Common Sense: A Revolutionary Idea

Interesting little film...the link is in the title.

Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Yep...I trust Big Brother to "protect" us don't you? How much more are Americans going to take? Do the sheeple even notice how very quickly this nation is turning into a police state?

Bush Preaches Democracy, Proposes Tyranny-The Fraudlent War on Terror

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Americans had best rethink the "war on terror" while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush's blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done................

Now the Bush administration wants to take away the American people's freedom to travel within their own country by airplane. Not content with an 80,000 "no fly" list, a subset of a 500,000-750,000 "watch list," the Bush administration's Transport Security Administration has proposed new rules that will require Americans to get government permission 72 hours in advance prior to being allowed to board a domestic flight.


Any agency of the government that can propose such a tyrannical regulation should be abolished. The TSA's mentality shows it to be a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

Even without the "permission to fly" rule, the TSA's practices are ridiculous and unjustified. The confiscation of tooth paste and unopened bottles of perfume, the harassment of US military officers in uniform, the harassment of old people struggling with their walkers, of mothers struggling with small children--none of this makes any sense except in terms of getting Americans accustomed to harassment as a citizen's duty to government and to train a cadre to conduct warrantless searches of fellow citizens.


Set aside the violation of the Constitution and the Soviet-style tyranny of the loss of the freedom to travel and consider merely the practical aspect of the proposal. What American wants his travel plans dependent on a government bureaucracy capable of putting US Senator Ted Kennedy on the "no fly" list and capable of issuing US visas to two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers six months after they allegedly died in the 9/11 events?

If we believe the official story, 9/11 itself reveals a government totally devoid of any competence whatsoever.

The "war on terror" is fraudulent. The cruel war and the deceptive vocabulary that protects it are a cover for expanding US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and for constructing a functioning police state at home. A country in which people cannot make airline reservations without the government's permission is not a free country.

This is definately an article well worth reading in full...We are being locked down in this country ...first the new passport regulations, now this...and who exactly are these "border tightening" policies meant for?....they are ineffective against people coming into the United States....structured to control the population here. Illegal aliens still come in every day, yet activists are stopped at the border trying to leave. The entire immigration debate has been started by these fascists to wind up the bigots, who are begging for tyranny to protect themselves from "those people"....the politicians can surely count on the eager assistance of the ignorant among us to further their police state agenda...they surely seem to outnumber the thinking people who can see through the divide and conquer politics and propaganda....as long as they keep the sheeple's minds occupied fighting amongst themselves, they are free to do as they please.

Reality Check......

Excerpts from:
Living in an Imperial World
by Karen Kwiatkowski

The republic is dead. Not sick, not dying, not failing, or in a gradual decline, not waiting to be resuscitated, but already stone cold dead.

This death probably occurred as we began to win the Cold War, but long before we realized we had prevailed. The professionalization of politics, of military and bureaucratic service to the state, of foreign policy making, and of business seems to have completely done in the old ideas. Simply federated, decentralized, self-depreciating government that once feared the people has self-actualized into a contemptuous, rapacious and iron-fisted murderer of freedom, and murderer of men.............

The founders worried that subsequent elites and factions would take over the republic they had birthed with every aspect of their power, as the gifted political elites of their time. Yet, as the 19^th century dawned, even the most pro-state among them loved freedom and hated tyranny.

They were right about government power and human nature, and their predictions true. New elites and government-dependent factions have ascended. Unfortunately, these political elites hate freedom and love the tyranny of government solutions...........

Recognize that the republic is dead, and that we owe its rotting bloated corpse no loyalty whatsoever.

This done, act accordingly. Publicly and privately, we should observe the corpse as a public nuisance, a pollutant both aesthetically and materially. When the yellow brick road leads us to the grand doors of government services, we should not avert our gaze but instead pull back the curtain, grandly, loudly, with the contagious laughter of a child, or the righteous anger of a soldier back in pieces from a war, like most wars, that was from the beginning a brutal political lie.

Will we insult a federal or state employee, a law enforcer or judge? Will we anger a politician, a lobbyist, a corporatist employer, or a government news organ for stealing our lives, our freedom of movement and thought, our productivity? We should certainly aspire to do so, with the zeal of missionaries.

To live in an imperial world, we must first, as survivors, recognize that it is an imperial world. History is filled with imperial/totalitarian states, as global graveyards are filled with those who were too late in recognizing what had already happened.

It’s over. The faithful and the hopeful may carry the corpse of the American republic, hoping that it can be brought back into normality, into life, and into power. I am afraid these nurturers will not survive the present reality of imperialism.

But some of us will look directly at the ugly, dangerous and very real empire. We will stare – with little hope but also with little fear – into the face of the FUBAR nation, and then roll up our sleeves and get started on the only life we may honestly live, as internal dissidents. We will no longer pledge allegiance, we will not obey old rules, we will make do and make it up as we go along. Our minds focused on surviving the empire, our talents and creativity unleashed against the state and its fantasist faithful, we will live as if we are free.

This simple prescription will not only make us survivors, but it will gradually cultivate a political landscape for a future of free republics where today we see nascent totalitarianism and bankrupt empire. This prescription was written for us in 1809 by revolutionary war general John Stark. He advised, "Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."

We face a modern American state more overweening and dictatorial than even King George III could imagine, yet we have no declaration of independence, no privileged elite to demand it, no interested population to read and debate it. This time, our declaration will be made individually, every day, in calm desperate fearlessness, as we simply live free.

Sometimes it is very liberating to face the reality of a situation, no matter how harsh it may be, and move on...often a real solution becomes clear when hopes and illusions are no longer in the way, causing one to waste time and energy in the futile attempt to save something that is already long lost.