Shame on the UK

The latest twist in the saga of the US government's illegal warrantless wiretapping program is that the government of the United Kingdom arrested a journalist for 9 hours trying to prevent the release of more proof of governmental wrongdoing. Brasilian journalist David Miranda - partner to Glenn Greenwald - was detained by terrorist thugs at Heathrow airport in the name of "preventing terrorism".

While all of these occurrences were predictable, they are despicable. But the reason it makes today's PtF post is because of the pass given by Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the UK and chief of the up-and-coming Liberal Democrat party. The Liberal Democrat is truly a big tent party whose politics simultaneously support serious government reform, civil liberties, human rights laws, progressive taxation. and green values. The Liberal Democrats have been the minority party in a coalition government with the Conservatives, at least indicating the party's tendency toward pragmatism, which in general can be a good thing.

The Independent says that Clegg backed his government's decision - which really was a Conservative party decision - to send Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to urge the Guardian to destroy its copies of information on the illegal, inhumane, and anti-liberty wiretapping programs still being conducted by the governments of the US and the UK. While the decision may help keep the Liberal Democrats in power, it will do a lot to discourage their electoral base from voting the next time around, meaning that the Conservatives and the Labour Party can be expected to carve up the pork in the old-fashioned way the next time the UK has an election. It's a massive setback for meaningful progress in the UK.

In addition to the direct ramifications for the political parties in the UK, Clegg's backing also reflects negatively on how little the party of civil liberties and human rights is willing to defend civil liberty and human rights with regard to the unlawful detention of Miranda. The excuse given by government officials is that Miranda was in possession of complete knowledge of the Matrix (aka PRISM) and the structure of the illegal wiretapping program that has been conducted since at least the days of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

The problem with wiretapping is that it does not work. Sure, a few idiots are caught in the process; but I can tell you from my own experiences with the black market in the US that those who want to get around the wiretapping do so with ease and impunity. Just look at the proliferation of illegal firearms in the United States, not to mention drugs like marijuana and crystal meth. All that warrantless wiretapping does is deny good, honest people "[t]he right... to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...." That's the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, but as has been made clear before by pleadingthef1rst, the text of the Bill of Rights does not in and of itself grant rights to people. It makes it clear that these rights belong to people outside of government structure, and that as such no government ever has any right to obstruct those rights.

There's also the matter of the US (and probably UK) government brainwashing prisoners and turning them into terrorists. Before the "war on terror", this was a routine tactic used primarily in the drug war. "Hey, want to get back at the 'Jews' who put you here? Then convert to the Nation of Islam and by the way, here's a fully functioning bomb for you." Then when the brainwashed, government-created terrorist gets out of jaim and actually goes to deploy his weapon, the FBI swoops in and arrests him again.

Rather than preventing terrorism, a program like PRISM actually makes it easier for the government to recruit its brainwashing targets. The reason the Tsarnayevs of Boston Marathon bombing notoriety failed to show up on the government's radar wasn't so much because they didn't want another brainwashed terrorist incident to help scare us into voting away our freedoms, but rather because their precious PRISM program is not designed to catch homegrown terrorists.

While the officers of government, and certainly my Senator Charles Schumer, are under the conservative impression that Snowden's leaking is a rogue act which can only be fixed by the heavy hand of the law; many Americans are actually of the opinion that PRISM is a far greater threat to the American way of life than any terrorist's bomb. What should be a bigger concern from the viewpoint of the conservative traditionalists - like Schumer, President Obama, PM David Cameron, and sadly Nick Clegg - is that the current state of global affairs is undermining a thousand years of legal progress beginning with the Magna Carta and pulling humanity back into a primitive reality where freedom is a joke. The blood of thousands of soldiers once stained the shores of Normandy so that we could all live in freedom and peace, but wiretapping every citizen and videotaping her in every street and detaining in an airport for 9 hours those freedom fighters who still value liberty as much their ancestors 1,000 years ago stains the very thing our forebears fought and died to protect.

Shame on the UK.

Scared Republican Runs for the Hills, Trips Over Logic

This is a little story. It's nothing super-important. But FOX News is under the impression that a Republican lawmaker taking his kids out of public school is a bigger story than it really is. The reason it gets a place on pleadingthef1rst over all the other important news of the day is because of the twisted logic.

Before we get to the lack of rationality by a politician - which almost goes without saying - it's worth pointing out for those not in the know that Republicans are notorious for their fear of public schools. One of my favourite fat GOP targets, Chris Christie, has been afraid of public school far longer than Rep. Tim Donnelly.

The background to Donnelly's knee-jerk lack of support for the people he represents was instigated by California Gov. Jerry Brown's signing into law a bill that enables transgendered students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender with whom they identify. Donnelly's reaction was - not surprisingly - to pull his children out of public schools, saying students' privacy rights "will be replaced by the right to be ogled."

Allow me to summarise why Donnelly's decision and reasoning (available in the FNC link above) are logically flawed:
1) Gender identity is totally a separate matter from sexual orientation, meaning Donnelly's fear of his boys being "ogled" is irrelevant, and therefore unfounded, and therefore stupid.
2) Let's say a person born female but identifying as a male is trying to act "as male as possible": wouldn't the conservative basis of our society mean that individual is more likely to be ogled as a girl in boys' facilities and not the other way around? And what heterosexual teenage boy would really have a problem being ogled by someone born a girl?
3) Regardless of transgendered individuals, the current setup of public schools means that there could very easily be homosexuals (of any gender) forced into those locker room situations with members of the same gender, meaning there coulde be lots of ogling already going on simply by virtue of our conservative system of education put into place centuries ago. Horrors, no!

The only way I can think of preventing that problem is by setting up gay boys and gay girls locker rooms separate from the straight boys and straight girls locker rooms already in existence. However, such a setup would violate the privacy rights of those students to figure out their sexual identity as they grow into adulthood, and as Donnelly rightly defends students' privacy rights - hey, I'll give him credit where it's due - he probably would not be in favour of exposing those gay students' private lives before their entire community at a vulnerable age where many are still figuring out those identity issues.

So perhaps the simplest solution is to throw all students of every gender into one locker room and let them ogle one another. I seem to recall such a suggestion by Socrates in The Republic, though perhaps today's Republicans have forgetten the roots of their philosophies.

As has been stated many times on the PtF radio show, taking public education seriously and fixing its flaws is the key to rebuilding the American democratic republic and fixing the current flaws with the other parts of the system. My own academic background is in public education, and others in the PtF community are currently active as teachers in public education.

With that in mind, allow me to propose yet another solution that works in the German public education system. First of all, know that the general German public school student attends his/her regular classes in the morning, goes home for a 1-2 hour dinner break with family around noon (German dinners happen at noon while a light lunch happens in the evening), and then returns to school (if s/he wishes) for what we Americans call "extracurricular activities" like band, drama, or sports. Of course, in Germany, these are considered serious courses of study and participation is heavily encouraged, not in the least by parents who need to go back to work in the afternoon.

Furthermore, the 3 hours of playing music, acting in a school play, or playing on an athletic team sufficiently taxes the young students' bodies and minds to the point where it far surpasses the measly 30- or 40-minute designated period for physical education in American public schools. When the student goes home for his/her family dinner at noon, s/he can shower in the privacy of home and dress for athletics without the uncomfortable stares of classmates.

I doubt Rep. Donnelly will ever read this little philosophical diatribe, but if he does, I do think that the German concept would be great not just for students of any gender and sexual orientation, but it would also do wonders for family values to know that kids are expected to head home to eat a meal with their families. Of course, this would interfere with the way America's political parties help exploit the working masses, but hey, family values wouldn't be under attack in the first place if Republicans and Democrats hadn't worked together to undermine them.

Gov. Christie Backs More Red Tape for Marijuana

I was going to head into the weekend without putting up another post. But then I saw this story from CNN about Gov. Chris Christie's response to his state's pending medical marijuana legislation.

I know, it's the second post this week about marijuana and CNN and still nothing about the uprising in Egypt, Bradley Manning's sentencing, or the latest revelations from Edward Snowden. But there are priorities at stake.

CNN have been reporting on Brian Wilson, a father from NJ whose 2-year-old daughter suffers from seizures due to Dravet's syndrome. This latest story is just a continuation, with the added twist of the father asking Christie "I was wondering what the holdup was; it's been like two months now."

Christie's response is the reason this story takes precedence over seemingly more important liberty news: "These are complicated issues," Christie told Wilson. "I know you think it's simple and it's not."

Actually, it's very simple. Allow me to quote from the Bill of Rights: "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...."

In this case, a 2-year-old girl's life and pursuit of happiness are both at stake. Preventing the seizures gives her and her family hope that she can grow up to be a normal girl, and it gives her the chance to actually go to school and form social relationships and get a job so she's not hooked on Medicaid. Why are these "unalienable rights" being denied to a little girl? Because the federal government and the State of New Jersey have both decided to interject themselves into the private affairs of individuals and deny them the right to a successful treatment.

Oh, and also because Chris Christie refuses to stand up for the American way. If this episode is any preview of a future Christie presidency, I fear for the nation's future.

While the law in New Jersey may be complicated, Gov. Christie has the right and the duty to protect the life and liberty of this little girl, not to mention her pursuit of happiness. As the top law enforcement officer in his state, he can issue an executive order to all other law enforcement entities in his state that expressly say they may not prosecute Brian Wilson's family for exercising their inborn human rights.

Gov. Christie, it is very simple. Don't give us the lame excuse that you first require more red tape from the NJ state legislature before this little girl's suffering can stop. Start respecting her rights NOW! It is your job to protect her, not ill-conceived federal or state laws about drug possession.

The government has never had any right to make marijuana illegal, as is made clear in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It's time to stand up for all our rights by standing up for a 2-year-old girl.

CNN and Sanjay Gupta Are Still Misleading on Medical Marijuana

Normally I hate to cover medical stories. Stories about medicine are usually corporate entities panning poorly researched products as miracle cures in the hopes that public awareness - even of products with low success rates - will somehow assist with the legitimisation process and allow the products to be sold as prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) drugs.

But in this case, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta has admitted to being the face of CNN's effort to mislead the public about marijuana's efficacy when used as a pharmaceutical. This story has implications for the freedom of religion, manipulation of the public by the press, and corporate manipulation of government. So the story earns its place here.

While I'd like to compliment Gupta on his honesty, it's too late in coming. Furthermore, his apology is shrouded in more half-truths. Media pundits have an obligation to research facts. While he claims to have "steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive," this very sentence is misleading. First of all, there is a ton of scientific literature from other nations that shows promising results in understanding marijuana's potential for helping cancer patients cope with extreme pain and regain appetite. There is also medical literature from around the world that explores the psychological mechanisms behind the various compounds in marijuana (not just THC) that can have a positive impact on a wide array of medical conditions.

But really, does Gupta or his overlords at CNN truly think that modern Americans are so stupid that we believe the medical community in the United States to be that divorced from what is being researched in other nations, say the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Israel, or Switzerland? Because out of the 15 biggest pharmaceutical corporations, half are based in the US. The other half conduct their research in the UK (GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca), Germany (Bayer), Japan (Takeda), France (Sanofi-Aventis), Israel (Teva), or Switzerland (Novartis and Hoffman-LaRoche). And that's not counting the plentiful marijuana research reports published in other nations like Australia, Holland, Brasil, Russia, India, or China. Either Sanjay Gupta is telling more lies or CNN really does ignore the world outside the United States when it puts together its newscasts.

What if CNN's anchors started out the newscast saying "we reviewed todays news stories from countries outside the United States and found them to be fairly unimpressive"? Would that fly with you? No news of bombings in Nigeria, no news of Oprah being dissed in Switzerland, no news of violence in the Holy Land... all because it's "fairly unimpressive". If you claim to run a first-rate news agency, it's a lame excuse that flies as well as a hog. Rather than regale you with all the published, peer-reviewed studies that Dr Gupta chose to ignore since they weren't published in "the United States", I'll just wrap up my point by pointing the "liar" finger at Dr Gupta's face.

Now, because I try to hold pleadingthef1rst to a higher journalistic standard than CNN, I did some background investigation into CNN's holdings and those who hold stock in CNN. At this point, I can confirm that Time-Warner (which owns CNN) holds no pharmaceutical stock. However, I was unable to confirm whether any pharmaceutical corporations hold stock in Time-Warner, or whether Ted Turner (the mogul behind CNN) owns any significant stakes in pharmaceutical corporations. These facts are important because now that a majority of the American public has consistently backed marijuana legislation for over a decade, pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out how to cash in.

The problem for their business side is that the American federal system has allowed a lot of smaller businesses to cash in ahead of them and accumulate a wealth of folk knowledge and research knowledge along the way. So because of anti-marijuana drug scheduling at the federal level, the only tactic left to the world's major pharmaceutical corporations for cornering the market is to turn to marketing. In other words, since they can't just play the game with its current rules, they want to deceive the public into thinking the rules are different long enough for them to manoeuvre into a dominant market position.

While this may sound like yet another outlandish conspiracy theory, it's how things are done. Just look at these few CNN stories from years past:
Dirt-Cheap Diabetes Drug
Leukemia Drug
Breast Cancer Drug

I could list many, many more similar articles from the CNN archives, but hopefully you are getting a sense for how at least this one media corporation is manipulating public thought on pharmaceutical information. They know that we, the People, will not spend our precious family time reading every major scientific article on every potenial drug. And we're not going to spend our free hours watching FDA proceedings in person. So they know we're going to rely on these secondary news sources (like CNN) to keep us misinformed. Mind you, every one of the major news corporations is doing the same thing. It's just that Sanjay Gupta's misdirection is so blatantly obvious that it provides an ideal focus for PtF's criticism.

Now, as for religious freedom, if you are of European or North Asian descent, there is a ~70% chance that your ancestors smoked marijuana regularly as part of a religious sacrament to honour and commune with your deceased ancestors. This religious tradition is still maintained today in the underground. Unfortuantely, the Supreme Court does not recognise religious practise unless it has not-for-profit religious status with the IRS. Just keep in mind that the Constitution exists to protect our rights, not to limit them. Yes, we may be breaking federal law by practising a religion that's over 3,000 years old, but we are not in violation of the greater law. In fact, it is the federal government that is in violation of that law.

Shame on CNN and Sanjay Gupta for enabling such an abuse to continue for so long, and shame on all American media for allowing so many medical patients suffering from epilepsy, insomnia, cancer, and other ills from getting the treatment that doctors today will still readily proscribe. While the public eye stands ignorant, doctors know what works. They may have their hands tied by insurance law, but they will still tell their patients how to survive chemotherapy, even if the federal government will arrest them for it.

Finally, shame on Barack Obama. We elected you thinking you would end drug persecution. We hoped that you would remove this scourge which alienates many African Americans and takes their lives and livelihoods at a young age. You've got two years to stand up and act like a progressive American, and we hope you - like Dr Gupta - won't act after doing a decade of damage.

Bomber Boycott Backfires

While I was out this past month, Rolling Stone decided to put the surviving Boston Marathon bomber on its cover, spurring torrents of outrage. It also spurred a misguided boycott, which according to the Christian Science Monitor, has backfired.

This story pops up as a free speech issue not because the government is stepping on anybody's freedoms, but because large masses of duped Americans are stepping on other Americans' freedoms. The kneejerk choice of the Boston police officer who released photos of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture is emblematic of the mindset that led to the failed boycott.

America needs to learn about what happened to Tsarnaev so that we can prevent it from happening again. I shudder to think that somewhere in Boston is still an officer of the law still serving as a police officer who believes so strongly in letting more Tsarnaevs happening in the US that he would be willing to step outside of the law in order to make a political statement. Such people do not have the mindset necessary for an impartial officer of the law and he should be immediately relieved of all duty, not just relegated to paperwork until this all blows over.

Of course, I don't think Sean Murphy actually wants to create more Tsarnaevs; but the effect of his statements and actions only perpetuate the climate of American ignorance that creates homegrown terrorists. All those people calling for a boycott of Rolling Stone over their editorial choice are also helping create more terrorists in the same ignorant manner. It's a matter of personal responsibility: either you take personal responsibility for society's ills and try to fix them, or like Murphy and the boycotters, you sweep society's ills under the rug until the burst forth again with renewed violence and more victims.

9/11 should have been a teachable moment. Millions of people around the world came together to support the United States. But when it became clear that such support was turning into military action, the support evaporated. We should have reacted to 9/11 by learning about what created Osama ibn Laden - the CIA, the ISI, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border conflict, and the larger Shia-Sunni struggle within the Islamic world - and taken steps as a nation to prevent that threat from growing. Instead, we destabilised the Middle East, entrenched the Taliban, and allowed religious fanatics to stake claim to legitimate government in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, and Egypt. Sadly, the way America responded to 9/11 created Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The way America responds to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will determine whether we create the next generation of terror. One of the things I have learned watching terrorism cases over the past 15 years, is that entrapment isn't just one of the tools used by American law enforcement to eliminate potentially terroristic personalities. It is actually the primary tool that creates domestic terrorism. From Newburgh to the Liberty City Seven, every single domestic incident of Islamic terrorism on American soil was incited by FBI investigators. The Tsarnaev situation is the first major terrorist case of this nature conducted by rogue operatives who were not incited to violence by the FBI. In both the Newburgh and Liberty City cases, the FBI gave money and fake explosives to the so-called terrorists. In the Newburgh case, as in many others, the perpetrators were coverted to Islam in jail by FBI operatives/informants, so that by the time they left incarceration they had been brainwashed into believing that "Jews" were responsible for all their suffering.

I don't know about Sean Murphy or my fellow Americans, but I find it absolutely disgusting to know that my own hard-earned tax dollars are being used to radicalise imprisoned Americans and convert them into anti-Semitic monsters.

The reason why Roling Stone's article is so crucial to our understanding and dialogue at this point in history is because the Tsarnaevs acted without FBI instigation. So did Wade Michael Page when he shot up the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI one year ago. In fact, so do many of our nation's ignored mass murderers. Our human reaction to these mass murders is one of disgust, but unless we are willing to take the philosophical suggestion of Jesus and Buddha and see ourselves within others, that disgust will lead to ignorance, which in turn leads to more mass murderers.

We are slowly discovering that a common thread in all these cases is social ostracisation, brought on by society at large percieving certain individuals as "socially awkward" or "mentally unstable". Rather than society dealing with the issue and fixing it, the approach of ostracisation makes the situation worse, pushing the individual toward instability when he should be headed toward adulthood. In many Muslim nations, especially in Central Asia, these individuals can join a guerilla group or terrorist group and end their suffering with a suicide bombing. In the US, they buy firearms and bulletproof vests and go on rampages.

For those who have read this far and think I'm a flaming liberal, this is the point where I stand up against gun control. Pushing for gun control does absolutely zero to end the ostracisation that is the cause of these mental disabilities and the root cause of all these murders. Sure, we must attribute personal responsibility to the murder and sentence him according to our law; but if we let it end there, we only allow future murders to happen. Therefore, pushing for gun control allows the same mentality to persist and allows future murders to happen, even if it might statistically reduce the per-capita numbers of gun violence.

Finally, we're also forgetting about suicide victims. How many more individuals decide to take their own lives instead of others? By focusing on gun control, we abandon suicide victims and their families while allowing their tormentors - who in most cases are serial abusers themselves - to walk free. Just look at the case of Phoebe Prince, and there are another 100+ recent cases of young people committing suicide under similar conditions.

So for the sake of the victims of 9/11, the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, the victims of FBI entrapment, the victims of suicide, and the victims of school shootings; I heartly applaud Rolling Stone for doing what needed to be done. It's good to see moral law preserving goodness in the face of evil people and it's good to see that confirmed economically by Rolling Stone doubling its sales for this one issue. For those of you who say I'm wrong, allow me to suggest you move to any nation whose political system suppresses the truth and values its peoples' ignorance.

America was put here as a revolution in the face of the Machiavellian order and all its abuses. If you have no interest in perpetuating the Revolution of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, you have no place being in America. And lest you think this is all about Tsarnaev and I'm giving him a free pass, I'm not. Tsarnaev's actions have demonstrated he is filled with the exact same mentality of contempt for America as still-serving police officer Sean Murphy. Both are a threat to our way of life, but luckily I live in America and still have the freedom to speak up and warn my fellow citizens: Let's make change now before any more Americans are killed.