The Fall of Constantinople

From Saturday's edition of Gates of Vienna:

Five hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, the city of Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire came to an end. The sack of Constantinople inaugurated centuries of brutal Islamic rule in southeastern Europe. Greece was finally liberated from the Ottomans in the 19th century, but to this day a small portion of Europe remains in Turkish hands, and the city of Istanbul — formerly Constantinople — remains a Turkish city.

Below is a guest-post about the fall of Constantinople by an author who writes under the pen name of Anestos Canelides. He has this to say about his essay:

I am half-Greek, and I wrote this as a memorial to those who fought in the epic battle against Islamic expansionism. I wrote it also as a memorial to the other Christians in the Balkans who lost so much to Islam. I have spent time in Istanbul, and I bear no hatred towards the modern Turks.

The Last Empire
1453: The Siege of Constantinople

by Anestos Canelides

On June 9th, 1453, three ships sailed into the harbor of Candia in Crete with a crew of mostly Cretan sailors. The sailors had arrived from Constantinople shortly after its fall to the Ottoman Turkish armies of Sultan Mehmet Bey. The Cretans had brought with them the tragic news about the fall of Constantinople to the armies of Islam, despite a heroic stand by the Greeks and their allies. The sudden news induced great anguish amongst the people of Crete and later the Christian west. The Ottoman conquest of the queen of cities had brought a tragic end to the Roman Empire, often referred to as the Byzantine Empire today. It was the final nail in the coffin of the center of the Byzantine world, but in turn it would bring about the rise of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic state.

Constantinople was attacked from land and sea, but the land walls, known as the walls of Theodosius, had never been breached in their thousand-year history. In the same way that three hundred Spartans had defied the advancing armies of the Persian Empire, the citizens of Constantinople also stood heroically and defended their city against tyranny. It was both the Byzantine Greeks’ desire for freedom from enslavement, and the belief that God would miraculously save them from defeat, that led them to resist the Turks fiercely for almost two months.

The Turks had sought to enter the city with a fanatic spirit because the Prophet, in the Qur’an, offered them a special place in paradise. Sultan Mehmet only mimicked the Prophet Muhammad when he said, “…even if some of us should die, as is natural in war, and meet our destined end, you know well from the Qur’an what the Prophet says, ‘that he who dies in battle shall dine whole in body with Mahomet, and drink with him in paradise and he shall take his rest in a green spot and fragrant with flowers, enjoying the company of women and lovely boys and virgins and he will bathe in gorgeous baths. All these things he will enjoy in that place by God’s favor.’” Despite facing such great odds, the Byzantines would defend their ancient Christian capital with great tenacity against the armies of Mehmet...
***

Read the rest.

Then consider this post, also from GoV.

Perspective, on a Day of Remembrance.

Freedom or death.

Codrea and Vanderboegh Via Romanian Media

Read it all.

Read also why the Romanian people must be celebrated and remembered for as long as free men and women draw breath.

Just don't tell Glenn Beck.

He'd be a-skeered.

Volk On Freedom

(click to enlarge image)

Courtesy of Oleg Volk.

Quote Of The Week

From EU Referendum:

It's not just that they are a bunch of low-grade, two-faced sh*ts that sticks in the craw - it's that they're doing it with our money and then sticking us with increased tax bills to pay for it all. The time for slaughter comes ever closer.

Jennifer III On WorldGov 2.0

Jennifer synthesizes many parts in this essay.

Read both it and the embedded links.

Still gonna live by your Glenn Beck pledge?

Word

As linked by Venlet:

I will be free if I have to break every law in the history of jurisprudence to do it. I will be free if I have to spend the rest of my life in prison to do it. I have no part with people who beg and plead for the privilege of exercising rights they were born with, people who pride themselves on how very law-abiding they are and count that as a measure of their “goodness,” people who kiss the hands that rivet on their chains.

Escorted Thugs: The SEIU and the DC Police

PowerLine has an important series on the recent police-escorted SEIU demonstration at a bank attorney's home in the Montgomery County, MD suburbs of DC:

A Thug Too Far, Part I

A Thug Too Far, Part II

A Thug Too Far, Part III

A Thug Too Far, Part IV

A Thug Too Far, Part V

Read the stories and embedded links, please.

Listen to this oath-taker from the DC police:



Do you understand yet?

'Civil Rights' And Total War

Read Will Grigg's latest.

Think about what is coming.

The divisions in this country cannot be reconciled, except by force.

Leviathan knows that.

And it will act.

I Thought You Couldn't Successfully Fight The G When It Comes To Get You?

David updates us on the situation in Jamaica:

Jamaica 'A Gun Control Paradise'

Jamaica's Problems Due To Government

He must be a criminal.

The government says so.

And he's resisting arrest.

Imagine what this cat knows about local corruption.

Imagine what the Jamaican government would do to keep those stories quiet.

Do you understand yet?

Beck: The Hinge Generations

From the irreplaceable Billy Beck:

McPhillips:

"The Left worked through academentia, through its media salons, through its sniffs and conceits, through its exhausted disdain for Americans themselves, through deep liars like Chomsky and cracker-barrel Marxists like Zinn."

It's pretty simple for a whole paragraph: just one sentence and not especially complex, although one must know the players, an awareness present in far, far too few Americans now. Not much to it, really, except for fact and truth, which is all one ever really needs.

No; what I find compelling in it is the past tense. Last night, I was driving up the road and thinking about some fairly large-scale writing. I conceived a section-lead that went like this:

"The long train of human history had been filled with endless revolutions, evolutions and chance transmissions of arbitrary power. People had grown habitual to the ridiculous and endlessly horrible idea that some could presume the power -- not the right -- of life and death over countless others, and this idea had rolled across centuries without principled question, gathering priceless and unique individuals as the grease under its wheels. In all the annals, however, an America had never fallen."

This is my working concept, now: that it's over, and that all that's left are the particular details of collapse. That will be a rich story in itself, for sure, but we are living a truly unparalleled tragedy. It is unparalleled in that this was the first country in history founded on rational ideals of individualism (even accounting for the original sin of black slavery), and it is a tragedy in that it has been destroyed from within.

It is interesting to note that there are those alive today who are living a uniquely notable experience because they are now still alive to see the end of America, but old enough to have lived its peak. The past century or so has seen the seeding and cultivation of ideas only now coming to terrible yield. However, the enormous impetus of America's original conception, coming together as it did with the Industrial Age, managed to carry various aspects of this country's culture (material, intellectual, aesthetic, etc.) to heights which were the apple of the world's eye through most of the twentieth century, and for good reasons. Even to this day, one can easily find anywhere in the world some benighted peasant who still longs for The Great Feast of Ostentatious Consumption that America represents to most people who haven't been studied by critical sociology. Of course, that poor bastard never got to blast gas through a Chevy 454 SS at three gallons (or more) for a dollar, never had the quality of information delivered to his door that we once had, and his country never celebrated life on the scale that ours did before everybody really started hating themselves and then -- of course -- everything else, and their arts showed it.

There was a time, within the lives of people alive today, when American life was a celebration. God's curse of rot upon all those who took it in heart and mind to cast some as outlaws by way of race, but we were producing our way out of that. By the time rock & roll came along, all that rot was on its way to the grave, even if the best days of Dr. King's life had to be burned down in that cause. Naturally, the blight of racism will never be completely gone because you can't do a damned thing about stoopidness. However, there were also generations in this country seeing each other across racial lines and the laws were being beaten into shape. No more Bull Connors cracking attack dogs on black people in the street in broad photographic daylight: now, everybody can get their door kicked-in in the middle of the night when the SWAT-Fifes don't have their poop in a group.

There are many alive today who satisfy themselves as "Americans" even as they remain ignorant of things that were being lost before they were born -- "free spirits" who were tattooed with federal numbers on traditional paperwork and who have never worked a day in their lives without accounting their very existence in dollars to the law. Their grandfathers could build houses if and where they wanted to once they had accrued the moral authority (that's "money", kids) to do it: these people can barely un-flatpack a bookshelf, but at least they wouldn't have to beg zoning permits for that.

Even as it slides, though...

("Won't be nothin'
Nothin' you can measure anymore"

-- Leonard Cohen, "The Future")

...they will notice the cold bite of the state. These are special generations -- the earliest of them just passing now and the last of them alive in albums with long hair and bell-bottoms -- who can see it all freezing right in front of their eyes. Their children are groomed to the cold from birth now. All the time, they know less and less about the sheer gaiety of life that once was this country, and what it took to produce that. They take for metaphysically-granted political (and their consequent cultural) structures emergent right in front of them that were once the stuff of "fevered McCarthyism". The worst part of that is the complicity of their parents, who should know better because they actually lived a great deal of what's been lost, now.

This is my working concept: there is no America anymore.

This is because it's not really about geography, although there just can't be an America anywhere else; not after all the history-blazing mind, body, heart and soul that countless heroes have stamped upon this land. It's not about some stumbling homunculus of a land, however, propped upright on stilts of pious nonsense.

There is an idea to it -- a mind to drive the machine, which is what it takes to keep the whole species in out of the cold and happy and thriving. It is one of the great, great things monumental to history that nobody grasped technology the ways that Americans did, and for all the whining and crying from brainless snots through much of the last half of the twentieth century, it must be said that they lived beyond the reach of kings only few generations before them because of the ways that tools multiply the power of the human mind and body.

And only free people do this. That's why we were what we were, and why we won't be soon enough for these people to live that, too.

Vandam/McPhillips sings countermelody in reply.

Forward -- unto the breach.

Lessons From Lithuania -- Part I

Extended a business trip to London with a detour to Vilnius, Lithuania and environs. Got back today.

While in Vilnius, I went to the NKVD/Gestapo/KGB Museum, and on my last day, the massacre site at nearby Ponary/Panieriu.

In between, I got a rental car and drove about 100 km to the west of Vilnius to a city called Kovno/Kaunas -- site of the infamous 'Ninth Fort'.

And no, the trip wasn't all death and gloom. In fact, I found Vilnius and its inhabitants to be charming and worthy of another visit.

But I did draw a series of lessons from what I saw on my excursions; part I is below:

1) Government identification records are the clerical basis for mass murder and other atrocities: No, not every government ID scheme leads to genocide and expatriation. But for the collectivists of both the German Reich and the USSR, each victim's identity card was both part of the initial targeting and the final "production record".

2) Get to the forest early if you want to live: If you think they will be coming for you, you are probably right. Plan not to be where they know you work and live. Act early if you want to maximize your chances. You and your family will die if you are at your government-approved address.

3) The Bad People will have lots of help from your neighbors: The most disturbing moment for me in the KGB museum was not in the execution or interrogation/torture cells. It was realizing, while moving through the excellent exhibits on the mass deportations of Lithuanians after "liberation" by the Soviets in 1944, that most of the deportees (many of whom were subsequently executed or starved or died of exposure and disease) had been betrayed to the NKVD/KGB by their neighbors.

4) "Fascism" is not the only mortal enemy of freedom and life; the real enemy is collectivism in any form: At each of the memorials, one could tell the provenance of any signage by its reference to "fascism". Mostly, such markings were from the Soviet era, during which -- not coincidentally -- many more millions of innocent human beings were killed by the "enlightened" Communists than had been slaughtered by the Hitlerites and their collaborators. While it is too much to expect the Soviets to acknowledge these facts, it is essential that freedom-minded folks grok that collectivism, in any form, can and usually does lead to the mass grave.

5) Never report en masse when ordered to do so: Nothing good ever happens to folks who do.

6) Food and ammunition will be the vital shortages you must address in order to live: Empty weapons and bellies a successful resistance does not make.

7) The Bad People will torture and kill those who help you: Get used to the idea. Retribution killing is a standard totalitarian play. Try to avoid jeopardizing your allies to the extent possible, but know that they too will be swept into the whirlwind.

8) The Bad People will torture and kill your family members: Sippenhaft ain't just a chapter in Vanderboegh's long-awaited novel. The KGB museum was filled with execution orders with notations indicating that not only had the subject been killed per order of the Party, but that "special measures" had or would be taken against the victim's family.

9)You must be prepared to fight until victory or death: Once you go to the woods, you are there for the duration. The Baltic "forest brothers" stayed out until they were killed or captured. More on them in the next part of this report.

10) If you think it can't happen here, you are wrong. The Polish and Lithuanian Jews who were ground into dust by the Einsatzgruppen thought the same thing. So did the Lithuanians who couldn't believe that the Communists under Stalin and subsequent regimes would hold their passionate patriotism against them.

Almost all of those folks who believed "it couldn't happen" died. A few survived by running into the woods, or by bearing up under the brutal realities of the Gulag, year after year after year.

Each of them knows the single biggest lesson from Lithuania: naked, brute force can and does triumph over kindness, love of kin and country, and simple human decency -- often for decades or more.

Lose your illusions.

While there is still time.

Welfarization & The Capsizing of Democracy

Please read this article by Jim Bovard, which begins:

The Founding Fathers intended that America be composed of self-reliant individuals who would not hesitate to pull the reins in on their rulers. However, in the past 75 years, the soaring number of government dependents has made it far more difficult to curb politicians’ power. Federal policy is dividing society between “those who work for a living and those who vote for a living,” as H.L. Mencken quipped during the New Deal.

In recent decades, politicians have launched one recruiting campaign after another to persuade Americans to accept federal handouts. The Heritage Foundation created an Index of Dependency to measure the rising number of Americans reliant on government. The index gauges “the pace at which federal government services and programs have been growing in areas in which private or community-based services and programs exist or have existed to address the same or nearly the same needs.” The index is based on housing aid, healthcare and welfare assistance, retirement income, and subsidies for college and other post-secondary education.



The Heritage Index rated the level of dependency in the United States at 22 in 1964, the year that Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society. By 1980, the year before the Reagan Revolution commenced, the index had risen to 100. By 2008, the index had soared to 240, signaling a ten-fold increase of dependency on the federal government over the prior 40+ years.
***

Take the time to read the rest.

Do you understand that scores of millions of your fellow Americans ("Americans" at least by nation of residence, if not by individualist ethics) would tear you and yours into bloody chunks were you ever to attempt to reduce their "benefits"?

Are you ready to starve the monkeys yet?

To quote Billy Beck:

You're either at the table or on the menu. Life under Amsoc.

Claire Wolfe's "Living Freedom" Blog

I have been negligent in not previously adding Ms. Wolfe's blog to the WRSA blogroll, but that oversight has now been fixed.

As a start, please read her take on this excellent article by Larken Rose.

Much food for further thought and action, I'd say.

Double-Dip Recession Guaranteed

Read the latest from Charles Hugh Smith, which begins:

Whether you believe the U.S. economy ever exited recession or not, a further decline is already baked in by numerous macro factors.

A "double-dip recession" makes no sense to the 76 percent of Americans who believe that the US economy remains in recession. And indeed, I argued in Suppressing the Cognitive Dissonance of a Bogus Recovery that the "growth" touted by the mainstream media and the Central State propaganda machine is a mirage.

To the 24% of the populace who believes the U.S. exited recession in fine fettle, I offer a "Two Scoop Special": a Double-Dip recession is guaranteed for the following reasons:

1. The Eurozone is heading into deep recession, taking U.S. corporate profits with it. Three things are certain in the Eurozone: Austerity, higher taxes and more of each nation's budget will be carved off to pay interest on their ballooning debt. All three mean less money in consumers' pockets, and in local government pockets.

Please see Why the Eurozone Is Doomed for more on the Eurozone's structural problems...

Read the rest here.

Plan accordingly.

Quote of the Week

From Colonel Cooper:

When I used to teach irregular warfare at Quantico, I borrowed a doctrine from Lord Dunsany in his book "Guerilla."

The guerillero does not fight - he kills.

Guerilla warfare is usually conducted with what we might call "spare parts," over- and underage types, wounded, and disabled. Such people cannot be organized into combat units with which to confront regular forces. If a guerilla actually gets into a fight he will almost certainly be wiped out, so he by choice takes the initiative, strikes and vanishes. This sort of thing enrages regular armies, as it did those of the French in the Peninsular War. It usually results in savagery on both sides. It is an ugly thing, but it will not go away just because it's ugly.

Jennifer III On Villa

Go and read, please.

Further readings on the topic:

Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

Beck On Private Property & Freedom

Billy Beck blasphemes against holy writ of modern collectivism.

Read it and think.

I Think It's Called Laughing As You Sink

Denninger links to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Clarke and Dawe on the global financial FUBAR.

Pass it on.

Robb: Leaking Legitimacy

Read John Robb's latest.

BP admission here.

The truth is not in these people.

Remember that.

Always.

Shenandoah: Why It Is Uglier Than They Are Telling You

Read:

Part I

Part II

And don't forget -- New Jersey ain't the only place having these issues.

Happy Recovery, everyone!

The times, they are a-changing:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Great Depression Mark II

From the UK Telegraph:

Leading City experts have started raising the prospect of "Great Depression II" amid worries that the European economic crisis could trigger a deeper bout of chaos.

By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor
Published: 7:03AM BST 20 May 2010

Markets on both sides of the Atlantic dipped to fresh lows as fears surrounding the fate of the euro project transmuted into worries about the wider global economic system.

Bill Gross of bond fund Pimco said that hedge funds were starting to liquidate their positions in a bid to preserve their capital – a worrying "mini relapse" towards 2008 territory.

Andrew Roberts, head of European rates strategy at RBS, said "Great Depression II" could now be approaching, adding: "It now has potential to speed toward its conclusion; a European $1trn package which does little and political panic tells you we are about to reach the end of the road. The world should be discussing deflation, not inflation."

The FTSE 100 flirted briefly with the 5,000 point mark, eventually finishing the day down 84.95, or 1.7pc, at 5073.13, while the French CAC 40 index was 2.3pc lower and Germany's Dax dropped 2pc. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones index both suffered their sharpest one-day falls in more than a year. The S&P fell 3.9pc to 1071.59, while the Dow closed 3.6pc lower at 10,068.01.

Fears that Europe's debt crisis could hurt a global recovery pushed Asian shares down for a third day. Japan's Nikkei 225 plunged 2.5pc to 9,782.02. Markets in Australia, Taiwan, mainland China, and Singapore also retreated. Hong Kong amd South Korean bourses were closed for public holidays.

The falls in share prices coincided with increases in the price of government bonds in Germany, the US and much of the developed world as investors sought a safe haven. German 10-year bund yields consequently hit a record low, while in the UK gilt yields dropped to the lowest level since early last December.

Although the rush to safety stems originally from the euro's difficulties this week and German efforts to ban short-selling on its banks, fears that the episode may evolve into a deeper economic crisis were bolstered by fresh data. The European Commission produced "flash" data showing consumer confidence falling from a 23-month high of -15 in April to a seven-month low of -17.5 in May. Howard Archer, of INS Global Insight, said: "This is clear evidence that the deepening and spreading eurozone debt crisis... is now weighing down appreciably on consumer confidence. This is a very worrying – if hardly surprising – development."

In the US there was a surprise 25,000 increase in jobless claims to 471,000 in the week ending May 15. The deterioration in the employment picture, coming hard on the heels of Wednesday's drop in inflation, underlined worries that the US is exposed to a possible global double-dip recession.

Mr Gross said investors were now being frightened off by worldwide "fiscal tightening momentum", adding that markets were facing "a mini-relapse of a flight to liquidity as hedge funds and other leveraged positions are liquidated to preserve capital".

One worry is that European leaders are not sufficiently behind the $1 trillion bail-out fund they announced, in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, last week. A second fear is that other indebted countries could soon be exposed.

One rumour abounding on Thursday was that a major rating agency will soon have to downgrade Japan's credit score, potentially bringing the world's second-biggest economy into the spotlight.

The euro jumped to a one-week high against the dollar of $126 on speculation that European Union officials meeting today will discuss some measures to counter the region's spreading debt crisis.

Earlier in the week the single currency has tumbled to a fresh four-year low around $1.21 after Germany's unilateral imposition of ban on shorting of government debt and the shares of ten major financial institutions.
***

As of 0245 edt on 21 May, Asian markets are mostly down significantly.

And remember -- desperate governments do desperate things.

Alea iacta est.

One Million Visitors

As of 0130 EDT on 21 May 2010, Sitemeter showed 1,002,234 total visitors since March, 2007.

Many humble thanks to everyone who has stopped by, as well as to each WRSA commenter and contributor.

Forward.

Jennifer III On...

The Great Consolidation

The Myth of Non-Violence

Fourth Generation Policing

Please do as I have done and add I'll Take Liberty to your blogroll and daily rounds.

Travelling

Business commitments, shaky connectivity, and time zones.

Posting should be more frequent starting on Friday.

Cheers.

Empty Holsters

Read it all over at The Cliffs of Insanity.

Knocked that one clean out of the ballpark.

Venlet: On the Constitution as a "Counter-Revolutionary" Act -- Parts I &II

Please read John Venlet's essay here, to which I will refer as 'Counter-Revolutionary -- Part I'.

In a comment to John's piece, I said that I would write up some thoughts on why I use the "Constitutional Restoration" as an organizing concept. As did John, I offer the same caveat -- I speak only for me in what follows. Moreover, nothing below should be construed in any way by anyone as the giving of "legal advice".

To begin, as a refresher, take a quick glance through each of these foundational American documents:

Declaration of Independence

Articles of Confederation

USC

BoR

Pretty rapid conceptual evolution, across less than twenty years of admittedly-tumultuous British and American history, wouldn't you say?

I will leave it to others to recount the details of that evolution. Suffice it to say that the trend to centralized, national government has its roots in the very founding of the Republic.

And as we sit here, nearly 234 years after the signing of the Declaration, it is apparent to a growing plurality that the objective of the USC/BoR drafters -- to cage the embryonic national government from all but a few limited, enumerated functions -- has not been met.

For that plurality, the question arises as to remedies for this situation -- discussions about which must be conducted within the context of Chapter 155 of Title 18 of the US Code:

• § 2381. Treason
• § 2382. Misprision of treason
• § 2383. Rebellion or insurrection
• § 2384. Seditious conspiracy
• § 2385. Advocating overthrow of Government
• § 2386. Registration of certain organizations
• § 2387. Activities affecting armed forces generally
• § 2388. Activities affecting armed forces during war
• § 2389. Recruiting for service against United States
• § 2390. Enlistment to serve against United States

I commend a slow, careful read of those statutes and the cases decided thereunder to any freedom-minded activist, coupled with a cold-blooded assessment of the Mighty Kenyan's moral and legal compass, along with those of his state security toadies Holder and Napolitano. The material and sources cited here may be helpful in that assessment, as will Will Grigg's recent thoughts on the subject.

But in risk, there is also opportunity. Read the full text of 18 USC 2385:

Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons.

But what if the agitator in question

...knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of restoring the government of the United States and the government of every State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, and the government of any political subdivision therein, to its Constitutionally-stated limits?

Aren't the forces of tyranny potentially present in any centralized human endeavor thwarted -- at least prior to the State's inevitable use of force decision -- by those who simply insist that Leviathan live within the constitutional cage designed for it more than 200 years before?

Make no mistake -- this matter is NOT going to be settled by word games. The stakes are simply too high for all parties.

Leviathan will respond to the constitutionalists' insistence with the only tools at its disposal -- tooth and claw.

And when they do, the pragmatic constitutionalist will understand, once and for all, what Spooner meant.

In a few days, I'll have the second half of my response to John's article thought through and written.

Until then, think about these issues.

Your life, and those of your tribe, may depend on the correct answers.

Denninger: One City Where Citizens Will Not Assist

Karl Denninger nails it:

We all hear about "police brutality" and other similar incidents.

Then there are incidents that aren't so clear.

Or are they?

DETROIT - Seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was asleep on the living room sofa in her family's apartment when Detroit police searching for a homicide suspect burst in and an officer's gun went off, fatally striking the girl in the neck, family members say.

Her father, 25-year-old Charles Jones, told The Detroit News he had just gone to bed early Sunday after covering his daughter with her favorite Disney princess blanket when he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot. When he rushed into the living room, he said, police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter's blood.

This isn't a case where the cops barged into the wrong house: The suspect they were looking for, who was wanted for murder, was in the house and was arrested - on a lawful warrant drawn for the property they entered.

"This is any parent's worst nightmare. It also is any police officer's worst nightmare," Godbee said.

Really?

Then perhaps you might consider your tactics in serving such warrants.

Let's remember that while a suspected murderer that was being sought, the key word here is suspected. Until tried and a judgment is entered of "guilty", he's a suspect, not a convicted murderer.

Needless to say someone suspected of murdering another is presumed dangerous. But from reports it was obvious there were children in the house (there were toys in the front yard), the raid happened at 12:30 in the morning, and a "stun grenade" or "flash-bang" device (basically a big firecracker) was tossed in a window first.

One word comes to mind: Why?

What sort of insane definition of "police work" leads a department to do this? Isn't this pretty much like David Koresh?

Remember, at Waco, rather than waiting for Koresh to leave the compound and arresting him in town or in his car (which would have almost certainly been a peaceful arrest), they instead stormed the compound at Waco and many people, including innocent children who had no connection to the crimes alleged, died.

In this case instead of performing police work (that is, staking out the property and arresting the suspect when he attempted to leave - as he eventually almost certainly would - without incident) the cops decided to use their "flashy SWAT tools" and storm the house, despite apparent obvious and clear knowledge, just as at Waco, that there were known-innocent persons inside.

The militarization of "police response" at times and during events when it is unnecessary and excessive is a dangerous step, and not only for the obvious reason that there is now a dead girl who did nothing wrong.

No, the more serious problem comes if and when order degenerates generally in society.

Logical and reasonable police forces and officers, of which there are many, will find themselves allied with the citizens of the area against the gang-bangers and common thugs who would otherwise seek to play "Zombieland" in our nation's cities and towns.

But in places where the gendarme has chosen to play "Big Balls" instead of acting with logic and reason they will find that the citizens will defend only themselves and not the institutions and officers of law and order.

And let's be clear, simply on the numbers: There are more bad guys than there are cops; only the general trappings of polite society keep them from deciding to go on human hunting expeditions with seriously-destabilizing results for the public at large.

If you doubt this then read some news, such as the LA task force that has had apparent gang-bangers try to blow up their offices by diverting a gas line! To say that the trappings of "polite society" are getting stretched a bit thin these days is not an overblown conclusion.

"No-knock" warrants are almost always abusive. If you know the person you want is inside, there's no reason to go in with guns blazing or in a military-style raid - unless you intend to kill. Does it matter if you catch the person you're after right this instant or the next morning when they step out for a pack of smokes - or some food?

There is no difference if your primary intent is to arrest and displaying your flashy hardware and tactics as a device to intimidate the population is not part of your agenda.

Are there instances where a raid as occurred in this case is justified? I can come up with a few. An active hostage situation where the assailant has demonstrated the will to kill hostages is one.

But a duplex where the sought person is believed (by, as it is alleged, observation of a vehicle registered to him) to be inside along with persons known to be uninvolved and innocent, such as the girl who is now dead, is not one of those circumstances until and unless said suspect barricades himself and threatens in some form to injure or kill the family, which obviously was not the case here.

The test should not be "can we get this guy if we storm the place" - it should be if we don't storm the place is someone likely to be injured or worse as a consequence of doing police work and arresting the suspect when he emerges, since by definition the use of these tactics has a high probability of injuring or killing someone innocent of any wrongdoing.

If I engage in conduct that has a high probability of killing an innocent person, I do so on purpose, and an innocent person dies, I face a near-certainty of being charged with some form of manslaughter - as I should.

Justice in this case cannot simply extend to the officer whose weapon went off via a negligent discharge or some sort of "I'm sorry." (As an aside there is no such thing as an "accidental discharge"; an unintended discharge of a firearm happens due to negligence, not accident.) Rather, it must extend to the preference of manslaughter charges against everyone involved in the planning and execution of this raid, without exception, up to and including those in the department who authorized this "show of force."

Trust and partnership between law enforcement and law-abiding citizens has, in many cases, become something that law enforcement no longer values.

Sadly, by the time law enforcement in these areas recognize the foolishness of their militaristic approach to serving warrants and enforcing the law it will be too late for them to change their mind and rebuild the trust that they will need.

If you live in such an area and cannot change your law enforcement agency's approach to the community via peaceful means you must leave now for a village, town or area where law enforcement recognizes the essential marriage between public policy and law enforcement. Such areas, if and when the gang bangers decide to try to serve "Zombieland" upon your area, will find both you and law enforcement standing shoulder-to-shoulder in your effort to resist - and you will be successful in doing so.

Cities like Detroit, on the other hand, will most likely literally burn to the ground.

Your choice to stay or go may, in the not-so-distant future, turn into the difference between life and death.

Choose wisely.

Local coverage here and here.

Yes, you read that right -- the SWAT team's raid was being filmed for an A&E network "real crime" drama.

Now there's an episode for the November ratings "sweeps" period....

UPDATE 17 MAY 2010 2005 EDT: From this WaPo article submitted by a commenter, this statement by the family attorney:

***
...But [attorney] Fieger said the [A&E] video shows an officer lobbing the grenade and then shooting into the home from the porch.

"There is no question about what happened because it's in the videotape," Fieger said. "It's not an accident. It's not a mistake. There was no altercation."

"Aiyana Jones was shot from outside on the porch. The videotape shows clearly the officer throwing through the window a stun grenade-type explosive and then within milliseconds of throwing that, firing a shot from outside the home," he said...
***

RTC: Possible Names of Dog-Killing Officers In MO Search Warrant Execution

An update here; additional details/corroboration will be appreciated.

On the SWAT front, another story -- this time, even more disturbing.

Remember: 100+ raids per day.

Every day.

They hate us because we're free.

Evans-Pritchard: Forget The 'Wolf Pack' – The Ongoing Euro Crisis Was Caused By EMU

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the UK Telegraph:

Jean-Claude Trichet tells us the world faced a second Lehman crash in the days and hours before EU leaders launched their €720bn (£612bn) defence fund. If the European Central Bank’s president is correct, we are in trouble. The EU-IMF package is already unravelling. What will the West do for its next trick?

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:37PM BST 16 May 2010

Mr Trichet was ash-white at the Brussels summit a week ago. He distributed charts of credit stress to every eurozone leader. By the time he had finished his hair-raising discourse, everybody round the table finally understood what they faced.

“The markets had ceased to function,” he told Der Spiegel. “There is still a risk of contagion. It can happen extremely fast, sometimes within hours.”

The spreads on Greek, Iberian, and Irish bonds have, of course, dropped since the ECB stepped in with direct purchases. But the euro rally fizzled fast, to be followed by a fresh plunge to a 18-month low of $1.24 against the dollar. European bank stocks have buckled again. Spain’s IBEX index fell 6.6pc in capitulation fever on Friday.

Geneva professor Charles Wyplosz said EU leaders made the error of overselling up their “shock and awe” package before establishing any political mechanism to mobilise such sums. “The fund is an empty shell,” he wrote at Vox EU. “Worse still, crucial principles have been sacrificed for the sake of unconvincing announcements.”

Brussels was unwise to talk of smashing the “wolf pack” speculators and defeat the “worldwide organised attack” on the eurozone. As Napoleon said, if you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna. Besides, the language of the EU priesthood – ex-ECB board member Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa talks of the advancing battalions of the “anti-euro army” – frightens Chinese and Mid-East investors needed to soak up EU debt. These metaphors are a mental flight from the issue at hand, which is that vast imbalances – masked by EMU, indeed made possible only by EMU – have been decorked by the Greek crisis and now pose a danger to the entire world.

One can only guess what Mr Trichet meant when he said we are living through “the most difficult situation since the Second World War, and perhaps the First”. Is this worse than Credit Anstalt in the summer of 1931, the event that brought down central Europe’s banking system and tipped Europe into depression?

Or was Mr Trichet alluding to something else after witnessing the Brussels tantrum by President Nicolas Sarkozy? According to El Pais, Mr Sarkozy threatened to pull France out of the euro and break the Franco-German axis at the heart of the EU project unless Germany capitulated.

To utter such threats is to bring them about. You cannot treat Germany in that fashion.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has put the best face on a deal that has so damaged her leadership. “If the euro fails, then Europe fails and the idea of European unity fails,” she said. Too late, I think. The German nation is moving on. I was struck by a piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine proposing a new “hard currency” made up of Germany, Austria, Benelux, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Poland, but without France. The piece entitled The Alternative says deflation policies may push Greece to the brink of “civil war” and concludes that Europe would better off if it abandoned the attempt to hold together two incompatible halves. “It can be done,” the piece says.

What makes this crisis so dangerous is not just that Europe’s banks are still reeling, with wafer-thin capital ratios. The new twist is that markets are no longer sure whether sovereign states are strong enough to shoulder rescue costs...
***

Read the rest.

Who cares?

You better.

The FedGov's ability to extract blood, sweat, and bone marrow from the American taxpayer on behalf of its master, the Federal Reserve Bank, is the only reed supporting the entire global financial structure.

That means as the Euro goes, so goes any restraint against seizing whatever they can from you.

Do you understand yet?

Spengler: Ignore That Keynes Behind The Arras

The latest from Spengler at Asia Times:

This was supposed to have been the final triumph of John Maynard Keynes, the crisis in which governments actually did what he urged them to do during the Great Depression, the proof that an elite of puppeteers in control of monetary and fiscal policy could make the innumerable actors in economic life march wide-eyed toward recovery.

Keynes' idea is simple; in fact, it is simple by construction, for it focuses on the very short term within a closed economy. If consumers won't spend, the government will spend for them; if businesses won't invest, the government will invest for them; and if investors won't take risks, the central bank will reduce the yield on low-risk investments to almost nothing.

No forecaster of note a month ago expected the Greek debt problem to threaten the world financial system, yet it has. Nemesis always comes in through the unwatched door. The risk is that lending among international banks may freeze up as it did during the late autumn and winter of 2008-2009, with catastrophic consequences for governments that depend on the banks to fund enormous deficits.

The cost of insurance against European bank defaults is now even higher than after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy of 2008. This is not a drill. It is a real crisis. Perhaps the European Community will calm things down for the moment. No matter: if they succeed, the crisis will find another outlet soon enough.

The Barack Obama administration, like most of the world's governments, decided on a massive dose of Keynesian medicine, taking the budget deficit to an unheard-of peacetime level of 13% and keeping short-term interest rates at near zero. It was advised by macroeconomic royalty: Obama's chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers is the nephew of two Nobel-Prize winning economists, Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, of whom the latter literally wrote the textbook that trained three generations of economists in Keynes' wisdom.

And it all seemed to be working. Even some of the bitterest critics of the Obama administration and Keynesian economics in general hailed the coming "V-shaped recovery". American consumers, right after suffering a US$6 trillion loss in wealth in the form of household equity, and right before the greatest retirement in American history, decided that they did not have to save after all. The savings rate fell and consumer spending rose. American corporations in the S&P 500 index stripped down to skeleton staffs and stopped investing, and declared a 60% rise in profits between the second quarters of 2009 and 2010. And the latest employment data show real improvement in the labor market.

It was Keynes' "money illusion" writ large. Inflate the currency, and the workingman will still see the same number of shillings in his pay packet, Keynes wrote at the beginning of his 1936 General Theory. Inflation thus will stimulate economic activity. This crude example illustrates a broader principle that might be called "wealth illusion": reduce the yield on low-risk investments to almost nothing, and investors will have to shift portfolios to riskier assets, stimulating investment and hiring.

As a closed-economy, short-run model, Keynes' approach has had two quarters of real success, and it behooves the Keynesians to declare victory and go home, as a Vermont senator proposed during the worst of the Vietnam War.

After the sovereign debt crisis erupted in Greece and spread globally - to the surprise of this writer as well as every forecaster he knows - the Keynesians must feel a bit like the hero of Pushkin's story The Queen of Spades, who plays cards on the advice of a ghost, only to win the first two rounds and lose everything on the third. One can imagine Lawrence Summers going as mad as Pushkin's gambler: "He is in the Obuhovsky hospital, room Number Seventeen; he does not answer any questions, but keeps muttering with astonishing rapidity: 'Three, seven, ace! three, seven, queen!'"

The trouble is that the world is not composed of closed economies, and investors do not think in terms of the short run - not always, in any event, and not when long-run considerations manifest themselves...
***

Read the rest.

We ain't seen nothing yet.

Bet on it.

IMF: US Faces One Of Biggest Budget Crunches In World

Battlespace preparation continues against American taxpayers at Ground Zero in the upcoming Creditors' War, starting with this report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This UK Telegraph article explains, at least in part.

Dick Morris explains further.

Just remember this list.

Those people will insist on being paid what is owed to them.

In full.

Balko: More Militarized Than The Military

Read Radley's latest, which begins:

A reader who asks his name not be used writes about the drug raid video from Columbia, Missouri:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call “cordon and knock”: they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn’t happen until after the sun comes up...
***

Read the rest, along with this recap of the review board meeting.

Meltup

Courtesy of Accept The Challenge, please watch this video.

Think.

Plan.

Act.

Tempus fugit.

Rand: The Nature Of Government

From the Ayn Rand Institute:

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution—and why?

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions-the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions.

“The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

“But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights.

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistoric savages...
***

Read the rest.

Now look around, and behold the antithesis.