The Chinese Finger Puzzle

by Steve Curtin

The German writer Johan Wolfgang von Goethe once famously said, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Most of us who would consider ourselves awakened, enlightened or unplugged recognize this truth in the pathology of the mob, who unwittingly worship authority and adore their slave masters while proclaiming themselves “free”. And yet there are some among us, who are otherwise enlightened, who believe there is a tradition, a heritage, a history, and/or a culture in this country that they feel it is their duty to restore; that they, the People, are capable of restoring it. They cling to this memory as if they have ever actually experienced it.

And so, even as the last vestiges of the old republic are being swept away, many people feel as though, this time, they, the defenders of the republic, will do what so many generations through so many elections have failed to do: vote in people who will follow the Constitution, abolish the Federal Reserve, end the illegal wars, and establish free trade and a free market, ushering in a new Golden Age of freedom in America that will last for all time. Or something like that.

If I had any hope of the same, and it was a fleeting hope at best, it was obliterated permanently by the traitorous defeat of Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill this summer. It’s not that it was defeated; no one in their right mind could think they would actually allow an audit of the private Federal Reserve, which had existed for upwards of an entire century without any government oversight whatsoever, opening the hyper-secret books to the most arch criminal entity probably in the history of human kind and thus spelling its destruction. No, what cemented this resolve in me was the manner in which it was defeated. More co-sponsors originally attached their name to this bill than the number of votes needed to actually pass it. Well, duh, you’d think all they'd have to do is hold a vote and it goes to the Senate! Victory! But no. When it finally came to a vote, 122 of its original co-sponsors voted against their own bill.

Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws. – Mayer Amschel Rothschild

Anyone with an understanding of the Federal Reserve system and its implications for our society should have no confusion over what caused these scoundrels to switch their votes. But sometimes, as Orwell once put it, restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

The Federal Reserve is a private institution. It is not part of the government (no more “federal” than Federal Express). It has no government oversight, and all who are involved in its machinations are unelected and have no accountability to the government or the People. And yet they are bestowed the almost god-like power of having free license to counterfeit as much money as they want, with a complete monopoly on the currency used. Worse, every dollar they create - our money – is loaned back to us at interest. The implications of this are startling and obvious, though most never give it a second thought: there will always be more debt owed than there is money in existence.

Worse, with this infinite bank account of our money with which they can spend with impunity, they have bought up every essential institution in this country: our education, our military, our media, and, particularly important regarding the current subject, and as demonstrated by the manner in which the Audit the Fed bill was defeated, our entire political system. These banksters, these robber barons, have scientifically devised a system, a matrix, for which all the power will always rest with them, while bestowing upon the plebs the illusion of power and choice. The Republic, as we know it, died when this criminal enterprise was spawned, in 1913.

Most people can see the illusion in American politics known as the false left-right paradigm, but they don’t recognize the implications for where this paradigm originates, and what it will mean to every election, no matter who you vote for, no matter what their campaign rhetoric. For the fact of the matter is, no matter how outside the system a candidate might be, or thinks he or she is, once inside that system he or she becomes the system. If they resist, if they don’t follow the agenda, some ghost from their past magically appears and attempts to destroy them. Or they mysteriously die in a plane crash, or a kayaking accident, or shoot themselves in the back of the head. The paradigm cannot be overcome so long as the Federal Reserve exists, and the Federal Reserve cannot be destroyed so long as the paradigm exists, because the banksters created the paradigm through the Federal Reserve’s infinite money creation machine to facilitate their own perpetuity and invincibility. The more you operate inside the system, inside this paradigm, the more you fight and struggle within it to change it, the more deeply you become enslaved by it. Like a Chinese finger puzzle, you pull and pull and the harder you pull the tighter its grip becomes, when all along all you had to do was relax and stop fighting it, so that it slips right off.

Thus, the only power they have is our cooperation, and, conversely, the only real freedom we have is our non-cooperation. This goes against every fiber of our being, because we are taught to believe in the power of our vote, that so many before us have fought and died (in wars started over lies that had nothing to do with your own personal freedoms) to give you this right, a right so many people in other parts of the world would give their own lives to have. Gosh, you know, you just have to vote, don’t you? Understand that the ability to vote only serves to put people into power over you that you falsely call your servants. These “servants”, while presenting the illusion of bowing before your will, do not serve you at all. They serve people above them, people you cannot vote out of office, and are thus never threatened by the consequences of their own malfeasance, for which their puppets gladly fall upon their own swords. You keep voting the bums out of office, and yet the same agenda is served, while the ousted politicians go on to make millions working for the same corporations they whored themselves to while in office. What is accomplished, therefore? You have only inured yourself further in the mire of their own system.

Your first and greatest loyalty is to freedom. The Republic we’re fighting to save is a rotting corpse, dead since 1913. Accept it and move on. Like the Chinese finger puzzle, let us relax, and breathe, and stop fighting a leviathan that is fed by our own fruitless and foolish struggle to exert control over it. Let us turn our back on our masters, and walk away from them clutching at our feet. For to see the farm is to leave it, and without the power that we, ourselves, bestow upon them, by our enthusiastic cooperation and conformity, they are nothing. They are fat, bloated bags of gas, full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing.

Stop voting for their puppets; stop pretending that you’re capable of choosing candidates that will miraculously serve you and not them, as if you somehow possess powers beyond that of previous generations who sought to do the same. Do you think that politicians got elected by telling the People they planned on serving the money powers? There are 535 members of Congress and only one of them can be said to have a consistent record grounded in the Constitution. That’s not because people have been stupid and have consciously voted almost exclusively for establishment puppets generation after generation. The establishment isn’t called the establishment for nothing. Stop indulging in groupthink. Don’t look for a movement to be a part of, a movement that will only be co-opted by the establishment. Stop looking for saviors. Stop looking for something external to be a part of and start being part of your own life. Nothing else matters.

Mosque Madness

It was an unfortunate waste of time, and a considerable expenditure of my wealth. In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, while the 9-11 truth movement was still a despised and laughed at minority, a debate raged on whether Islam itself could be blamed for the attacks and others like it, or if these murderers were of the same ilk as the Crusaders and the Inquisitors, et al. And so for 7 years, I delved into the subject. I studied Islam’s core scriptures and writings, amassing more scripture than most Muslims own and, I imagine, even more than you may find at your average small town mosque.

I say it was a waste of time because, as time went by, I eventually discovered that, despite my own verdict on Islam as a religion, it had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks. Not because its scriptures taught peaceful co-existence – quite the contrary. But because it wasn’t 19 Muslims with boxcutters who were responsible for it all; it was criminal elements within the US and Israeli governments.

Obviously anyone in the truth movement will have no qualms about a mosque near “Ground Zero”, or at least no more qualms than they would have about a mosque anywhere else. It’s completely irrelevant. But there is something deeper and darker about the whole issue that is driving people into a frenzy, and creating a furor of anti-Muslim violence and hate that distracts from real issues that truly affect Americans.

It all begins with the location and substance of the actual institution. Rational people can obviously see it is not built on the ashes of ground zero. In fact it is being built in an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory warehouse, which was built before the 9-11 attacks and obviously was not destroyed by them. It is at least a full two New York blocks away from the “pit”, and if you’ve ever been to New York City you know how massive a block is.

The hypocrisy involved here is staggering, as “conservatives” who proclaim themselves as champions of both religious freedom and private property rights claim that, while still ardently supportive of both, they oppose the mosque because what you have a right to do and what you should do are somehow at odds in a free society. It should be apparent to anyone, and normally is, if conservatives are referring to Christian religious freedom at least, that you do not have a right not to be offended in this country, so there should obviously be no discrepancy between what one has a right to do and what one should do.

But there’s a special exception to this rule, and an exception in the rights of private property, where Muslims are concerned. Not because Islam had anything to do with 9-11, mind you; Newt Ginrich and the rest of the neocon cabal will be the first to point that out. They're not saying it's because Islam is to blame for 9-11, except that they are. They just don't have the moral courage to say so openly. Incidentally, there’s a strip club, a sex shop and a gambling hall within the same radius as the “mosque” (it’s not a mosque, either), and there’s a mosque inside the Pentagon, but nobody has a problem with these "abominations" on these “hallowed” grounds.

Of course, none of this information is privileged, and anyone who bothers to apply critical thinking to the issue would’ve discovered this easily. But in our stupefied, dumbed down and distracted society, people revel in ignorance and stupidity like its a badge of honor, and we cede common sense and intelligence to talking heads and politicians who tells us what to think.

This became obvious when it was revealed the imam that will head the Islamic center (not a mosque) is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The role the CFR plays in American media and geo-politics is too involved to go into detail here, but anyone familiar with this shadow government can put two and two together when a key player in this issue is from among its ranks.

To further illustrate the circus sideshow aspect of this fake controversy, the number two shareholder in News Corps is a partial funder of the “mosque”; News Corp is of course the owner of the cable news network most responsible for hyping this fake controversy: Fox News. Somehow I doubt Boobus will boycott Fox News until they stop funding the “ground zero mosque”. In fact, there is no doubt. They’re too interested in trivialities to figure this all out for themselves, which would take a whopping half hour away from their time spent obsessing over football or the new Hurt Locker reality TV show. Bill O’Reilly and Hannity and Sarah Palin tell them they have to be outraged and oppose the "mosque", and that is the extent of their critical thinking capabilities.

This is a sad example of the mental state of the average American. Nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the "ground zero mosque", a massive number of people who are just complete imbeciles. Just when you think, with all the real life events that truly effect all of us; events that show the US government and its puppet masters are far more a threat to the American way of life than some decadent, self-destructive 7^th Century warrior’s ideology with no navy or air force (except what the United States sells to them) and no revenue they can spend to threaten us (except for our own petrodollars and the drug money we help them cultivate) that people are finally snapping out of their chemical and indoctrination induced comas, the globalists show us just how hopelessly enslaved we really are.

The case of the "Missing" Gulf Oil

“A firm belief in something for which there is no proof,” is the definition my dictionary gives me for faith. Faith can take many forms, but given that no one alive has ever seen a free market in order to gauge the effectiveness of it, it is as much a leap of faith for believers in the free market, such as I, as any belief in deity.

For many libertarians, it seems there is a difficult time distinguishing between a free market and, in our instance, corporatism/fascism. Free market principles are often defended even though there simply is no free market, particularly when, as Mussolini defined his model, corporate power merges with state power, and especially when the corporate is above the state. The military industrial complex controls "Defense". Big pharma runs our healthcare. Big agra runs controls the USDA and the EPA. Oil and natural gas control energy. And all under the umbrella of private banksters, who control Treasury. For many, these facts are obvious, and yet for some reason I cannot fathom, only the State side of the equation is scrutinized, while corporate, presumably in defense of this never-witnessed free market, is defended almost to the death (of credibility).

Most libertarians recognize the corporate media has become nothing more than the propaganda arm of the State, and yet, in defense of an oil company – BP – and its right to develop resources for the benefit of civilization, they have embraced media reports ludicrously claiming after 100 days of massive oil leakage, no one can find the oil, so it must not be there. It is not privileged information that BP, as well as our own Coast Guard, sprayed many millions of gallons of toxic dispersants, most infamous the “corexit” variety, into the gulf to disperse the oil below the surface where it could not be seen. To any objective observer, and to whistleblowers within their own ranks, BP’s goal was to cover up the disaster, not to clean it up. And this is the point of the dispersant. Rather than eliminate the oil entirely, it prevents the oil from collecting in huge pools on the surface where it is visible. Out of sight, out of mind, in other words.

And yet fluff piece after fluff piece ran, from Time Magazine to Vanity Fair to Associated Press, taunting the devastated residents of the region that there was no oil, and that the disaster was overblown. And yet, knowing for a fact that the media does little else but lie, otherwise intelligent people thumped their chests as if they had won some sort of great victory because no one could find the oil, as if they’d never heard of corexit, or that it had been dumped in the Gulf by the millions of gallons. Of these fluff pieces, only the AP article mentions dispersants, and only to suggest that these highly toxic chemicals may have aided oil-eating microbes in cleaning up the oil. No word of course is mentioned on its effects on everyone else who is not an oil consuming microbe.

Over at Lew Rockwell.com, barely a day goes by without someone (usually Rockwell) cheering on the supposed non-catastrophe. My ire began to rise initially when he featured an article describing oozing oil to be as natural as sunshine. Yes, oil does seap into the Gulf of Mexico naturally, but, also taking into account that this was an eruption, not a “seap”, mercury is also natural. So are noxious gases, which comprise of 40% of what was gushing from the well, but you wouldn't want to go breathe the air on Uranus. In their zeal to defend the free market from perceived State persecution, as if anything will be done to punish those who were in fact criminally negligent, it seems that common sense has been completely abandoned.

Of course the disaster was overstated, says Rockwell this week in response to a Slate article which of course says not one single word about dispersants or corexit. It’s as if they never existed. Charles Featherstone later replies to Rockwell’s blurb, “I’ve long believed the greatest tragedy of the whole Deepwater Horizon disaster has been the sheer amount of crude oil that has been wasted.” Now I understand where people might think libertarians are heartless. And Tom DiLorenzo can only muster outrage at the fact that Obama is referred to as “President” while Rush Limbaugh is referred to as “the obnoxious anti-environmentalist”. Someone needs to reconsider their priorities, perhaps starting with reconsidering why any libertarian would care how disgusting neocon Limbaugh is caricatured in the media.

I can grasp the knee-jerk urge to defend industry against radical environmentalism, which as a rule has nothing to do with environment. But we should not lose sight of our sense of what’s right, and especially not to the point where we are blatantly dishonest. You’d have to live under a rock for the past 100 days not to know about corexit or the dispersants. These are not conspiracy theories confined to alternative media sites; they are the kind of mainstream news stories you can believe because they are too easy to verify independently (unlike reports that the disaster was overblown). We know they sprayed the corexit, by the millions of gallons. We know that, rather than make the oil disappear – absurd – the purpose of the dispersants is to cause the oil to break apart into small globules and sink under the surface, so it can’t be seen. Thus its function, and BP’s strategy, has not been to clean the oil, but to hide it. This cannot be overstated. And we know that corexit is highly toxic, containing chemicals used in pesticides. Even if you concede that what oil we’ve already seen is all we’re going to have to clean up – and this is a significant amount on its own – how can you gauge the scope of the disaster without accounting for the dispersants, especially after barely 100 days?

Already we have seen unusual anomalies occur in the region. Crops in the Gulf region are suffering from mysterious diseases since the spill occurred. Clean-up workers have reported becoming extremely sick, some bleeding from their rectums. Oil and dispersants are being found under the shells of Gulf shellfish. And finally, Hugh Kaufman, who helped expose the EPA cover up of the air quality at Ground Zero in the wake of 9-11, which caused many thousands of people to become deathly ill, tells us how the oil is not gone but is lurking in plumes miles below the surface (which is the purpose of the dispersants), and the dispersants have poisoned the entire Gulf region:

Irregardless of all these facts, it is ludicrous and blatantly disingenuous to question, after such a short period of time, whether the oil leak has been overblown. And yet, to top everything off, Rockwell features on today's edition an article from the Daily Mail absurdly claiming that the oil has either been skimmed off the surface or has dispersed naturally. No word about dispersants or corexit (that would suggest that the oil dispersed unnaturally, so, uhh, naturally they would want to omit that little item from their fluff piece). Is Rockwell turning into what he claims to hate - a media figure who shills for corporatism? Is it an instinctive blind defense of the free market? Is it some childish urge to flick his nose at radical environmentalists who want to abolish industry and push humanity back into the Stone Age? Or has he just simply fallen out of his tree?

Knowing that corexit and dispersants are highly toxic, and knowing they were dumped by the millions of gallons into the gulf, and knowing people are already suffering the effects of these toxins, just as the cleanup crews of the Exxon Valdez spill did decades ago, it is reckless to say with authority (of course!) that this is over, that it’s not as bad as they said it would be, and it is gutless and cruel to say the biggest catastrophe is the sheer amount of oil lost – ie cannot be consumed for profit. People who only tell half the truth are perhaps more dangerous than those who lie constantly; at least you know when the liars are lying.

Links on health, survival, gardening and sustainable agriculture, and current events

It occured to me that since I'm not going to be doing much with this blog anymore, it would be helpful to my readers if I produced a resource guide that I used to educate and inform myself and others. I hope you find it useful.

Current Events

• Drudge. Obviously.
• LewRockwell.com. The best libertarian commentary and news on the web. Don't forget the blog and the podcasts.
• The Raw Story. Sometimes too far to the left on issues like the environment, and caught up in the false left/right paradigm, but indispensable for anti-war and civil liberties topics.
• WhatReallyHappened.com. Kind of like a Drudge Report for government conspiracies and criminality.
• Alternet. Like Raw Story on steroids when it comes to the left/right paradigm. Over-obsessed with the tea party and establishment talking heads like Beck. But strong on health, civil liberties, and the bankster-perpetrated economic collapse.
• AntiWar.com. Name says it all.
• Mises.org. All economy, all the time.
• Info Wars and Prison Planet. Say what you want about AJ, these sites and their reporting are indispensable.

Health

• Natural News. It's best to sign up for their news letter. It comes daily and always has at least one item of interest in terms of your health, what's in the food you're eating, the effects of the Gulf spill, etc. The website also has excellent reference information on toxic food additives, natural cancer treatments, and more.
• Mercola.com. Sign up for the news letter for daily reports on natural health. Also has excellent references on food toxins and natural remedies for almost everything that might ail you.
• HealthFreedomUSA.org. Dr Lima Laibow's website on Codex Alimentarius. If you don't know what Codex is, watch Nutricide!

Gardening and Sustainable Agriculture

• Mother Earth News. The best in homesteading, organic gardening, renewable energy, landscaping, DIY projects, etc. Sign up for the newsletter.
• NewTerraNaturalFood.com. Everything you could possibly need for growing your own food, from chicken coop and greenhouse DIY plans, to free tips on how to start a garden market. Excellent resources.
• Backyard Food Production. Get the DVD. You'll be glad you did.
• Solutions from Science. Products and services on how to store food, seeds for growing food, organic fertilizer, solar power generator, and more. Try to ignore the proselytizing.

Survival

• SurvivalTopics.com. Name says it all. Everything from how to build a proper fire, to building a debris shelter. Check out their products.
• The Survival Zone. Survival Gear.
• Survival Blog. The 'patron saint' of survivalists. Ignore his politics. Learn what he knows. Make use of the podcast.
• Survivalist Blog.

That's all I could think of off the top of my head. If I think of more I'll add them, and any suggestions are appreciated. My advice is, go to the store and buy plenty of printer ink and a binder or two, and start printing up everything you find useful. It's not enough to have the information on your computer, since you won't be able to access it if the grid collapses and you don't have back-up power (get back-up power!).

I hope you are all prepared/preparing. We've passed the point where we can safely say there's plenty of time. Good luck and love to you all. -- Steve

TEOTWAWKI

For a while now I've tried to resist the urge to call it a day and go underground, just trying to figure out for myself and those closest to me how best to prepare for what's to come. I honestly believe that the best and most productive way to change the world is to change myself, and I think I'm on that road, though with miles to go. I've continued to write in this blog because it's difficult to know what's coming and not say anything, but it's difficult not to feel that you're either preaching to the choir or casting pearls before swine.

I like to write so I can't say this will be my last post. I am constantly reading, constantly learning, and I enjoy sharing what I know with others. This blog has been my contribution, my effort, to try to stop and reverse what they're doing. In that endeavor I believe we have all failed, because the only way to fight an illegitimate system is to refuse to acknowledge its existence. When you go to protests, when you call your congressman, when you go to the voting booth, when you turn on your television, you acknowledge and thus empower that system. If you're fighting the system you're a slave to it; no one rules if no one obeys.

Who can deny The People no longer have a voice in this former republic? We didn't want Obamacare. They voted for it anyway. We want the government to stop spending, and stop bailing out corrupt corporations; they spend and bail out anyway. We're tired of the war we know is immoral; they have no intention of ever leaving. And they will push through the climate bill, whether by partisan vote in Congress or by executive order. They will shut down or severely limit your internet use. The police state will continue to clamp down. There is nothing you can do; if you vote the bums out the money powers will just give you two new candidates to choose from, each promising to continue the agenda (or else). Again, we've lost because we are operating within a system that, through no real fault of our own (we weren't alive when this happened), has been rigged so we can never win. But that is what's beautiful about it: all we have to do is realize the only real power they have is the power we give to them, and it ends, immediately, at the drop of a hat.

So that is my message to you. STOP. Get out of the political process. If you cannot resist the urge to vote, vote locally only, and insist that candidates resist and nullify Federal tyranny. Your local Sheriff has more authority over his jurisdiction than POTUS. And as always, the real power is with you. Asses off couches. Get up and take control of your life. Your helplessness has been deliberately engineered into your psyche. Unlearn it. Grow and raise your own food. Or starve; eat poison. Get off the power grid. Or pay astronomically high electric bills; freeze to death; die of heat stroke. Remove yourself in every way from their Matrix, and realize how little power they really have.

These are the final hours; I have no doubt about that. Even those asleep must have at least a subconscious sense of unease, like something bad is about to happen. It will be worse than they, indoctrinated with American triumphalism and exceptionalism, are capable of imagining. It may be this month or the next; six months or a year. The economy will crash, the social structure will break down, martial law will be declared. If they haven't figured this out by now, my friends they never will.

If you want to change the world, consider first changing yourself. This is a timeless, universal rule. Fellow human beings, you are my brothers and sisters. No matter where we are, no matter where we end up, I am with you.

Religion, Secret Societies, and the Occult

One of the more controversial and hotly debated issues among the truth movement and those aware of and fighting the New World Order is the existence, beliefs, and influence of secret societies, particularly of the occult variety. Some would say this society or that society exists or doesn’t exist; their beliefs are evil or benign; and some say they’re merely a fraternal organization who share esoteric secrets, while others believe they’re part of a centuries-old conspiracy to rule the world and enslave humanity.

One should never place full faith in the opinions and findings of others, particularly in regards to a subject so shrouded in mystery, and subject to the biases and prejudices of those whose beliefs diverge from what they think these societies believe. Many people are incapable of seeing the world without looking through the lens of their ideological identity.

Any scholar worth his salt will tell you the discussion of secret societies and the occult is limited due to the fact that esoteric beliefs and histories have been deliberately concealed from us (“occult” means hidden) or wiped away by rival ideologies. Handicapping myself further is the fact that I am a relative novice when it comes to the subject matter. The purpose of this essay is just to express some general thoughts on esoteric beliefs, symbols and influence that I think most people misunderstand or are just plain unaware of.

The Secret Society

From my limited reading, the origin of the secret society stems from the acquisition of certain truths and knowledge that the keepers of such information felt was too dangerous in the hands of the average person. I’m not entirely certain I see the logic in this; to me, knowledge is power, so the belief that the mundanes can’t be trusted with such knowledge, lest they corrupt it, is probably an excuse to horde the knowledge for themselves and sustain power over the masses.

It should be noted that, besides differing faiths outside of Christianity, there were many different beliefs within Christianity that came under the scrutiny of the Roman Church. Among the earliest of these were the Gnostics, who believed that Jesus never walked among Man in the flesh, but appeared to them as an apparition or phantasm. Therefore he was not born of a virgin, did not perform miracles, was not crucified or risen from the dead. Later forms of Christianity included the Bogomils and the Cathars. These Gnostic heresies believed that two gods reigned: one, an evil god who created the material world and trapped our souls within it; another, a god of love, peace and light who ruled over the spiritual realm our souls longed to return to. It may surprise many to learn that these related sects believed that the god of evil was Yahweh or Jehovah of the Hebrew Torah or Old Testament.

Many people may wonder how these beliefs came to be known as heresies (heresy derived from the Greek hairesis, meaning “to choose”) and how mainstream Christianity came to be accepted. First of all, the current Bible was compiled at the Council of Nicea, where politicians decided which books were canon and which were apocryphal. For instance, there is a gospel of Barnabas, a gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a gospel of Thomas, which claims that Jesus had a twin brother. Still, other sects endured, and, in the case of the Bogamils and the Cathars, became extremely popular – the former within the lands of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the latter in the lands the Catholic Church claimed authority.

With state sponsorship of Christianity through the emperor Constantine, the Christian Church transformed from a sort of persecuted secret society itself to a mob of murderers and thieves seeking to convert humanity to the Faith, and crushing anyone who refused. Despite what many people are led to believe, many pre-Christian and heretical beliefs did not simply fall by the wayside, overwhelmed by the logic and truth of the politically-motivated doctrine created at Nicea. Even the ancient Egyptian religion, which most people believe is primitive pagan mythology, was quite alive and well until the Church had it violently stamped out, while the Cathar “heresy”, enormously popular, was eradicated by the sword of Crusade and the fire of Inquisition (Bogomilism eventually fell prey to Islamic jihad).

But these beliefs were not, in fact, wiped out. Their followers, though decimated, simply hid their beliefs from the inquisitors, until such time as they could be shown the light of day.

Origins of Freemasonry

While in Jerusalem, a small band of knights formed a fraternity that, it is alleged, sought to protect Christians on pilgrimage to the holy land from armed Saracen raiders. These knights made their headquarters in the Muslim Dome of the Rock, which sits on what is known as the Temple Mount – the supposed site of the Temple of Solomon. Thus they became known as the Knights Templar. Regardless of the veracity of this story – that their mission was simply to guard Christian pilgrims from marauding Muslims (there were originally only 9 knights in the order) – it appears that while in Jerusalem the Templars were greatly influenced by the convergences of different faiths and beliefs they came into contact with, including Hebrew Cabalism and Egyptian mysticism, as well as mathematics and geometry.

After their crushing defeat at the Horns of Hattin and the eventual fall of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Templars returned to their homes, particularly in France, where they came into contact with the Cathars. It is debatable whether the Templars subscribed to Catharism, but many tenets of Catharism were absorbed by the Templars just as they had absorbed the mysteries of the East. And when the Pope, who the Templars were sworn to serve, ordered a crusade to wipe out the heresy, the Templars refused to participate. Whether they were full-blown Cathars or not, the Templars were inevitably convicted of heresy and their order was eradicated on Friday, the 13th of October 1307.

Of course, this was only the end of the Templars by name; their remnants would scatter across Europe and their rituals and mysteries would eventually form the basis for Freemasonry. Whereas ancient cults hid their knowledge in symbolism and allegory (supposedly) to protect it from corruption, the keepers of the esoteric faith now relied on symbolism and allegory to hide their beliefs from the Church.

It is beyond my capability and the scope of this essay to go into detail regarding the myriad beliefs and symbolism of secret societies, particularly Freemasonry, the most prevalent. For one, like early Christianity, there are different sects of Freemasonry (Scottish Rite, Egyptian Rite, etc). But for the most part, the core of esoteric beliefs is the use of symbolism.

Almost any religion, from the ancient Sumerian to modern Christianity, is a series of allegories and symbols, usually revolving around astrology. Most religious beliefs and archetypes have their roots in some religion of an earlier culture or civilization. For instance, Jesus is the same as the Egyptian Horus, the Zoroastrian Mithra, the Greek Dionysus, etc. All of these pre-Christ gods were anthropomorphized caricatures of the sun and its travels among the twelve constellations of the Zodiac (12 Zodiac signs, 12 disciples). Jesus is associated with the fish because he represents the sun in the age of Pisces; Moses is associated with the ram because he represents the age of Aries. When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he was enraged to find his followers worshiping a golden bull – the bull being Taurus, representative of the previous age which had ended. These are just a scraping of the astrological allegories which form the foundation of almost any religion, far too numerous to list here.

The gods

Likewise, the “devil”, Satan, or Lucifer has similar allegorical origins. The image of Satan as the evil reptilian creature stocking the fires of hell with his pitchfork is an invention of the Catholic Church. To the ancients, Lucifer, like the sun god associated with Jesus, had many different names and similar stories appear in various religions of different cultures and civilizations which seemingly had no contact with one another.

The word Lucifer derives from the Latin term lucem ferre - bringer, or bearer, of light. In passing I note that this is the name given to Jesus in 2 Peter 1:19. Gustave Dore describes how a bearer of light became the Prince of Darkness:

The scholars authorized by King James I to translate the Bible into current English did not use the original Hebrew texts, but used versions translated largely by St. Jerome in the fourth century. Jerome had mistranslated the Hebraic metaphor, "Day star, son of the Dawn," as "Lucifer," and over the centuries a metamorphosis took place. Lucifer the morning star became a disobedient angel, cast out of heaven to rule eternally in hell. Theologians, writers, and poets interwove the myth with the doctrine of the Fall, and in Christian tradition Lucifer is now the same as Satan, the Devil, and - ironically - the Prince of Darkness.

Known in other cultures as Phaeton or Tiamat, among others, Lucifer was a planetary body that was so bright it rivaled the Lord – the sun. In the Bible, the book of Isaiah says, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" The book of Ezekiel tells us of Lucifer: “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness.” And yet consider that these are Hebrew texts incorporating a Latin term.

Imagine a bright object, similar to Venus (‘the morning star’, another name for Lucifer (and also the name Jesus gives himself in the book of Revelation 22:16)), which is so bright it casts a shadow on a clear, moonless night. It is unknown what exactly this body was. Some say it was a comet, others an actual planet that orbited between Mars and Jupiter, where today is found the asteroid belt. This planet was somehow destroyed, perhaps in a collision by a rogue planet some call Nibiru or X. Whether a comet or the remains of Lucifer/Tiamat, a large mass from space came crashing down to the abyss, or the ocean, causing a flood that covered the entire planet. William Comyns Beaumont tells us:

The flood immortalizes the collision of a fallen planet, later termed ‘Satan’, actually a cometary body, with our Earth.

The creation myth of the Ute Indians tells us:

The sun was shivered into a thousand fragments which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration. Then Ta-wats (Tiamat) fled before the destruction he had wrought, and as he fled the burning earth consumed his feet, his legs, his body, his hands and his arms, until at last, swollen with heat, the eyes of the god burst and the tears gushed forth in a flood which spread over the earth and extinguished the fire.

Similarly, in the Babylonian creation myth known as the Enuma Elish, Marduk, the Babylonian equivalent of Jove or Jupiter, fought Tiamat, known as ‘the glistening one’, a bloated dragon of salt waters. Marduk defeated Tiamat and cast her to the abyss of Earth, where her chaotic waters mingled with the sweet waters of Apsu, the Babylonian god of the abyss, which to the ancients wasn’t a fiery hell but the oceans.

And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both; (Apsu and Tiamat’s) waters were mingled together.

Stephanie Dalley, in her interpretation of this text, says that Tiamat’s eyes became the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Was Tiamat/Lucifer a glistening salt-water planet destroyed in some cataclysmic event?

The book of Enoch, an ancient text once part of the Bible prior to the Council of Nicea, tells us:

And behold a star fell from heaven…and the children of the Earth began to tremble and quake before them and to flee from them. And again I saw how they began to gore each other and to devour each other and the Earth began to cry aloud.

I saw in a vision how the heavens collapsed…and when it fell to Earth I saw how the Earth was swallowed up in a great abyss…and I lifted up my voice to cry aloud, and said “the Earth is destroyed.”

In the Roman myth by Ovid known as the Metamorphoses, Phaeton (Tiamat, Lucifer), a child of the sun god Helios, wished to become the sun for a day by driving the great sun chariot across the sky. Unable to control the fierce horses that drew the chariot, he caused chaos and destruction, forcing Jove (Marduk) to strike him down with a thunderbolt. The sun chariot crashed to Earth in flames, which were put out by a flood from a river unseen before:

The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair,
Shot from the chariot, like a falling star,
That in a summer's ev'ning from the top
Of Heav'n drops down, or seems at least to drop;
'Till on the Po his blasted corps was hurl'd,
Far from his country, in the western world.

And finally, the book of Revelations tells us:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels going forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels…And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world; he was cast down to the earth…

One thing that raised an eyebrow while reading about the Gnostic heresies in Graham Hancock’s Talisman was that Gnostics often referred to their god of good as the bearer of light, or the god of light, which, while they never used this term so far as I know, are also names given to Lucifer. The reader will recall that Gnostic dualistic beliefs actually held that Yahweh, or Jehovah, was the evil god of the material realm, and that all Hebrews and Christians who followed him were led astray, their souls doomed to stay trapped in their unnatural state in the material world. Here we see that there existed a religious sect who, though Christians, believed that the god of the Old Testament, which most Christians believe to be the father of Jesus, is actually the Devil, or what was known as the demiurge - the creator of the material world our souls yearned to escape.

Good vs Evil

Great detail is given to the origins and ideas of the myth of Lucifer or Satan, what Christians refer to as the Devil. The point being, despite hysterics and propaganda emanating from the Church, who certainly know better, the term “Luciferian” doesn’t necessarily mean worshiper of the Christian Devil.

In all mystery schools, the language is symbolism and allegory. Almost never is a story to be taken literally. To many, the worship of Lucifer symbolizes not the mere acquisition of knowledge but the worship of it, for Lucifer, the light bearer, symbolizes illumination. Knowledge is value neutral; only its application can be good or evil.

Similarly, in the Gnostic sects which were eliminated by the Church but whose beliefs became ingrained in Freemasonry, one did not achieve salvation through faith, but through knowledge of the true nature of things: all one needed was to realize that his soul was trapped in the material realm, and reject the evil of the material, which included the flesh, to free the soul. One can see why Gnostics regarded the Pope and his agents as servants of the evil god of the material, as the Church slaughtered anyone who dared to think he or she could achieve salvation simply by the acquisition of knowledge, rather than blind faith and obedience through fear.

Any adherents to certain faiths, when they hear the word “God”, automatically think of “their” god, while the antithesis of their god is always Satan, the Devil, etc; the root of all evil. Understand that the Gnostics were Christians, yet their idea of “god” was the polar opposite of mainstream Christianity. A Christian today may say that they were tricked by the Devil, but given the manner which mainstream Christianity triumphed over the heresies – by genocide, not by logic and reasoning – it would seem obvious that, if anyone was tricked by “the Devil”, it was the adherents of mainstream Christianity – Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, etc; the evil god of the material realm.

The Society With Secrets

Eventually the fires of the Inquisition went out and Freemasonry was no longer a secret society, but a society with secrets. There is no doubt that, since being able to practice their mysteries in the open, and perhaps even beforehand, Freemasons have yielded almost omnipresent influence in world events. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were master masons, as were many Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Marquis de Lafayette was a French Freemason who played a pivotal role in both the American and French Revolutions, the latter of which is also soaked in Masonic influence. Almost every major American and European historical figure of the last two or three hundred years was a mason. Some would see this as a conspiracy; others would simply note that Freemasonry was extremely popular among the elite at that time, thus it was inevitable that many of the participants in these events would be Freemasons.

Masonic influence can be seen in the city planning and architecture of many cities. The civitas solis of Paris is practically a carbon copy of the solar complex at Karnak, Egypt (Temple of Luxor). Every major structure is meticulously designed and placed for an astrological effect, as well as the dates and times their cornerstones were placed.

The same can be said for Washington, DC, which, along with its carefully planned street routes corresponding with astrological events such as the heliacal rising of Sirius (the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Isis) and the solstices, its owl-shaped roads around the capitol building, and not-so inconspicuous pentagram with the White House at the head of the "star", is also patterned after the Cabalistic "tree of life", with its 10 "Sephiroth" archetypes and the 22 paths that connect them, adopted by Freemasons to represent the 32 degrees. It is the first city designed, in its entirety, from the laying of its first cornerstone, to be a talisman. Again, prejudiced by Christian influences, whether they are aware of them or not, some hysterically point out that the pentagram is the symbol of Satan/Lucifer. Understanding what Lucifer represents in esoteric symbolism, the rational reader will inevitably ask, so what? You must purge your mind of the cultural preconceptions of Satan as the prince of darkness, this unimaginably evil figure you've seen in movies and read about in books.

The 33rd Degree

There are two aspects of Freemasonry that must be considered to grasp the full scope of any conspiracy. First, there are the esoteric beliefs of the Freemasons, which are, again, beyond the scope of this essay. In this endeavor I recommend Manly P Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, and Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma. Second, there is the hierarchical order of the society, and how much influence each degree yields. That there are 32 degrees of Freemasonry is practically common knowledge. It is my impression that these initiates simply study esoteric mysteries, such as philosophy, geometry, and Pythagorean mathematics, among others. There is a 33rd degree, which is not so much a level of attained knowledge as it is a title, and between the 32nd and 33rd degree is a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon; a secret society within a secret society.

I believe even those of the 32nd degree are unaware of what goes on among those above them, and it is those at the top of the capstone who coldly and calculatingly conspire to conquer and enslave the world. Thus, in my opinion there is no Masonic conspiracy to rule the world; there is a 33rd Degree conspiracy to rule the world. This 33rd degree is likely what some call the Illuminati, which other secret groups such as Bilderberg, the CFR, and the Bohemian Club fall under. As such the first 32 degrees are almost like a college course, after which it is likely only those of a certain bloodline qualify to advance. I do not dismiss the possibility that such elites practice other variations of occult worship, such as mock or even real human sacrifice. The only way to fully make this determination is to learn their mysteries, and make your own determination as to what end such knowledge can be used.

Through all of this, it is my hope that you’ve kept in mind that my opinion is barely qualified, if at all. Have I done my homework? Yes, to a certain extent; likely more than the average person, particularly those who automatically think that because secret societies aren’t Christian they must automatically be evil. I have bad news for them: many if not most of this country’s Founders were not Christian; they were deists, which, in my view, is the religion of Freemasonry – the worship of the Grand Architect, l'Être supreme. No matter how deeply you delve into the subject matter - and, again, any scholar you encounter will tell you this - they're called secret societies because, well, they're secret, so no one will ever have a complete and concise picture of their histories and beliefs. One must also be wary of cultural and ideological prejudices that might lie beneath accounts of such societies, as, again, some people are simply incapable of seeing the world in any other way.

More than anything, rather than insult your intelligence by deigning to convince you of some “truth” that I know and you do not, the intent of this essay has been to break down the barriers of prejudice, and to make you think, so that rather than lazily allow others to insult your intelligence by telling you they’ve got it all figured out, you’ll crack open a book, or load a web page, and begin doing your own research, having confidence in your ability to discern what is truth and what is not. I will continue to do the same.

Quote of the Day

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality. - Dante Aleghieri

Jobs Market Barely Budges in June as Hiring Stays Weak

'Recovery Summer' will really be Catastrophe Summer. You are standing on the precipice of total collapse. You are short on time. Whatever you need to do to shelter yourself from the fallout, do it. Do it now.

CNBC -

U.S. private employers added just 13,000 jobs in June, according to a report published Wednesday that suggested expectations of a big drop in the government's upcoming nonfarm payrolls report were on target.

The ADP Employer Services report also said May's gain was revised marginally higher to 57,000 from the original estimate of 55,000.

That revision was basically the only good news, however, in a report that under-shot expectations of a rise of 60,000 private-sector jobs in June.

It also supported fears that the short and tepid recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s was fizzling.

"There is really no way to characterize this number other than disappointing," said Macroeconomic Advisers LLC chairman Joel Prakken, whose firm jointly developed the ADP report. "The overall number tells you that the recovery in the jobs market is very, very sluggish at this point."

Read it all.

The US Government can kill anyone, including you, without trial, covertly

All they do is call you a 'terrorist' and you become a non-person.

At trial, Noriega claims Panama drug money a US-run ‘imaginary banking scheme’

Of course, he's right. But the Ministry of Information has done such a thorough job of castigating 'Pineapple Face' over the years that boobus will automatically disbelieve him. Our government doesn't engage in such activity. Next.

Raw Story -

Panama's ex-dictator Manuel Noriega on Tuesday dismissed charges of laundering drug money as an "imaginary banking scheme" concocted by the United States as he took the stand in a French court.

The 76-year-old general denied taking payments from Colombian drug lords in the 1980s and told a Paris courtroom that cash deposits transferred to French banks came from his legitimate businesses and the CIA.

"I say with much humility and respect that this is an imaginary banking scheme," Noriega told the court in Spanish through his interpreter on the second day of his trial.

"I will have the opportunity to produce documents that show that I was a victim of a conspiracy mounted by the United States against me," he said.

Read it all.

Why Schools Don't Educate

John Taylor Gatto
LewRockwell.com -

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse – and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

Read it all.

Afghan Police: NATO Troops Killed Eight Civilians in Pre-Dawn Raid

NATO Insists All Slain Were 'Insurgents'

Jason Ditz
AntiWar.com -

NATO forces issued another of their usual “successful raid” reports last night, saying that a pre-dawn raid on Monday left eight insurgents, including “a Taliban commander” killed in an attack on two compounds in Kandahar City.

The deputy provincial police chief, Mohammad Shah Farooqi, tells a far different story, however, saying that NATO forces raided a pair of homes in the major southern city and that there was no evidence at all that any of the eight slain were involved in any “anti-government activities.”

Unconfirmed reports are that there have been some small protests in Kabul and Kandahar related to the killings, though as with so many other stories the two very different versions will likely leave it unclear exactly what happened.

The death toll across Afghanistan has been soaring over the past several months, and a record number of NATO soldiers have been killed in June. The civilian toll is less readily available, but it appears that it too is on the rise.

Kagan Declines To Say Gov't Has No Power to Tell Americans What To Eat

Sea Ice News #11

I find all this global warming debunking to be redundant. Because it never was about global warming, and thus "evidence" is meaningless. Most of the people are too dumbed down and indifferent to bother looking at the evidence, so they can say anything they want. And if the only people looking at the evidence are the relatively small amount of people on either side of the debate, with the great mass of humanity in the middle not giving a shit, and with almost all of the power and influence wielded by those of the alarmist, eugenics persuasion, who cares what I or Steven Goddard thinks?

If they were trying to save the planet they'd be capping the damn oil leak. Instead they allow it to get worse. And they spray toxic dispersants all over the place that poisons our water supply and kills our crops; nobody bats an eyelash. If they cared about the environment, they'd stop the mass pollution of our drinking water with sodium fluoride. They'd stop factory farming. They do something about the Texas-sized trash islands in the Pacific ocean. I could go on. The point is, it's not about global warming, it's about global government. It's about putting a price on life. It's about taxing you for breathing. And, ultimately, killing you.

Steven Goddard
WattsUpWithThat -

“Steepest slope ever.”



We have been hearing a lot about how the decline in Arctic ice is following the “steepest slope ever.” The point is largely meaningless, but we can have some fun with it. The Bremen Arctic/Antarctic maps are superimposed above, showing that ice in the Antarctic is at a record high and growing at the “steepest slope ever.” You will also note that most of the world’s sea ice is located in the Antarctic. But those are inconvenient truths when trying to frighten people into believing that “the polar ice caps are melting.”

There are several favorite lines of defense when trying to rationalize away the record Antarctic ice.

1. It is the Ozone Hole – which is also the fault of evil, American SUV drivers. That is a nice guilt trip, but sadly the Ozone Hole doesn’t form until August and is gone by December. Strike one.

Read it all.

Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug

Rats in a cage.

Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

CCHRINT -

A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk” in infants just a few weeks old. We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or brain abnormality to start with. There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one. So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.

For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, “researchers now believe” they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or “new evidence suggests” evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease. But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of “belief” —no evidence to support the theory. One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains. They’ve spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the “belief” in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science. As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” —Allen Frances (And Frances isn’t the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)

The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and “the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research” really after? What is their goal?

Read it all.

Airport body scanners 'could give you cancer', warns expert

Don't you ever get tired of being treated like a human lab rat?

UK Daily Mail -

Full body scanners at airports could increase your risk of skin cancer, experts warn.

The X-ray machines have been brought in at Manchester, Gatwick and Heathrow.

But scientists say radiation from the scanners has been underestimated and could be particularly risky for children.

They say that the low level beam does deliver a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin - one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body - that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.




An airport staff member demonstrates a full body scan at Manchester
Airport. Now a U.S expert has said the X-Ray may deliver a higher
radiation dose to the skin than first thought

Dr David Brenner, head of Columbia University's centre for radiological research, said although the danger posed to the individual passenger is 'very low', he is urging researchers to carry out more tests on the device to look at the way it affects specific groups who could be more sensitive to radiation.


He says children and passengers with gene mutations - around one in 20 of the population - are more at risk as they are less able to repair X-ray damage to their DNA.

Read it all.

Quote of the Day

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right? There's another 90 percent of our brains that we have to illuminate. ~ Bill Hicks

The Obama Tax Hike Exemption Card

Politico -

Here's something that could make for some awkward exchanges at the cash register this summer.

Americans for Tax Reform, which rarely met a tax it likes, has put out an "Obama Tax Hike Exemption Card," which (in theory) exempts "Americans making less than $250,000 from any form of tax increase signed into law by President Barack Obama."

"This card a tangible reminder that Obama has deliberately broken his central campaign promise not to raise any form of taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, in a release. "The last President to break his tax pledge - Bush 41 - served only one term."

If you'd like to give one of these cards a test run, here's how it works: If you make under $250,000 and find yourself facing any of the new taxes highlighted by ATR ("Tax on Indoor Tanning Services," "Medicine Cabinet Tax," "Special Needs Kids Tax," etc.), you present the card and, if challenged "politely ask, 'Excuse me, but are you calling President Obama a liar?'"

No guarantees, of course.

Kagan: It's Fine If Law Bans Books Because Government Won't Really Enforce It

Who's switchboard you gonna melt? Who are you gonna vote out of office? Kagan? She'll never be up for election.

'Recovery Summer' continues...

Stocks and interest rates tumble on fears that recovery will fade; Consumer confidence slumps

Associated Press -

Stocks and interest rates tumbled Tuesday after signs of slowing economies around the world spooked traders.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell about 235 points in afternoon trading to drop below 10,000 for the first time since June 10. The Dow and other major indexes each lost more than 2 percent.

Stocks began the day by following Asian and European markets lower. Asian markets fell after an index that forecasts economic activity for China was revised lower. And then European indexes fell sharply after Greek workers walked off the job to protest steep budget cuts.

Then, shortly after U.S. trading began, the market was hit with news that consumer confidence fell sharply this month because of worries about jobs and the overall economy. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell to 52.9 from a revised 62.7 in May. It was the steepest drop since February and economists polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast only a modest dip.

Read it all.