U.S. and British officials would be hailing him as a courageous hero, one who was deserving of the Nobel Prize. It is an excellent point, one that is indisputable.
Sadly, what the Reds are saying about U.S. hypocrisy is absolutely correct. What amazes me is that they haven’t yet, as far as I know, pointed to the Pentagon/CIA torture and prison center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which could easily have been modeled on similar structures in communist countries.
It’s pretty sad when the communists are condemning and criticizing the U.S. government for hypocrisy when it comes to human-rights abuses and civil liberties. It’s even sadder when they are right, especially in the case of Julian Assange.
4 Facts About IRS Gun Arsenal
Some of the 87,000 new agents whom Democrats propose to hire at the Internal Revenue Service could come with some extra firepower.
On Friday, House Democrats gave final passage to the tax and spending bill they dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, would double the size of the IRS with 87,000 new agents to beef up enforcement.
As of two years ago, the IRS had an arsenal of 4,600 guns, reported OpenTheBooks, a government watchdog group.
Two federal investigations in the past decade found that IRS agents had not been sufficiently trained and were accident-prone with the weapons they have. Armed IRS raids on nonviolent taxpayers surfaced as a concern almost 25 years ago during a Senate hearing.
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Democrats’ bill, which the Senate passed Sunday, awaits the signature of President Joe Biden should it clear the House as early as Friday.
The legislation, which unwinds from 2023 through 2031, would devote $80 billion to expanding the IRS and boosting tax revenue to pay for Democrats’ green energy subsidies and other pet projects.
Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that opposes the legislation, assembled information about the IRS arsenal from government and media reports.
During the House floor debate Friday, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., raised concerns about arming IRS agents.
“This bill has new IRS agents and they are armed, and the job description tells them that they need to be required to carry a firearm and expect to use deadly force if necessary,” Boebert said. “Excessive taxation is theft. You are using the power of the federal government for armed robbery on the taxpayers.”
Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., suggested that no IRS agents are armed.
“The idea that they are armed—I know that Ms. Boebert would like everybody to be armed, but that’s not what IRS agents do,” Yarmuth said. “I would implore my Republican colleagues to cut out the scare tactics. Quit making things up.”
In a posted job opening for a special agent, the IRS specified that applicants should be “willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments,” and able to carry “a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.”
After sparking some controversy amid the proposed expansion of the agency, the IRS deleted “willing to use deadly force” from the job description.
The IRS referred questions to the Treasury Department as to whether the arsenal would increase as the number of personnel multiplies.
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
Here are four key things to know about the Internal Revenue Service and weapons.
1. IRS Guns and Ammo
The current IRS workforce includes 78,661 full-time employees, so Democrats’ legislation, if passed as written, would more than double the agency’s employees.
A 2020 report from OpenTheBooks, titled “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” shows that the IRS Criminal Investigation division has a stockpile of 4,600 guns.
The firearms include 3,282 pistols, 621 shotguns, 539 rifles, 15 fully automatic firearms, and four revolvers, the report says.
The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, reported in 2018 that the IRS had 3.1 million rounds of ammunition for pistols and revolvers.
The tax agency had 1.4 million rounds of ammunition for rifles, the GAO report said, along with 367,750 shotgun rounds and 56,000 rounds for automatic weapons.
2. Armed Agents ‘Not Properly Trained’
The IRS’s National Criminal Investigation Training Academy has the responsibility to implement firearms training and a related qualification program nationwide.
However, IRS agents assigned to the Criminal Investigation division regularly failed to stay up to date with training or to report incidents of improper firearms use, according to a 2018 report from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.
The inspector general’s report notes that “there is no national level review of firearms training records to ensure that all special agents meet the qualification requirements.”
“Special agents not properly trained in the use of firearms could endanger the public, as well as their fellow special agents, and expose the IRS to possible litigation over injuries or for damages,” the report says.
For qualification, each agent must score 75% or higher on the firing range, but the IRS lacked documentation showing its agents met the standards, according to the inspector general.
The report says that 79 of the 459 special agents in the agency’s long gun cadre failed to meet standard qualification requirements. Further, the report says the IRS could not provide information about whether 1,500 special agents were trained in tactical equipment proficiency.
In fiscal year 2016, the inspector general’s report determined, the IRS Criminal Investigation division “did not maintain documented evidence that 145 out of 2,126 special agents met the firearm standards established by CI [Criminal Investigation] and therefore were not qualified law enforcement officers.”
3. More Unintended Discharges Than Intended Ones
The poor firearms training for IRS agents has led to more accidental firings than intentional firings, according to a separate inspector general’s report from 2012.
“Having the availability of deadly force puts hiring so many new agents into perspective,” Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, told The Daily Signal.
The inspector general for tax administration “found they fired their guns more times by accident than on purpose,” Norquist said. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”
The poor training was not a new problem, since the 2012 report from the inspector general found similar issues with firearms training.
“If there is insufficient oversight, special agents in possession of firearms who are not properly trained and qualified could endanger other special agents and the public,” the report says.
The 2012 report not only found that IRS agents fired their weapons by accident more times than intentionally, but that the agency concealed details about the accidental discharges.
“There were a total of eight firearm discharges classified as intentional use of force incidents and 11 discharges classified as accidental during FYs 2009 through 2011,” the report says.
And, the inspector general’s report continues, “we found that four accidental discharges were not properly reported.”
It says that “the accidental discharges may have resulted in property damage or personal injury.”
The public report, however, redacts four references to unreported accidental discharges of firearms.
4. IRS History of Armed Raids
In 1998, the Senate Finance Committee held investigative hearings into IRS abuses that featured testimony from a Virginia restaurant owner.
The restaurant owner said that armed IRS agents with drug-sniffing dogs burst into his restaurant during breakfast hours and ordered customers to get out.
Agents took his cash register and records, the restaurant owner told the Senate committee. When he returned home, he found that his door had been kicked open and his residence had been raided.
A tax preparer from Oklahoma gave similar testimony, saying that about 15 armed IRS agents came to his business and harassed his clients.
The owner of a Texas oil company recounted that agents came to his office and told employees: “Remove your hands from the keyboards and back away from the computers. And remember, we’re armed!”
In each case, the agents came up empty-handed.
The Washington Post reported at the time that Democrat and Republican lawmakers alike expressed dismay, and that the Clinton administration’s IRS commissioner, Charles O. Rossotti, promised an investigation of such actions.
At a separate hearing that year before the same Senate committee, Treasury Department’s inspector general, Harry G. Patsalides, told senators that the IRS had tolerated car thefts and anonymous bullying by promoting an agent accused of sexual harassment and allowing agents to conduct armed raids on nonviolent taxpayers.
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The Son
It’s hard to see the promises of a new dawn……when you have your back to the Son.
ARM
Rejecting Rockerfeller Germ Theory
By Jon Rapport
The entire tragic, criminal, murderous, stupid, farcical COVID fraud is based on a hundred years of Rockefeller medicine—-a pharmaceutical tyranny in which the enduring headline is:
ONE DISEASE, ONE GERM.
That’s the motto engraved on the gate of the medical cartel.
—-Thousands of so-called separate diseases, each caused by an individual germ.
“Kill each germ with a toxic drug, prevent each germ with a toxic vaccine.”
In the absence of those hundred years of false science and propaganda, COVID-19 promotion would have gone over like a bad joke. A few sour laughs, and then nothing, except people going on with their lives.
The overall health of an individual human being has to do with factors entirely unrelated to “one disease, one germ.”
As I quoted, for example, at the end of a recent article—-
“The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part, this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.” Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis, Bantam Books, 1977
And Robert F Kennedy, Jr.: “After extensively studying a century of recorded data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins researchers concluded: ‘Thus vaccinations does not account for the impressive declines in mortality from infectious diseases seen in the first half of the twentieth century’.”
Positive vitality is what keeps us healthy
“Similarly, in 1977, Boston University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay published their seminal work in the Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly on the role that vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive 74% decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century: ‘The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century’.”
“In this article, which was formerly required reading in U.S. medical schools, the McKinlays pointed out that 92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950, before most vaccines existed, and that all medical measures, including antibiotics and surgeries, ‘appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900 — having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances’.”
How the immune system (if it is a system) actually operates is beyond current medical hypotheses.
“T-cells, B-cells, neutrophils, monocytes, natural killer cells, proteins,” are welded into a breathless story about a military machine that attacks germ invaders. Push-pull. Search and destroy.
The notion that THIS is what creates health is fatuous.
Positive vitality is what keeps us healthy.
A few factors of positive vitality are on the tyrannical COVID list of what-should-be-squashed: financial survival; open mingling of friends and family; people looking (unmasked) at people; open communication without fear of censorship.
Nutrition and basic sanitation are key vitality factors
Nutrition and basic sanitation are key vitality factors, of course.
And then we have Purpose in Life: where are people pouring their creative energies?
Obviously, freedom from harmful medical treatment is necessary for vitality to flourish.
Suppression of LIFE, in order to stop a purported germ, is institutionalized death.
Modern medicine is sensationally exposed in a review I’ve mentioned dozens of time over the past 10 years: Authored by the late famous public health doctor at Johns Hopkins, Barbara Starfield, it is titled, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 26, 2000.
It found that, every year in the US, the medical system kills 225,000 people.
Per decade, the death toll would come to 2.25 million people.
You won’t find that in CDC reports.
In 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield. I asked her whether the federal government had undertaken a major effort to remedy medically caused death in America, and whether she had been sought to consult with the government in such an effort.
She answered no to both questions.
~~~
(Episode 16 of Rappoport Podcasts—“Destroying the Tyranny; Today’s Rebels, Tomorrow’s Leaders”—is now posted on my substack. It’s a blockbuster. To listen, click here. To learn more about This Episode of Rappoport Podcasts, click here.)
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here—with sources.)
(Follow me on Substack, Twitter, and Gab at @jonrappoport)
Rise Up Now
“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.” ~ George Washington
Hostility
Most Americans seem to believe we are experiencing a political divide like never before seen in America. Such a belief belies history. Sharp political divide and resulting demonstrations have been a part of the American body politic since the beginning.
In the early 1790s the nascent political parties, Federalists and anti-Federalists (later Jeffersonian Republicans), divided sharply over how to respond to the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars, with Federalists favoring allying with Great Britain and anti-Federalists favoring the French.
President George Washington issued a neutrality proclamation in May of 1793 over the protests of members of both parties. American merchants continued to trade with both England and France.
But as hostilities between England and France escalated the British began seizing American merchant vessels attempting to trade with France. After they had seized hundreds of ships and their cargo, Washington sent Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay to work out a treaty with the British for the return of the ships and deal with some business left over from the American Revolutionary War that weren’t solved by the Treaty of Paris.
The terms Jay worked out fell short of Washington’s expectations and angered both political parties. The controversy over the treaty’s terms sent Congress behind closed doors for negotiations. The more Americans learned about the treaty’s terms the less they liked it.
When demonstrations opposing the treaty broke out they often included the chant:
“Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won’t damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won’t stay up all night damning John Jay!”
Jay was burned in effigy during many demonstrations that included pushing and shoving. Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton was heckled when he appeared at a meeting in New York to explain the benefits of the treaty. Some in the crowd even threw stones.
Of course, the difference between those demonstrations and the ones we are seeing now is obvious. Those were grassroots demonstrations carried out by Americans who understood threats to liberty posed by government.
Today’s demonstrations are AstroTurf elitist-funded and fueled riots that are drawing in useful idiot leftist (mostly) millennials and single-issue pro-baby-murder women from across the nation who know little about American civics and even less about liberty and who are advocating for totalitarian government intervention to throw our borders open to a host of Third World America-hating socialists and destroy liberty.
Leftist never-Trumpers are still shouting, “Damn Donald Trump! Damn everyone who won’t damn Donald Trump! Damn everyone who won’t stay up all night damning Donald Trump!” As he’s not even the president anymore.
Civil discourse
It seems as though there will never again be civil political discussions in America.
Even if you overlook the clashes between the two fascist forces — BLM/Antifa and the white supremacists, who are nothing more than an extreme but vocal minority — as fringe elements and not reflective of reality, all political discourse seemingly deteriorates quickly to calumny, contumely and vitriol, if not open conflict.
We are at a point where television pundits and deep state operatives call Donald Trump delusional and who continually questioned “his ability, his fitness to be” in office, while ignoring the seeming lack of mental acuity of the sitting president; when supporters of the opposition are “deplorable”; when right-leaning Hollywood actors “are very hesitant to speak out in support of Trump because they fear that they will never work again”; and where journalists condescend to conservatives, implying — if not stating outright — that conservatives are simply unthinking Neanderthals with single-digit IQs.
There is nothing new under the sun
So the question becomes, is this a new phenomenon? Are we experiencing something never before seen in American politics?
The short answer is no.
Our country was only a dozen years old when political divisions began rearing their head; mostly between the Alexander Hamilton faction of High Federalists and the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.
The political differences taking front and center in the early days of the republic cost Thomas Jefferson many friends and opened rifts between him and other friends. One of them was John Adams.
Jefferson spoke of this in an 1808 letter to Richard M. Johnson, writing:
It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.
Those conflicts sometimes resulted in duels. Let’s hope cooler heads can prevail today. It’s not looking likely… but America is still here, despite a history of political divisiveness. I can only hope we are enduring a harsh winter and that a spring thaw will come one day. Otherwise, another civil war seems likely.
Yours for the truth,
Pride
Proverbs 16:18
Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.
amallory54 