Is the Liberty Movement Delaying a Syrian Conflict?

So, a war looms with Syria and I find myself having the same conversations with so called progressives about why we shouldn't attack Syria as I had ten years ago with so called conservatives as to why we shouldn't attack Iraq. I would have never guessed that progressives and conservatives were so alike. They like to think of themselves as different parts of the political spectrum, but when it comes to war it appears they are both equally easy to lie to and fool. War is ok as long as it's their side that's promulgating it. It's ok as long as it's their respectables with their suits and ties making the case and telling the lies.

I suppose I could be wrong. One side or the other might be slightly easier to fool. It certainly seems to me that the Bush administration went to greater lengths to try to hide their lies and deceptions. Perhaps the Obama administration saw how well Bush was able to manipulate the emotions of his followers and figured it would be even easier to pull the heart strings of their own blind followers who are known for their bleeding hearts. After all, human nature makes it extremely hard to even admit that you could be wrong, as I just did above, and after all the Obama cheerleading and he's going to save the world and the hope and change thing and the peace thing, well any war he might want to get involved in must be justified, right? I think perhaps the Obama administration underestimated their followers. There's lots of people out there actually thinking these days and it's gotten much harder to use the same old excuses that have been used in the past. Jon Stewart does a wonderful job exposing this through his own special brand of comedy in this clip.

When you think about it, it's really not so surprising that things are the way they are. No one likes to admit that they're wrong. No one likes to admit that they backed a war mongering tyrant. Most people will quietly change their positions and go on with their lives as if they never did back him. Those who were the loudest and most out front about backing such a person are more likely to defend him to the point of absurdity. The human ego can be a powerful force when it comes to one's behavior, and yet it seems so fragile that a simple admission of just the possibility of being wrong can shatter it. Well, when it comes to war and dropping bombs, more than just egos are at stake, the very lives of many innocents are at risk. More and more people are putting their egos aside and taking up the call to protest any military intervention anywhere.

Public pressure has caused the Obama administration to cave on the issue of unilaterally launching a military strike without first seeking congressional approval. This public pressure is due, at least in part, to the freedom movement. It is due, at least in part, to the wisdom of the non aggression principle set forth in libertarian philosophy. It is due, at least in part, to the ideas and principles set forth in the individualist model of governance as opposed to the collectivist model. It is due, at least in part, to a desire to move forward into a new era of decentralization where power is put into the hands of ordinary individuals rather than backward into an era where power was centralized in the hands of a few wealthy royals. And while the powers that be might try to ignore such pressure and their mainstream media may try to create a perception that such pressure doesn't exist or is far less significant than it truly is, such forms of denial can't hold back the waters of reality indefinitely. Sooner or later, attention will have to be paid to the grassroots or the rest of the plant will wither and die.

Those of us with a freedom and libertarian mindset have said for decades that war is wrong. We've pointed out the suffering of innocents. We've pointed out that wars are expensive and a drain on the economy, not a boom to them. Only a very few corporate and banking entities profit from war. We've pointed out the dangers and expense of trying to maintain an empire. With the long, drawn out engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, many people are beginning to agree. We have too many conflicts going on right now. We don't need to buy into another one.

Congress is due to vote on the resolution to intercede militarily in the Syrian civil war. Obama has intimated that his administration will carry out strikes against the Syrian regime regardless of how congress votes. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It will be interesting to see if the Obama administration will be able to finagle the votes it needs from congress to rubber stamp his plans. It will be interesting to see if he does, indeed, go through with a military strike should he fail to get the votes. It will be interesting to see if he is somehow able to save face, or if he becomes a pariah among world leaders. The stakes are very high in this international game of centralization and control. The problem is they are playing with innocent lives they don't own and the rest of free humanity needs to remind them of this fact.

The ruling elite want this conflict. They want to entangle the United States of America in another Vietnam type quagmire. If that's not obvious than nothing is. I'm not exactly sure why, but there have been hints left in many places and miles long paper trails which need to be seriously considered and investigated. A very few wealthy elite run the world for their own amusement and profit. A very few well hidden individuals are too influential for their own good, let alone for humanity's good.

The ruling elite like to pretend that they can do what they want and it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks. They like to think they can hide behind their elite political puppets. They like to think their political puppets will take the heat when things go wrong and that they will still get what they want. That's changing. The real masters are being exposed. More and more people are beginning to see the men behind the curtains. It began with the bailouts when people began to question the Federal Reserve and it continues today with people questioning government sources more than ever, asking and investigating "cui bono?" more and more, and questioning the motivations of those who pound the war drums the loudest. We need to keep the pressure up and show just how frightened of the light the ruling elite truly are.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

What Does it Mean to Wake Up When Life is Just a Dream?

These days, I hear more and more about how people are waking up. I even write about it. When I write about "waking up" I'm trying to convey the concept of becoming aware of hidden reasons for why reality is the way it is. I'm trying to get people to look behind the illusions and the curtains and discover the truth to the manipulations that are really going on. But what if there is more to even that truth than meets the eye? What if even the manipulators are being manipulated? What if those who are creating the illusions are merely an illusion in and of themselves? What if we are stepping out of one cave only to find ourselves in another? The possibilities are mind boggling.

I don't usually talk about my dreams in my blog posts. I don't mean the dreams I have for mankind and for living in a peaceful, prosperous, free society, I mean the dreams I have while I'm sleeping. A few nights ago I had quite an interesting dream. In fact, I found it interesting enough that I thought I might like to share it with the world.

In my dream, I was asleep. There was a powerful entity that was trying to wake me. At first I didn't know why he (it was a male presence) was trying to wake me, but he was not being at all pleasant about it. As I began to become more aware of what was happening, I began to feel an evil intent oozing from this entity who was trying to awaken me. He began slapping me and when I didn't respond he started slamming my body around. He then laid me out and made the whole world shake around me. This frightened me more than anything else he had done to me.

Still, I refused to wake up in my dream. Rather, I refused to move and let this being know I had awoken. You see, I suddenly realized that this being was trying to make me get up and run. I instinctively knew that this evil entity was planning on using my movement as an excuse to kill me should I try to make a break for it. Although every fiber in my body wanted to bolt, I fought with all my might to remain still and make the entity believe that I was still asleep. Finally, frustrated that his efforts hadn't worked, the being assaulting me took a baseball bat and started swinging it at my face. I didn't flinch, aware that as long as I didn't move there was a force protecting me from this being's malice. The bat was stopping inches from my face as he swung again and again. Still I did not move. It was at this point I awoke into this three dimensional reality and found myself laying in my bed.

I have bizarre dreams quite often, but usually I don't pay that much attention to them. I was unusually disturbed by this one and felt it was trying to tell me something, but I wasn't sure what. The imagery is rather obvious, and yet what is the meaning? Am I being warned to shut up? Am I being warned to not let them know I am awake, to make them think I'm still asleep? Or am I being told that I'm not actually awake yet, that though I might think I've awakened to some ubiquitous truth, there's a deeper reality which I am not aware of yet? It is my wont to ponder such difficult questions.

Here's a scary thought, what if certain elements within the NSA can tap into the dreams of individuals and observe them, or even alter them? That sounds extremely paranoid, but then a few years back it sounded extremely paranoid to ask what if a government agency was listening to all phone calls and other communications around the world. This is the stuff that science fiction is made of, but then how much of what we have now was just science fiction a mere decade ago? Is any idea really all that crazy anymore? Maybe we should all start taking crazy sounding ideas a little more seriously and start examining evidence with more open minds rather than being fooled into believing that dancing shadows on the wall are reality because that's more convenient, or less scary to think about, or more emotionally comforting, or for whatever reason.

What if life is just a dream, as the childhood song claims? Could we all just be characters in some theater created by someone else's mind? Could our actions and behaviors all be controlled by what someone else's subconscious determines it wants from us? What would happen then if someone woke up in that dream? What if that someone declared he was a sovereign individual, that it was he who owned his own body and not the dreamer? What if that someone decided to control his own actions and behaviors instead of letting some unseen dreamer do it?

What if that someone was you? Would you observe others in the dream still letting their lives and fortunes be determined by unseen forces? Would you try to wake them, or would you just go about your business knowing that you are free and not caring about the others? Since you would still have to interact within the dream, how would you go about changing things so that you could assert more control? Would you try to let the dreamer know you were awake, or would you just go about your life and hope he never noticed?

What if the dreamer discovered you? What if he wanted to prevent you from trying to wake others? If something was protecting you, would you stay down and let him try to break through it, or would you take a risk, get up and run hoping you'd be able to get away and warn others? That's the risk taken by those who blow the whistle and tell the truth, and those in control of the dreams of this world have made their lives nightmares.

What happens when the dreamer loses control of the dream? What happens when he wakes up? Do the characters in the dream disappear into some netherworld of unending emptiness, or do they find themselves free to create the type of world they want to see? Do they at that point become collective dreamers, each with his or her own goals and purpose? What if we are all connected, woven into the fabric of a dream, each with the power and capacity to change the world, and we just don't realize it?

What does it mean to wake up when life is just a dream?

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity.  By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Obama's Tyranny Against the Media

Back in 1987 I graduated from a night school course in digital electronics from the DeVry Institute of Technology which had a campus in Lombard, IL at the time. While attending night school in the two years prior I had a chance to talk with a couple of technicians who worked for AT&T at the time. They were continuing their education which was being paid for by their company because technology back at the time was in a state of flux and they needed to keep up with the latest as AT&T was transitioning from old relay style switches to digital circuitry. Seems they're always transitioning from something to something newer.

I had occasion at the time, perhaps as early as 1985, to discuss with these gentlemen some of the more interesting aspects of their jobs. On at least one occasion that I can remember I was told of a switching room in the Oakbrook facility where one of the federal alphabet agencies kept some equipment. I was told this equipment could listen in on any phone conversation passing through that facility, and that facility handled millions of calls at least monthly, if not weekly or daily. They might not have called it PRISM back then, but the idea was very similar. At the time, I didn't think much about it. I thought it was strange that the feds might want to cast such a wide net, but I had other things to worry about. I was a new father trying to take care of a family and was on my way to getting a good paying job in the lucrative field of circuit board repair. I didn't give much thought to the implications of what I heard for myself or my children or the future of this nation.

Think about that for a second. It was 1987 at the latest. Ronald Reagan was still president. The Internet was not yet available to the general public. PCs were just barely making inroads into the marketplace. There were very few in private homes. Cutting edge technology at the time would have been something like a 10 megabyte hard drive and 250K RAM. Running computer programs often times meant swapping out floppy disks quite often. Windows 3.1 hadn't even hit the market yet. People were still complaining about DOS. 9/11 was years away. Waco and Ruby Ridge were just small dots on the map no one had ever heard of. Already, 26 years ago, the seeds for the current police state were being planted.

There I was, nobody special, just some guy looking to make a better life for myself, and I'm exposed by circumstance to a story that would some 26 years later become one of the most talked about stories of the day. I have to wonder, why wouldn't some reporter have heard about this? I knew about it and I was just a classmate with some low level technician. It seems to me that some reporter somewhere was friends with someone higher up at AT&T who should have known about this. How has this remained so quiet for so long? Why wasn't this broadcast far and wide decades ago?

People talk. The alphabet agencies install their equipment in a private company and people have to know. They have to tell the people who repair the equipment to leave it alone. They have to warn the low level technicians not to touch anything that belongs to them. Those people aren't going to remain silent. They have lives. They go out drinking with their buddies on the weekends. They talk to their spouses at night and let them know how their day went. They tell people what they know. They aren't out to leak government secrets. They aren't trying to expose government wrong doing or abuse of power. They are simply explaining an aspect of their work that they have to deal with. It has never been a huge secret. It seems to me that just about everyone has known for a very long time now that the government has been listening, that they've been overreaching. Why did they wait so long to report it and to bring the debate to the public square?

One might wonder what would have happened if this had been seriously reported on 26 years ago. Would that have stymied the oppressive surveillance state? Would there have been arrests made and precedent setting court rulings? Would our privacy have been honored by government agencies? Would we be safer now and feel more secure that our rights were being respected, or would terrorists have managed to hatch secret plots that would have killed most of us? It's all just speculation because it wasn't reported on enough to bring it to the forefront of American consciousness all those years ago.

So why now? Because Edward Snowden publicly spoke out? Who is Edward Snowden anyway? Is he any more credible than my classmate who told me all those years ago about what he'd seen? Could my classmate be more credible since he was not involved with a government spying agency, he was talking to someone who was not involved (at the time) with any news organization and he had no way of knowing his revelations would come out in some obscure blog some 26 years later? Blogging wasn't even a remote concept back then. Is this some sort of strange psychological operation put into motion to get the American public to accept NSA spying as a normal fact of life? Are the powers that be desperately trying to gain the ability to openly rule the world instead of having to do it from behind the scenes? Is there something else going on that they don't want us talking about so they bring this to the forefront of our national debate? I don't have the answers to these questions and apparently the mainstream media remains reluctant to investigate such matters, but it seems to me that there's more here than meets the eye.

Perhaps the so called mainstream media has finally started to pay attention to this story because it has finally, for them, come home to roost. It wasn't too long ago that it was revealed the NSA has been spying on news agencies. It has been spying on specific news reporters. It has been intercepting and reading emails and such. Now, suddenly, the news agencies are paying attention. Did they think they were going to be immune to the spying? Did they think that if they kept quiet about it and just went along with what the government wanted they'd be able to keep operating like it was business as usual? Does that sound maybe a bit to conspiratorial to you?

Even in my own experiences I have come to see just how deep this spying goes. In the last half a year or so, I have had trouble with my Internet connection every time I try to publish one of these articles. When I go to add pictures to the article, suddenly I can't access my server and the connection times out. When I called my web hosting service they told me that the server was fine, that the connection was being interrupted somewhere between the server and my computer. I will wait a half hour or so, and suddenly there is no problem. This has yet to prevent me from publishing an article, but who knows what the future holds? Are they watching us? What other conclusion am I supposed to draw? I'm just a small time blogger expressing a freedom oriented opinion. I am peaceful and have never advocated violence. Why should they watch me? I pose no threat to anyone, but they seem to think I do. They are wasting my time and your tax dollars. It needs to end. Our right to privacy needs to be honored.

Well that's nothing compared to Michael Hastings' death. Here was a reporter with a long history of taking on the establishment who had apparently been in touch with some other news sources and was claiming to be pursuing a huge breakthrough story. Strange how he should somehow end up dead not long after, before he could make his huge story public. I wonder what he found. Strange, too, that he should die in such a bizarre manner. Well, I suppose dying in a car accident isn't so strange, but the way in which this car accident took place, it's almost as if they wanted people to believe he was murdered. It's as if someone was sending a message to other journalists, a message like "if you don't want to end up dead, you'd better not stick your nose where it doesn't belong." I know it's just speculation, but it's kind of like the old Soviet Union where reporters would mysteriously die just as they were about to expose some kind of ongoing government misdeeds. Coincidence? I think not. There's been an awful lot of "coincidences" lately that keep moving neocon and new world order agendas forward.

The question that I ask when I hear about something like what happened to Michael Hastings is, "Who benefits?" It's a question that not enough reporters ask anymore. Who benefits from Michael Hastings' death? If the answer is no one, then I would be more inclined to believe that it was, indeed, an accident. If the answer is someone, but that someone didn't have the means or the motivation to create such an accident, then I would still be inclined to believe that it was an accident. If the answer is someone else, and that someone else does have the means and the motivation to create such an accident, then things start to look a little suspicious to me. If what is said about Michael Hastings is true and he was about to break a huge story about spying on Americans, and I have no reason to doubt that it is true, then the intelligence gathering agencies within the United States of America would benefit from his death and had the means and the motivation to create a fatal accident for Michael Hastings.

So yes, I am a little conspiratorial. I'm a little tired of people claiming that conspiracies don't exist. I'm a little tired of hearing people say those who believe in conspiracy theories are crazy nut jobs in tinfoil hats. I'm especially a little tired of people saying conspiracy theories involving government should be treated with derision and not investigated. Of course conspiracies happen, do you really think things like political assassinations, bombings, planes flying into buildings, etc. happen without two or more people plotting them? Do you really think that elements within the government wouldn't plot to increase their power and influence? Does it make someone crazy simply because they ask "who benefits?" Does it make someone crazy because they can see the obvious answer to that question and they point it out even though it might destroy the childlike fantasy we have that government is good and watches over us, or are so called "conspiracy theorists" called crazy simply because so many don't want to face the reality that we've been had by the establishment and we are no longer free and independent as we were meant to be?

The Obama administration has taken to tyrannizing the media. They obviously don't want the truth of what some agencies in the federal government have been doing to come out, especially the spy agencies. They have a war on whistleblowers going on and now they have extended that war to the media. How long before that war is extended even further, to maybe anyone who says anything bad about any federal government agency? How long until we are living in the dystopia that is George Orwell's "1984?" Some would say we're already living it, and I would tend to agree.

This op/ed piece was not approved by the ministry of validated opinions.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Free Markets, Central Planning and the Family Budget

Recently a Facebook friend of mine commented on a story about austerity not working and made a statement to the effect that therefore Hayek was wrong and Keynes was right. I was quick to race to the defense of Hayek and free markets. I pointed out that we haven't had a truly free market ever and that Keynesian policies had been in place since before Keynes even became a famous economist. I told him that if he was going to give Keynesianism credit for all the good that's come from economic policy, he needed to blame it for all the bad repercussions also. We haven't been vacillating between Keynesianism and free markets, we've been steadily but incrementally becoming more and more a Keynesian economy since at least the inception of the Federal Reserve and the institutionalizing of a fiat fractional reserve central banking system.

Since my friend leans toward the liberal side of things, I even included some quotes from Hayek to show he was firmly against austerity measures. It seems Hayek was not the cold hearted libertarian many historians paint him as, nor was he as staunch in his belief of the free market's ability to take care of every humane need as some might suggest. Of course, being that he was in academia and therefore likely heavily influenced by bureaucracies of some form or another, seeing him acquiesce to some points is almost to be expected. If he hadn't, I wonder if history would even remember him at all. But I digress.

Not long after airing my defense of Hayek, I read an article that contained an explanation of why the government's budget is not like a household budget, said that comparing the two was fallacious and offered an opinion as to why the deficit is a good thing. These explanations even seemed to make sense and I could see why the uninitiated would be easily fooled by the reasoning. It said, in short, that the government needed to keep spending up so that the economy wouldn't go into a death spiral, so that unemployed people could continue to collect unemployment and spend money at the grocery store so that grocers didn't go out of business, and basically to keep things going until the private sector got back on its feet. It needed to do this even if it had to borrow far beyond its limits and that eventually the deficit would be paid back.

This got me to thinking. I have used the household budget example in the past, particularly when talking about debt and the fact that piling on debt upon debt does not get one out of debt, it gets one deeper in debt. The author of that article dismissed that argument out of hand because, well, government debt and your personal debt are two different animals, to coin a phrase. So, I wondered, where is the disconnect? Perhaps these economies of scale aren't understood not because the comparison is invalid, but because it is a case of the seen versus the unseen. Moral issues notwithstanding, this is another area where it takes a little more critical thinking and a little imagination to understand what has never been.

What is it that we've never seen? Well, for one thing, I don't think in the history of the world we've ever seen a truly free market, except perhaps for a time in the so far distant past that it is long forgotten and archeologists find it hard to fathom. There's almost always been some kind of government intervention into the market system where someone powerful has used that power to bully people into doing things their way, usually revolving around taxes or the form of currency used to make transactions or some such thing. It is therefore fallacious to blame free markets for market failures. A closer look at failures will likely show that the intervention itself is to blame, either through corruption of the supposed objective of the intervention, through abuse of power that comes when intervention is turned to law, or through unintended consequences that inevitably occur when such interventions take place. What we've never seen is the power we as individuals would have to exercise if we lived in a truly voluntary society with a truly free market economy.

To demonstrate this, I will use the well worn example of the family budget versus the government's budget, only this time I'm going to try to put a little twist on it. Let's begin by looking at the family budget as it exists in this reality, in modern times. There are a few things you're going to need money for every month. The top priorities are of course going to be housing such as mortgage or rent, food, utilities such as electricity, heat, and maybe water and sewer, communications such as telephones and Internet access, transportation expenses such as gasoline, car payment, and automobile maintenance, insurance payments, etc. All these are your responsibility. It's up to you to figure out which is most important to pay and how much you will need every month to pay these things.

What this means is that you have the power to determine your lifestyle. Maybe you want the bigger, fancier home, so you have to drive a smaller car, or a used one. Maybe you don't need or want a large home, so you get a smaller one or rent so that you can afford the nicer car. Maybe clothes are important so you give up something to afford the really nice name brand suits. Maybe you want the latest in electronics, or the best food, or whatever, so you live more frugally in one area so that you can splurge in another. Maybe you just want to save your money so you have a nest egg so you live more frugally in all areas. The point is, it's your decision. You decide how the budget will work. You also decide which companies you want to do business with and which you don't. This gives you quite a bit of power as companies compete to give you the best deal so that they can obtain the dollar you budgeted for their product.

Of course, if you run a business, budget priorities are different from that of a household, but the same principles hold true. It's your business, your decisions to make. Whether you succeed or fail depends on your ability to determine how much money will be coming in, where the money is best spent to help increase or maintain profit levels, and how well you can adapt to competition in a changing market. It also depends on how happy you can keep your customers so that they keep coming back.

When government creates a budget, they don't have to worry about earning the money they get. They don't have to worry about keeping customers happy. They claim and have the authority to tax. They get their money no matter what. Why should they care if you're happy or not? If you don't pay your taxes you will lose your home, or your business, and they will sell it for the taxes you owe. They will use force to make it so, if necessary. You would think that would make government budgets the easiest to manage, for they should know how much they'll be getting year after year and how much they need to spend. Yet, somehow, it always seems like governments have the most difficult time sticking to a budget. It seems they just can't stand the thought of sticking to constraints. No matter how much money flows into their coffers, it never seems to be enough.

Now, let's suppose for a minute that government was unable to just extort your money in the form of taxes and needed to compete against other organizations offering the same services they offer. In this case, every cent you ever earned would be yours to decide what to do with. All of a sudden you'd find yourself faced with more decisions to make and you'd have to think quite a bit more about what's important to you. On the national level, you'd have to think about how much each month (or year) you'd like to spend on things like the armed forces, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), and a myriad of other national agencies that every year clamor for more tax dollars and bigger budgets claiming they need more to do their jobs properly.

On a more local level you'd have to think about how much per month you'd want to pay for education services, both for your family and your community, for police services, fire protection services, roads, libraries, parks, etc. Some of you would have to think about things like water, sewer and garbage services while others already have private wells and septic systems and a private company to haul away garbage. Yes, it might be a little more work. You might have to plan a little more for your children's future. You might even have to get a little more involved with your community and talk to your neighbors a little more often. You might have to take time to do some actual organizing or set up alternative organizations to field competing ideas. But just think what you could do with all the money you'd have if you didn't have to pay property taxes. Just think of the good you could do if you and others decided how that money would best be spent rather than a bunch of control freak politicians.

Some people do this partially anyway. People already shop for a home in a neighborhood with good schools, some choosing to pay more in taxes because of the school district. Some people choose to dish out additional money to send their kids to private schools. A few may look for a neighborhood with good policing criteria, or may put out the extra money to live in a gated community. People donate freely to police and fireman benevolence charities. I remember once when the fireworks event in a community I lived in was going to be cancelled, but it went on that year better than ever because the park district asked for donations by putting jars out in the neighborhood grocery stores and people gave freely to the cause.

Can you see the point I'm trying to make by using the example of the family budget? This all isn't merely about spending money, it's about power. It's about your power to decide what your future will look like. It's about taking your power away from you and entrusting it with someone else. It's about trying to make you believe that you're entrusting that power to some nice, well meaning politician when, in fact, that politician is most likely lying to you and the real power resides in the corporations paying for the politician's campaign. When you give away your power to a group of bureaucrats, whether those bureaucrats live in your neighborhood or in Washington, DC, your future is at least partially being decided by them. It should be obvious by now that they don't have the same vision of the future that you have. It should be obvious that their priorities are quite a bit different from yours. In fact, judging by the way things are going these days, it seems to me that they are the paranoid, delusional ones, not the common folk. It seems that the crazy people have all ended up in so called leadership positions and the sane folk are too frightened of them to do anything except obey.

This is how they really maintain control, not through politics, not through political actions, not through their ordinances, not through their regulations and oversights, not through the laws they pass, but through economic means. Through the budget. Through not only telling you how much you should be spending on certain things, but by making you to pay that much through bullying and force of law. Through keeping you from even thinking that perhaps you should have a say in such matters. Through making you believe that they know better than you how to spend your money. Through making you acquiesce to their theft of your earnings. They are the biggest bullies of all. They are the mob. If you were able to withdraw not only your consent to be ruled, but your funding of their efforts to enslave you without fear of retribution, then it would be they who would have to change their way of thinking or suffer dire consequences. As it is right now you are the one who has to think the way they want you to think or you will suffer at their hands. This is what fundamentally needs to change.

It's strange to think that usually I'm the one who's trying to simplify things. Usually I'm the one who's pointing out the obvious. When it comes to budgeting, I think it needs to become a little more complicated for the common folk. For too long we have shunned our responsibilities. For too long we have delegated our power to politicians just so we wouldn't have to think too much. If we want freedom, we will have to take responsibility for our actions, and for our economy. We will have to claim personal responsibility for our spending practices and will be expected to use this power to hold poorly run companies accountable for their foibles. Then we will live in a truly voluntary society.

I cannot guarantee that a true free market society would be a better society, but evidence of past performance suggests it would certainly be a more prosperous one. I cannot guarantee that all our problems would be fixed by a free market economy, but it certainly makes sense that a myriad of solutions being tried at the same time is more likely to find the best solutions than any one size fits all solution based on force that government agencies might come up with. I don't promise that having a free market would lead to utopia because I am not a politician and I don't make promises that I don't intend to keep like they do. I simply believe that if we want to make a more fair and honest world we need to stop making excuses for and allowing practices akin to theft and extortion at any level, for any reason. After all, how can we have a fair and honest world when the basic fundamentals of our governing systems rely on unfair and dishonest principles?

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Monsanto and the Ron Paul Syndrome

A few days ago millions of people in hundreds of cities worldwide participated in protest marches against the Monsanto corporation. Were you aware of that? If you're reading this then chances are you were, for most people that read blogs like mine are already aware of the freedom agenda that the powers that be are trying to keep hidden. But there's a problem in that there are still far too many people who insist on getting their news and information from the so called mainstream media. These people have no idea what reality is, for they actually continue to believe the propaganda they see on CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and all the networks and that they read in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, and all the other so called trusted mainstream media newspapers.

The so called mainstream media, the media owned by the same corporate elite who own the political elite who deign to rule over you, have refused to report on the March against Monsanto. I guess they don't consider this event important enough to report on. Funny, it was important enough for millions of people to participate in, but they felt it wasn't important enough to inform their viewers that this was going on. They want to keep as many people as ignorant as possible about what is really happening. They want to create the reality you see. They want to control your mind so that their masters can control your wealth. They don't like to see the masses waking up and doing something about the reality we live in, and so they do all they can to keep as many people as possible asleep.

This is just further evidence of who really owns the media. If they don't make the news, they don't report it. If the news sheds bad light on one of their corporate masters, they don't report it. It kind of makes one wonder about the validity of the news they do report. It kind of makes one wonder about what they're not telling us.

It's no secret that I was a big supporter of Ron Paul and an advocate of his run for the presidency. As such, I noticed a similar phenomenon when he was campaigning. The same mainstream media that now refuses to report on the March against Monsanto refused to accurately report on him. They refused to show his true popularity. They refused to report on the wins he had. They refused to investigate the reported cheating done by the GOP hierarchy to minimize his impact. This has apparently become a syndrome. When the media doesn't want the people to know how popular something has become with the masses, minimize it by not reporting on it, or by spinning it. It's dishonesty at its most disgusting level.

Why would they do this? I believe it's because something like this is a uniting issue. No one wants to be a guinea pig in an experiment involving the very food we eat. Just about everyone wants to know that the food they're eating is safe. Just about everyone wants to be able to decide for themselves what is safe to eat and what is not by knowing what their food honestly contains. Just about everyone can see the inherent evil in allowing a company to patent natural processes. It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, a tea partier or an occupier, when it comes to food and its consumption there is much we can all agree on.

The message of freedom is just as unifying, and Ron Paul was all about the freedom message. But it seems the mainstream media doesn't want a unified electorate. Or, rather, the powers that be don't want a unified populace. They want to keep us divided, that way we're easy to control. They want to keep us fighting amongst ourselves so we won't unify to fight against them. That's why they don't want to report on Monsanto. They are Monsanto. They are the corporate elite, the corporate cartels. They don't care how many people are getting sick or dying because of their products, they just want your wealth and they don't want to honestly compete and provide a healthy product to get it. And if you get sick eating their GMO foods, well then you'll just have to spend more of your wealth going to their corporate controlled medical cartel who will prescribe drugs from the corporate controlled pharmaceutical cartel which will be paid for in part by the corporate controlled insurance cartel that you were forced to buy into by law. The mainstream media sources don't want you knowing about this, they certainly don't want you investigating it and they're most definitely not going to do that investigating for you.

Just about everyone would be able to see the inherent flaw in the thinking that organically grown plants contaminated with GMOs somehow violate the patent holder's property. And yet there's already been many family farms that have gone out of business because Monsanto sued them when the GMOs have contaminated the natural crops. Were you aware of that? And the courts have sided with Monsanto! The courts, which you may have thought were there to protect the individual, are protecting the corporate interests! The corruption, the evil of this is unfathomable. That's become the mainstream media's job these days, to make sure the evil goes unreported and that those who perpetrate evil are left unaccountable.

It's great that millions of people are trying to hold Monsanto accountable for their crimes against nature. It's wonderful that so many are waking up to this issue and are doing something about it. But it's not enough to just march against Monsanto. We need to also hold accountable those who enable Monsanto. We need to hold accountable the media. Stop watching corporate news. Stop reading corporate newspapers. Tell everyone you know to stop doing so, and tell them why. Keep up the social networking posts and tell everyone you know how you feel about this issue. It is an important issue. Point out the politicians who enable Monsanto, including Barack Obama who in March of this year signed into law what has come to be known as the "Monsanto Protection Act." No more excuses. The corporate influence in politics has become too dangerous to be ignored. It is up to you, now. You are the new media.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Hard Work and Savings or Financial Thievery

I work hard for a living. I've worked hard all my life. I think most of us have. When I've had work, I've done my best to become the best at the job I've done. When I haven't had work, I've done my best to keep busy and tried to make the most of my time by writing, doing odd jobs, and trying to get along as best I could. I used to make a lot less money, but then a dollar bought a lot more back then. I was taught that hard work led to great reward. I was lied to.

Don't get me wrong, I believe hard work can lead to great reward. Sometimes hard work is reward in and of itself. In fact, I think that hard work should be the way one becomes successful. Unfortunately, that's not the reality of this world. I also believe that hard work can lead to poverty when that hard work gains one nothing except a currency that loses its buying power over time. This is what happens when a criminal element gains a monopoly on the creation of currency in a society, whether that society is local or worldwide. It's called fraud, and when an extremely small faction of the world's population is able to dictate to the rest of us what medium of exchange to use for our transactions that small faction will garner immense wealth and power, enough to put itself above the law.

Herein lies the problem. Hard work and savings are not rewarded in our society mostly because we operate on a fractional reserve fiat currency that has lost much of its value over time. Fraud and corruption are rewarded, however, as those responsible for issuing and distributing that currency are not held accountable for their errors or their criminal behavior. They are rewarded because they are able to legally steal the wealth that you and I have worked hard to obtain. This is done through taxation. This is done through inflation, which is inflating the money supply. This is done through indebtedness and artificially keeping the price of things so high that it becomes prohibitive to save for most large purchases and so one is forced to borrow.

You own nothing. Your family is not secure. So long as you have debt, your property is in jeopardy. So long as you are forced to pay taxes you are the property of the system, of the government, of an elite ruling class answerable to no one except the corporations that pay for them. The second you can no longer afford to pay for their excessive policies and social programs they will swoop in and take everything you thought you owned in order to satisfy back taxes. The courts are not there to protect you, they are there to take everything you own from you and give it to the banksters and politically connected the second you trip up, get sick, make bad financial decisions, or otherwise find yourself unable to keep up with the mortgage, or the car payments, or the business expenses, despite the fact that you may have already paid off the original value of the property two, three, four or more times. People worry so much about those who might go bankrupt due to medical expenses, and yet they just seem to shrug their shoulders and not care about those in danger of going bankrupt due to excessive interest rates or property taxes.

What's it like to find yourself in your later years with nothing to show for it? Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't. Perhaps you realize the precarious position the vast majority of us seem to be in, perhaps you think you're doing well for yourself and your wealth is secure. Don't be fooled. No one is untouchable. The criminal class at the top want control of all the wealth. Laws can be changed at any moment. Taxes can be raised. The economy can be trashed. So long as the politically powerful remain unaccountable for their actions, can garner support from the masses, can use the force of law to condone what would otherwise be obvious criminality, and command an army of mindless, unquestioning enforcers to silence any opposition or questioning of their authority, your wealth, your property, your life and liberty are in severe jeopardy. Remaining silent now will not help you in the future should they decide to come after you and yours.

And yet, maybe we're all just a little greedy. Maybe we tolerate financial thievery because as a society the vast majority of us engage in it at least a little bit. Many want a little something from the government. Everyone wants their subsidies. We let them take money from everyone so we can pay for our military, our roads, our schools, our trains, our buses, our courts, our hospitals, to help the poor, to help the farmers, to go into space, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Whatever your favorite government program, no one considers that you are forcing others to pay not through a legitimate charge for usage, but through force of law, mostly tax law. You are forcing those who don't use the service to pay for those who do use it so that those who do use it can pay less. That's theft. No one asks for donations. No one tries running these services as businesses for profit. They just take your money and do as they want with it. How can you compete with an organization that claims the authority to take from everyone to service a few?

Then we sit there and piss and moan about corruption and waste in the public sector. What do you expect? They don't have to tighten their belts when times get rough, they just raise taxes. Can't afford your property taxes? Too bad, they'll just take your house. Can't afford your income taxes? You'd better or they'll throw you in jail, and the law be damned! You don't like the wars, or the torture, or the drones? Too bad, so sad. That's their money, not yours, and just try to withhold taxes as a protest and see where that gets you. Complain all you want, as long as you pay your taxes they couldn't care less.

Of course the system is corrupt, the very concept is criminal in the first place. And so those who learn to play the system are financially rewarded. Free enterprise in this nation died nearly a hundred years ago when the federal government sold out the people of this country by implementing a privately owned, quasi-public, central bank known as The Federal Reserve System. From that point forward, only the corporate interests with the right connections were able to truly win the game.

How do we correct this problem? Well, clearly doing what we've been doing for the past century hasn't worked. Clearly trying to regulate this behemoth with corrupt and corruptible politicians is not working. Maybe we should try something different. Maybe we should allow a system based on competition where you decide what kind of currency you'd like to use for exchanging goods and services. I may be wrong, but I'd venture a guess that under such a system honest money, money exchangeable for some kind of commodity, like precious metals maybe, would soon be in greater use than all the debt based fractional reserve currencies in the world. Maybe that's why modern day central banks work so hard to prevent such a thing from happening. They know that if they were forced to actually compete against such honest money they would soon lose all their wealth and power.

We have a choice. We can continue to accept the Federal Reserve System and the theft and corruption it represents, or we can demand an end to the Fed and a return to a legalized, honest monetary system. We might have to give up some convenience, but the prosperity that would come from it would be well worth giving that up. Imagine a world where you worked and saved and when you bought something it became yours to keep. You wouldn't have to worry about losing it due to sickness, or injury, or some other unfortunate mishap. You could hide your money away for years and when you decided to spend it it would still have the same purchasing power. You could plan for your retirement using simple math instead of trying to guess how much you'd need your money to grow in order to survive. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but it would certainly be better than the uncertainty we have today.

The Federal Reserve with their monopoly on the creation of currency have their hands on the levers of power. These levers affect not only every American, but nearly every person on the face of this planet. By taking these levers away we take the economic fate of the many out of the hands of the few and give this power back to where it belongs, to the people that earn the money through hard work. And we should have that power, for we are the ones who produce. If you want to see growth, if you want to see more production, then it behooves us all to reward those who honestly produce reality rather than those who fraudulently create illusion.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti

Incompetence Rewarded or Malicious Intent?

Ask yourself this, what would happen to you if you were incompetent at your job? What would happen to you if you were in management and people you supervised were constantly making poor decisions? What would your boss do to you? Would you still have your job? How many times would you be able to use the excuse that you just didn't know what some underling was doing? I bet it wouldn't take long before some disciplinary action was brought against you. It's likely that sooner or later you would be held accountable. If only it was that way in politics.

Back when W was president he used to like to use the incompetence excuse also. I spoke out against it. He told Brownie he was doing a helluva job even after the Katrina debacle. He claimed his intelligence agencies had no way of knowing about the 9/11 attacks even though several other intelligence agencies had sent warnings. He spoke of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when there were none. Time and again he claimed incompetence or no knowledge when handling events that they should have been better prepared to handle. I felt back then he should have been held accountable, and I feel now that Obama and his administration also ought to be held accountable for their incompetence and seeming inability to keep the president in the loop.

The thing is, you had the left running cover for the right and now you have the right running cover for the left. Back when Bush was president, I believe it was Nancy Polosi, one of leaders of the left, who said that impeachment was off the table. Why would someone on the left say that of Bush? Why would these supposedly staunch philosophical opponents remove their strongest weapon for keeping the powerful in check? The answer is simple. They already knew that one day their guy would be in power, this time sooner rather than later. When that happened, they wanted their guy to be able to get away with the same bullshit the other guy got away with. In the political game, they know it's power that matters, not principle.

I don't expect Obama to be held accountable for his administration's foibles, much as I'd like to see that happen. Of course, I would have liked to have seen the Bush administration held accountable for their misdeeds also. The fact that they weren't is one reason why I don't believe the Obama administration will be either. None of these people are ever held accountable, not unless you count Richard Nixon being forced to resign, and he hardly did anything as reprehensible as these past few administrations. But then, he did put an end to American involvement in the Vietnam conflict which had to anger the powers that be to no end.

In the world of politics and public bureaucracies, it seems that incompetence is almost always rewarded rather than punished. The incompetent don't get fired, they get more money for their department's budget as if throwing more money at them will make them more competent. Powerful representatives don't get booted out of office by the electorate, but the overwhelming majority of incumbents are re-elected even when they've been incompetent, usually because he or she seems or is portrayed as the least incompetent choice of those running for office. It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't syndrome. In such an environment, is it any surprise that the system breeds incompetence? In such an environment, is it any surprise that people seem to almost strive to be as incompetent as possible? Or is there some malicious intent behind the scenes that wishes to create an illusion of incompetence to see how much they can get away with, how much control they can command before the common folk sit up, take notice, and begin to deny their consent to be ruled.

Perhaps that's been the problem all along. Perhaps there really is a secret elite class that controls all the politicians. Perhaps this has been their plan all along. Perhaps there is a conspiracy to centralize all the power of human activity and commerce into the hands of a few people at the top who will be able to dictate to the rest of us what to do so that they can engineer a society based on their vision of what humanity should be rather than everyone else's. Perhaps they don't even care about building a consensus anymore, although they'd like you to think they do so that if you disagree you'll think you're in a minority and that you can change things simply by convincing others to accept your point of view.

If there is a cabal working behind the scenes than maybe the puppets they control aren't so incompetent after all, maybe they're just following orders. After all, Obama seems to be a fairly intelligent guy. Even Bush seemed quite intelligent and articulate before he became president when he suddenly became a caricature of a southern bumpkin. How can men who seem so intelligent suddenly become so incompetent after being elected president? Is it more likely that there is some sort of malicious intent at work here? Is it more likely that there is a secret agenda being implemented? Could there be forces at work trying to manipulate the masses of humanity into accepting some form of authoritarian world government? Or is our political system such a failure that we are destined to forever elect incompetents into the supposedly most powerful office in the world?

Whatever the case, incompetence, malicious intent, or both, the recent scandals have shown that the system is beyond broken. How can we continue to accept a president who consistently doesn't know what those under his supervision are doing? How can we accept a president who doesn't seem able to appoint high level staff who are capable of operating within the parameters set down for them by law? How can we continue to reward incompetence by giving those who prove incompetent even more power? How can we continue to give more trust those who consistently abuse or mishandle the trust they have already been given?

The time has come to reduce the power entrusted to the administrative branch of the federal government. The time has come to enforce the limits of power on the federal government as set down in the Constitution. The time has come to investigate the incompetence and to determine whether malfeasance is involved and where it has come from. It is not enough to simply accept that low level bureaucrats who take their marching orders from above were somehow so incompetent that they couldn't do their jobs correctly. Somehow, someone at the top was involved. It's long past time that those at the top were held accountable for what those below them do.

If you enjoy my writings, please visit szandorblestman.com to make a donation.

Below is a list of all my works available at smashwords.com. Please help me by purchasing one or more of my ebooks and writing favorable reviews if you like them so that others might also find and enjoy them.

Caged in America: A Collection of Essays Celebrating Freedom. By Szandor Blestman

Ron Paul's Wisdom, A Layman's Perspective. A Collection of Opinion Editorials. By Szandor Blestman

Galaxium. A screenplay By Matthew Ballotti

The Colors of Elberia; book 1 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Legacy of the Tareks; book 2 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Power of the Tech; book 3 of The Black Blade Trilogy. By Matthew Ballotti

The Edge of Sanity. By Matthew Ballotti

The Ouijiers By Matthew Ballotti