Ebola: Question All Basic Assumptions

Guest Post by Jon Rappoport


To understand what the sellers are selling, you have to go back to the beginning of their story.

You have to restrain yourself from buying the beginning, because if you do buy it, uncritically, you’re now on their river, you’re now traveling in their boat.

And even if you jump off later and claim, “They’re lying!”, you’re still holding the suitcase with their first assumptions in it.

At the beginning they say there has been an outbreak in three separate areas of West Africa.

The first part of “outbreak” means: accelerated dying is occurring.

How do you know that’s true? Where are the numbers to confirm that? Where is evidence that shows present deaths are jumping beyond recent past deaths?

The second part of “outbreak” means: the new accelerated deaths in all three geo-areas are linked by the same cause.

Where is the evidence for that?

The diagnostic tests? The antibody and PCR tests, both of which are useless, misleading, irrelevant, and rampant with false-positive results?

Is the evidence the symptoms these victims are showing? General symptoms like fever, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, bleeding, all of which can and do stem from a variety of causes? Of course not.

The third part of “outbreak” means: researchers have found what the link is among all the new deaths—the Ebola virus.

On what basis do they know this? Those useless diagnostic tests? Divining rods? The solemn assurance of the CDC? Quick eyeball diagnosis of every patient with a fever wandering into a clinic in West Africa?

On all counts, the beginning of the story is unproven—and the burden of proof is not on you, it’s on the “experts” making the claims.

Three cops are called to the scene of a death. In the apartment, a man is lying on the floor. He is, in fact, dead.

Upon examination, the cops and a medical examiner find no holes in his body. They find no shell casings, no weapons, no gunshot residue.

They confer. Their conclusion? He was killed at close range by two rounds from a revolver.

The papers and the local news broadcasts carry the story: “A man was shot to death in his apartment by an unknown assailant last night…”

The next day, the cops arrest a schoolteacher who has a revolver locked in the trunk of his car.

A few days later, you’re sitting in a bar watching the news on television. You see video of the schoolteacher’s arraignment on a charge of first-degree murder.

You say, “How do they know he did it?”

The people sitting near you break out into a chorus: “Who else could it be?”

Sixteen years later, while the schoolteacher is sitting on death row awaiting his execution, a lawyer manages to have the victim’s body exhumed.

On re-examination, the coroner finds no evidence of a gunshot wound…but the remains of the body are decayed beyond the point where a definitive judgment can be made.

Oh well, those are the breaks.

Here is what I’m encountering in many quarters. People are saying, or assuming: the CDC and the World Health Organization lie about everything under the sun EXCEPT…when they launch stories about outbreaks. Then they must be telling the truth. The basic beginning of their tale must be true.

In those crucial moments, they never lie.

Really, now. Think about that.

And then think about this: the 2009 “outbreak” called Swine Flu. In that situation, the CDC stopped counting cases in the US, because the overwhelming number of lab tests on diagnosed and likely Swine Flu patients were coming back…with no sign of Swine Flu or any other kind of flu.

So…as a “big lie” strategy, with roughly ten thousand bogus cases of Swine Flu cases on their hands, the CDC suddenly claimed there were 22 MILLION cases of Swine Flu in the US.

That was their “outbreak” story.

And now, when they tell a story about an “outbreak” of a virus called Ebola…well, they must be telling the truth, right?

Egregiously lying THEN means they must be telling the truth NOW, right?

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Freedom Demands Better People!

Guest Post by Adam Kokesh

Many people, despite our evolved state and position as the dominant species on our little spaceship Earth, live their lives like animals.

We have given a myriad of opportunities made available by the "evolutionary brain explosion" and still, many people CHOOSE (due in part to social conditioning) to use only a fraction of the 10% of our brains we supposedly use.

While it would be arrogant to say that libertarians have ALL the answers, we do have something valuable to share that seems to go in line with the general intellectual approach shared by most of us.
Freedom is simply one conclusion of a rational analysis of the human condition, but it has many implications. It is not simply a political conclusion—that without the force and coercion of government, we will all be better off—it is also a moral code and a higher calling.

The message of freedom is simple: You as a free, beautiful, independent human being, own yourself, and therefor it is wrong to forcibly violate the rights of others.

It would seem we could present this not just as a nice idea that will just so happen to completely upend the social order when embraced, but as a scientific principle: human relationships are better overall for everyone involved by any metric when they are free of violence and coercion.

Hearing people debate this must sound like the flat earth vs round earth arguments. It's funny that despite our intelligence and unique capacity for rational analysis, we still routinely reject science on behalf of our insecurities and fears.

The Opposite of Freedom

The opposite of freedom is slavery—supposedly complete control by others.

Under modern governments, we live a state of semi-slavery.

Governments certainly act like they own their citizens like tax cows. The reason they get away with it is that most people deny or avoid this. Those who simply chafe against control and avoid it often do so with a certain cognitive dissonance because of feelings of guilt imposed by their fellow tax cows demanding that everyone "pay their fair share."

Regardless of how much people avoid taxation, most of us give up or have stolen from us large chunks of our productivity to support governments, but far more is being stolen.

We can all be placed on a scale from zero to autonomous for how we choose to live.

When a child is born, he or she is in a state of zero autonomy, completely dependent and incapable of making decisions far beyond his or her own bodily functions. Most people only partially grow out of this state and maintain a degree of subversion to the authorities of their lives. In a sense, we all do this to some degree to the extent that we allow the emotional manipulations and bullying of others to compromise our respect for our own individual will.

Those of us who embrace the moral message of freedom tend to treat ourselves with more respect.
When you understand the value of your own decision-making capacity, you tend to respect it more. You don't put up with abusive relationships with individuals or groups—a partner who takes advantage of you or a government.

You don't live by the expectations of others, but rather your energies are free to pursue a fully actualized life.
You feel no guilt or shame in seeing your world as it is and molding it to your desires.
You meet your fellows with the same love and respect that you have for yourself.

Those string pullers at the top of the current system would tell you that except for the few elites, humans are incapable of true autonomy, not independence, but spiritual, emotional, and psychological autonomy.
They would tell you that most people were born followers. Sheep. Mindless pack animals. And from looking around us today, they might be right. But you don't have to be one of the elites to decide that you are going to be the alpha of your own life! Your circumstances are irrelevant to the attitude by which you CHOOSE to live your life!

Most of us today live relatively sad, pathetic lives that are planned out for us—in which the relevance of our intent and preferences is insignificant compared to the people who tell us what to eat, what to wear, what to think, how to live, and who to work for.

Alphas emerge to exploit the rest of us, but by and large, the human animal is one that submits to fear and intimidation, and cowers in the face of tyranny.

Your Destiny

While it is tempting to be pessimistic, and today it is all too easy to lose hope—IT IS NOT OUR DESTINY TO LIVE LIKE CATTLE!

The gift of the human consciousness is too much to be squandered. We all have the capacity to be the alphas of our own lives. To say that you should be free, as libertarians would make the case, is to say that you deserve better.

You are a free, beautiful independent human being and you should never let anyone tell you otherwise. To wake up to the message of freedom, to see the light of logic, to understand what it means to BE FREE—is not just a call for a handful of political positions, is not just a set of beliefs, is not a mere box to be checked, IT IS A CALLING TO BE A BETTER PERSON!

As long as we remain as pack animals, we will be restrained by those who would exploit us. As long as we willingly accept the subversion of our own potential, we will remain in such a childlike state of immaturity, uncertainty, and subservience. This is about how you think, how you act, how you treat other people, what you eat, what you buy, who you associate with, and how you appreciate the unique gift that is your own will. The message of freedom demands better people.

Step up.

Adam Kokesh

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The Myth Of The Free Press

Guest Post by Chris Hedges, originally posted at TruthDig blog,

There is more truth about American journalism in the film “Kill the Messenger,” which chronicles the mainstream media’s discrediting of the work of the investigative journalist Gary Webb, than there is in the movie “All the President’s Men,” which celebrates the exploits of the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal.

The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy - even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses. The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power.

When Webb, writing in a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News, exposed the Central Intelligence Agency’s complicity in smuggling tons of cocaine for sale into the United States to fund the CIA-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press turned him into a journalistic leper. And over the generations there is a long list of journalistic lepers, from Ida B. Wells to I.F. Stone to Julian Assange.

The attacks against Webb have been renewed in publications such as The Washington Post since the release of the film earlier this month. These attacks are an act of self-justification. They are an attempt by the mass media to mask the collaboration between themselves and the power elite. The mass media, like the rest of the liberal establishment, seek to wrap themselves in the moral veneer of the fearless pursuit of truth and justice. But to maintain this myth they have to destroy the credibility of journalists such as Webb and Assange who shine a light on the sinister and murderous inner workings of empire, who care more about truth than news.

The country’s major news outlets—including my old employer The New York Times, which wrote that there was “scant proof” of Webb’s contention—functioned as guard dogs for the CIA. Soon after the 1996 exposé appeared, The Washington Post devoted nearly two full pages to attacking Webb’s assertions. The Los Angeles Times ran three separate articles that slammed Webb and his story. It was a seedy, disgusting and shameful chapter in American journalism. But it was hardly unique. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in the 2004 article “How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb’s Career,” detailed the dynamics of the nationwide smear campaign.

Webb’s newspaper, after printing a mea culpa about the series, cast him out. He was unable to work again as an investigative journalist and, fearful of losing his house, he committed suicide in 2004. We know, in part because of a Senate investigation led by then-Sen. John Kerry, that Webb was right. But truth was never the issue for those who opposed the journalist. Webb exposed the CIA as a bunch of gunrunning, drug-smuggling thugs. He exposed the mass media, which depend on official sources for most of their news and are therefore hostage to those sources, as craven handmaidens of power. He had crossed the line. And he paid for it.

If the CIA was funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in drugs into inner-city neighborhoods to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, what did that say about the legitimacy of the vast covert organization? What did it tell us about the so-called war on drugs? What did it tell us about the government’s callousness and indifference to the poor, especially poor people of color at the height of the crack epidemic? What did it say about rogue military operations carried out beyond public scrutiny?
These were questions the power elites, and their courtiers in the press, were determined to silence.

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power. The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state. It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions.

The mass media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to readers and viewers their sense of themselves. They tell them who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice and schemes that promise personal and professional success. The mass media, as Wright wrote, exist primarily to help citizens feel they are successful and that they have met their aspirations even if they have not. They use language and images to manipulate and form opinions, not to foster genuine democratic debate and conversation or to open up public space for free political action and public deliberation. We are transformed into passive spectators of power by the mass media, which decide for us what is true and what is untrue, what is legitimate and what is not. Truth is not something we discover. It is decreed by the organs of mass communication.

“The divorce of truth from discourse and action—the instrumentalization of communication—has not merely increased the incidence of propaganda; it has disrupted the very notion of truth, and therefore the sense by which we take our bearings in the world is destroyed,” James W. Carey wrote in “Communication as Culture.”

Bridging the vast gap between the idealized identities—ones that in a commodity culture revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame and power, or at least the illusion of it—and actual identities is the primary function of the mass media. And catering to these idealized identities, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, can be very profitable. We are given not what we need but what we want. The mass media allow us to escape into the enticing world of entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but it is not the primary concern of the mass media. No more than 15 percent of the space in any newspaper is devoted to news; the rest is devoted to a futile quest for self-actualization. The ratio is even more lopsided on the airwaves.

“This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.”

At the core of this pseudo-world is the myth that our national institutions, including those of government, the military and finance, are efficient and virtuous, that we can trust them and that their intentions are good. These institutions can be criticized for excesses and abuses, but they cannot be assailed as being hostile to democracy and the common good. They cannot be exposed as criminal enterprises, at least if one hopes to retain a voice in the mass media.

Those who work in the mass media, as I did for two decades, are acutely aware of the collaboration with power and the cynical manipulation of the public by the power elites. It does not mean there is never good journalism and that the subservience to corporate power within the academy always precludes good scholarship, but the internal pressures, hidden from public view, make great journalism and great scholarship very, very difficult. Such work, especially if it is sustained, is usually a career killer. Scholars like Norman Finkelstein and journalists like Webb and Assange who step outside the acceptable parameters of debate and challenge the mythic narrative of power, who question the motives and virtues of established institutions and who name the crimes of empire are always cast out.

The press will attack groups within the power elite only when one faction within the circle of power goes to war with another. When Richard Nixon, who had used illegal and clandestine methods to harass and shut down the underground press as well as persecute anti-war activists and radical black dissidents, went after the Democratic Party he became fair game for the press. His sin was not the abuse of power. He had abused power for a long time against people and groups that did not matter in the eyes of the Establishment. Nixon’s sin was to abuse power against a faction within the power elite itself.
The Watergate scandal, mythologized as evidence of a fearless and independent press, is illustrative of how circumscribed the mass media is when it comes to investigating centers of power.

“History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ‘controlled experiment’ to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened,” Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote in “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.” “By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or dissident victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted and absent altogether. This is why Nixon could go so far, lulled into a false sense of security precisely because the watchdog only barked when he began to threaten the privileged.”

The righteous thunder of the abolitionists and civil rights preachers, the investigative journalists who enraged Standard Oil and the owners of the Chicago stockyards, the radical theater productions, such as “The Cradle Will Rock,” that imploded the myths peddled by the ruling class and gave a voice to ordinary people, the labor unions that permitted African-Americans, immigrants and working men and women to find dignity and hope, the great public universities that offered the children of immigrants a chance for a first-class education, the New Deal Democrats who understood that a democracy is not safe if it does not give its citizens an acceptable standard of living and protect the state from being hijacked by private power, are no longer part of the American landscape. It was Webb’s misfortune to work in an era when the freedom of the press was as empty a cliché as democracy itself.

“The Cradle Will Rock,” like much of the popular work that came out of the Federal Theatre Project, addressed the concerns of the working class rather than the power elite. And it excoriated the folly of war, greed, corruption and the complicity of liberal institutions, especially the press, in protecting the power elite and ignoring the abuses of capitalism. Mister Mister in the play runs the town like a private corporation.
“I believe newspapers are great mental shapers,” Mister Mister says. “My steel industry is dependent on them really.”

“Just you call the News,” Editor Daily responds. “And we’ll print all the news. From coast to coast, and from border to border.”

Editor Daily and Mister Mister sing:

O the press, the press, the freedom of the press.
They’ll never take away the freedom of the press.
We must be free to say whatever’s on our chest—
with a hey-diddle-dee and ho-nanny-no
for whichever side will pay the best.

“I should like a series on young Larry Foreman,” Mister Mister tells Editor Daily. “Who goes around stormin’ and organizin’ unions.”

“Yes, we’ve heard of him,” Editor Daily tells Mister Mister. “In fact, good word of him. He seems quite popular with workingmen.”

“Find out who he drinks with and talks with and sleeps with. And look up his past till at last you’ve got it on him.”

“But the man is so full of fight, he’s simply dynamite, why it would take an army to tame him,” Editor Daily says.
“Then it shouldn’t be too hard to tame him,” Mister Mister says.

“O the press, the press, the freedom of the press,” the two sing. “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; if something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit. With a he-diddly-dee and aho-nonny-no. For whichever side will pay the best.”

The State Has No Right To Do Anything

  
Guest Post David S. D'Amato

I often hear people make casual remarks like, “Well, the State has a right to collect taxes,” “the State has a right to punish criminals,” or “the State has a right to controls its borders.” Inside, I am always somewhat horrified at how very easily these kinds of assumptions are made, at how obvious the truth of such claims seems to others. Such assumptions are simply a given for most people, not even on the table for debate, no one really speculating about where the State acquired all of these special rights over everyone and seemingly everything.

The only “right” the State could possibly have is the right of conquest, the barbaric notion that might makes right. It could never own what is possesses in any legitimate sense, either acquiring a chattel through peaceful and consensual trade, or land through actual occupancy and use, standards recognized in theory by all libertarians. Defenders of the State give us a glaring example of question begging when they take for granted that their favored institution originated out of contract or agreement as a way to institute law and preserve order. In so assuming, they take as their central premise a hugely controversial factual claim that, when confronted with the historical record, cannot withstand scrutiny. Ostensible utilitarian justifications for the State are no less specious. Statists often claim, for example, that in the absence of government, society would collapse into a brutal, chaotic war of all against all — a condition which we are apparently meant to compare to the sublime order and peace offered us by governments. As Albert Jay Nock once noted,

It seems to be a fond notion with the legalists and authoritarians that the vast majority of mankind would at once begin to thieve and murder and generally misconduct itself if the restraints of law and authority were removed. The anarchist, whose opportunities to view mankind in its natural state are perhaps as good as the legalist’s, regards this belief as devoid of foundation.

Presented with statism’s ridiculous and backward narrative, we must wonder who the starry-eyed utopians really are. After all, the violence and chaos that putatively accompany anarchist societies are purely speculative and hypothetical, whereas the vicious, bloody chaos of the State is well documented in countless volumes of world history for thousands of years. Even if we do not doubt the sincerity of the State’s faithful, we must certainly doubt the faith itself, the credulous trust in the idea that force and compulsion are the best ways to organize human beings.

Statists, moreover, seem always to forget that ultimately governments too are quite necessarily market actors; in forcing us into their coercive, authoritarian schemes, they do not thereby magically suspend the laws of supply and demand, which are as real and immutable as the laws of physics. And since all statists disagree with one another as to which goods and services we ought to regard as being “outside of the market,” best overseen and provided by the bureaucratic, centralized State, we are left to wonder how any statist sets about drawing the line. Today’s authoritarians speak with one voice in their earnest denunciations of the 20th centuries authoritarian regimes, all while never quite enlightening us as to just how much government is too much; divine revelation notwithstanding, we must puzzle over what it is that furnishes them the secrets of how much coercive power a special elite ought to wield over otherwise peaceful, productive society. Whether it’s telling us how many ounces of a soft drink we’re allowed to consume or forbidding us from whitening people’s teeth without special permission, all statists have their pet tyrannies. For the rest of us, it’s largely rather impossible to tell the difference between the sincere but misguided do-gooder authoritarian and the opportunistic, rent-seeking, pressure group authoritarian, for whom public policy is a way to private gain. The intentions behind coercive, rights-violating laws therefore end up being relatively unimportant, especially when compared to the results of such laws. Statists bank on the completely far-fetched and historically untenable belief that when we give a small elite power to make rules for everyone, they will use that power for the welfare of the whole public. Suddenly, human beings are not the violent, selfish brutes they were when we were talking about anarchist societies; no, human beings under the rule of the State are instead almost perfectly righteous and altruistic, free from all the assumptions we ordinarily make about the antisocial flaws of human nature.

Once we begin to see the State as it is — a predatory criminal organization, violently and arbitrarily arrogating to itself the power to make laws for everyone within a given geographical space — we begin also to see the strictly practical problems with such a system. Without any check or restraint on the monopoly power that defines the State, any other social institution competing with that power, the threat of mayhem and bellicosity among human beings is at its most menacing. As a result, contrary to the hollow assertion that we need government to protect us from each other, government itself turns out to be the foremost danger to the prospect of peace and goodwill among men. We anarchists do not comprehend or expect any fundamental change in human nature. We do, however, believe that we can continue to change our social institutions, shaping them to be more closely aligned with the principles of individual dignity, autonomy, and agency. We do not accept that, presented with the historical facts of war, conquest, and destitution, we must simply throw up our hands and concede that these ought to be the dominant, governing forces of all social life. We have modified both our theories and our institutions in the past and have concluded that some are indeed better than others. No longer do we regard women as unequal to men, or human enslavement as a natural and legitimate detail of economic relations (well, most of us anyway). Likewise, anarchists look forward to and work to create changes in the social environment which will bring us closer to the ideal of individual sovereignty and total freedom — even while acknowledging that the absolute, perfect realization of that ideal is not possible.

The fact that we cannot construct a perfect skyscraper, completely without any infinitesimal imperfection or engineering mistake, has never made us think that we ought to halt all progress in the direction of a better skyscraper; the perfect skyscraper, though hypothetical and nonexistent, remains our template. Scientific principles apply no less to questions of politics, society and civilization. The difference seems to repose on the fact that poorly engineered, inferior skyscrapers do not enjoy the self-serving propaganda of courtiers and free riders with something to gain from the status quo. Furthermore, controversies in the engineering sciences do not seem to animate in human beings the same passion as do questions of a political kind. Politics is rather bound up with our feelings about community, right and wrong, war and peace; the truths of these do not seem to be as definite or well-settled as those in the “hard sciences.” But even if political and social truths do not lend themselves as readily to our discovery, this is no reason to think that they don’t in fact exist. We find in nature truths more general and more specific, more conspicuous and more hidden, different types and orders of phenomena, all reflecting truth in their own ways. All the more reason to allow the pluralism and experimentation inherent in anarchism, which free us to discover the truest and the best in social relations organically and without artificial constraints, through a decentralized process of trial and error. Under the concentrated, hierarchical schemes produced by the State, errors are costly and far-reaching, predisposed to creating systemic crises that threaten huge groups of people. Errors under anarchism are not so easily foisted on millions because they do not rely on compelled hierarchical relationships, cannot command lockstep obedience with arbitrary orders. Anarchism is evolutionary more than it is revolutionary, expanding like frozen water in the crack of a rock until that rock, the crumbling old system, finally cracks. As a practice and as a theory, anarchism questions easy assumptions about what it means to be human and how we are supposed to live together as coequal free agents. The State doesn’t have a right to tell you what you can and can’t do — no one does, and no one could. Only individuals have rights, and none of us has the right to rule anyone else.

Why I Will Not Submit To Medical Martial Law

 

Guest Post by Brandon Smith

One of the most dangerous philosophical contentions even amongst liberty movement activists is the conundrum of government force and prevention during times of imminent pandemic. All of us at one time or another have had this debate. If a legitimate viral threat existed and threatened to infect and kill millions of Americans, is it then acceptable for the government to step in, remove civil liberties, enforce quarantines, and stop people from spreading the disease? After all, during a viral event, the decisions of each individual can truly have a positive or negative effect on the rest of society, right? One out of control (or “lone wolf”) citizen/terrorist could reignite a biological firestorm, so, should we not turn to government and forgo certain freedoms in order to achieve the greater good for the greater number?

If the government in question was a proven and honorable institution, then I would say pro-Medical Martial Law arguments might have a leg to stand on. However, this is not the case. In my view, medical martial law is absolutely unacceptable under ANY circumstances, including Ebola, in light of the fact that our current government will be the predominant cause of viral outbreak. That is to say, you DO NOT turn to the government for help when the government is the cause of the problem.

The recent rise of global Ebola is slowly bringing the issue of medical martial law to the forefront of our culture. Charles Krauthammer at The Washington Post recently argued in favor of possible restrictions on individual and Constitutional liberties in the face of a viral pandemic threat.

The CDC now argues that in the case of people who may be potential carriers, or even in the case of people who refuse to undergo screenings, it has the legal authority to dissolve all constitutional protections and essentially imprison (quarantine) an American citizen for as long as they see fit to do so.

The Obama Administration is now using militant terminology in reference to Ebola response, including the formation of “Ebola SWAT Teams” for quick reaction to potential outbreak areas.

In typical socialist fashion, the nurses union 'National Nurses United' has called for Barack Obama to use “executive authority” to take control of all Ebola response protocols in hospitals across the country. Yet another perpetuation of the myth that more government power is the solution.

And finally, the Department of Defense has been tasked to create a military controlled “quick-strike team” to deal with Ebola within U.S. borders. This team will be under the command of none other than Northcom, apparently trampling the Posse Comitatus Act and setting the stage for the rationalized use of military personnel against U.S. citizens under the guise of pandemic prevention.

It should be clear to anyone with half a brain that medical martial law is being quietly prepared, and that the threat of such measures is not a paranoid conspiracy, but a very real possibility. It should also be noted that such provisions are not only the products of the Obama Administration. It was George W. Bush who first created laws intersecting with the World Health Organization's pandemic preparedness planning. These laws include the “overrule of existing legislation or (individual) human rights” in order to quell a viral outbreak, and were originally drafted around the potential of an influenza crisis.

It is this kind of executive overreach that has set precedence for states such as Connecticut to announce a tentative state of emergency with medical martial law restrictions.

I discussed in great detail why Ebola works in favor of establishment elites in my article 'An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists'.

Understand that bureaucrats will come to you with promises of offering a helping hand, hoping that you are afraid enough to accept, but their intentions will not be compassionate. Rather, their intent will be to assert as much dominance over the public as possible during the chaos, and to erase any conception the people may have had in the past that they have inalienable rights.

But going beyond the hidden motives of tyrants, I think it is important to point out that the Center for Disease Control and the federal government in general has already lost all credibility in dealing with Ebola, and therefore, it has lost any authority it may have had in administrating a future response.

Ebola has been officially known to the CDC for over thirty years. Why has the CDC refused for three decades to produce proper care guidelines for hospitals? Medical staff in the U.S. didn't even receive guidelines when the outbreak in Western Africa was obviously progressing out of control.

Why did the CDC leave Thomas Duncan, the very first U.S. Ebola case, in the hands of the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, without proper procedures in place to prevent further infection, and without a CDC team present? The CDC has an annual budget of nearly $7 billion. Where is all of this money going if not to stamp out such threats as Ebola?

The argument presented by the White House, the CDC, and even the World Bank, has been that stopping direct or indirect travel from nations with an Ebola outbreak would be “impractical”, and that such travel bans would somehow “make matters worse”. They have yet to produce a logical explanation as to how this makes sense, but what if we did not need to institute a travel ban? The CDC, with it's massive budget, could easily establish quarantine measures in infected countries. Anyone wishing to travel outside of these nations would be welcome to do so, as long as they voluntarily participate in quarantine procedures for a set number of days. No quarantine, no plane ticket. Where has the CDC response been in Western Africa?

Why not use minor and measured travel restriction in Africa today, instead of using unprecedented martial law in America tomorrow? It makes no sense, unless, of course, the plan is to allow Ebola to spread...

Why has the White House nominated Ron Klain, a man who knows absolutely NOTHING about Ebola or medical emergency strategies, as the new “Ebola Czar”?

Why has all discussion on Ebola prevention revolved around government measures rather than community measures?  Why has all talk centered on what the government will do AFTER an outbreak occurs, rather than on what can be done to prevent an outbreak in the first place?

The reality is that the federal government does not have any treatments for Ebola that are outside of the knowledge and capabilities of the average medically trained citizen. Meaning, the government and the CDC are NOT needed for a community to handle an Ebola outbreak, if that community is given proper guidelines and strategies in advance. Treatment for Ebola, at least in first world nations, consists primarily of regimented transfusions. These transfusions are a mixture of isotonic saline, electrolytes, and plasma, designed to keep the body supported until its immune system can build up a proper defense to the virus. Natural and homeopathic methods can also boost immune system functions making the body resistant to the virus before it is ever contracted. The most effective of all treatments appears to be the transfusion of blood from a recovering patient with antibodies into a newly sick patient. This is likely the reason for the quick recovery of infected doctors like Kent Brantly.

The CDC would never be able to coherently organize a large-scale program of transfusion initiatives, even if it wanted to. Most hospitals around the country have no isolation wards able to handle even a minor Ebola outbreak. The hospitals that do have facilities are limited to less than a dozen beds. According to the medical workers I have spoken with, most hospitals require a minimum of around 50 health professionals to deal with a single Ebola patient.  In the event of an outbreak larger than a few people per state, the CDC and local hospitals are simply not equipped to react to the problem.  Blood transfusions from recovering donors would be few and far between, unless organized by local citizens working under their own directives.

Ironically, it was the Bush Administration's own report in 2006 on the possibility of bird flu pandemic that admitted the government is completely unequipped to handle an outbreak of moderate size. The report stated that “all sources of external aid may be compromised during a pandemic,” and that "local communities will have to address the medical and non-medical effects of the pandemic with available resources." Little has changed in the federal government's pandemic preparations since the report was written.

This leaves individual communities to either prepare for the worst, or die off while waiting for the government to save them. Self isolation and self treatment are the only practical options.

The greatest danger to American citizens is, in fact, not the Ebola virus, but government reactions to the Ebola virus. Already, several medical outfits around the world are suddenly interested in producing an Ebola vaccination when no one seemed very interested before. This might sound like good news, until you learn the terrible history of modern vaccinations.

Pharmaceutical company Merck was caught red handed faking vaccine efficacy data. Merck's Gardisil was found to contain DNA fragments of human papillomavirus.

GlaxoSmithKline, a major vaccine producer, has been caught repeatedly attempting to bribe doctors and health professionals into promoting their products or outright lying about their effectiveness. Glaxo was caught producing rotavirus vaccinations tainted with a swine virus in 2010. Glaxo has been caught producing vaccines tainted with bacteria and endotoxins.

It is important to point out that Glaxo is also spearheading an Ebola vaccine initiative.

U.S. company Baxter produced a flu vaccination in Austria tainted with both avian flu and swine flu. The mixture just happened to be randomly tested on a group of ferrets by a lab in the Czech Republic. The test animals died. The exposure of this “mix up” was quietly swept under the rug by Baxter and the mainstream media, but reports indicate that if the vaccine had been used on the general population, a terrible pandemic would have erupted.

Beyond the fact that vaccinations have a tendency to cripple our natural immune system and infect patients with the very disease they are meant to prevent, none of these existing companies can be trusted to produce a vaccine that is safe even by traditional pharmaceutical standards (which are very low). If the CDC and the federal government trigger a medical martial law scenario, they will most likely include forced vaccination of the population to maintain “herd immunity”. The bottom line? The use of such vaccines will be a death sentence for many, a death more certain than the contraction of Ebola. In my opinion, Ebola vaccination should be avoided at all costs by the American populace.

I can think of no rationale for government involvement in the treatment of an Ebola outbreak. If it is not pure incompetence on their part that has exacerbated the threat, then even worse, it is a deliberate program of genocide. In either case, no military or CDC “strike teams” should be allowed free reign in our neighborhoods, towns, counties, or states. DHS and FEMA Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) are also a no go, given FEMA's track record of dismal disaster response. They CANNOT be allowed to take control of our communities.

The only way for Americans to survive such an event is to cut out government entirely and establish their own medical strategies, as organizations like the Oath Keepers Community Preparedness Teams (CPT) are doing.

If someone wants to voluntarily go to the CDC or FEMA for assistance, then they should be allowed to take that risk. However, medical martial law over all of us in the name of the “greater good” should not be tolerated. The government has proven beyond a doubt that it is not qualified to handle a viral crisis scenario, let alone determine what the “greater good” actually is. I can't speak for the whole of the Liberty Movement, but as for myself, if a group of hazmat suited thugs decides to chase me down with a syringe, I am relatively certain none of them will live through the encounter.

Will I be accused of aiding the spread of Ebola because of my non-compliance? Of course. Do I care? Not so much. Each individual American will have to make their own decision on this matter in due course. Is it better to conform and risk annihilation at the hands of an ignorant and/or corrupt government, or, to fight back and be labeled a bio-terrorist? With the clear lack of tangible government preventions for outbreak in the U.S., you'll probably get your chance to find out soon enough.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com Alt-Market, where this first appeared, is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

Our Walking Dead World - Either You're the Butcher or You're the Cattle

 Guest Post by  The Burning Platform

I know many people have no interest in watching the boob tube because 99% of the programming is either mindless drivel or government sanctioned propaganda. It’s the 1% that reflects the deeper themes and moods engulfing our society. Television shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead reflect the darkening mood of this intensifying Fourth Turning. I wrote one of my more pessimistic articles called Welcome to Terminus in April regarding the season four finale of the Walking Dead series. I essentially argued we are approaching the end of the line and the world is going to get real nasty.



In the six short months since I wrote that depressing article, we’ve seen men beheaded on Youtube videos by terrorists no one had ever heard of at the beginning of this year. Somehow a ragtag band of 30,000 Muslim terrorists, using American military equipment supplied to fight Assad in Syria and taken from the Iraqi Army when they turned tail and ran away, have been able to defeat 600,000 Iraqi and Kurd fighters with air support from the vaunted U.S. Air Force. Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan descend into never ending religious based warfare. We’ve even had passenger planes mysteriously disappear in Asia with no trace.
Crimea seceded from Ukraine and rejoined Russia, initiating a plan to punish Russia by the western powers. America supported and planned the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the Ukraine, with a predictable push back response by Russia, leading to a bloody civil war in the Eastern Ukraine. We’ve had a false flag shooting down of an airliner over the Ukraine by the Ukrainian government, blamed on Russia and Putin by Obama and his EU co-conspirators. The American corporate media mouthpieces have ignored the cover-up of missing controller transmissions, black box recordings, and physical evidence regarding the murder of hundreds of innocent people by western politicians. Israel and Hezbollah resumed their endless religious war in Gaza, with thousands of casualties and destruction.

UK fear mongering and financial threats barely averted the secession of Scotland from the UK. Cantalonia continues to push for a secession vote to leave Spain. Violent protests have broken out in Spain, Italy, France and even Sweden. Turmoil, protests and riots in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico have been driven by anger at political corruption, high inflation, and general economic dysfunction. Saber rattling between China and Japan has increased and young people in Hong Kong have been protesting the lack of democratic elections being permitted by China. The world economy, undergoing central bank monetary stimulus withdraw, is headed back into recession as Germany, China and the U.S. join the rest of the world in economic decline. And now the Western Africa outbreak of ebola has gone worldwide, with predictions of an epidemic potentially causing worldwide economic chaos.

What’s happening in the real world makes the dystopian zombie world of Walking Dead seem almost quaint. The writers of this show brilliant use of symbolism and imagery captures the violent, chaotic, inhumane, darkening, brutal world we inhabit as the Fourth Turning crisis period we entered in 2008 deepens on a daily basis. There is a good reason why the first episode of their fifth season drew the biggest cable TV audience in history. The show is clearly tapping into the mood of the masses. Early in the latest episode you realize Terminus has become a processing center run by cannibals. The line between victim and criminal, killer and prey, good and evil, madness and sanity, and moral and immoral is blurred. Everything is relative in the post-pandemic world of the Walking Dead.



Seeing Wall Street cannibals walk away unscathed after devouring the worldwide economic system in 2008 with their fraudulent financial schemes, corrupt politicians enriched by throwing taxpayers under the bus, militarized police forces trampling the Fourth Amendment, the NSA spying on every American, a private central bank enriching their owners by funneling trillions into their bank vaults, a president trampling on the Constitution by issuing executive orders to bypass the other branches of government, and billions of welfare and tax fraud from the urban ghettos to the penthouse suites in NYC, has convinced a large swath of Americans that everything is relative and nothing matters in our warped dystopian world. Right and wrong no longer matter. Morality is an antiquated concept. Adhering to the Constitution is an outmoded notion. Our society celebrates and condones our dog eat dog economic paradigm. Or zombie eats anything world in the case of Walking Dead.

The Terminus complex is reminiscent of the concentration camp in Schindler’s List. It is complete with railroad cars to hold the prisoners, gates with barbed wire, armed guards, and extermination facilities to “process” the prisoners. Thick black smoke belches into the air. There is a room stacked full of booty, teddy bears, watches, clothes – everything except the gold fillings.The Nazi like precision and attention to detail is reflected in the almost business-like method in which the Terminus administrators go about gutting their prey. The bone chilling efficiency and antiseptic processing facility evoke memories of the holocaust gas chambers. The opening sequence when Rick, Daryl, Glenn and Bob are among a group of men lined up to be gutted like pigs over a trough in place to collect their spilled blood, might have been the most brutal scene ever put on non-premium cable TV.

The callous and dispassionate way in which the prisoners (cattle) are lined up in front of a stainless steel trough is disconcerting and bone chilling. The victims are hit with a baseball bat and then their throats are slit over the trough by men in protective suits. They have become nothing but cattle to be butchered and consumed by the Terminus cannibals. You see another part of the processing plant where human remains are hanging from hooks like sides of beef. Gareth, the leader of Terminus, supervises the operation like a CEO, berating the butchers for not meeting quotas and following standard operating procedures. Not much different than how our mega-corporations are run today.



The other fascinating similarity between the dystopian “nightmare of want” setting of Terminus and our modern day dystopian “empire of excess” is the use of false advertising and propaganda to lure “customers” into their web. Their version of billboard advertising was plywood with the hand written messages of “Sanctuary for All”, “Community for All”, and “Those Who Arrive Survive”. The Terminus cannibals would have fit in well on Madison Avenue with the highly paid spin artists, propagandists, and whores for the corporate oligarchs.

The signs along train tracks and radio transmissions from a call center like facility showed the calculated business-like efficiency of the cannibals in systematically and methodically luring victims to their slaughterhouse. It is the same techniques used by the apostles of Edward Bernays to consciously and intelligently manipulate the habits, opinions, tastes, ideas and actions of the masses, in order to control and influence their buying habits, voting decisions, and support of their rulers. The unseen men who constitute the “invisible government” use these techniques to keep the cattle docile, fed, and ignorant, as they are led to slaughter.



The government and lack thereof is always lurking in the murky background of how and why the United States has devolved into an infected world of the walking dead. This episode provided some clues about government labs producing viruses as weapons to be used against some unexplained enemy. The insinuation is that the government somehow lost control of the virus and the ensuing pandemic destroyed our modern world and left the survivors to battle the biters and each other for the remaining scraps. The Federal government caused the societal collapse and is nowhere to be found in rebuilding the nation.

It is unclear how the apocalypse went down, but you can assume it began with fear, which led to panic, chaos, economic collapse, violent upheaval, war, and total breakdown of governmental authority and control. It is ironic that today fear of a worldwide ebola pandemic is coinciding with an inevitable economic implosion, wars raging in the Middle East, violent protests raging around the globe, and trust in governmental authority plunging to all-time lows. The Walking Dead has wittingly or unwittingly captured the ambiance of our turbulent times.

When you are faced with desperate circumstances you can either do whatever you need to survive or you can submissively accept your fate and die. Gareth and his cannibalistic cohorts had been in the same situation as Rick and his posse, but they had somehow turned the tables on their captors. Gareth’s survival of the fittest creed was “either you’re the butcher or you’re the cattle”. Human beings react to intense pressure and life threatening situations in different ways. Some people snap and turn into monsters, like Gareth. Some people snap and lose their minds. Others, like Rick and Carol, summon an inner strength to do whatever it takes to survive while barely maintaining their humanity. Others turn into blind followers of a strong forceful leader, not questioning the morality, legality or humanity of what they are ordered to do. The line between right and wrong, necessary versus unnecessary, vengeance versus justice, and butcher versus cattle is blurred in a world without rules, government or accepted norms.

I believe the “butcher or cattle” analogy is sadly a valid meme for the world we currently inhabit. In the Walking Dead world, individuals must choose to be butcher or cattle. It’s a Darwinian world of kill or be killed. Like minded individuals with common values and goals form communities to protect themselves, provide for themselves, and attempt to bring a semblance of order in a chaotic world. The community of Westbury, led by the governor and the community of Terminus, led by Gareth, are founded upon a foundation of evil and ultimately destroyed. Rick’s community of liberty minded freedom fighters do whatever is necessary to survive, but retain their humanity, decency and desire to create a better world.

Our present day world may not be as brutish as the Walking Dead world, though the line between reality and fiction is often indistinguishable when you turn on the news, but the distinction between butchers and cattle is clear. The elected and non-elected rulers of the deep state are the butchers, sending young men off to die for oil companies and arms dealers, impoverishing the masses through inflation and their control of the currency, and enriching themselves through their complete control of the political, financial, judicial, and economic systems. This establishment, or invisible government as Bernays described, is committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. Its scope, financial resources, and global reach put it in a predator class all by itself.

The common people are the cattle being led to slaughter. We are kept docile with incessant propaganda from the mainstream media; marketing messages to consume from Madison Avenue; filtered, adjusted, manipulated economic data fed to us by government agencies; an endless supply of iGadgets and other electronic distractions; government education designed to keep us ignorant; 24/7 reality TV on six hundred stations to keep us entertained; corporate toxic processed food to keep us obese and tame; and an endless supply of Wall Street supplied debt to keep us caged in our pens with no hope of escape. The butchers of the deep state have maintained control for decades, but we’re entering a new era.

Fourth Turnings result in the tables being turned on the butchers. Some cattle are awakening from their stupor. They can see the bloody writing on the slaughterhouse wall. Anyone who isn’t sensing a dramatic mood change in this country is either a mindless zombie or a functionary of the deep state. The financial shenanigans of the ruling class are again being revealed as nothing but a Ponzi scheme built on a foundation of debt and propped up by delusions and ignorance. When the house of cards collapses in the near future, the tables will turn. When people have nothing left to lose, they will lose it. The butchers will become the cattle. There will be no sanctuary for these evil men. Their reign of terror will be swept away in a whirlwind of retribution, death and destruction. It might even make the Walking Dead look like a walk in the park.

Rule from the Shadows - The Psychology of Power - Part 1

Via StormCloudsGathering,

“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

-President Woodrow Wilson in his book the “The New Freedom” published in 1913

The quest for power is the primary driving force of history, always has been, always will be. Those who fail to recognize this principle are not spared in the grand chess game, but rather are moved and manipulated by forces that they do not understand.

From the perspective of those who dominate the board it is obviously preferable to have a population of ignorant pawns than it is to have an array of opponents which are capable of mounting an effective resistance. To that end it has always been in the interest of the ruling class to cultivate illusions which obscure the true nature of the game.




It's important to remember that wealth, social status and official positions of power do not reduce the effects of group psychology.

To put it in simple terms the politicians aren't calling the shots. They're puppets. Voting the bums out doesn't work, and now you know why.

Even if we remove every single corrupt oligarch from the councils of government we will end up right back in the same situation unless we deal with the psychological underpinnings of our enslavement.
But how do we do that? How do we reach the group mind and shake the crowd from its slumber?
Group psychology is a weapon and like all weapons it is capable of being used for good or for evil. For many years it has been in the wrong hands. It has been hidden from the public and used against them. It's time for the people to pick up that weapon and use it to free themselves.

Full transcript here...