This is a very worth wild read (imo)
The Point of No Return
The warnings of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln have never been more relevant.
How did we get to the point where many people feel that the America they have known is being replaced by a very different kind of country, with not only different kinds of policies but also very different values and ways of governing?
Something of this magnitude does not happen all at once or in just one administration in Washington. What we are seeing is the culmination of many trends in many aspects of American life that go back for years.
Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the institutions set up by the Constitution are enough to ensure the continuance of a free, self-governing nation. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what members of the Constitutional Convention were creating, he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
In other words, a constitutional government does not depend on the Constitution but on us. To the extent that we allow clever people to circumvent the Constitution while dazzling us with rhetoric, the Constitution becomes just a meaningless piece of paper as our freedoms are stolen from us, much as a pick-pocket might steal our wallet while we were distracted by other things.
It is not just evil people who would dismantle America. Many people who have no desire to destroy our freedoms simply have agendas of their own that are singly or collectively incompatible with the survival of freedom.
Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias, “social justice.”
Those who construct moral melodramas — starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — are ready to disregard the constitutional rights of those they demonize, and to overstep the limits that the Constitution puts on the powers of the federal government.
The outcries of protest in the media, in academia, and in politics when the Supreme Court ruled this year that people in corporations have the same free-speech rights as other Americans were a painful reminder of how vulnerable even the most basic rights are to the attacks of ideological zealots. Pres. Barack Obama said that the Court’s decision would “open the floodgates for special interests” — as if all you have to do to take away people’s free-speech rights is call them special interests.
It is not just particular segments of the population that are under attack. More fundamentally under attack are the very principles and values of American society as a whole. The history of this country is taught in many schools and colleges as the history of grievances and victimhood, often with the mantra of “race, class, and gender.” Television and the movies often do the same.
When there are not enough current grievances for them, they mine the past for grievances and call it history. Sins and shortcomings common to the human race around the world are spoken of as failures of “our society.” But American achievements get far less attention — and sometimes none at all.
Our “educators,” who cannot educate our children to the level of math or science achieved in most other comparable countries, have time to poison their minds against America.
Why? Partly, if not mostly, it is because that is the vogue. It shows you are “with it” when you reject your own country and exalt other countries.
Abraham Lincoln warned of people whose ambitions can only be fulfilled by dismantling the institutions of this country because no comparable renown is available to them by supporting those institutions. He said this 25 years before the Gettysburg Address, and he was speaking of political leaders with hubris, whom he regarded as a greater danger than enemy nations. But such hubris is far more widespread today than just among political leaders.
Those with such hubris — in the media and in education, as well as in politics — have for years eroded both respect for the country and the social cohesion of its people. This erosion is what has set the stage for today’s dismantling of America, which is now approaching the point of no return.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244252/point-no-return-thomas-sowell
I think this is the same site that originally during the election showed the phoney live certificate of birth on it. Stuff like that does not raise it creditablity at all.
Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas.
http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html
While i don't agree wholeheartedly, the author makes a few good points and it is worth the read.
UNDER SIEGE IN AMERICA
By Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny"
August 23, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
As an attorney who represents businesses and interacts frequently with entrepreneurs, I hear repeatedly concerns that investigators for various federal and state agencies have become emboldened and are endeavoring to put them out of business. This widely expressed sentiment is not paranoia. It is a justified fear, and it is giving rise to a bunker mentality highly destructive to free enterprise. Many executives are holding onto their cash, hunkering down, and avoiding making moves to expand their businesses, hire more employees, or undertake new ventures because they greatly fear an unpredictable regulatory future—one where relationships with lenders and insurers are changing fundamentally and will keep changing in unforeseeable ways for years to come.
The greatest uncertainty they fear is the unleashed regulator, unleashed by the Obama Administration with instructions to seek and destroy. They believe the new army of regulators coming out of the Obama Administration regard industry as exploitative and evil. They are undoubtedly correct, at least to the extent that career civil servants who have harbored hatred for those they regulate but have been stopped from taking adverse action by political appointees of a conservative bend now have no such barriers in their way.
When law and law enforcement become unpredictable, entrepreneurs look for places to hide. Because they most often have assets not easily removed from a country, they usually try to stay off the radar screen, avoiding any move that will heighten their visibility by regulators. This is a characteristic of many third world countries, where regimes are unstable, where police can become armed bands of thugs, and where judicial decisions and local elections can be bought.
In the United States, we have enjoyed a very long period of stable governance. Transitions of power from one party to another have occurred without violent revolution. Police, while on occasion corrupt, are by and large law abiding. The military remains under civilian control. We, of course, had the great benefit of George Washington, who established limits to power through his words and deeds as President and Commander in Chief.
The rule of law, once held sacrosanct here, is now violated with impunity by federal regulatory agencies whose leaders think their missions more important than any laws that forbid their actions. They reinterpret their authority, acting directly against statutory and constitutional limits on their power quite frequently. They conduct under cover surveillance operations against citizens of this country, falsely representing their identities in an effort to induce violations of agency rules as a bases for prosecuting the offenders. Civil and criminal penalties can attend these violations, and many of the rules in question are either so obscure or counterintuitive as to seem incredible to those who violate them.
Rangers in the West whose cattle have traversed rights of way over federal lands for in excess of a century, have suddenly come to realize that they are being held guilty for the first time of trespass on those federal lands and ordered to pay huge fines. A trespass is deemed to occur every time a calf, a cow, or a bull takes a step onto federal property off of the right of way. Not good about following street signs, cattle on the move rarely stay in their lanes. BLM and Park Service agents perch with binoculars from high points and aircraft, photographing every trespass, monitoring the brands on the cattle, and then circling back to impose fines on unsuspecting ranchers.
Folks who own cherry orchards come to find out from professors at the university that certain kinds of tart cherries contain high levels of antioxidants and other biochemicals that are effective in reducing the symptoms of arthritis. They give that information, including the studies, to customers who buy cherry juice. Agents of the Food and Drug Administration visit them unannounced, inspect their farms, demand their literature, and inform them that they must stop telling people of the effects of cherries and cherry juice on arthritis or their cherries will be deemed unapproved new drugs. The farmers can then be charged with selling unapproved drugs, sentenced to jail terms, and lose their farms.
Dairy farmers who harvest fresh milk from healthy cows and share it with neighbors or make it available to health food stores come to realize that several federal and state agencies, doing the bidding for large milk processors, will prosecute them because their milk is not pasteurized, without regard to the fact that the milk is healthy and contaminant free.
Parents who home school their children and elect not to obtain vaccinations for them, choosing to avoid any risk of injury from vaccines while simultaneously not exposing their children to public school environments, are surprised to learn that state health authorities insist that they vaccinate their children against their will, despite the fact that they pose no material risk of disease transmission to the general population.
Parents of a child dying of cancer are informed by attending oncologists that they can do nothing to save the child. The parents take their child to a clinic that offers an experimental drug for the cancer in question. The child takes the drug, begins to experience a reduction in tumors throughout his body. The parents are then informed that the FDA has determined that the child is ineligible to receive the experimental drug and must return to the failed regimen previously rejected by the parents and their attending oncologists.
A single mother who lives in the city and has two school age children decides after a second break-in to her home that she must arm herself. Delighted that she has maimed an intruder and stopped the break-ins, her delight turns to a feeling of helplessness when police arrest her and charge her with use of excessive force. She discovers that her successful use of her weapon to defend her home and children has resulted in a criminal prosecution for excessive force and a civil prosecution by the one she maimed for negligence, both entertained by the courts rather than dismissed. She ends up incurring huge legal bills, continues to suffer break-ins, and is sentenced to community service that forces her to leave her school age children alone at home for several hours each day.
A border patrol agent in pursuit of illegals who have crossed the border without authorization discharges his weapon and kills one in the course of that alien resisting arrest. The agent is prosecuted, convicted, fired, and given a life sentence.
These are all true examples of a bloated, all-consuming regulatory state that replaces a system of ordered justice with one of bureaucratic efficiency and that replaces respect for the rights of man and the rule of law with expansion of agency control over every aspect of enterprise.
Economic and civil liberties cannot prosper, let alone survive, in an environment of unstable law and law enforcement. Unless we reestablish constitutional government in the United States, replete with governors accountable to the people and possessed of limited powers and meaningful protection for economic and civil liberties, we are not that far from witnessing our nation devolve into the anarchic decay, rife corruption, and official lawlessness that is so common in third world countries.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Emord/jonathan149.htm
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