How To Destroy America From Within

by John Hawkins

As Adam Smith, the Godfather of capitalism, once said, there’s a “great deal of ruin in a nation.” That’s doubly true when you’re talking about a nation like America, the world’s last remaining superpower. How do you destroy a country with a powerful economy, a strong military, and a moral and decent people?

It has to be a long, slow process that moves subtly on many simultaneous fronts. If you become too bold, too fast, people will catch onto what you’re doing and even many of your biggest supporters will be forced to distance themselves from you….well, at least until you get a little further down the slippery slope.

To begin with, as conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” If you want to change a people for the worse, you have to start by undermining their values. This happens by slowly, yet surely taking over their institutions. Control Hollywood and the music industry and you can portray duty, honor and character as old timey concepts that no longer matter. You can also paint the most successful Americans as bad guys, the military as mind-numbed robots and decent Christians as hypocrites who want to ruin everyone’s good time.

More importantly, once you have actors and musicians on your side, there is practically no limit to the number of ways you can shape the culture for the worse. You can promote drug use and promiscuous sex. You can encourage men to feminize and women to be more masculine. Most importantly, you can portray your opponents who want to save what’s great about America as desperately unhip.

This reinforces the messages young Americans, who care desperately about being popular, are getting from their schools. Once you control Hollywood, music and the schools, you have a direct pipeline to the brains of the young Americans who will one day run the country. So, what do you teach them? It would be best if you could entirely get away from teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic and history, but as of yet, other than in a few inner city schools (see Detroit for a perfect example), that is not yet possible. So, what you do in the interim is distort their history. Don’t teach them the nuances of the Constitution; teach them the flaws of the men who made it. Vilify capitalism and Christianity. Look for every opportunity to move from giving children hard facts to teaching them pabulum about diversity and being nice to other people as opposed to having any sort of moral standards. With enough work, you can turn them into ignorant, entitled creampuffs who need “safe spaces” and warnings about “trigger words” to even make it through a day in a coddled university environment. 

Once you’ve worked your magic on the populace, then you can start making moves in the political sector. The first is to promote judges who believe in a “living Constitution,” which is functionally no different than not having a Constitution at all. This allows arrogant judges to override the people in order to put foolish policies into action, but more importantly, it allows the unlimited expansion of government. The bigger government becomes, the less capable it seems of doing ANYTHING WELL despite its swelling cost. Once you have a government that’s almost universally considered to be incompetent despite spending so much money that it jeopardizes your nation’s future, your nation is on the road to ruin.

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How To Destroy America From Within - John Hawkins

There's A Fine Line Between Skepticism and Science Denial. Know the Difference.

Science has a problem. And that problem is science deniers.

One of the looming, dark spots in the sciences was recently brought to light by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), an organization that was founded in 1976 by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov (among others). The goals of this organization are quite simple. The CSI asserts, “The mission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.” In essence, they aim to promote healthy skepticism.

The problem? Too many people aren’t skeptical; they are biased and wrong, and they claim that they are “just being skeptical.” Even worse, a number of news sites and science organizations (for one reason or another) refers to science deniers as “skeptics.”

Skepticism is essentially a quest for evidence and proof. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “skeptic” comes from the Latin “scepticus,” which meant “inquiring” and “reflective.” Its original application, by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, basically encouraged individuals to question their own assumptions because (obviously) our perspectives and assumptions are often biased and one-sided. It’s not that we can’t ever be certain about anything; it’s that this certainty needs to be based on research and evidence; it needs to have its foundation in a conversation that extends beyond our own inner thoughts.

In short, our perceptions are biased and skewed—they are subjective. So is our interpretation of data. Consequently, we shouldn’t reject or accept anything out of hand. Rather, we should ask for evidence in all things. We should be inquisitive; we should be reflective; we should be skeptical.

This is not what most people are when they talk about many scientific issues, such as the vaccine/autism link, climate change, and GMOs. Of course, not everyone who questions climate science or the effects of GMOs are deniers. But unfortunately, this is where many deniers seem to setup camp
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There's A Fine Line Between Skepticism and Science Denial. Know the Difference.

Examining The Jesus Myth

By Mark Fulton | 13 October 2013
MadMikesAmerica

The Gospel writers and editors were myth-makers. Many historians suspect the authors didn’t base their writings on a genuine character, and they may be right. No contemporary archaeological evidence has ever been found for Yeshua’s existence. Do contemporary historians mention him?

Flavius Josephus (37–100 CE), a prolific and comprehensive Jewish historian, who would frequently write a few pages on the execution of common Jewish thieves, has not one authentic line that mentions Yeshua. “He” does mention “Christ” on two occasions, yet both have been convincingly exposed as interpolations. So if Yeshua existed, either Josephus chose not to write about him, or early Christians destroyed his record because it didn’t fit with their manufactured image.

Justus of Tiberias (35–100 CE) was a first-century Jewish author born in Galilee. Although he wrote extensively about contemporary Jewish history, there is no record that he ever mentioned Jesus.

Philo-Judaeus, a prolific writer and historian, was an Alexandrian Jew who visited Jerusalem in the years Jesus was allegedly teaching and working miracles. He too failed to mention Jesus.

We might expect Jewish religious officials to have said a significant amount about him, but they didn’t. The earliest references to him in Judaic rabbinical literature didn’t occur before the third century CE and bear little relation to the Jesus of the Gospels.

What about the Roman writers of the first century? There are no Roman records of Pilate’s or Herod’s dealings with Jesus. The Roman world left behind senate records and volumes of other writings, which provide historians with a large amount of data, yet nothing about Jesus. Edward Gibbon, writing in the latter half of the eighteenth century in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, stated:

“How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world.”

Gibbon devoted twenty or so years of his life to his classic seventeen-volume work on the Roman Empire. It’s the result of exhaustive research, so we can trust that his comments are authoritative.
Saint Paul, who probably appeared on the historical scene only fifteen plus years after Yeshua’s death, does repeatedly commend his Christ, but some scholars suspect he refers to a different character to the human Yeshua. If this is so, his references to “Jesus” are interpolations. Whether or not Paul’s Christ was Yeshua, his writings are remarkably deficient in facts about Jesus.

Pliny the younger did mention the existence of Christians in Asia Minor in 112 CE, but wrote nothing about Jesus the person.

It’s said that in 115 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus made the first mention of Jesus. However, this reference isn’t mentioned by any of the church Fathers (eminent priests and theologians of early Christianity) and is considered by many historians to be a forgery. This reference is frequently referred to in pro-Christian literature.

The surprising truth is that no contemporary literate official, scribe, merchant, soldier or priest documented details about Jesus that have survived. If he’d preached to thousands, cured cripples, expelled demons, and risen from the dead, surely some of these people would have jotted down some notes about him, but it appears they didn’t.

Despite the dearth of reputable evidence, I think a man named Yeshua probably did exist, and that parts of the Gospel plots are loosely based on his life. My reasoning is as follows.

There is non-biblical evidence for the existence of John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, and for James, Jesus’ brother. John and James were leaders of a Jewish sect, the Nazarenes, and many scholars claim Yeshua was their boss between these two, an idea that fits with what we know about Yeshua. The Nazarenes soldiered on for a few centuries after Jesus’ death, weren’t Christians, and there’s evidence from the church fathers’ writings that they believed Yeshua had existed.

Paul, the creator of Christian theology, claimed he met James and Peter, who may have been Yeshua’s brother and disciple.

I propose that Yeshua probably existed, but his life story was far less remarkable than the Gospels would have us believe. I think his genuine historical record, if it ever existed, would have recorded his insignificance, so was destroyed by evangelical Christians sometime in the second, third or fourth centuries.
Once Yeshu
a’s existence is assumed, anyone who writes about him must comb through the Gospels to get specifics about his life. This is unfortunate, because the Gospels are unreliable records; yet to do so is unavoidable because details about him are lacking in other literature.

Dr. Mark Fulton is a practising physician living on the Sunshine Coast, Australia and the author of Get over Christianity by Understanding it. His website is at www.markfulton.org.

 
Source:
Examining The Jesus Myth

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The Most Abused Clause in the Constitution

by Chad Kent

It’s time in our journey through the Constitution to look at one of the most abused and distorted clauses in the entire document: the General Welfare Clause. Over the years, we’ve managed to get to the point where our courts now read this clause to mean the complete opposite of what was intended.

That re-invention of the General Welfare Clause has been pivotal in allowing the federal government to grow to the enormous size it’s at today. So pivotal in fact, that if we could just convince the courts to apply this one clause as intended, that alone might be enough to get our system to work properly again.

To see why, let’s start by taking a look at the text of the clause itself in Article 1, Section 8:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

Today, the conventional wisdom is that this clause means that Congress can spend money for any public purpose it wants—and that this spending power is not limited by the enumeration of powers that comes later in Article 1, Section 8. The Supreme Court made that exact claim in its majority decision in U.S. v Butler (1936).

As I’ve explained earlier, the General Welfare Clause has also been improperly used to claim that Congress has a virtually unlimited power to tax.

But that interpretation is complete nonsense. To see that, let’s go back and take a look at what the size and scope of our federal government was intended to be.
During the Philadephia Convention, influential Founder Roger Sherman characterized the purpose of the federal government this way:

“The objects of the Union… were few – first, defence against foreign danger; second, against internal disputes and a resort to force; thirdly, treaties with foreign nations; fourthly, regulating foreign commerce, and drawing revenue from it… All other matters, civil and criminal, would be much better in the hands of the states.”

Another leading founder, James Iredell, expressed a similar point of view in North Carolina’s ratifying convention:

“The general government will have the protection and management of the general interests of the United States. The local and particular interests of the different states are left to their respective legislatures. All affairs which concern this state only are to be determined by our representatives coming from all parts of the state; all affairs which concern the Union at large are to be determined by representatives coming from all parts of the Union.”

These two statements are a pretty good representation of the beliefs of a lot of the people who wrote and ratified our Constitution.

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Constitution Revolution: The Most Abused Clause in the Constitution | TheBlaze.com

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