Most don’t realize that your Google Maps app spies on you even when it is closed, and not running. I was appalled and pissed off when I just opened Google maps, and found out that it tracks and identifies the names of places that I go, even though I have not opened the app in 3 months!
You can bet that the 4 letter agencies are putting this criminally collected, and shared data in places like their Net Fusion Center in KC Missouri.
“The SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] is probably the most dangerous hate group in America,” says Dr. Michael Brown–and he’s probably right.
“Which is more insidious, the enemy that you recognize or the enemy that appears to be your friend? Which is more dangerous, a rag-tag bunch of poorly-funded White Supremacists or a well-organized, massively-funded, ‘civil rights’ organization which demonizes Christian conservatives? And which lie is more likely to spread, one that is false from beginning to end or one that mixes with falsehood with truth?
“Based on the obvious answers to these questions, it is the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, that is most insidious and dangerous, and it is the lies of the SPLC that are more likely to spread. The SPLC even has blood on its hands, and by its own definition, should be listed is [sic] a hate group.”
Brown then illustrates his assessment by referring to a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune that regurgitates the SPLC claim that there were eight “hate groups” in San Diego’s backyard. Two of the eight are conservative Christian organizations, including a pro-family Catholic organization. These two organizations make the SPLC “hate” list because they are “anti-LGBT.”……. Read More
From time to time, I see lists on the internet that propose to solve the problems of intergenerational poverty in America.
Unfortunately, most of the time, these lists recommend massive transfers of wealth from rich people to poorer people, or suggest the creation of new “poverty-fighting” government bureaucracies, in spite of the fact that neither of these approaches is likely to solve the underlying problems.
The Decline and Flatline of Poverty
The fact is that in the 25 years before Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” began, the poverty rate in America was on the decline.
But now, decades after we’ve created numerous Federal bureaucracies formally dedicated to eradicating the problem for good and over $22 trillion spent, our poverty rates have flat-lined instead. Worse, many of the programs designed to benefit the poorest members of our society have actually created dependency traps that make it nearly impossible for people who grow up in impoverished conditions to escape.
And as for the idea that the problem of poverty could be solved if only rich people were forced to give their wealth to poorer people? That sounds plausible enough until you realize that it wouldn’t make a significant difference to poverty anyway.
For example, if you combine the entire net worth of Forbes’ list of the world’s 400 richest people, you’d come out with about $2.4 trillion. Yes, it’s an enormous number, but it’s not exactly what you might think.
This is not money all piled up in a grain silo somewhere, waiting for some rich guy to dive in and roll around. Instead, it’s the estimated monetary value of all the assets they own. That means all the office buildings, furniture, computers, telephone lines and other capital infrastructure of their various businesses; the value of their employee salaries, payroll, and pensions; and the on-paper economic value of the businesses themselves.
For example, Amazon reportedly holds $83.4 billion in assets. That includes all their warehouses, trucks, servers, and the actual stuff they keep in stock for people to purchase. And that money is what’s rolled into Jeff Bezos’ supposed $89 billion net worth. Bezos can’t just cash out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars without liquidating the inventory his company holds, selling all of his buildings, and divesting himself from Amazon entirely – and he could only do that in a world where there are other rich guys ready to buy.
So, that $2.4 trillion isn’t a real number in any sense that can be converted into a transfer of income.
Poverty is the natural state of the world and the big mystery of human history is not how people become poor, but how people get rich.
But let’s imagine that it was, even if we could just magically grab $2.4 trillion in cash from the world’s billionaires, when divided amongst the rest of us 99%ers in the United States (about 319,000,000 people), we’d all walk away with a one-time-payment of just $7,500.
Even if we just limited the transfer from the richest 1% to the bottom 20%; each person would get $37,151.70 – or basically a one-time payment of considerably less than the median salary in the US.
Not that we wouldn’t all like the extra cash, but let’s be honest… After that money is gone and we’ve sent a clear signal to the most successful businessmen & women in the world that the reward for building a company like Google or Apple is to have all your assets taken from you and your business destroyed, then what?
Neither long-term government dependency or wrecking the economy for a short-term payout is the answer.
So what should we do instead?
First, we should understand that poverty is the natural state of the world and the big mystery of human history is not how people become poor (that’s easy, do nothing), but how people get rich. Once we recognize that fact, we have to shift our way of thinking about poverty and start seeing growing wealth as a consequence of people’s ability to create and exchange goods and services with each other.
In the end, wealth is not just dollars in a bank account. It’s our very standard of living and quality of life. The money is just a measurement tool.
So what we need is to create a world where it’s incredibly easy for people from every conceivable starting point to enter the market and create their own success. To that end, I’d like to offer 10 actually effective ways to reduce poverty and inequality in America and around the world.
Here we go:
Eliminate most occupational licensing restrictions and lower barriers to entry to getting jobs and starting businesses.
It’s an issue that people often know little about, but roughly 1 in 3 occupations in the United States require a government-granted license before people can even begin to earn a living. And while it’s common to believe that these licenses are protecting the public from bad doctors, dentists, and lawyers, the truth is that most of these licenses are for barbers & hairdressers, florists, landscapers, and gym class instructors. The Institute for Justice maintains an annual report on the state of occupational licensing in America.
According to IJ:
“The report documents the license requirements for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations—such as barber, massage therapist and preschool teacher—across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It finds that occupational licensing is not only widespread, but also overly burdensome and frequently irrational.
On average, these licenses force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees. One-third of the licenses take more than a year to earn. At least one exam is required for 79 of the occupations.”
These licenses are often insurmountable barriers to entry for low-income people not only to finding employment but also to starting their own businesses. In 2014, I made a documentary chronicling the story of one such entrepreneur, Melony Armstrong, and her battle against occupational licensing in Mississippi:
“Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit.”— H.L. Mencken
Let’s not mince words.
Jeff Sessions, the nation’s top law enforcement official, would not recognize the Constitution if he ran right smack into it.
Whether the head of the Trump Administration’s Justice Department enjoys being the architect of a police state or is just painfully, criminally clueless, Sessions has done a great job thus far of sidestepping the Constitution at every turn…… Read More
How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.
We are witnessing the unraveling of the American dream one injustice at a time.
Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the American people wake up a little more to the grim realization that they have become captives in a prison of their own making. No longer a free people, we are now pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.
The death toll is mounting. The carnage is heartbreaking. The public’s faith in the government to do its job—which is to protect ourfreedoms—is deteriorating…….. Read More
I could not believe how good the Missouri marijuana “bill” was that I ran across last year. For starters it was not a bill. It was a Constitutional amendment. H’mmm I thought. Finally some people that are on the right track, as I have been very critical of so called “legalization” in other states. As far as I can see, legalization, as in everything that the psychopaths in the legislature do, was first of all a scheme to make the state, and the friends of the legislature, a lot of money off of the backs of the citizens. When in fact they are supposed to be protecting those citizens rights, not economically exploiting them.
The elephant in the room about “legalization” is that it is anything but….. In each case they just pass new and different laws about how they can kidnap you, and destroy your life over the use of a plant that God gave us in the book of Genesis.
Let’s hope that with some public education that when. Missouri changes it’s laws that they will reflect a protection of rights, rather than just creating new ways to violate our rights, and euphemistically calling it “legalization”.
Here is one Facebook group that is helping to get the amendment on the ballot:
What I do not understand is how the state can claim to “legalize” something that they have no right to criminalize in the first place. It’s all part of the continueing and never stopping psy-op coming from the state, but that is another conversation…. What I put into my body, is my choice, and one of my infinite God given inalienable rights. Obviously a right does not have to be listed in the bill of rights. The 9th and 10th amendments acknowledge that fact. The state on the other hand is practising slavery. i.e. It is claiming to own our bodies.
This country was founded upon the simple principles that John Locke espoused in his Second Treatise on Government. Thomas Jefferson elucidated them in the Declaration of Independance. Those principles are:
That we are the sovereigns, and thusly that we have all rights. Not a single one of the “legalization” states has even come close to protecting those rights when it comes to MJ. The fact that this has been allowed to happen is a testament to the successful brainwashing, and dumbing down of the public into not even knowing, much less demanding their rights.
The public knows nothing of the history of the Opium Wars. That the global elite, the same ones that are behind the The UN Drug Control Conventions that we have adopted, are the ones that are behind and are benefiting from the “war on drugs”, and the useful idiots, the order followers in blue, definitely do not understand the Satanic agenda that they are helping implement.
The drug war in the US, like the Opium Wars, has been a tool to trample our rights, to socially engineer, to corrupt both police and government officials, and to go after enemies of the state. In that respect the war on drugs has been extremely successful, but does any of this sould like a legitimate function of government?
The very greatest impediment to humanity throwing off the chains of illegitimate government, were expressed by Benjamin Franklin over 200 years ago, in his famous “Join or Die” political cartoon.
This is just as true today as in the Revolutionary era. The masses are dumbed down in government schools, and have fallen for the divide and conquer. Americans even though it may save their lives and liberties are too stupid to work together and remain largely divided. “Christians” are IMHO the biggest offenders here. Most of them do not even really support the concept of God given rights with anything other than lip service, much less be willing to work together to defeat the dark forces that are in power…… rather ironic if you think about it ~MFP
Pastor Chuck Baldwin hits the nail on the head about US “Christians” doing the exact same thing that the Christians in Nazi Germany did when faced with evil… They went along and said nothing! ~MFP
“…And as I have discussed many times in this column and in my messages, Romans 13 is one of the most egregiously misinterpreted passages of Scripture in America. Romans 13 is distorted to the point that Christians in this country have become little more than carbon copies of what a majority of Christians became in Nazi Germany: sheepish slaves of the state.
Yes, Romans 13 was Hitler’s favorite Bible passage. He had many of Germany’s pastors and preachers (“spiritual advisers”) constantly delivering sermons and Bible studies that taught (indoctrinated) churches to believe that, as Germany’s leader, Hitler had God’s approbation to do “anything,” including attacking foreign countries (which, of course, he did), and that it was the Christian’s duty to submit–and that any lack of submission to Hitler was a lack of submission to God. If this sounds eerily familiar to what you are hearing in the church you currently attend, you are in a Hitlerian church, my friend, and you need to GET OUT……” Read More
Americans could learn a heck of a lot from the Ants in this popular movie. The lesson is what the deep state does not want the sheep to know: “join or die”: ~MFP
“…And as I have discussed many times in this column and in my messages, Romans 13 is one of the most egregiously misinterpreted passages of Scripture in America. Romans 13 is distorted to the point that Christians in this country have become little more than carbon copies of what a majority of Christians became in Nazi Germany: sheepish slaves of the state.
Yes, Romans 13 was Hitler’s favorite Bible passage. He had many of Germany’s pastors and preachers (“spiritual advisers”) constantly delivering sermons and Bible studies that taught (indoctrinated) churches to believe that, as Germany’s leader, Hitler had God’s approbation to do “anything,” including attacking foreign countries (which, of course, he did), and that it was the Christian’s duty to submit–and that any lack of submission to Hitler was a lack of submission to God. If this sounds eerily familiar to what you are hearing in the church you currently attend, you are in a Hitlerian church, my friend, and you need to GET OUT……”
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This course is a two hour, self-paced learning experience with a focus on the history of American thought during the era of American history directly following the American Revolution. It uses primary documents so that you can understand the ideas of the Framers of the Constitution as they did themselves in order to ascertain why they created the government that they did. The workshop also uses entertaining videos to explain the history surrounding this pivotal stage in American history. This online course works wonderfully as a stand alone educational experience for those who want to learn on their own and as a resource for social studies teachers.
This week, Donald Trump focused all his energy on addressing the opiate crisis. Calling for enhanced “law and order” tactics, Trump promised to use the very same methods that have already proven themselves to be useless in fighting drug consumption.
“Strong law enforcement is absolutely vital to having a drug-free society,” Trump said on Tuesday. “I’m confident that by working with our health care and law enforcement experts we will fight this deadly epidemic and the United States will win.”
All terrible government policies have unintended consequences.
It would appear that Trump has been living under a rock for the past 30 years. As anyone who has paid any attention to the government’s failed war on drugs would know, the “law and order” approach simply doesn’t work. If it did, the opiate epidemic would have never happened in the first place….. READ MORE
