Hemp Versus the Status Quo
by Rand Clifford
Activist Post
October 17, 2011
Industrial Hemp - Wiki image
The US rose to eminence by producing value, and by a fair percentage of citizens sharing the wealth. The further the nation has been corrupted from the stability of fairness, the faster our rate of decline. Runaway greed, lust for power, and raw crony capitalism have reversed our national trajectory so insidiously that not just we, but even Earth’s biosphere, are in free fall. Is it more than simple coincidence that such comprehensive decline so closely parallels our prohibition of hemp?
Sure, there was a glitch 5 years after hemp was banned as the evil weed with roots in hell. Top government officials still insist, forcefully, that there is no difference between “marijuana” and industrial hemp. With that in mind, please compare marijuana propaganda and hysteria that heralded hemp prohibition and haunts us to this day, with the government’s own film, Hemp for Victory, produced in 1942. We needed hemp to “win” WWII, so under duress, the feds resorted to truth.
So what changed in those 5 years? Certainly not hemp, exactly the same resource extraordinaire that has served humanity for at least 12,000 years. Priorities changed, propaganda changed. And hemp didn’t change when the war ended and hemp reverted to our enemy. You might wonder, whose enemy?
Arguably, hemp is the most useful member of the entire plant kingdom. So how could nature’s premier converter of sunshine and water into value, a superstar of the biosphere and powerful supporter of life on Earth be considered an enemy?
War is our enemy. Nobody wins in war, everybody loses…except the “money changers”. Ever since Jesus ran them out of the Temple with a whip (remember him, the Prince of Peace?), they have relentlessly, progressively embedded as a certain subspecies—psychopaths born without conscience, without any sense of right or wrong, without a soul; beings to whom truth and justice are alien concepts, to be in any way so much as acknowledged only under extreme duress. So yes, all of humanity loses in war, there are no winners. And coincidence has nothing to do with those at the root of hemp prohibition being the same as those who have blessed us with perpetual war.
As in the words of humanity’s Rosthschild malignancy: “We own you. We will take everything.”
Greed is Not Good
Remember “Morning in America” (mourning?) when “greed is good” pealed like church bells? Reaganomics was born that morning. Even after decades of wealth gushing ever upward, hardly any of it ever seems to trickle back down. Imagine that, shucks, the whole concept sounds so…Reagan. Millions of fossil Americans can still get misty at any mention of “Dutch”.
Despite reality (real reality, not Bush, or reality TV kinds), the GOP (repugnantcan party) clings tenaciously to this fiendish canard even as we approach midnight in America. Trickle-down theory…Reaganomics.
Greed is the glue that sticks wealth to wherever it rises. Greed is also the essence that keeps hemp our enemy. Hemp has every potential to spread wealth down through the workers who actually create wealth, potential to energize regional economies—perfect antidote to the plague of globalization, that concentrator of wealth into, as George H. W. Bush described, “…higher, tighter and righter hands.” Same hands now steering humanity toward hell; hands with the stickiest fingers, and the greatest distance from those passé concepts: humanity, and commonwealth—or common good.
War is All Hell
Keeping track of all our current wars gets increasingly difficult, especially with CorpoMedia so focused on future targets, such as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China…even, as certain tea-party princesses have said, the “country” of Africa.
After so much of our manufacturing base has been gutted, fully one third of it within the first decade of “America’s century” (four-fifths of that during the Bush/Cheney nightmare); and with so many other good jobs herded offshore, it might seem that war and financialization are becoming our primary industries. Plunder and casino, rape and manipulation, destruction and parasitism, murder and financial malignancy…the future is so bright we’ve gotta wear headlamps.
The farcical War on Terror is a dream come true for the money changers. The war against a ghost that could never surrender because it’s, well, a ghost. Forever war. And the slimiest war mongers of all feverishly masquerade as hardcore fundamentalist Christians. The Prince of Peace would puke.
Almost seems we can’t engage anything without declaring war on it. And talk about (intentionally?) miserable aim. The War on Terror, besides being a lurid excuse for pirating resources, especially oil, and “spreading freedom and democracy”, it cloaks a maniacal assault on our Constitution (with or without “boots on the ground”) to render the US a police state. Such irony might have only one viable competitor….
The War on Drugs
Somehow, it might not seem quite so bad, a government waging war against its own people to eliminate the scourge of drug abuse; but when that same government is the world’s top drug trafficker…rather exceeds the term irony, transcending into the Twilight Zone.
If more people knew how much the Taliban’s eradication of opium poppy production had to do with why we invaded Afghanistan, and have stretched it out to our longest war ever…well, it probably wouldn’t matter.
It’s sensible business, filling our increasingly-privatized prison system with marijuana smokers to capitalize on a huge, reliable slave-labor pool. And after all, as president Calvin Coolidge said:
“The business of America is business.”
Bad business is one thing, but, the worst business…guess that’s why we’re Number One. When you’re the Boss, anything you might say or do is right; hard right, nowadays, as hard as the righteous wing cherry-picking scripture…and through the most twisted, tortuous exegesis, all but actually saying—indeed, platforming: “In the beginning, God created corporations….”
Of course that’s not quite correct. Hemp came way before corporations. Hemp is even older than money—has actually been used as money, the real kind, not faith-based money (fiat). In early America, taxes could be paid in hemp. Nowadays our tax dollars feed the rounding up of marijuana offenders and packing them into work prisons. Yes, our taxes perpetuate the drug war cash cow (that would wither without marijuana), and insure that hemp will not threaten the status quo in this corporate-controlled home of Big Oil.
Wisdom Versus Cleverness
Our star, Sol, the sun…it gives us all the real-time energy we might ever need. The challenge is harvesting that energy as elegantly as with growing hemp. Luckily…or perhaps exactly the opposite for us—and even more unluckily for our progeny—Earth has been very good at fixing solar energy into fossil energy.
Millions of years worth of solar energy mostly sequestered from the biosphere; toxic, biocidal energy, black death safely isolated from Earth’s life processes…. Perhaps fossil energy is some grand test of human wisdom, along the lines of: If you’re clever enough to significantly tap fossil energy, are you wise enough not to disrupt the biosphere with it?
Cleverness is plentiful—the human brain is magnificent…except for the wisdom deficiency, which so dependably invites disaster. Cleverness often breeds destruction; wisdom involves nurture, greater awareness and esteem for what gave us life and keeps life going, and utmost respect for the future. Wisdom versus cleverness influences being born into heaven, or hell.
Wisdom feeds the creation of value. Cleverness too often engenders a world controlled by parasites who create no value, but instead, employ every form of violence, murder, destruction and manipulation to usurp value from those who create value. Hemp is a paragon of wisdom—of fitting perfectly into and furthering Earth’s living energy systems. Hemp could shield the wisdom in humanity from the parasitical cleverness driving us down the road of perpetual war, toward utter biospheric collapse.
Where will we, and the rest of Earth’s species live after human cleverness collapses our biosphere?
For at least 12,000 years, humanity’s wisdom embraced hemp as an indispensable ally. For 74 years (except for those few years of Hemp For Victory!), cleverness in this nation now become the greatest parasite the world has ever seen has kept hemp our enemy. But wisdom hangs on in the more than 30 countries treating hemp as the supreme natural resource it has always been. Those countries feed the annual $450 million retail hemp business in this country—business living exclusively on imported raw materials.
Nothing compares with hemp in terms of powering good jobs that cannot be offshored—millions of acres of hemp, an agricultural revolution creating an expanding spectrum of gainful employment. Nothing could touch hemp in terms of impacting the near total dominance of corporations in virtually every aspect of modern America.
Hemp offers many thousands of superior products that perpetuate living systems, instead of killing them as the fossil-energy empire is doing—a whole new industry of vast scope, creating value, virtually independent of the corporate fossil empire. Only hemp has such fantastic potential to wrest power from the parasites and spread it among their victims. Hemp could turn Power to the People from a trampled cliché, into glory!
If you believe that marijuana realistically had anything to do with the prohibition of industrial hemp farming in this world’s most powerful parasite…please try to not judge me too harshly. I’m simply advocating wisdom.
For further reading about hemp, and its prohibition, please go here.
Rand Clifford’s novel Castling, the classic “Story of the Power of Hemp”, and the sequel, Timing, are published by StarChief Press. The novels, Priest Lake Cathedral, and Voices of Vires will be available soon.
(hat tip: Activist Post)
In less than 24 hours Congress could vote to change the internet forever
by Madison Ruppert
End the Lie
December 14, 2011
Tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee is going to vote on H.R.3261, the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA for short. As I have previously outlined, this legislation would destroy the internet as we know it and severely impinge on free speech and the spread of information.
If this passes committee, which all indications say it likely will, it could be voted on by the whole of the House of Representatives at any time.
Individuals and corporations both large and small are stepping up to fight back against the draconian SOPA legislation and the Senate’s sister legislation, the PROTECT IP Act.
However, there is a significant lobby that is pushing back against the tide of freedom and liberty in an attempt to severely restrict the internet.
As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed out in a Congressional hearing, SOPA will restrict non-infringing online content right along with the infringing content the bill is supposedly aimed at combating.
“By contemplating an order that effectively bars others from gaining access to both infringing and non-infringing content, the proposed statute goes beyond appropriate First Amendment free speech protections,” the ACLU said.
The wildly restrictive SOPA legislation would essentially make it impossible for some of the largest websites on the internet to operate in any way that is remotely familiar to the climate we have known.
Any social media website that allows users to freely post content could be shut down at any time if any infringing content is posted on the site.
This means that all of YouTube, all of Twitter, all of Facebook, all free blog hosts, etc. could be forced to close down if a single individual posts infringing content.
This is China-style internet censorship on steroids; it is so astoundingly oppressive that there has been a blatant disinformation war waged against those who seek to keep the internet free.
However, little bits of truth sneak out here and there, with Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and former Senator, letting out a shocking admission which gives a glimpse into the minds of those who support the destruction of one of the last vestiges of true freedom in America.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites,” Dodd said.
A similar sentiment was echoed by Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he was promoting his so-called “internet kill switch” legislation.
“Right now, China – the government – can disconnect parts of its internet in a case of war. We need to have that here too,” Lieberman said at the time.
Dodd leveraged the emotionally charged example of how internet service providers (ISPs) already block content like child pornography as proof that the notion of blocking websites is not unprecedented.
While this is true, Dodd is either knowingly misrepresenting the legislation or he is simply ignorant as to what it actually allows.
While no sane person advocates the spread of child pornography, extending the example to legislation which could force a site to shut down if a copyright holder reported anything ranging from a picture copied without paying licensing fees to a teenage girl singing along to Katy Perry is patently ridiculous.
In a recent interview at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers conference, Dodd further proved himself to have little to no understanding of the legislation he is promoting or even the most basic of logical faculties.
“How do you justify a search engine providing for someone to go and steal something?” Dodd asked. “A guy that drives the getaway car didn’t rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view.”
Upon reading Dodd’s statement – which amounts to what might pass for an analogy in a special needs kindergarten classroom – I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
If we apply the bank robbery analogy to the SOPA legislation, it would not be that you’re going after the driver of the getaway car, but instead you’d be going after the company that manufactured the car, the company that produced the gasoline that powered the car, the manufacturer of the tires on the car, etc.
This would be like going after a gun manufacturer after someone uses one of their guns to commit a robbery.
It would also be like going after the manufacturer of a burlap sack that a bank robber used to load money into before running out of the bank.
What Dodd and others are promoting is not just penalizing the thieves – those actually responsible for the crime – but instead penalizing those who were exploited by the thieves in the course of the robbery.
In any normal law enforcement situation I do not think that any remotely lucid person would go after a General Motors plant for producing a car which was used by a robber to flee the scene of a crime or the gas station that the robber used to fill up the car before driving to the robbery.
It is beyond me how anyone in the world could accept such wholly nonsensical reasoning (if you could even call it that) as justification for pushing through such dangerous legislation.
This insane logic – if you can even bastardize the concept of logic enough to extend the definition to what these buffoons are engaging in – is also mirrored in much of the mainstream media.
Take the case of Scott Cleland, a contributor for Forbes who, unsurprisingly, has a clear conflict of interest due to the fact that he is President of Precursor LLC, which is what he describes as, “a Fortune 500 research consultancy focused on the future of Internet competition, privacy, security, property rights, innovation and algorithmic markets.”
Whoops! Cleland, if you want to seem even remotely credible, you might not want to advertise the fact that you run a company that would directly benefit from the SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA.
While I am no Google cheerleader, their position on SOPA/PIPA is admirable, and one which Cleland seems hell bent on attacking at all costs, as you can see in his article and other “popular posts” of his on Forbes which all deal with Google.
Cleland claims that the House Manger’s Amendment to SOPA “fixed the major legitimate problems with the original bill,” because of course Cleland is the arbiter of what a legitimate problem is and what an illegitimate problem is when it comes to this legislation.
After all, you’re too imbecilic to actually do your own research and come to your own conclusions, you must have Cleland spoon feed the truth to you, right?
Despite Cleland’s unqualified assertions, which apparently we’re supposed to swallow without question due to his alleged expertise, the ACLU says that the changes in the amendment “don’t go far enough.”
“It will still be likely that ISPs and even search engines will end up removing perfectly legal content – content that is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution – from the Internet,” the ACLU wrote.
Cleland points to the widespread bipartisan support for SOPA/PIPA along with the support lent by outside organizations as if that bestowed any legitimacy on the legislation whatsoever.
There is also “strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate” for legislation which strips American citizens of their most fundamental rights, turns the United States into a battlefield, and allows for anyone and everyone to be held indefinitely in what is commonly known as a FEMA camp or any other facility, foreign or domestic, without charge or trial on suspicion of being a terrorist or being linked to terrorism.
Let’s not forget that they supported the section which allows Americans to be shipped off to any foreign country and handed over to any foreign entity for any number of horrors to be committed without so much as a shred of evidence.
Our government is no longer legitimate and pointing to widespread support of legislation in Washington is not something that can be leveraged to promote a bill as a positive measure, at least not to any thinking person that has read the Constitution and realizes the gravity of the situations with which we are currently dealing.
Cleland attempts to delegitimize and marginalize the major corporations and individuals opposing SOPA/PIPA, like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Craigslist, Flickr, PayPal, Reddit, AOL, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Tumblr and others, by claiming that they “are becoming increasingly isolated politically.”
This list includes many of the founders themselves, people who obviously value intellectual property as without this concept their businesses would have been stolen out from under them immediately.
Cleland then points to some carefully cherry-picked aspects of the Manager’s Amendment which are, in fact, far from the iron-clad restrictions he makes them out to be.
He attempts to shut down those who point out that companies would be forced to police user content by pointing to the clause in the Manager’s Amendment which reads in part, “no duty to monitor … activity on the network or the service…” although he fails to point out that they could still be held liable regardless.
While there might be “no duty” there is the inferred duty as your website will still be held responsible for content posted by users.
On page 20 of the PDF, we clearly read, “To ensure compliance with orders issued under this section, the Attorney General may bring an action for injunctive relief – (i) against any entity served under paragraph (1) that knowingly and willfully fails to comply with the requirements of this subsection to compel such entity to comply with such requirements,” so if you do not police your users and comply with any and all demands made by the federal government, you can have “an action for injunctive relief” brought against you.
He then attempts to counter those who point out that SOPA/PIPA allow a run-around of due process by claiming “most of the bill’s framework is about requiring the traditional DOJ prosecutor approach of needing to seek a Federal Court injunction from a judge to expressly protect due process.”
Once again, Cleland is either betraying his abject ignorance or proving himself to be a bold faced liar who is self-servingly deceiving the gullible and lazy.
Ken Paulson, the President of the American Society of News Editors, or ASNE, made this very clear in a letter written today to the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith and the Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr.
“Navigating the balance between copyright and free speech demands precision, and in seeking to protect the interest of copyright holders, the First Amendment requires Congress to adopt the least restrictive intrusion on speech available,” Paulson wrote.
“SOPA fails this test.” He continues, “It allows individual copyright owners to effect the most onerous restriction on speech – the prior restraint – with little evidence and virtually no due process, utilizing vague and overbroad definitions in the process. While it is directed at ‘rogue’ websites engaged in widespread privacy, the law carries the real potential to go well beyond that narrow target.”
I think we all know that when a door is left open in legislation like this, it is exploited to the greatest extent possible.
“Without endorsing them, we not that more narrowly tailored alternatives have already been proposed,” Paulson writes, hinting at the OPEN Act which Ars Technica called “a useful starting point for a sensible conversation that could actually lead to acceptable compromises.”
Continuing on the subject of SOPA/PIPA alternatives, Paulson wrote, “Their existence calls into question the constitutionality of SOPA and suggests that this Committee must reject H.R. 3261 and continue to examine other, less restrictive alternatives that strike the right balance between preventing privacy and protecting free expression.”
“Again, we support your ultimate goal of eradicating online content piracy. We simply feel that this particular formulation is not precise enough to protect legitimate free speech rights,” Paulson wrote.
I wholeheartedly agree, and this false sense of, “Either you’re with us or you’re with the pirates,” mentality that Cleland and others are fallaciously promulgating must be shown to be what it is: pure fiction.
You don’t have to give the federal government, and their corporate cronies, free reign to control the flow of information on the internet in order to control privacy, but this is exactly what they are trying to say.
The most hilariously imbecilic aspect of Cleland’s attempt to demonize opposition to SOPA/PIPA is when he says, “it [the SOPA/PIPA opposition] accuses those same committees [House Judiciary Committee and others at the federal level], whose oath is to protect the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the motive of encouraging [sic] the U.S. to “censor the web” like China and Iran do.”
Really, Cleland? Yet again, he proves himself to either be living under a rock, a liar or very possibly delusional.
Every single Senator (93% in total) who voted for S.1867 betrayed the oath of office and directly attacked the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The same can be said for every single member of the House of Representatives (74% in total) who voted in favor of H.R.1540.
To put it simply, Cleland is shilling for the fascist establishment that is currently turning the United States into a society so restrictive that North Korea would be green with envy.
If you care about freedom and the future of the United States you must take a stand now, before SOPA leaves committee and thus would be able to be passed at any moment.
Even if you have already inundated your Representatives with calls and emails already, do not stop. Call your friends and family and tell them to join the groundswell of American people and corporations who are fighting back against this draconian legislation.
Whatever you do, do not give up; continue to make it clear that you will not stand for this, or any other of the many attacks on the Constitution we are now witnessing like the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) fiscal year 2012.
Flood your so-called Representatives with calls, emails, letters, and if possible show up in person and make your voice heard.
Unless the majority of the United States starts taking an active role in fighting back against the tyrannical fascistic government that is stripping away everything which America used to stand for, we can only expect an even darker future to unfold.
Related posts:
- Google preaches Congress on Wikileaks-style embargo for the Web
- Senate bill upgrades illegal Internet streaming to a felony
- Super Congress? Congress may be forming a new legislative body
- Save the internet and boycott these companies
- Super Congress: the final nail in the coffin of representative democracy and freedom as we know it
Short URL: http://EndtheLie.com/?p=31358
Vet Says Soldiers Are Starting to Wake Up to Gov’t Lies (video)
YouTube – SmokinJoeTrainer
December 8, 2011
(hat tip: Activist Post)
Bullets & bombs ‘humanitarian aid’ to help Syria? (video)
RT
December 12, 2011
In Syria, violence intensifies as clashes between government forces and army defectors spread. This Sunday, 23 people have reportedly been killed in battles in the south of the country, and new fights have erupted in the northwest. To discuss the ongoing violence in Syria, RT joined live from Beirut by Dr. Rania Masri who’s a professor at the University of Balamand.
Red ALERT – The Intel Hub is DOWN We Need Your Help!
Potent News Editor’s note: Today I tried accessing The Intel Hub and it only brought me to the page after 15 minutes. Now, just a couple hours later, the website seems to be down again.
The Intel Hub has been a valuable resource for knowledge and breaking news for me and many other people. I strongly urge everyone to support them in this time of need.
The Intel Hub
December 13, 2011
The Intel Hub, one of the top independent alternative media outlets on the web, is DOWN!
We are either under major hack attack(our service provider says this is NOT the case) or our traffic levels can no longer sustain our current hosting plan.
We need to move our servers up and to do this we need to raise at least half of the over 700 dollars it is going to cost us. If we can raise that, I will ignore some of my personal bills and cover the rest out of pocket.
This is the greatest threat The Intel Hub has EVER faced. We need your help!
Unfortunately most of our easy donation links are on theintelhub.com which most cant access.
You can donate at the chip in next to this article or by going to theintelhubradio.com and looking for the donate button on the right hand side of the home page.
Thank you in advance!
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Potent News Editor’s Note: If the donate link is not working for you, the paypal email is donations@theintelhub.com.
JACL Director Floyd Mori: NDAA Bill is A Move Back to The Dark Ages (video)
The Alex Jones Channel
December 9, 2011
On the Thursday, December 8 edition of Infowars Nightly News, Alex talks with the Japanese American Citizens League’s National Executive Director Floyd Mori about the National Defense Authorization Act and the possibility of rounding up Americans for internment.
http://www.jacl.org/
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/
Stewart Rhodes: Feds Demand Customer Lists From Storable Food Facility (video)
The Alex Jones Channel
December 9, 2011
“A fellow veteran contacted me concerning a new and disturbing development. He had been utilizing a Mormon cannery near his home to purchase bulk food supplies. The man that manages the facility related to him that federal agents had visited the facility and demanded a list of individuals that had been purchasing bulk food. The manager informed the agents that the facility kept no such records and that all transactions were conducted on a cash-and-carry basis.
PN 