Eisenhower and Petraeus and Butler

General Smedley Butler



General Dwight Eisenhower



General David Petraeus


What differentiates the images of these three generals? And what does it have to say about modesty and real character? Which of these three men would you NOT want to put in charge of a secret, shadow army?

Careful With THE REASON

I always try to caution anyone looking for the reason behind any Federal policy or program. The Federal government acts outwardly like an empire, but the machinations behind closed doors in the Imperial capitol are much more complex than the will of Caesar. But, every day I read the reason behind something at least once. It is often amplified by writing the real reason. The articles that pretend to uncover the real reason usually touch one of many forces behind some asinine governmental action. But in order for there to be single, hidden reason behind Obamacare, or the Global War On Terror™, or the bank bailouts there would have to be an incredible behind-the-scenes organization of thousands that is capable of maintaining its deliberations and communication perfectly secret. That is but the most obvious of the reasons (small r) that THE REASON is a truly stupid notion.

As designed, the American political process is complex, in practice in the 21st century it is infinitely more complex than designed. The President does not rule by decree. As Ludwig von Mises explains in "Human Action", even a dictator rules only with the consent of the governed. And the President is, even today, somewhat constrained by the Constitution to make laws and obtain funding through the Congress. Nor is the President's rule simply a question of getting a majority of Congress behind him. The President must align divers powerful interests before he ever goes to Congress, or decides that he has enough power to ignore Congress.

In the American power structure there are legal, institutional interests, such as the Congress, court system, state legislatures and the Departments of the administration. We can know some of what they do. We know the legislation that they are discussing, we can see some of the court cases that are being adjudicated. We can read the reports that are published by all the different Departments and Offices and Administrations within the Federal leviathan.

There are also semi-legal institutions such as registered lobbies. The lobbies write many more laws than do the Congress because the lobbies have more resources, more professionals and more motivation to write good laws. (good for them, that is). The lobbies control the money that Congressmen and especially Senators need to be re-elected. The lobbies have become the real constituency of the US Senate. The lobbiest-Congressman conversations are not transparent. We the people have no idea what is talked about there.

Then there are extra-legal powerful interests. The most important extra-legal power groups are the big corporations acting through public employees. Americans are much more constrained and manipulated by regulations than by laws. Those regulations are written by bureaucrats who are frequently eyeing a lucrative job with one of the biggest corporations in the field that the bureaucrat is entrusted to regulate. But bureaucrats don't just write regulations, they also have great influence over law. When politicians decide to make a new law and they do not enlist a lobby to write it, then the politicians usually must count on bureaucrats to give them the data that will inform the new law. Bureaucrats can determine the nature of the law by carefully selecting the information that they provide or conceal. They have tremendous influence over the actions of government.

The media is another extra-legal source of real political power. The larger the medium, the more its opinions and desires are taken into consideration. FOX News has more weight in Washington than does antiwar.com (unfortunately). Editorials in important papers can change the course of what the government does. But media does not only influence government, it also aids the government by being its propagandists. The mainstream American media never challenges the primary precepts of the status quo in American government, and they actively broadcast lies designed to confuse and frighten Americans into malleability.

All this mess is woven together in an extremely complicated, dynamic and treacherous network. Decisions are only enacted when enough actors with enough influence push in the same direction. This does not mean that these interests are aligned on other issues, or that their motives to align on the issue in question are similar. But the interests that always seem to be pushing away from the consensus get marginalized and their power wanes. Power in Washington comes through networking and from making successful accords and partnerships. The art of the deal is the ability to align enough interests to get your agenda moving.

A small fraction of this network or matrix is visible. Congress holds some public discussions. The President announces his ideas for the future. Political pundits pontificate in the media. But most of the application of power and influence happens out of the public eye. For instance, we will never hear the discussions between Pfizer and upper level civil "servants" at the FDA, although these discussions are key to how drugs are regulated in America. The Secretary of Labor may suggest in a cabinet meeting that unemployment will spike if we end the wars, but we won't know that until years later when someone writes a memoir. The general that writes papers about possible alternative military strategies for the White House is counting on a job from Lockheed when he retires, but only he knows that the position is already waiting for him. AIPAC representatives dine with a Congressman and offer money and veiled threats for her support. These are examples to show that the hidden applications of influence are probably more powerful than the visible ones.

So there is no ONE REASON behind anything that happens in DC. I think that one of the reasons that so many people believe in THE REASON is that they can only see a fraction of the myriad deals and interchanges of support that impel government action. The reasons that are given to the public through spokesmen and through the media to explain government actions are often clearly untrue or just absurd. That leads to the search for THE REAL REASON. But its just not that simple.

One thing is certain, if we are to have any control over government, it needs to be more transparent. But that will not happen by working through the system. The system is designed by the powerful to keep us out of the loop. And that's why we all need to support these wonderful people.

Panqueques de Papas

In honor of Rachel Corrie and all brave antiwar activists.




The key to this recipe is to have potatoes with a relatively low water content. Most American potatoes are irrigated and are full of water. They suck. If you're in the USA, try the gold or yukon gold variety. They aren't so watery.

5 medium potatoes
2 eggs, beaten
less than 1/4 cup of flour
salt and pepper to taste
10 grams of butter
5 ml. cooking oil

lots of homemade plum jam

Peel and coarsely grate 5 medium sized potatoes into a colander. Pour cold water over the grated potato to rinse off the starch. Now squeeze as much water out of the grated potatoes as possible.

Transfer potatoes to a bowl and add the beaten eggs, the flour and the salt and pepper. Let sit for 5 minutes.

Heat a heavy sauté pan and put in half of the oil and butter. Spoon the potato mixture into the hot pan on medium heat. Each pancake should be the diameter of the palm of your hand. Flatten the pancakes with the back of the spoon to about 1.5 cm. thick. Let them brown slowly about 3 or 4 minutes, turn and brown the other side.

Serve hot with homemade jam. Spread lots of jam on the pancakes, especially if the jam is good.

We usually serve the pancakes on a summer weekend with the doors and windows open to hear the chucao call from the woods and see the trees revel in the morning sun.

Eat these pancakes with fried eggs from country (free-range) hens. Factory eggs are watery and the taste bad. Find a farmer whose hens wander around and eat grass and bugs like they should. The yolks will be a deep yellow and the whites will be firm. Don't cook them too long! The yolks have to be runny to mix in with the pancakes.

For Everyone Else, There's Wikileaks

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
it expects what never was and never will be...
Thomas Jefferson

What Does it Cost to Change the World? from Wikileaks

Liberty and secrecy do not co-exist. When governments hold information secret from the electorate, liberty and Constitutional government are in jeopardy. When governments discuss and craft policy in secret from the electorate, liberty and Constitutional government are already on the run. When governments constrain our representatives from telling us what they know, liberty and Constitutional government have been truncated. When laws are made that are secret from the people, then liberty and Constitutional government are already dead. All that is left are institutions that maintain a pretext of government by the people. Remember that after Octavian made himself Juilius Caesar Augustus and ruled by decree, that the institutions of the Senate and the Tribunes were still in place, however they were only for show. Our Congress also exists for show, all important decisions are made by the unitary President and unelected bureaucrats. We are not privy to the conversations that lead to those decisions.

In order to recover liberty we must stop the secrecy under which our government operates. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Federal government is generating around 560 million pages of documents marked secret or above every year! It is ridiculous to think that we can control OUR government if we have no idea what it is doing and what it knows. Free society must operate without secrets.

Since the Federal government (or the Empire, if you prefer) will not allow us "consumers" access to the information that it uses to make decisions on war, spending, regulations, dirty tricks or selling guns to the Mexican drugs mafia, we are blind and dependent on the US media which has been shown to cooperate with the government to keep the electorate in the dark.

But this is true in every country where the government rules without citizen participation in the decision making process. The Egyptians knew, viscerally, that Mubarak and his minions were as corrupt as Papa Doc Duvalier, but they didn't have any concrete evidence and they were afraid to organize. Those who complained too much went to jail. The same was true in Tunisia under Mr. Ben Ali and in every other country in the mideast and many other places as well. But a ray of truth broke through the cloud cover of secrecy when the hero, Bradley Manning copied some 600,000 secret US State Dept. files onto a Lady Gaga CD and posted those files onto the Wikileaks confidential upload site.

The Arab spring is an avalanche which was set into motion when Tunisians, Egyptians, Jordanians and their neighbors began to read documents that confirmed their suspicions. They read those documents on Wikileaks. Information is freedom. The US government does not want you to have information, therefore the US government does not want you to be free. Period. Full stop.

Support Wikileaks with money and with pressure on the government to abandon its persecution of Julian Assange.

And support Bradley Manning who opened the curtain a tiny bit and gave us a glimpse of the cynical men and women who decide your destiny in secret.

Freedom is singular and it means liberty, freedoms are a list of government authorized prerogatives

I have had the advantage of spending most of twenty years outside the USA from 1987 until the end of 2005. I still spend half of the year outside of the States, but during the 90s and the first half of the 00s, I only came to the States for a week or two each year. So I saw the transformations that the USA has undergone like a disjointed slide show rather than a continuous movie. Perhaps that is why so many things that the rest of my countrymen accept without question seem alien to me.

For instance, when I left the States to live in South America, most of the cars on the road were used. Shiny new cars made up a small percentage of the vehicles that one saw around town or on the freeway, and then in stagger steps, due to my periodic trips north, I saw the mix of vehicles change. It was very noticeable from my perspective. In steps I saw old cars disappear and ever bigger, ever shinier and more expensive and newer cars outnumbered older, used cars. After a couple more stagger steps there were almost no older, used cars at all.

I thought, what does this mean? Are people really making that much more money? Is this really the age of prosperity for everyone? But I noticed another trend in stagger steps on my periodic short trips back to the land where I was born. My slide show view of America revealed that credit scores had become almost a definition of net worth, or even a definition of personal merit. How and why did credit scores get to be so important all of a sudden? Well, given that the importance of credit scores and the percentage of new cars dovetailed perfectly, the conclusion was pretty obvious: people were not necessarily making any more money, they were just all going into debt, and what mattered to them was their ability to take on even more debt.

From my viewpoint, a number of transformations to the American panorama look very surprising, but the Americans haven’t had my slide show view and don’t seem to notice the changes. One transformation that drives me crazy is the change in number of that essential American word: Freedom. Throughout the history of America, freedom has always been expressed in the singular.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Mr. Lincoln did not speak of freedoms. He spoke of freedom.

Freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle, which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages.
FRIEDRICH HAYEK

Mr. Hayek, who certainly understood the topic, did not speak of freedoms. He used the singular.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
RONALD REAGAN

Perhaps, Mr. Reagan, we didn’t manage to pass freedom on to the next generation because over the last twenty years, freedom has been replaced with freedoms. Freedoms imply something very different than freedom. George Dubya Bush spoke of freedoms almost daily, although he couldn’t pronounce the word very well. When he said it, it came out sounding like freedomsh. So what’s the difference between freedom and freedoms?

Freedom is an overarching state of being. It is a natural God-given right to owe no homage to any man or to any government. Under freedom every man is a king and no man is a king. Under freedom the government fears and obeys the voters, when freedom is in wane, the voters learn to fear and obey the government. Freedom touches and encompasses everything. It applies to our ability to move about the city, state and country. It informs our ability to do business as we wish, where we wish and with whom we wish. Freedom gives us the right to live as we will without having to comply with any codes of conduct. The only caveat to our freedom is that our actions cannot impinge on the freedom of others. As a free man I can do what I will, as long as it does not harm or restrain any of my fellows.

Freedoms, on the other hand, are enumerated rights. Freedoms are granted by the government and each is limited in scope and easily revoked upon the whim of the government. When the President speaks of defending our freedoms, what does he mean? Does he want to defend my natural right to do what I will as long as it doesn’t harm others? Apparently not, because if what I want to do is to smoke a marijuana cigarette, the presidents laws will threaten me with violence and lock me up. If I care to build a restaurant on a second floor balcony over looking the street that does not have an elevator, than the government will close it because I have violated the freedoms of a person who cannot walk up the stairs. Apparently the freedoms of that person trump mine, and the state uses violence or its threat to take away my freedom so that another may decide what I do with my property. That’s not freedom. Its freedoms.

As a country we now exercise one of our freedoms to go and kill people on the other side of the world who never did anything to us and never could. And we are told that defends our freedoms. In order for our freedoms to be properly defended we do have to give up the right to habeus corpus, we also have to give up the right to have private conversations, we have to give up the right to have our property inviolate without a court order. It seems to me that while I was in Chile, Americans traded in their freedom for a short list of freedoms.

The Biggest Threat To Freedom is War

"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

James Madison


Stop the wars! Close the foreign bases!

The threats to America are not solved by the wars and the overseas military presence, they are caused by the wars and the overseas military presence.

What did Smedley Butler, America's greatest war hero, have to say about war? He said "War is a racket"

If you value freedom, if you want government to stop the fraud and live within its means, then this election cycle vote for an antiwar candidate. So far only two antiwar candidates have announced: Gary Johnson, ex-governor of New Mexico and Ron Paul, the champion of the Constitution.

Donate to one of these men. Get off your butt and volunteer to work in their campaigns. Get the word out that our freedom depends on ending the Endless War.

And God bless you all.

Ron Paul 2012: In Defense of Liberty

Doctor Paul needs to be careful. As he gets closer to winning the election I fear for his safety and for the future of our Republic.

Tom Woods says at 2:50 of this video "This is just going to shake the establishment. They do not want this guy running for President". Its funny now, but honestly if it looks like Dr. Paul is going to win the Republican Primary, I think that his life will be in danger. And the assassin will not be a nutcase like John Hinkley, but rather a CIA or contract murderer.

Maybe that sounds paranoid, but think about this, will the defense contractors, the generals waiting to retire to big bucks in Washington think tanks, the CIA and NSA just quietly let Dr. Paul disassemble the Empire?

Watch your back old man. May God protect you from all harm. May His mantle cover you and keep you safe from the enemies of freedom.

War Is Nothing But Hate And Death And Suffering.

God Damn the war makers.

Jack Hunter and Judge Napolitano: The similarity between neocons like Bill Kristol and liberal internationalists like Obama and Hillary Clinton

Here's what I think. A lot of America's conservatives aren't very bright. They are easily led around by anyone who can use the right symbols and key words. I mean politicians like the team of McCain/Palin that ran for the White House against the Peace Laureate, and their followers. They have good intentions. They know that they want small government and individual liberty but they have been sold the patently absurd notion that America faces multiple existential dangers from around the world that require half of all the world's expenditure on war and intelligence. Its absurd. Ridiculous. Suicide terrorists do not and could not ever pose an existential danger to the USA even if they were armed with an atomic weapon, which could never happen anyway.

The USA also faces no existential danger from any organized military in the world and could not even if American expenditures dropped to $100 Billion a year on defense/intelligence. We have an ocean to the east and the west, Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. We have aircraft, missiles, ships, submarines and satellites that can see any incursion into our territory and blow it out of the sky or the water long before it reaches our country. (Not our Homeland. We are not Nazis for goodness sakes).

So the conservatives have been snowed into a militaristic orthodoxy against their best interests. Who has done this? Two parties have done this. From the practical, financial side it has been the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about. But the MIC was missing something important, and that was the intellectual angle. There needed to be intellectual support for the Permanent War State. And that was provided by the Straussian neocons.

The neoconservative movement was initiated by men who purposely and consciously abandoned leftist, socialist policies to convince America's conservatives that had already been softened up by the pro-CIA Bill Buckley, that what was needed was a big military and a worldwide presence. They invented the dangers posed by the collapsing Soviet Empire in the '80s that convinced the US to support and arm the mujehaddin that then became the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Now they continue to point out terrible existential dangers posed by bearded men in turbans. Bill Kristol is the dean of this group and he continues to convince conservatives to support unlimited war and unlimited war spending.

_____________________________________________________________

So what does this rant have to do with the video that I hope you watched? It is this: no one should be surprised that Bill Kristol, Hillary and Barack are all on the same page. They come from the same place. All three are statists. All three believe in big government. Bill Kristol has identified himself as a big-government conservative, which is an oxymoron. Anyone who thinks Kristol is any kind of conservative is just a regular moron without the oxy.




It is natural for people who believe that the state is a force for good to desire to apply the force of the state to any and all problems. The progressive pragmatists in this administration want to solve problems, and not just our own problems. They want to solve everybody's problems and that leads them to use force. It leads them to kill people for their own good. And, not surprisingly, it leads them into perfect alignment with Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Dick Cheney. They have the same world-view and they are natural allies.

The real right, that is what intellectuals are still left after the pogroms of the last twenty years, needs to use this budding alliance between Kristol and the administration - between neocons and progressives - to show that the Permanent War State is NOT conservative and must be abandoned.

Mensaje de Bienvenido a Obama

Bienvenido asesino