Joseph P Shanley

Laurence Vance has coined the word “warvangelical” to describe so-called evangelical Christians who are obsessed with supporting all of the state’s wars and all of the death, destruction, and mayhem that they entail.  They ignore the ancient just war tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, and simply support all war and all military aggression – as long as the U.S. government is the aggressor.

These are the people who booed at Ron Paul when he reminded them at one of their conventions that Jesus is known as “the Prince of Peace.”  These are the people who became quite hysterical (and hateful) when Ron Paul quoted the Biblical admonition, “live by the sword, die by the sword” in response to a question about a U.S. Army sniper who had written a book boasting of murdering hundreds of Iraqis after he was murdered after returning to civilian life.

These are the people whose churches are littered with gigantic American flags that dwarf any Christian icons; who routinely ask anyone who owns a military uniform to wear it to church; who sing the state’s war anthems at their services; who divert their Sunday offerings away from the poor and needy in their communities so that the money can be sent to grossly-overpaid military bureaucrats; and who can never stop thanking, thanking, thanking, and thanking “soldiers” for their “service” in murdering foreigners and bombing and destroying their cities – if not their entire societies – in the state’s aggressive, non-defensive, foreign wars.

Where did this very un-Christian “religion” of violence come from?  The answer to this question is that it first developed as a part of New England’s neo-Puritanical “Yankees” in the early and mid-nineteenth century.  It reached its zenith in the 1860s when, finally in control of the entire federal government, the New England Yankees waged total war on the civilian population of a large part of their own country, mass murdering fellow Americans by the hundreds of thousands, and then singing a “religious” song that described it all as “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

As Murray Rothbard described them in his essay, “Just War”:

The North’s driving force, the ‘Yankees’ – that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois – had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent ‘postmillenialism’ which held that as a precondition of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year-Kingdom of God on Earth.  The Kingdom is to be a perfect society.  In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin . . . .  If you didn’t stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved.

This is why “the Northern war against slavery partook of a fanatical millenialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle,” wrote Rothbard.  They were “humanitarians with the guillotine,” the “Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.”

Clyde Wilson described these neo-Puritanical zealots in a similar manner in his essay, “The Yankee Problem in America”:

Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights.  It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s driving mission to establish Heaven on Earth . . . .  [M]any abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and Blacks would disappear and the land repopulated by virtuous Yankees” (emphasis added).

Indeed, the New England Yankee literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson once predicted that black people, being an “inferior” race, would soon die off and “go the way of the Dodo bird.”

The renowned historian and novelist Thomas Fleming, the author of more than fifty books, supports Rothbard and Wilson in his latest book, A Disease in the Public Mind.  The main reason why there was a “Civil War,” and why America was the only country to NOT end slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century, writes Fleming, is twofold:  First, there was an extreme “malevolent envy” of Southerners on the part of the New England Yankees, who had always believed that they were God’s chosen people and should therefore dominate the U.S. government, if not the world.  Second, several dozen of the wealthiest and most influential abolitionists had abandoned Christianity, condemned Jesus Christ, and adopted a bizarre “religion” of violence based on the words and deeds of their idol and mentor, the mentally-deranged, self-described communist and mass murderer, John Brown, whom they claimed was their real “savior.”

John Brown “descended from Puritans,” writes Fleming, and was “the personification of a Puritan.”  He became a “god” to influential New England Yankees like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Brown “that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”  Emerson praised Brown for having murdered a man and his two sons in front of their mother in Kansas.  The men were not slave owners; Brown said he wanted to “strike terror into the hearts of the proslavery people” by committing the murders.  He went to Harper’s Ferry intending to repeat the crime in spades.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that “Brown was Jesus” and “the bravest and humanist man in the country” (in language that would earn any middle school English student a grade of F).   William Lloyd Garrison was another John Brown idolater, as was his abolitionist compatriot Henry C. Wright, who declared Jesus Christ to be a “dead failure” and that “John Brown would be a power far more efficient than Christ.”

These literary “giants,” and many other New England Yankee pamphleteers, waged a decades-long campaign of hatred against all Southerners that were so outrageous that Fleming compares them to the previous New England Puritanical crusades such as  the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials (and murders).   It is little wonder, then, that Southerners in 1861 no longer desired to be in a union of states with the likes of Massachusetts and its “witch”-burning, violence-worshipping, Christ-condemning, neo-Puritanical nuts who, to boot, were hell-bent on plundering them with high protective tariffs.

The glorification of war, violence, and mass killing in the name of “religion” was very prevalent in New England’s newspapers on the eve and on the beginning of the War to Prevent Southern Independence.  It is all eerily similar to today’s worshipping of all things military by the warvangelicals (and the neocon connivers who use the warvangelicals’ sons and daughters as cannon fodder in their aggressive, non-defensive wars).

For example, on April 26, 1861, the Providence (Rhode Island) Daily Journal  editorialized that “At no period in this country’s history, save in the revolution . . . has it been so glorious and joyful to have a life to give.”  The editorial referred to the invasion of the Southern states “the solemn but glorious duty to which Heaven now calls.”  Young men should be “proud” to “die in the holy cause that asks for your services,” wrote the old men at the Rhode Island newspaper, demonstrating that Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and William Kristol were not the first “chickenhawks” in America.  No mention at all was made of slavery being any part of the reason for the invasion of the Southern states.

On April 27, 1861 the Buffalo Daily Courier wrote that “We do not believe there can be a man . . . who does not thank God that he has lived to see this day.”  The war, said the Buffalo, New York newspaper, was being waged for the purpose of preserving “the sacredness of government” (emphasis added)   And, “the Christianity of the land is vitalized in the prayer that rises from a common altar to the God of battles . . .”  Again, there was no pretense that the war had anything to do with freeing any slaves.

On April 29, 1861, the New York Herald intoned that “without war society would become stagnant and corrupt.”  The paper lamented the fact that “For half a century there has been no war on this soil” and praised “the statesmen of Europe” for instigating wars more frequently than Americans had done.  The chief cause of the war, said the New York Herald, was too much prosperity. “The chief cause of the present war is excessive prosperity.”  Americans were “too happy and too well off,” said the neo-Puritanical, happiness-hating New Yorkers.  War would hopefully reverse that situation, they said.

The Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette chimed in on May 6, 1861, that war supposedly “raises the standard of national character, purifies the moral atmosphere, and dispels the gathering corruption, meanness, and want of principle which long peace and prosperity are apt to engender.”  The war will finally establish the superiority of the Yankee over the Southerner, declared the paper in the City of Brotherly Love:  “When this war terminates the northern man will be recognized for what he is – the true founder of our national glory and greatness.”  (Again, no mention of slaves or slavery, only of empire and “national greatness”).

The pulpit of the Northern states “has almost unanimously been in favor of a vigorous prosecution of the present war,” the Boston Evening Transcript declared on May 10, 1861. Pretending to speak for the Northern “pulpit,” the Boston editorialists proclaimed that “there is not a word in the New Testament which forbids” the formation of an army of a hundred thousand men “to annihilate Jefferson Davis and his rascal crew.”

Such a campaign of mass murder would be justified, said the Bostonians, by the Biblical admonition, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” the modern-day warvangelicals’ rallying cry.    “This necessarily implies the use of force,” they said.  And, moreover, “by rendering unto Abraham Lincoln, who is our Caesar, the things that are Abraham Lincoln’s, we obey a Divine Command” (emphasis added).  No mention of slavery here either.

The Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican was just as bloodthirsty when it wrote on May 27, 1861, that “We can imagine nothing more sublime than a great people moving unitedly to war.”  The paper denounced the peace movement led by the Quakers as “dumb,” and declared the motivation for the invasion of the South to be “this spirit of noble Christian devotion to the country’s flag,” which the paper called “the sacred national flag” (emphasis added).  No mention of slavery, only the “sacredness” of the state’s symbols as the cause of the war.

The Dubuque (Iowa) Daily Times informed its readers on May 28, 1861 that Southerners were not a religious people (“We suspect that the traitors have precious few religious meetings”) and warned Southerners of the perils of opposing “an army of men full of christian (sic) courage, with God and the Right as their watchwords . . .”  No mention of slavery there, either.

The real purpose of the war, the Albany (New York) Evening Journal announced on June 1, 1861, was to warn the rest of “Christendom” of the coming dominance of the American empire.  “If we shall succeed in convincing the world that we have a Government strong enough, vigorous enough, determined enough, to overcome all combinations and attacks, whether from conspiracies within or invasions from without; if we shall be able to impress Christendom with the conviction that our Western Empire is built upon a rock, which no convulsion can shake, and no tempests undermine – if we shall be able to do this, and do it effectively, the war, no matter how long or how desperately waged, will be the cheapest enterprise upon which the nation has ever embarked.”  Moroever, “every drop of blood that has been shed” and “every dollar that has been expended” will “fructify into future blessings.”  No mention of slavery.  (All of these editorials can be found in Howard Cecil Perkins, editor, Northern Editorials on Secession (Glouchester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 1063-1097).

Lincoln himself never became a Christian according to the two people who were closest to him – his wife and his long-time law partner William Herndon.  But the old Illinois machine politician who H.L. Mencken likened to a Tammany pol nevertheless was very slick, if not masterful, in his use of religious rhetoric in his political speeches.  As Charles Adams wrote in When in the Course of Human Events, “Lincoln’s Jehovah complex gave the war a psychopathic Calvanistic fatalism, with God [supposedly] directing the whole affair and punishing both North and South for tolerating slavery.”  (Lincoln never attempted to explain why God did not also punish the British, French, Spanish, Danes, Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedes for slavery.  Or free black slave owners in the U.S. for that matter).  The slaughter of hundreds of thousands of young men, the gruesome killing of civilian women, children, and old men, the massive theft of private property in the South, and the bombing and burning of entire cities and towns would continue, said Lincoln, until God decided otherwise.  “Not even the maddest of religious fanatics ever uttered words to equal Lincoln’s second inaugural address,” wrote Adams.  (Lincoln’s second inaugural address is where he exonerated himself from all responsibility for the war and pinned the blame on God.  The war just “came,” he said, out of nowhere and without his knowledge or participation).

It is worth mentioning that all of this editorializing about the war being waged over the “sacredness” of “the flag” is consistent with what Lincoln cultist James McPherson wrote in his book, What They Fought For: 1861-1865.   After reading hundreds of letters home and diaries of “Civil War” soldiers on both sides of the conflict, McPherson concluded that the average Yankee soldier believe he was fighting for “the flag,” whereas the average Confederate grunt believed that he was fighting against a tyrannical government that had invaded his country, bombed his town, and threatened to harm his family.

Having conquered the “sins” of secessionism, federalism, states’ rights, and Jeffersonianism, the early-twentieth-century generation of American humanitarians with a guillotine set about to use the coercive powers of government to (supposedly) stamp out even more “sin”in the world, especially Catholicism and alcohol consumption.  They viewed American participation in World War I as a grand demonstration project of how Heaven on Earth can be achieved through Big Government.  As Murray Rothbard wrote in his essay, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” the “religious” warmongers of the World War I generation were animated by “a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered ‘Yankee’ areas of Northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out “sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.”  They were “dedicated, messianic postmillennial pietists or else former pietists, born in a deeply pietist home, who . . . possessed an intense messianic believe in national and world salvation through Big Government.”

An illustration of this crazed, murderous philosophy that is offered by Rothbard is a congratulatory letter to Woodrow Wilson from his son-in-law, fellow pietist “progressive” William Gibbs McAdoo, the Secretary of the Treasury, for having plunged America into the European War.  “You have done a great job nobly!“, wrote McAdoo. I firmly believe that it is God’s will that America should do this transcendent service for humanity throughout the world and that you are His chosen instrument.” There were more than sixteen million deaths in World War I, including some 7 million civilians.

Such “religious” fanaticism provided a moral cover of sorts for the armaments industry and others who supported (and support) war for monetary reasons only.  Some things never change.

I finally found time to view the History Channel’s multipart series, The World Wars, which aired last week and I was absolutely appalled.

Perhaps the less said about this egregious travesty of historical falsehoods and distortions of facts the better.

It is simply neocon agit-prop featuring “the usual suspects” (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, McCain, McChrystal, Panetta, etc.) from the unconstitutional, preemptive wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq as “expert commentators” and their court historian Amen corner echo chamber. This is not objective history but advocacy for the unrestrained warfare state in which these war criminals were key participants characterized by their attempts to portray a historical continuity from WWI to WWII to the failed wars in which they presided over.

Such a continuity exists but not the one they sought to convey.

This disaster suffers from many of the same flaws in the earlier History Channel production, The Men Who Built America.

The programs were characterized by cartoonish docudrama recreations and clichéd observation by the spurious commentators discussed above. Recognizable faces from failed neocon wars under Bush and Obama do not ensure authoritative historical observations of the First and Second World Wars.

Episode one’s introductory treatments of Hitler in the trenches, Churchill and the bloody fiasco at Gallipoli, and Patton and Pancho Villa, were fairly well done. My grandfather was in the Army with General Pershing going in pursuit of Villa and later in France with Pershing in the Argonne Forest campaign in 1918.

Yet within the first 30 minutes of this first episode there is one of the most profound distortions of actual historical truth I have seen, making the film absolutely useless in a classroom setting.

It is the manufactured account of Stalin and the Russian Revolution. There were two Russian Revolutions in 1917. The first in February was led by disgruntled workers, soldiers and deserters back from the front, and housewives angry at the food situation in the cities because of the war. Lenin was still in exile in Switzerland. The Bolsheviks played almost no role in this people’s uprising.

This Revolution forced the Czar to abdicate and be placed under arrest. A Provisional Government led by Menshevik Social Democrat Alexander Kerensky was established. Russia remained in the war.

Lenin and his Bolshevik entourage arrived in the famous sealed train at the Finland Station in Petrograd in April. He denounced the February Revolution as “bourgeois,” and called for opposition to Kerensky’s Provisional Government. (Kerensky had been a student of Lenin’s father in Simbirsk.) Stalin, who had returned from exile in Siberia in mid-March and had taken control of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, had been campaigning for support for the Provisional Government. Lenin soon issued his famous April Theses.

Later that year Lenin and the Bolsheviks were denounced as German agents provocateurs and traitors. Lenin shaved his beard and again went into hiding and exile in Finland.

In October Lenin returned from Finland. From the Smolny Institute for girls, Lenin directed the Bolshevik coup d’état against the Provisional Government, and the so-called “storming of the Winter Palace” to establish the Bolshevik’s government in Russia. The October Revolution had actually been relatively peaceful. The revolutionary forces already had de facto control of the capital thanks to the defection of the city garrison. Few troops had stayed to defend the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace. Most citizens had simply continued about their daily business while the Provisional Government was actually overthrown.

Contrary to what was depicted in the series, Stalin played almost no major role in these events. The repeated images of Lenin and Stalin together are reminiscent of the duplicitous and doctored propaganda photos later created by Stalinists to elevate and mythologize Stalin’s role in the Revolution.

The Bolsheviks did not “storm the Winter Palace.”

This is sheer cinematic propaganda from filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in his epic, Oktober:

The Soviet Union was not formally created until 1922 after years of bloody civil war between the Bolshevik “Reds” and the anti-communist, pro-Czarist “Whites.” There were also the “Greens” but virtually no mainstream court historian mentions them because they do not fit in their tight little narrative.

There was no discussion of the role of Trotsky in the Revolution. It was Trotsky who was responsible for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in WWI. And it was Trotsky who successfully led the Red Army in the civil war against the Whites.

Mussolini, before the war was more than an “antiwar activist, a pacifist.” He was a prominent radical Marxist socialist revolutionary, editor of the leading Socialist newspaper, Avanti!

Avanti!, under Mussolini, had an anti-war stance on the war, urging neutrality for Italy when the war began in August 1914. Mussolini formed the pro-war, interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia and the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista (“Revolutionary Fasci for International Action”) in October 1914.

This paper was 180 degrees different than his editorial stance at Avanti! Why the sudden change? He was bribed by the French who provided funds to start his publication. Mussolini was always the ultimate opportunist. He soon left to join the Italian Army.

There is nothing in the series about Churchill and the scandal (and nefarious cover-up) regarding the sinking of the Lusitania.

It was George C. Marshall (later Chief of Staff of the Army during WWII) who was instrumental in the planning and coordination of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which contributed to the defeat of the German Army on the Western Front. But this inconvenient fact does not fit within the scripted narrative regarding Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton in the series.

There was nothing about the savage and inhumane British naval blockade of Germany from 1914, continuing after the war until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. While millions staved, a whole generation of German children grew up with the ravages of hunger seared in their memory. This would be the generation that would fight WWII for Germany.

Rather than undertaking a detailed torturous critique of the numerous historical inaccuracies, omissions, and flaws in the second episode of the series, I will simply urge you view the excellent BBC docudrama series, World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West.

It is vastly more historically accurate, based on recently released archival materials in the former Soviet Union which were cloistered away since the end of WWII, and contains higher production values and much better actor portrayals of major figures such as Stalin, Molotov, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, etc.

World War II Behind Closed Doors • 1 of 6…

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 1

World War II Behind Closed Doors • 2 of 6…

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 2

World War II Behind Closed Doors • 3 of 6…

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 3

World War II Behind Closed Doors • 4 of 6…

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 4

World War II Behind Closed Doors • 5 of 6…

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 5

World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, part 6

The award-winning documentary, The Soviet Story, boldly presents many previously hidden aspects or inconvenient truths concerning the intimate relationship between National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union as partners in aggression and genocide.

The Soviet Story

These are essential films to watch in reaching an understanding of the Second World War.

I have used these exceptional documentaries in the past with my World History students and will continue to do so in the future.

There is much more to the story of Pearl Harbor than depicted in the film series.

The fighting in Italy did not stop with Mussolini removed from office by the King of Italy as shown in the series. It intensified dramatically by the Germans sent to engage the Allied troops there. Mussolini was not just “hiding out in northern Italy.” He had been liberated in a daring German commando raid by Otto “Scarface” Skorzeny. Mussolini, under Hitler’s guidance, established a Nazi puppet-state, a new Fascist regime in northern Italy, the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italian, known as the Republic of Salò).

The skewed attitude of the series was repeatedly demonstrated by stating that FDR and Churchill were the two most important people in winning the war, downplaying Stalin. There was no mention of the undeniable fact that the bulk of the fighting which took place during WWII was between the Germans and the Soviets, of the 27 million Soviet deaths in the conflict, or the 70,000 towns and villages destroyed in the war. Picture the USA from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, with every school, factory, hospital, apartment building or house, in every town and city destroyed, along with 27 million dead. That was the devastated Soviet Union after the War.

Patton was repeatedly shown as the great tank commander of the conflict but there was no mention that the greatest tank battle in world history took place between the Germans and Soviets at the Battle of Kursk, the major turning point in the war.

Who was ultimately responsible for beginning WWII in Europe?
The Chief Culprit

Timeline To War

And who was the ultimate winner of WWII?

FDR and Churchill were not overly suspicious of Stalin as portrayed in the film series.

They actively competed to gain his favor while openly back-stabbing each other at the various “Big Three” conferences. They affectionately called him “Uncle Joe.”  Churchill even gave the atheist Generalissimo Stalin a rare crusader’s sword.

There is no mention in the film series of the Wall Street plot to overthrow FDR.

There was no mention in the film series of the Yalta conference and the detailed plans for post-war Europe.

There is no mention in the film series of the Japanese Rape of Nanking in December 1937/January1938 where 250,000 Chinese were butchered and 60,000 women were savagely raped.

There was no mention in the film series of the Bataan Death March in the Philippines after MacArthur left or other horrific mistreatment of Allied POWs in Asia or Europe.

There was no mention in the film series of Generals Eisenhower or Marshall. It was Eisenhower (as Patton’s commanding officer) who ultimately ordered film crews document the Holocaust and bring German civilians and military to view the camps, not the anti-Semitic Patton.

The film did not even get the basic facts correct concerning the April 1945 deaths of FDR and Hitler.

Hitler was shown alone in his Berlin bunker committing suicide with a poison pill and a pistol. Not shown was his dog Blondi (who he poisoned to see if the pills worked) and his new bride Eva Braun (his long-time mistress he married the day before) who also swallowed one of the cyanide capsules.

Not discussed were the facts that after V-E Day (May 8, 1945) with the surrender of Germany, Japan’s prime minister and his cabinet actively sought to negotiate surrender terms. Their only major condition from “unconditional surrender” was that the Emperor Hirohito not be prosecuted as a war criminal. Under the Shinto religion the emperor was considered a god.

Truman, Stalin, and Churchill met in mid-July at the “Big Three” Potsdam conference. It was there that Truman learned that the explosion of Trinity (the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico dessert) had been successful, and it was there also that Churchill learned that he had been replaced as prime minister by Clement Atlee of the Labour Party, not as shown in the film in his office in London. Atlee flew to Potsdam, and the new “Big Three” had to pose for new photos to reassure their peoples back home that the alliance was still intact.

After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, the Soviets entered the war against Japan the next day. On August 9 the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Yet it was the massive Soviet intervention into the war that brought about the surrender of Japan (who had been trying to surrender for months).

Historians have argued that the dropping of the bombs were unnecessary and actually prolonged the war which could have ended months earlier. Truman was not FDR. He did not share Roosevelt’s attitude toward Stalin. Guided by his hardline secretary of state James Byrnes, he ordered the use of the bombs to threaten Stalin in the post-war world.

Ultimately Japan surrendered and the emperor was not prosecuted as a war criminal, the conditions Japan had sought in May.

Hitler Lives!

This Academy Award winning documentary is an excellent example of post-WWII, pre-Cold War propaganda (the target is a revitalized and aggressive Germany, not an expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union). It is very effectively produced, incorporating a powerful emotional narrative with many searing images familiar to theater audiences of the day who had been exposed to Frank Capra’s celebrated Why We Fight series. It warns that the defeated German population still contains Nazi supporters and that the world must stay ever vigilant against the prospect that a new Hitler will arise within Germany. The film combines dramatized content mixed with archive footage.

So long as race hatred, bigotry and intolerance are found, Hitler Lives!

Because of their privileged status as subsidized institutions protected from the marketplace, colleges and universities are not sensitive to the desires or needs of their customers. In a normal, marketplace environment, higher education institutions would seek to provide services and offend as few customers as possible, while providing maximum value. The tired custom of commencement speeches, on the other hand, in which high-profile speakers with no particular academic expertise are purchased at great expense, is just the latest example of the disconnect between students and employees of these institutions.

Recent cases of protest against commencement speakers, who were deemed undesirable by some students, produced savage push-back from tenured faculty, administrators, and conservative pundits. The assertion on the part of  these parties was that the customers (the students) who objected to the activities of employees supported by student tuition (the faculty and administration) were necessarily spoiled brats who did not appreciate the wise decisions of their betters. The fact that it was immediately assumed that students should have no say in how their dollars are spent by their colleges exhibits how successful higher education institutions have been in convincing the general population that they are something more than the mere paid consultants and instructors that they are in fact.

Indeed, the commencement speech is one of the more absurd traditions still maintained by higher education institutions today, and it has very little to do with providing an educational experience. Graduation ceremonies overall  mostly exist to stroke the egos of the faculty members and give the institution itself a pat on the back while simultaneously attempting to convert the new alumni into donors. The speeches, we are told, are some sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear wisdom form the lips of politicians and perennial government employees like Condoleeza Rice and Christine Lagarde, who are in turn paid handsomely to lecture new graduates about “giving back” to the community, or being yourself, or following your dreams.

As with most everything that occurs as a university, the purpose of the commencement speech is not to provide a service to the students, but to make the institution’s faculty and staff feel important. If an institution can land a celebrity speaker (no matter how blood-soaked or morally bankrupt) to deliver the commencement speech, it will be great for the next fundraising campaign, and if the speaker says something really entertaining, insightful, or controversial, then it might even get the institution on the evening news. The commencement speech serves a public relations function, not an educational one.

This year’s commencement season brought with it the usual controversy, and several commencement speakers withdrew after some students protested. Among those who withdrew were Condoleeza Rice and Christine Lagarde.  It turned out that some students failed to see how these politicians would dispense timeless life-lessons to the students, given their rather questionable careers spent in a variety of morally questionable pursuits.

It should be noted that most students who attend commencement ceremonies couldn’t care less who the celebrity speaker is. Most of them are there because they like the ritualistic aspects of it, and virtually no one remembers what is said at commencement speeches in any case. The fact that there is a vocal minority that manages to veto some speakers is immaterial to the experience of nearly all students who will attend. Most students are really just waiting to get their prop diplomas (the real ones are mailed later) and go to brunch with their families.

But it’s a whole different ballgame for the faculty. Reinforcing the fact that commencement ceremonies exist not for the students but for the faculty, is the reaction of William Bowens.  Having grown fat and complacent on government grants and foundation dollars provided by the fabulously wealthy, Bowens lectured the student protesters for complaining about the selection of Robert Birgeneau, the government bureaucrat who sent police to pepper spray and beat non-violent protestors while Chancellor at the University of California. Student activists did not attempt to block Birgeneau’s speaking, but merely asked for a few words of regret from Birgenau about the way the non-violent students were treated. Birgenau refused.  For people like Bowens and Birgeneau, being a university administrator means never having to say you’re sorry.

Perhaps the most obnoxious aspect of the response to successful student protests is the passive-aggressive shrugging from pundits and administrators who act like commencement speeches offer an invaluable contribution to the “conversation” over a variety of issues. Representative of this is the response of Abby Phillip:

Will ousting Lagarde as Smith commencement speaker undo the perceived ills of the IMF? Probably not. But it all but ensures that Lagarde’s perspective won’t be represented at Smith on Sunday.

Oh yes, the poor, poor IMF. Without speeches at Smith, how will people like Legarde, who spends her days with the world’s most wealthy and powerful people, ever be able to get her message out?  And how would students ever know Legarde’s opinions about things? Aside from Googling her name, I mean.

The idea that withdrawal from a commencement speech in any way impacts the global debate over issues related to the IMF is unconvincing at best.

And let’s be crystal clear about this: none of the speakers  we’ve mentioned here withdrew because their invitations were revoked. They withdrew because they only wished to deliver a commencement speech on their terms. That is, they do not want to speak anywhere that they are not treated with adulation.

One student at Smith summed up the reality of these speakers’ motivations:

I do not agree with a base assumption that the Smith community’s dissent stifled Lagarde’s speech. It did not. She didn’t want to see or hear our disagreement, so she decided not to join the party. Her choice. She has access to muffled rooms that silence our analysis on a daily basis and has chosen not to leave them.

It is the speakers who have no interest in debate. The student protesters have only attempted to make their voices heard. But as is the usual wont of higher education faculty, the desires of the students, including those who have successfully completed their degrees apparently, are to be treated with contempt.

Let’s face it, the real reason the senior faculty are so enraged is because the student activism robbed them of an opportunity to attend a cocktail party with Lagarde or Rice in one of the university’s posh meeting rooms. “Debate” has virtually nothing to do with it.

As Casey Cep recently explained in Politico, the commencement speech is a tired and very expensive ritual, although some of the more intelligent university trustees have already done away with it altogether:

As Jason Song of The Los Angeles Times noticed, current Washington and Lee President Kenneth Ruscio explained in 2009: “The wise and fiscally prudent Board determined that in future years our graduates and families should rest easy knowing that if they had to endure a worthless Commencement address, it would at least be inexpensive,” meaning the president gives the only speech.

That is indeed wisdom in this era of the commencement-industrial complex, when millions are spent every year for grand, pompous ceremonies despite the discontent of students and the fiscal crisis of higher education. So let those already on the university payroll give the speeches if there are to be any: a better use of the exorbitant fees paid to speakers and security costs for their appearances ($700,000, for instance, in 2009 for First Lady Michelle Obama to speak at University of California, Merced) might very well be holding a raffle to award one lucky graduate with funds to repay the average $29,400 in student loans that they already have as a souvenir of their education.

On this Good Friday, Christians are focused on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a propitiation for the sins of the world. But on every other day of the year (expect perhaps Christmas), many Christians are focused on some other people in the Bible.

The Bible on several occasions likens a Christian to a soldier (Philippians 2:25, 2 Timothy 2:3, Philemon 2). As soldiers, Christians are admonished to “put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11). The Apostle Paul, who himself said: “I have fought a good fight” (2 Timothy 4:7), told a young minister to “war a good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18).

But it does not follow, as some Christians think, that because Christians are likened to soldiers in the New Testament that it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because aggression, violence, and bloodshed are contrary to the very nature of Christianity, it is sin, the world, the flesh, and the devil that the Christian soldier fights against. The weapons of his warfare are not carnal (1 Corinthians 10:4). He wears “the breastplate of righteousness” (Ephesians 6:14), not a military uniform. His loins are girt about with truth (Ephesians 6:14), not an ammunition belt. His feet are shod with “the preparation of the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15), not army boots. His shield is “the shield of faith” (Ephesians 6:16), not an armored personnel carrier. He wears “the helmet of salvation” (Ephesians 6:17), not a flight helmet. His sword is “the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17), not an M-16.

The New Testament admonishes Christians to not avenge themselves (Romans 12:19), to do good to all men (Galatians 6:10), to live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), and to not render evil for evil (Romans 12:17). There is nothing in the New Testament from which to draw the conclusion that maiming, killing, destroying property, and making widows and orphans is somehow sanctified if it is done in a military uniform or in the name of the state.

Yet, some people—mainly Christian armchair warriors, Christian Coalition moralists, evangelical warvangelicals, Catholic just war theorists, reich-wing Christian nationalists, theocon Values Voters, imperial Christians, religious American exceptionalists, religious military exceptionalists, Red-State Christian fascists, pro-lifers for mass murder, bloodthirsty Christian conservatives, God and country Christian bumpkins, Religious Rightists, and Christians who wear American flag lapel pins in the shape of a cross—still try to justify the actions of Christian U.S. soldiers because, after all, soldiers aren’t condemned in the New Testament. Yes, just like slave owners aren’t.

After reading and hearing scores of Christian apologists for the military over the past ten years defend the role of Christians in the military who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have come to the conclusion that they have all drunk from the same corrupt spring. And one of their favorite drinks is the insidious cocktail of “soldiers aren’t condemned in the New Testament.”

Their flawed, illogical reasoning is as follows:

Cornelius the centurion was a just man that feared God—so it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A soldier of Cornelius is said to be devout—so it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Apostle Paul never instructed Christians to not join the military—so it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

John the Baptist didn’t tell the soldiers that came to him to leave the military—so it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jesus Christ marveled at the faith of a centurion—so it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why would any Christian, unless he had some agenda, unless he subscribed to military exceptionalism, unless he was an apologist for the military, use the fact that soldiers aren’t condemned in the New Testament to justify the actions of Christians in today’s U.S. military?

There are some other soldiers in the New Testament that aren’t condemned either. Yet, no Christian ever appeals to them to justify anything. These soldiers are strippers, smiters, mockers, spitters, gamblers, thieves, liars, scourgers, bribe takers, assaulters, mutilators, and crucifiers.

Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.

And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.

And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.

And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.

And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name: him they compelled to bear his cross.

And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull,

They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.

And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. (Matthew 27:26-35)

And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,

Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.

And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.

So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. (Matthew 28:12-15)

The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.

Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him.

But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs:

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. (John 19:31-34)

Although Christ forgave the soldiers who crucified him, no one would ever reason from this that it is okay for a Christian to join the U.S. military and bomb, maim, kill, and destroy for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the lesson here is just the opposite. Because you never know what you might be told to do in the military, because you never know which country you might have to invade, because you never know which country you might have to bomb, because you never know which country you might have to occupy, because you never know who the enemy might be next week, because you never know whom you might have to kill—the best thing for a Christian to do is to stay out of the military in the first place.

From his diary, Baltimore, April 1, 1945:

The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack on my security.

(Thanks to EPJ)

… who support warmongering politicians.

Although the ebook reader market has been dominated by the Kindle (still going strong) and the Nook (losing steam) for years, there’s a contender rising from the ranks: the Kobo Aura HD. Read on as we put it through the paces.

What Is The Kobo Aura HD?

Before we jump into looking at the actual ebook reader, let’s take a quick look at the company behind it. Although many readers, especially American readers, might be unfamiliar with the Kobo brand (it only has around a 3% market saturation in the U.S. market), it’s one of the largest ebook reader companies in the world, accounting for a sizable chunk of the global market (20% of the global market, more than the 16% share split between Sony and Barnes and Noble). In America, for example, you won’t find Kobo ebook readers on the shelves outside of a few large independent bookstores, but in Canada you’ll find them stocked at all sorts of big box stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Staples, etc.

Kobo produces ebook readers in a range of sizes from their tiny Kobo Mini (a pocket size reader with a 5″ screen) to their larger flagship ebook reader, and the one we’re interested in, the Kobo Aura HD. Let’s take a look at Aura HD.

Note: Our reviews traditionally include a section devoted to new device setup. The Kobo, like the Kindle Paperwhite, has a very straight forward setup. You turn the device on, you connect it to a local Wi-Fi node, and you register the device with Kobo. Given how straight forward the setup is, we’ve opted to skip detailing it screen-by-screen.  If you have any questions about the specifics of setting up the Kobo over Wi-Fi or trouble shooting the initial setup, please refer to Kobo’s Setting Up Your eReader guide here.

Form and Styling

Viewed head on, the Kobo Aura HD (herein referred to as the Aura HD for brevity) looks like most ebook readers: it’s rectangular with a matte black bezel, it has a recessed matte finish screen, and it’s branded with the company logo at the bottom center of the bezel. Also like nearly every modern ebook reader, there are no external page turn buttons as everything is handled via the touch screen. Where the Aura HD begins to stand out in the form and styling department, is when you view it from the side or flip it over.

The body of the Aura HD has a distinctly angular construction not seen on the bodies of competing ebook readers. While we were at first apprehensive about the design choice, the slight angling of the body does in fact make it more comfortable to hold the device as it provides a slight and natural groove for the fingers to press into. Interestingly enough, we didn’t notice that the angles/grooves are spaced differently until a left-handed friend tested the unit out. The spacing of the finger holds on the back definitely, however minutely, favorites holding the device with you right hand.

The top of the Aura HD has three elements: a red slider-style power button (why red? it looks terribly out of place with the rest of the black styling on the unit), a tiny LED activity/charging indicator light, and a black button that toggles the front-lighting on and off. While it’s nice having physical buttons for things, we didn’t care much for the physical front-light button. On the Kindle, for example, you adjust the front-lighting by tapping on the light bulb icon and you immediately see there is a wide gradient of potential brightness settings. The Aura HD, on the other hand, ships with the brightest setting enabled so when you turn on the front-light for the first time it’s easy to think that it’s a binary system: off completely or on and insanely bright. (When the front-light is on, there’s a little icon in the navigation bar you can tap on to adjust the settings).

On the very bottom of the unit you’ll also find three elements: a micro USB port for charging and syncing the unit, a MicroSD slot for expanding the unit’s storage capacity, and a tiny pin hole reset button which can be triggered with a paperclip. We’re huge fans of both of these features.

While most ebook readers ship with enough internal memory to hold thousands of books (and the Aura HD is no exception) we’ve always like the ability to expand an ebook reader with a microSD card (and were very disappointed when the newest Nook readers dropped this feature). Sure, not everyone feels the need to carry every ebook they’ve ever acquired with them, but for those who do they can use up to a 32GB microSD card in the Aura HD to push their storage potential from a few thousand books to tens of thousands of books. There’s no special formatting or tinkering required to use the microSD either; take any common Fat32 formatted microSD, copy your ebooks over to the root directory, and stick it in the Aura HD. The microSD’s contents will be automatically added to the device’s library.

The reset button is also a nice touch. Ebook readers tend to be really stable devices, but during those rare times that they lock up, it can be a huge pain to get them to reboot/reset themselves. A physical reset button is a welcome addition for those rare times you need to reset your device.

In terms of overall size, the Aura HD is larger but not necessarily unwieldy. The Aura HD is 6.97 x 5.05 x 0.46 in and weighs 8.5 ounces. The Kindle Paperwhite is 6.7 x 4.6 x 0.36 in and weighs 7.5 ounces. The Aura is bigger both in dimensions and weight, but for those extra fractions of an inch and ounce you end up with a bigger higher resolution screen.

Here’s a comparison photo showing the physical footprint of the Kindle Paperwhite beside the Aura HD:

The Aura HD is bigger in length and width, but only marginally so; if not for its wide bottom bezel it would be hard to even notice. Where the difference is more apparent, however, is when you look at the depth:

The Aura HD is significantly chunkier, in this regard, than the Kindle. Some people like gadgets that are as slim and light as possible, other people want something that’s easier to hold. By that measure, the Aura HD does have a significantly beefier shell with the raised finger holds.

The Screen

Given that you’ll spend more time staring at the screen of your ebook reader than you’ll spend doing anything else with it, the screen is the most critical component. In that arena, the Aura HD’s screen is both objectively and subjectively the most beautiful screen on in the ereader market right now. If you read our review of the Kindle Paperwhite, you’ll recall how much we liked the crisp screen. The Kindle Paperwhite sports a nearly-XGA resolution screen (6″, 758×1024 pixel, 212 ppi) where as the Aura HD sports a bigger and better WXGA+ resolution screen (6.8″, 1440×1080, 256 ppi).

Do those extra pixels and ppi make a difference? Absolutely. While there’s nothing wrong with the lower-resolution Kindle Paperwhite screen (and it’s certainly better than just about any other ebook reader screen out there), the Aura HD’s screen is beautiful. It’s the first ebook reader we’ve ever used where we’ve completely forgotten we’re looking at a digital screen. Regardless of any complaint we might have about any other element of the Aura HD design, interface, or user experience, the screen is undeniably the best around and the sharpest one we’ve had the pleasure of reading on.

The front lighting, once you figure out that there’s a button to turn it on and off as well as an on-screen adjustment to make, is quite nice. We were braced for poor front lighting, as this is typically something manufacturers have struggled with (and fumbled through). The first generation Kindle Paperwhite, for instance, had this terrible uneveness in light distribution that wasn’t fully remedied until the release of the second generation Paperwhite.

With that in mind, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the back lighting on the Aura HD is great. The light is even, there are no splotches, and unless you turn the unit upside down and look towards the base of the screen at a very severe angle, you can’t even see the light source. Only at that upside and severe angle do you see the hint of the LEDs that light the screen. Given how much the poor light distribution on our first generation Kindle Paperwhite bugged us, we were primed to pounce on any defect we found in the Aura HD’s lighting, but we found nothing to complain about.

Under the Hood and the User Experience

Under the hood, the Aura HD sports the snappiest ebook reader chipset on the market with a speedy 1GHz processor. While this puts the Aura HD a full 20% faster than any other ebook reader, it’s honestly a negligible benefit in most cases. In day to day use, a slightly faster chip doesn’t translate into radically faster rendering and page turns. Where we did find that the faster processor helped is when adding lots of books to the device; the Aura HD added and indexed books significantly faster than the Kindle Paperwhite. We side load a lot of content onto all our ebook readers, and what the Kindle would choke on (and then spend several minutes indexing and grinding through), the Aura HD would index in around 15-20 seconds.

The Aura HD sports 4GB onboard storage, expandable via microSD card to 38GB (4 internal + 32 via card). By comparison, the Paperwhite sports 2GB. As we mentioned earlier in the review, if you’re looking to carry your whole library with you, the Aura HD has the clear edge. Battery life is typical for an ebook reader: like the Paperwhite, you can expect up to 8 weeks of casual daily use.

When it comes to the actual GUI and interacting with the device, we found the experience to be quite a mixed bag of things we absolutely loved and things that frustrated us. First, let’s look at the source of Kobo’s marketing claim that Kobo ebook readers, especially their flagship Aura HD, are designed for serious readers. We’ve already checked “crystal clear” screen off the list of demands that serious readers make of their ebook readers. The other elements that ebook reader power users lust after are smooth page turns (not a problem with the speedy 1 GHz processor), excellent font/page customization, and easy interaction between the user and the device.

In the customization category, Kobo really nailed it. The Aura HD has so many ways to tweak how the page looks. There are over 12 fonts to choose from, including Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic, two font systems designed specifically to help readers with dyslexia. You can adjust the font size, the line spacing, and the margin size, and you can do so not just in a this-or-that or 1-2-or-3 selection process, but by incrementally adjusting them with sliders. You can also toggle text justification and adjust it. If that’s not enough adjusting for you, you can even jump into the Advanced font menu and adjust the weight and sharpness of the font with a really handy before/after preview side-by-side preview pane:

The Aura HD has, hands down, the most advanced font tweaking and adjustment system around. If you’re very particular about how your text looks, the combination of ultra-sharp screen and incredibly granular controls really helps the Aura HD stand out from the pack.

In addition to customizing the fonts, you can even (and we were delighted to find this setting) customize the way you tap and turn the pages:

This is the first time we’ve come across a device that allows you to customize not just how the screen looks but where you tap/swipe the screen to perform certain actions. So while we noted the angularity of the case favored right-handers (by a tiny amount) the designers clearly want the device to be useful to both right and left handed people based on how you can adjust the interface.

While we loved the actual reading experience and were delighted with the customization options, one element of the experience we didn’t care for is the main home screen. Specifically, we hated that the tiled interface is constantly moving on you.

We didn’t dislike the individual elements (such as displaying the last book read, recently finished, suggested books, etc.) we disliked that based on what you’d recently opened (or what the device had recently updated), the tiles moved around the screen. One minute the library tile might be at the top corner, the next it was in the middle, then at the bottom. It was disorienting and it prevents you from navigating your device on auto pilot. You never get used to the feeling that tapping in the upper corner will open the library or tapping in the lower corner will open up your reading stats page.

We understand the idea they were going for here, that the most used tiles “float” to the top, but it’s extremely annoying in practice. Imagine, if you will, that your desktop icons moved around based on how much you clicked on them (or when you last clicked on them). What’s further infuriating about this setup is that you can customize just about anything on the Aura HD (everything from screen time outs to screen savers and everything in between), but you can’t stop the tiles from updating and sliding around.

Let’s not leave discussing the GUI and user experience on a sour note though, as there were a bunch of extra (and some might argue frivolous) things that we thought were pretty neat. For example, the Aura HD can track your reading style (if you’re not interested in this, you can turn it off in the settings menu) and perform a variety of tricks based on the information it tracks. You’ll get a running tally of how many books you’ve finished, how many hours you’ve read, and a host of fun little game-style achievements. Here’s what the reading stats page for the current book looks like:

In addition to the concrete feedback provided by the Reading Stats page, there’s also an awards page that lists a variety of fun and quirky little awards you can win by interacting with your reader and library:

While some readers might think the whole game-badges and social media sharing element of the ebook reader experience are silly, there’s a lot to be said for the gamification of society and how making experiences game-like and social increases participation. If you hate the idea of tracking, badges, and sharing on social media, you can turn it off. We think it’s pretty neat though, and would like to see similar features come to other devices.

The Kobo Ecosystem

The screen is sharp and the GUI is clearly very reader-oriented (albeit with an annoying home screen), so that leaves us with one serious subject to dig into: the Kobo ecosystem. Ecosystems are the life support system for ebook readers: a lack luster ebook reader backed by the worlds biggest product ecosystem will thrive, while the word’s finest ebook reader with a mediocre ecosystem will sit rotting in warehouses.

Like our experience with the GUI of the Aura HD, the underlying Kobo store ecosystem was, to repeat ourselves, a mixed bag. To be clear, you won’t have much trouble finding stuff to purchase. We searched for dozens of best selling books in both the Amazon and the Kobo stores and never came up empty handed. In fact, outside of a few Amazon-store exclusives like novellas or short stories from well known authors, we couldn’t really find anything on Amazon that wasn’t on Kobo. Even the prices, with a few outliers, were reasonable. Here’s the top five fiction and non-fiction books from the January 13th, 2014 New York Time’s Best Seller Lists:

While the total difference between our ten book purchases was around $20, realistically most people aren’t bulk purchasing the Time’s best sellers at once, and a few bucks here or there isn’t as big a deal (and there are certainly deals and discounts to be had in the Kobo store like any other store).

Where the Kobo store suffers in comparison to the Amazon store is that the Kobo store comes off as almost completely sterile. Amazon has built itself a thriving community with tens of millions of book reviews and ratings, a healthy suggestion engine, and a sense that the place is bustling with activity and readers. By comparison the Kobo store, despite being stocked with the same books, feels empty.

Let’s look at one of the books from the above list, as an example: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. In the Amazon store, as of the time of this article, the book has 946 reviews (not bad for a book that came out only a few months ago). It also has suggestions based on what other customers purchased along with it, editorial reviews, an author biography, and auxiliary functions that many overlook (like discussion forums) but are still there as part of the community.

By contrast, the listing for David and Goliath in the Kobo store is nearly empty. You get a brief synopsis, you get some related titles, and, glaringly missing from the experience, you get no customer feedback or reviews. You don’t even get any sort of editorial review or criticism.

The Kobo store used to have reviews; it out-sourced them via the thriving reader community Goodreads. In the spring of 2013, however, Amazon bought Goodreads and Kobo dropped the Goodreads reviews from their store. Strangely, though, they appear to have made no move to replace them. Maybe they crunched the numbers and did the analysis only to realize that the reviews didn’t matter and their customers didn’t care; we, however, were unable to shake the feeling, despite finding all the books we wanted, that the Kobo store seemed impersonal and unvetted without them. You won’t have trouble finding the book you’re looking for, you’ll just feel like you’re shopping in a deserted store while you’re doing it.

The Good, The Bad, and the Verdict

We’ve played with the device for the better part of a month now, read on it, poked around in menus, bought books for it, and we’ve given you a look at the device and the ecosystem in which it lives. After all that, we’re ready to report on the good, the bad, and whether or not the Aura HD is for you.

The Good

• The screen is beautiful. Not just good looking but hands-down-the-best-on-the-market beautiful. Photos can’t do it justice.
• If you’re picky about fonts, spacing, justification, even tiny details like degree of font-sharpening, you’re not going to find an ebook reader that can hold a candle to the degree of tweaking and customizing you can pull off in the Aura HD. You can even adjust things like screen time outs and how frequently the device refreshes to cut down on ghosting.
• The front lighting is even and works well.
• Page turns and refreshes are snappy; the general in-book navigation, searching, and book marking is all pretty standard stuff that’s neither significantly better or worse than what you would find on a competitor like the Kindle.
• The microSD port ensures you’re not hampered by the 4GB of onboard storage (which is already twice as much as the Kindle Paperwhite offers).
• It supports a ton of formats including ePub, PDF, MOBI, TXT, HTML, CBZ, CBR, and various image formats like JPEG and PNG. PDF handling is definitely best in class and runs circles around the Kindle.
• The reading tracking/rewards features are fun.

The Bad

• While the angular finger grips on the back of the case look pretty cool, we’re not entirely sure they actually add anything to the experience, and they make the device feel really thick compared to other more slender devices (if you hate skinny ebook readers, however, this is a feature not a bug). We’d have preferred a more textured back in place of the angles.
• The home screen GUI lacks the sophistication and polish that is present in so many other elements of the GUI experience (like adjusting the fonts). The moving-tiles issue is extremely annoying.
• Despite being populated with millions of books and magazines, the Kobo store feels sterile and kludgy; we’d like to think that a company as big as the one producing the Aura HD (and with as big of a market share around the world) could produce something nicer.
• At $179, it’s the most expensive ebook reader on the market right now.

The Verdict: Right now, the Kobo Aura HD is in no position to knock the Kindle off its throne, but that doesn’t mean you should turn your nose up at it. While we wouldn’t buy the Aura HD for a non-techie friend (because it simply lacks the dead simple ease of use and massive ecosystem the Kindle boasts), we would buy it for a someone with a huge ebook library who loves top-tier gear. That’s the market the Aura HD is resting in right now; it’s not an ebook reader for the Average Joe, it’s an ebook reader for the ebook enthusiast who wants the sharpest screen, the fastest processor, and doesn’t have a problem managing their own ebook library collection, tinkering, and tweaking. If that sounds like you or the person you’re shopping for, the Aura HD the crystal clear but quirky ebook reader you’ve been looking for.

For 50 years defenders of the Warren Report have claimed that JFK conspiracy theorists simply cannot accept that a little man killed a great man.

Really?

Let’s see now. John Lennon was a great man. Oh sure, he was monitored and spied on by the U.S. national-security state but that was only because national-security state officials were convinced that anyone who opposed what the national-security state was doing during the Cold War was a communist or communist sympathizer and part of the world-wide communist conspiracy to take over the United States, not to mention, of course, a grave threat to “national security.”

Yet, despite how the national-security state viewed Lennon, most everyone would agree, I think, that Lennon was great man and that his assassin, a man named Mark David Chapman, was a little man.

Yet, I don’t see a huge number of people saying that Lennon was the victim of the U.S. national-security state and that Chapman was nothing more than a “patsy” for the assassination. In fact, I don’t see many assassination researchers saying that about the assassination attempts against Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.

So, what’s different about the Kennedy assassination? Why have so many people over the years, including brilliant researchers and analysts, concluded that the national-security state orchestrated and carried out Kennedy’s assassination?

Among the reasons are:

1. The countless anomalies in the Kennedy case, anomalies that make absolutely no sense at all except in the context of a national-security state assassination.
2. The large body of circumstantial evidence pointing to a national-security state operation in the Kennedy assassination.
3. The manifest evidence of fraud in the autopsy, which was controlled by the the national-security state.
4. The fact that the national-security state had the motive to kill Kennedy, on grounds of national security.
5. The fact that the assassination fits within the pattern of regime-change operations, including assassination, in which the national-security state apparatus has been involved since its inception in 1947.

Consider some of the many anomalies.

1. The medical personnel at Parkland Hospital, FBI agent Clint Hill, and the FBI agents who attended the autopsy at Bethesda, all stated that the president had a large hole in the back of his head, indicating an exit wound, which means that a shot was fired from the front.

Yet, the official autopsy photographs show the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact.

We’re just supposed to ignore that. Or we’re expected to believe that all those people just made a mistake, independently of each other. The last thing we’re supposed to do is to conclude that the government falsified the evidence to cover up shots having been fired from the front. We’re supposed to just defer to authority and meekly accept the official version of events.

2. What about all the military personnel who stated that Kennedy’s body was secretly brought in early to the Bethesda morgue in a cheap shipping casket, unbeknownst to the public? Well, we’re expected to assume that they’re mistaken too or just lying. Never mind how improbable it is that a group of enlisted military men, along with the most prestigious funeral home in Washington, conspired to concoct a fake and false story about how Kennedy’s body was brought into the Bethesda morgue. We’re just supposed to meekly defer to authority and conclude that that they were just, for some unknown reason, engaged in a conspiracy with each other to concoct a fake and false story as to how JFK’s body was brought early into the morgue.

Otherwise, we might be tempted to conclude that national-security state officials were up to no good that night by bringing the body into the morgue earlier than everyone thought in order to make the necessary arrangements to hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front.

3. What about the two different brains that were examined after the autopsy? One brain exam session included the official autopsy photographer, who stated that the brain was sectioned or cut during the session, which is standard procedure to discover the direction of a gunshot.

But there is a problem. That official photographer denied that the photographs of the brain that are in the official record today were taken by him. That means that, unless he was lying, they were taken by some other, unknown photographer who attended a second brain exam session, one that included an autopsy pathologist who said that the brain wasn’t sectioned or cut at all.

Oh, and there’s another problem. The photographs of the brain in the official records show an almost complete brain, one with disrupted tissue but with all the mass still present, a brain that actually weighs more than an average brain, notwithstanding the fact that everyone agrees that at a large portion of Kennedy’s brain was blown out by the gun shot that hit him in the head.

But we are just supposed to passively accept all this and move on. After all, it’s just inconceivable that the U.S. military would be up to no good during the president’s autopsy.

4. Indeed, we’re not even supposed to think that anything was unusual when a team of Secret Service agents brandished guns and forced their way out of Parkland Hospital with the president’s body, implicitly threatening to kill the official Dallas medical examiner who was just doing his job by insisting that the body remain at Parkland to undergo an autopsy, as required by state law. We’re just supposed to accept the idea that federal agents would violate the law, threaten to kill hospital personnel, and jeopardize a criminal prosecution, all on their own initiative, rather than cooperate with state officials in the investigation of a very serious crime, as we would ordinarily expect them to do.

In fact, we’re not supposed to think that anything is unusual in the fact that Lyndon Johnson was patiently awaiting the delivery of Kennedy’s body at Dallas Love Field. After all, supposedly the assassination could have been the first step in a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. But who are we to wonder why the new president, LBJ, would supposedly put chivalry toward Mrs. Kennedy ahead of the survival of the nation, especially given the deep hatred and antipathy he had for the Kennedy family?

5. Indeed, who are we question the fact that the feds took no adverse action whatsoever against an American citizen and former U.S. Marine who had supposedly given top-secret information to the Soviets, America’s official enemy throughout the Cold War?

Sure, we know how the feds treat people like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsey (Bradley) Manning, John Walker Lindh, and Edward Snowden. They arrest them, they torture them, they abuse them, they prosecute them, and they incarcerate them.

And we also know how the CIA and the FBI viewed communist sympathizers during the Cold War, such as those in the U.S. Communist Party, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and, according to national-security state officials, even the American civil-rights movement. They spied on them, they harassed them, they prosecuted them, they blackmailed them, they incarcerated them, and they ruined them.

But hey, Lee Harvey Oswald was different, right? He was only a guy who supposedly had shamed the Marines by becoming a communist, supposedly betrayed his country by supposedly delivering  top-secret information he had acquired as a Marine to the Soviets, and supposedly defected to America’s official Cold War enemy (and World War II partner and ally), the Soviet Union.

Oh well, everyone makes mistakes, right? So, let’s just let bygones be bygones and even lend Oswald the money to get back home. And when he later asks for a new passport so he can go to Mexico, let’s rush and give him one-day urgent service.

And let’s not even think of harassing him, torturing him, abusing him, arresting him, or even subpoenaing him to testify before a federal grand jury about his supposed betrayal of his country.

And above all, let’s not think to ourselves that any of this is anything but normal behavior on the part of the feds, even when they are busy ferreting out and destroying communists in the State Department, the army, Hollywood, the Communist Party, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the ACLU, and the civil-rights movement at the height of the Cold War.

6. Let’s also not ask where Oswald acquired his spy-craft skills, including getting post office boxes registered to bogus names, or even how he learned to speak fluent Russian while in the military. Those are things that we just shouldn’t think about it.

7. Or why Oswald would stamp “544 Camp Street” as the return address on his Fair Play for Cuba Committee pamphlets in New Orleans, which just happened to be an entrance to the offices of a retired FBI agent named Guy Bannister, who had close ties to anti-Castro Cubans and whose office just happened to be situated within walking distance of the FBI, CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence, and the fiercely anti-communist Reily Coffee Company, which had hired as an employee a supposed fierce pro-communist named Lee Harvey Oswald.

But we’re just not supposed to wonder about such things. We’re supposed to defer to authority and just move on.

8. Indeed, we’re not even supposed to wonder why the magic bullet that supposedly went through Kennedy’s neck and broke Gov. Connally’s rib and wrist bone was still in pristine condition and why it didn’t have one even tiny bit of flesh or blood on it. After all, what’s the alternative — that it was planted to frame an innocent man? Why, that’s just inconceivable. Everyone knows that the law-enforcement officials never frame innocent people.

9. Or what about those people on the grassy knoll who displayed Secret Service badges to keep people away immediately after the shooting when, in fact, there were no Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll? Well, that’s just something that we need to ignore too. It just couldn’t have happened. Those people must have been mistaken too or are also conspiring to establish a false conspiracy.

10. Indeed, Malcolm Perry, the Dallas emergency physician who performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy, and who stated three times at a press conference immediately after the assassination that the bullet hole in the front of Kennedy’s neck, which Perry obviously examined closely, was an entry wound, most assuredly must have been mistaken too. We should just defer to those military pathologists at Bethesda, who claim that they didn’t even notice the bullet wound in the front of the neck during the autopsy and instead concluded, after the autopsy was over and the body released, that the bullet wound in the front of the neck (that they hadn’t noticed) had to be an exit wound, one from which the magic bullet supposedly exited.

11. And let’s just block out of minds that the chief pathologist at Bethesda burned his autopsy notes and the original autopsy report. Why, that sort of thing happens all the time, right? Just like that FBI agent who destroyed a pre-assassination note from Oswald and then kept the destruction secret from the Warren Commission.

12. And we need to also ignore the fact that the official FBI report on the autopsy indicated that the bullet hole was in Kennedy’s back, not in the back of his neck and that the hole did not go through all the way through the president’s body. Never mind that the FBI agents reported that one of the military pathologists even put his finger into the bullet hole in Kennedy’s back and confirmed that the hole didn’t go through the body. We’re just supposed to assume that that those FBI agents were lying or just mistaken too.

13. In fact, we’re also expected to assume that the FBI got it all wrong — that when the official FBI report showed that two bullets hit Kennedy and a third bullet hit Connally, we’re supposed to just reject that in favor of the Warren Report’s magic bullet theory. Why? Because then, what would we do with the fourth bullet — the one that hit a bystander, the one that the FBI report doesn’t even mention? A fourth bullet means another shooter, so we don’t want to go down that road, just like the FBI and the Warren Commission didn’t, because that would mean, well, two shooters.

14. When we’re told that devout communist Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate retired army General Edwin Walker, we’re supposed to just meekly accept that without asking any questions. Never mind that Walker and Kennedy were at two ends of the ideological spectrum.

Walker was one of those fierce anti-communist fanatics who believed that the communists were coming to get us and that America was already filled with communists, especially in the civil-rights movement. In fact, he was one of those people in “nut country” to whom Kennedy was referring on the morning of the assassination, notwithstanding the fact that Walker’s Cold War, anti-communist mindset perfectly mirrored that of high officials in the Pentagon and the CIA. Indeed, don’t forget that Attorney General Robert Kennedy had even had Walker involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

But we’re supposed to believe that Oswald wanted to kill both men, despite the fact that they had diametrically opposite mindsets about the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We’re not supposed to question such things. Indeed, we’re not even supposed to question how a supposed crack shot like Oswald could miss hitting a stationary target like Walker from just a few feet away but somehow hit a target much further away, and moving away from him, with a junk Italian-made rifle with a misaligned scope on it.

And the anomalies just go on and on. Show me such anomalies in the John Lennon assassination. Or in the assassination attempts on Presidents Reagan and Ford. Or even in the autopsy of Lee Harvey Oswald, which was conducted by the Dallas medical examiner, not the U.S. military. Unlike the Kennedy case, strange and unusual anomalies don’t exist in those cases.

You see, the Kennedy assassination is like a great big puzzle with lots of pieces that just don’t fit within the official version of events. So, defenders of the Warren Report say, “Well, just throw away the pieces that don’t fit. Or, better yet, just ignore them. So what if the puzzle has missing pieces or pieces that don’t fit? Let’s just move on. It’s been 50 years.”

It was obvious that by the time Kennedy was assassinated, John F. Kennedy was a different man from the one who had been elected president in 1960. Having been seared by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had decided to move America in a dramatically new direction, one in which the Cold War would be brought to an end, one in which there would be peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and Cuba, just like the situation today between the United States and communist China.

Watch or read Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University in June 1963 for one of the most remarkable speeches ever delivered by a U.S. president, a speech that Soviet authorities permitted to be broadcast all across the United States.

Or read a fascinating new book by Jeffrey D. Sachs entitled To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace, a book not about the assassination but about the dramatic turn that JFK took after he and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the very brink of nuclear war.

Or see this brand new article by Robert F. Kennedy entitled “John F. Kennedy’s Vision of Peace” in Rolling Stone magazine.

As part of that process, Kennedy had guaranteed that there would be no further invasions of Cuba. He had ordered U.S. officials to shut down Cuban exile operations intended to oust Castro from power. He told close advisers that he intended to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam after the 1964 election and, just before he was killed, issued an order to the Pentagon initiating that process. He entered into a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, over the fierce opposition of the Pentagon and the CIA. He even proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union abandon the race to the moon and instead go together.

I ask you: Why would a supposedly devout communist kill Kennedy when the devout communist would know that Kennedy would be replaced by a devout anti-communist Cold Warrior like LBJ, a man whose Cold War, anti-communist mindset mirrored that of the Pentagon and the CIA? That makes no sense at all.

Why would a little man who was supposedly hoping to go down in history for killing a big man deny that he did it?

Indeed, if he was hoping to get away with his crime, why use a gun that was easily traceable to him? In fact, if he was hoping to escape, why take the time to hide the rifle, hang out in the building drinking a coke, casually make his way home, and end up in a movie theater?

None of it makes any sense in the context of the official version of what supposedly happened.

On the other hand, as the records have seeped out over the years, it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. national-security establishment, unlike Oswald, actually did have a powerful motive to get rid of Kennedy. From the standpoint of national security, Kennedy, as president, posed a much graver threat to national security than Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, Lumumba, Diem, Allende, or any other regime-change target of the national-security state during the Cold War.

For one thing, we’ve now learned that Kennedy was fighting a fierce bureaucratic war with the national-security state establishment, a war that mainstream historians are now openly acknowledging. One searches in vain for any discussion of that war among the members of the Warren Commission.

Kennedy’s worst offense, from the standpoint of national security, was his decision to try to bring an end to the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The national-security establishment believed that that was impossible given the nature of the enemy. Like most other American anti-communists, they were convinced that no communist could ever be trusted and that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.

Thus, Kennedy was viewed as hopelessly naïve. Rather than saving America by going to war against the communists, he was effectively disarming America and surrendering to the communists with talk of peace and peaceful coexistence, nuclear test ban treaties, and intentions to withdraw from Vietnam. What greater threat to national security than that?

As an aside, ironically Kennedy was the original conspiracy theorist. Well, actually, Eisenhower was, when he pointed out that the military-industrial complex, which he observed was new to the American way of life, posed a grave threat to America’s democratic processes. Kennedy, when asked whether a military coup was possible in the United States, answered that such a danger did exist. He even encouraged that the novel Seven Days in May be made into a movie as a warning to the American people. And of course, there was former President Truman, a man thoroughly familiar with the ways of the CIA given that he was the president who brought the CIA into existence in 1947, who published an op-ed in the Washington Post 30 days after the assassination observing that the CIA had become a sinister force in American life.

Compounding the problem were Kennedy’s many sexual escapades, including with a Mafia girlfriend, the ex-wife of a high CIA official, a White House intern, and an unstable Hollywood starlet. Imagine the potential for blackmail. In fact, who could say with any certainty that Kennedy wasn’t already being blackmailed into disarming America and surrendering the country to the communists?

If all that isn’t a threat to “national security,” what is? Certainly, no one with that background would ever be issued a security clearance at any level.

On top of all that is the circumstantial evidence that Kennedy was smoking dope and possibly even taking LSD, specifically during his affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer. What greater threat to national security than a president who might be under the influence of mind-altering drugs when Soviet nuclear missiles came unexpectedly flying into the United States.

When defenders of the Warren Report get indignant over the suggestion that national-security state officials would kill the president, they just don’t get it. It’s not that national-security state officials would have considered themselves bad people for effecting regime change within the United States. On the contrary, they would have considered themselves the ultimate patriots — risking their lives and liberty precisely to protect national security by removing the threat from office, the same justification, by the way, used by the military in Chile and more recently in Egypt when they ousted their heads of state from office.

That’s what the Warren Commission, however, couldn’t confront — the idea that an out-of-control, super-patriotic, Cold War national-security state apparatus orchestrated the assassination of the president of the United States and the cover-up of what it did, in order to protect “national security.”

Such a thing was simply considered inconceivable — and still is by the Washington establishment and, for that matter, the mainstream press. Sure, everyone would agree that it was conceivable that the CIA would engage in such conduct against foreign regimes. That was (and is) to be expected. But to think that the national security apparatus — i.e., the CIA and the military — would conspire to do the same here in the United States was (and is) considered by the Washington establishment and the mainstream press to be inconceivable, which is precisely why the Warren Commission never even entertained the possibility.

It’s what I call the Inconceivable Doctrine — the doctrine that induces people to conclude that the Warren Commission got it right and disregarding the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have come up with during the past 50 years pointing in the direction of the national-security state.

Imagine the current Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, publicly declaring his opinion that the national-security state assassinated President Kennedy and framed Lee Harvey Oswald. Add to that some federal judges and some U.S. Senators saying the same thing. Add to that the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.Impossible to imagine, right?

Well, the situation was much worse in 1963, a time when deference to authority was at an all-time high and in which there was a 99 percent trust factor in favor of the military and the CIA. There was simply no possibility that a mainstream lawyer in his 70s like Earl Warren, who was finishing his legal and political career as Chief Justice of the United States, was going to target the CIA for assassinating Kennedy and go to war against it. In fact, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Warren Commission relied on the CIA and the FBI investigative reports that were being furnished to the commission rather than establish its own team of investigators.

And that same deference to authority mindset afflicted the other members of the Warren Commission. All of them were not only the epitome of the Washington establishment, they were also 100 percent convinced that the national-security apparatus was absolutely necessary to the safety and well-being of the United States. They weren’t about to do anything that would downgrade and diminish the power and prestige of either the military or the CIA, especially at the height of the Cold War.

Thus, the fact is the fix was in from the very beginning, a fix that focused on Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of President Kennedy. The biggest reason for that was what has become known as the “World War III scenario.”

While assuring the general public that Oswald was a lone nut assassin, Lyndon Johnson was telling Earl Warren and, through him, the rest of the Warren Commission, that the fate of the United States lay in his hands. If the Warren Commission’s investigation led to a conspiracy in which Oswald was serving as an assassination agent for Cuba and the Soviet Union, that would mean World War III, given that a state-sponsored assassination would be an act of war, one that would require retaliation. That would inevitably mean nuclear war. Johnson told Warren that according to the best estimates, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union would mean around 40 million American deaths.

That’s what caused Warren to accept the position as head of the commission, despite the fact that he had long opposed any justice on the Supreme Court engaging in such extra-judicial activity. With tears in his eyes over the enormous burden that now lay on his shoulders — the burden involving the possibility of nuclear war that could kill 40 million Americans and countless more Soviet citizens — he reluctantly accepted the position as chairman of what became known as the Warren Commission.

And it’s not as if the evidence didn’t conveniently point to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Lee Harvey Oswald was purportedly an ardent communist, one who supposedly tried to defect to the Soviet Union, who established a chapter of the supposedly pro-communist Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, and who had supposedly visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City immediately prior to the assassination.

And don’t forget the evidence of shots having been fired from the front, as established by all those people in Dallas who saw an exit hole in the back of Kennedy’s head and an entry wound in the front of his neck, not to mention all the witnesses who heard shots being fired from the grassy knoll in front of the president.

Case closed, right? Assassins from the front and from the back, with the assassin being a known communist and betrayer of America who’s had clear ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

What could Warren do? Conduct an investigation that established that Oswald was part of a Soviet and Cuba conspiracy to kill Kennedy, one that would lead to nuclear war that would lead to 40 million American deaths? That’s clearly not what Johnson wanted when he convinced Warren to serve on the commission. He wanted Warren to save the country by concluding that Oswald did it all alone, thereby sparing the United States from nuclear war with the Soviets.

There is another critically important factor that has to be considered here. It was the CIA during the Kennedy administration that started the assassination game against Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, a country that never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.

How could Warren conduct an investigation that would lead to the Soviet Union and Cuba and World War III knowing that it had been the CIA that had started the assassination war?

Did Warren know about the CIA’s repeated attempts to assassinate Castro, given that the CIA succeeded in keeping that fact secret from the public until the 1970s? While there is no direct, definitive evidence that the CIA informed Warren of that fact, according to a new book about the assassination, A Cruel and Shocking Act, by Phillip Shenon, Senator Richard Russell, another member of the Warren Commission who was fed the World War III scenario by Johnson, suspected that Warren was being secretly briefed by the CIA or Johnson during the commission proceedings. (Ironically, despite pointing out countless anomalies in the Kennedy case, Shenon ends up endorsing the lone-nut conclusion of the Warren Commission.)

If Warren were secretly apprised by the CIA or LBJ of what Johnson would later describe as a “damned Murder, Inc.” enterprise by which the CIA was assassinating — and trying to assassinate — foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro — a likely probability given the wish to shut down any investigation into the possibility of conspiracy — there is no way that Warren would have conducted an investigation that could possibly have led America into World War III and nuclear war, especially since it was the United States that would have secretly started the assassination war. How would they explain that to the people who survived the nuclear war?

The World War III scenario would also explain why Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach immediately issued a memo after the assassination saying that it was imperative that the American people be assured that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and not a part of a conspiracy to kill the president …  and why the FBI immediately settled on Oswald as the lone assassin and completely discounted the evidence of shots having been fired from the front … and why the military personnel at Bethesda falsified the autopsy to hide evidence of shots having been fired from the front …  and why the Warren Commission immediately set up an outline that focused on Lee Harvey Oswald as lone-nut assassin rather conduct a wide-open investigation that could lead to anyone, the type of full and wide-open investigation that we would ordinary expect when a federal official is assassinated.

During the past 50 years the mainstream debate has revolved around whether Oswald acted alone or as part of a conspiracy, which were the parameters established by the Warren Commission. The assumption has always been that Oswald did it. The question has always been and continues to be with the Washington establishment and the mainstream press: Did Oswald act alone or in concert with others.

The notion that Oswald didn’t do it at all — that he was an entirely innocent man — a man who was exactly what he said he was — a patsy, a person who is being framed for a crime he didn’t commit — was never seriously considered by the Warren Commission. Such a notion was simply considered inconceivable.

Yet, when one gives serious consideration to either the lone-nut theory or the Oswald-conspiracy theory, both theories lead to nothing but dead ends.

We’ve already seen that if you go the lone nut route, you end up with a man who has no motive to kill the president. Even the Warren Commission finally gave up trying to figure out Oswald’s motive. If he was motivated by a love of communism, why kill a president who is trying to end the Cold War and who has issued a guarantee that the United States will never invade Cuba again, knowing that he’ll be succeeded by Lyndon Johnson, the classic pro-Cold War president whose “the communists are coming to get us” mindset mirrored that of the Pentagon and the CIA? If Oswald was motivated, on the other hand, by wanting to become a famous man for killing a popular president, then why deny he committed the crime?

And if we instead go the Oswald conspiracy route, then we still end up with dead ends.

If he was acting as an agent of Cuba and the Soviet Union, why would they have hired a person that could easily be traced to them? Wouldn’t you think they would hire an assassin who wasn’t so public about his defection to the Soviet Union, his pro-communist views, and high-profile visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City?

Moreover, why would the Soviets and the Cubans want to get rid of a president who was now committed to ending the Cold War and living in mutual peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and Cuba, knowing that he’d be replaced by a president whose Cold War views mirrored those of the Pentagon and the CIA?

If Oswald was instead acting as agent of the Mafia, another popular theory, what incentive would U.S. officials have to conduct a fake and false autopsy to cover up an assassination committed solely by the Mafia (as compared to the Mafia as the CIA’s assassination partner)? We all know that that’s not the way the federal government works. If U.S. officials were convinced that Oswald was acting solely on behalf of the Mafia, the federal government would have unleashed a reign of terror on the Mafia that would have completely smashed it out of existence forever.

What about Oswald as coconspirator with the CIA and the military? That’s actually a possibility that the Warren Commission had to confront early on and that absolutely scared the members of the commission to death. At one of the early executive sessions of the commission, there was an urgent, almost panicked, deliberation over rumors that were coming out of Texas that Oswald had been serving as an informant for the FBI and possibly for U.S. intelligence. The matter was so sensitive that the Warren Commission even ordered the transcript of the meeting to be destroyed. (It was later discovered by assassination researchers because the court reporter who was recording the proceedings failed to destroy her original recording of the session.)

How was the matter resolved? The Warren Commission simply asked the head of the FBI and the CIA to state under oath whether Oswald was an informant. They both testified no, and that was the end of the matter.

What else could Warren and the rest of the commissioners do — accuse the CIA and the FBI of lying and order a private investigative team to force its way into CIA and FBI headquarters and start searching out incriminatory evidence within the CIA and FBI files? Imagine the headlines: “Warren Commission Targets CIA and FBI. Accuses Officials of Lying About Oswald.”

Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs fiasco, had also been appointed to serve on the commission by President Johnson. He was the guy that Kennedy had fired for what happened at the Bay of Pigs. Since Dulles was retired, he was able to attend more sessions than any other commissioner, all of whom had other fulltime jobs that seriously interfered with their service on the commission. Thus, Dulles was in the perfect position to ensure that the interests of the CIA were fully protected during the proceedings, not that any protection was needed because the commission and its staffers totally trusted the CIA during the entire proceedings.

Neither the Warren Commission nor the Washington establishment considered Dulles’ appointment to be a conflict of interest because it never occurred to them that the CIA might have been the one who orchestrated and carried out the assassination. It wouldn’t be until the 1970s, during the Church Committee hearings and the House Select Committee hearings, that people would learn that the trust that the Warren Commission had placed in the CIA had been seriously misplaced.

There is another factor to consider in the Oswald-CIA conspiracy scenario. If such a conspiracy had truly existed, wouldn’t you think that everyone involved in it would have been told in advance to keep his mouth shut in the event of an arrest? That’s not what Oswald did. He began jabbering away about being a “patsy,” a person that others had framed. If Oswald really was involved in such a conspiracy, wouldn’t he have figured that when the others were rounded up, they were going to finger him as also being involved in the plot?

Of course, there are also are those who hold that it is simply inconceivable that Lyndon Johnson would have been involved in such a plot, notwithstanding the fact that Johnson would clearly rank among the most crooked, rotten, power-hungry politicians who have ever served as president. Sure, the Johnson defenders say, it’s true that LBJ illegally stuffed ballot boxes in South Texas to win his U.S. Senate seat, and sure it’s true that he cavorted with known killers in Texas, and sure it’s true that he was facing the likelihood of a criminal indictment for corruption and bribery at the time Kennedy was assassinated, and sure it’s true that rumors were flying that JFK was going to dump Johnson off the ticket for the 1964 election. Nonetheless, it’s just considered inconceivable that LBJ would involve himself in a plot to remove Kennedy from office so that he could satisfy his lifelong quest to become president or even to avoid prison for corruption and bribery.

Well, let’s not forget that this was the man who killed millions of Vietnamese people without one iota of remorse or regret. This is the man who, just nine months after the assassination, knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally lied about the supposed North Vietnamese attack at the Gulf of Tonkin, enabling him and the national-security establishment to send tens of thousands of American men to their deaths in a senseless war in Southeast Asia.

Inconceivable? Don’t forget that it was Johnson who was patiently waiting for Kennedy’s body to be forcibly taken out of Parkland Hospital and delivered to his waiting plane, notwithstanding the supposed possibility that the assassination was the first step in a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. It was Johnson who had to have been the person who issued the order to that Secret Service team to violate Texas law and use whatever means necessary, including deadly force, to prevent an autopsy from being conducted in Texas. Secret Service agents would never have done something like that on their own initiative.

By raising the prospect of nuclear war, a war that the CIA would have started with its assassination attempts against Castro, the World War III scenario that Johnson outlined to Warren effectively shut down any possibility of an aggressive investigation that might have led directly to the national-security establishment.

Warren really had no other choice. If he conducted a real investigation that would, in his mind, likely lead to the Soviet Union and Cuba, that would mean the deaths of 40 million Americans, as Johnson pointed out to him. Since he was convinced that Oswald was the assassin anyway, it was best to simply leave things at that and move on.

But of course, that meant that there could be no real investigation into any other possible conspiracies, including one in which the national-security state orchestrated and carried out the assassination, a scheme in which Oswald, as an intelligence operative with a secret cover of being a U.S. Marine who had purportedly discovered a love for communism, was framed.

What difference does the Kennedy assassination make today?

Well, in case no one has noticed, the United States today is the world’s assassination nation. Yes, we are still #1 and exceptional in that one important area — assassinations. We lead the world in the number of assassinations being committed every year, against both Americans and non-Americans. And guess who is committing them. The CIA and the U.S. military — also known as the U.S. national-security state, the totalitarian-like apparatus that was brought into existence to wage a Cold War against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, and which fundamentally changed American life and culture in the process — the institution that is still part of America’s governmental structure despite the fact that the original justification for its existence — the Cold War — ended a long time ago.

Defenders of the lone-nut conclusion of the Warren Report say that conspiracy theorists simply cannot accept the notion of a little man killing a big man. Actually, the problem is that defenders of the lone-nut theory posited by the Warren Commission cannot accept the notion that the national-security state — an institution that was brought into existence to wage a “cold war” against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union — an institution that lone-nut proponents are convinced is essential to their freedom and well-being — an institution under which they have all been  born and raised and that they’re convinced defends their “freedom” and keeps them “safe” — one that they idolize, much as a child idolizes his parents — got a out of control and employed its omnipotent powers to remove what it perceived to be the biggest threat to national security since the advent of the national-security state in 1947 — a supposed threat posed by a president who had the audacity to reject the standard Cold War, anti-communist, nut-country mindset and instead pursue peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and Cuba, which, if he had been successful, would likely have led him to dismantle the national-security state apparatus itself, thereby restoring a peaceful and harmonious society to our land.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

In his famous essay, “War is the Health of the State,” Randolph Bourne made an important distinction between country and state.  One’s country is “an inescapable group into which we re born.”  As such, “there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than there is in our feeling for our family.” Country is “a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live,” wrote Bourne.

The state, on the other hand, “is essentially a concept of power, of competition.”  Conflating the two concepts – country and state – sends one into a hopeless and very dangerous confusion.  For the history of the American country is one of “conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals.”

The history of the American state, by contrast, is one of “making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing  those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for it all.

In peacetime the state “has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions,” wrote Bourne.  The average citizen largely ignores the state.  For example, at the outset of the American “Civil War” the only connection the average citizen had with the federal government was though the post office and paying about $45/year in taxes.  This of course is considered to be a disaster or a calamity by all statists.

“With the shock of war,” however, “the state comes into its own again.”  War is the health of the state.  It is the reason given for high taxes, internal revenue bureaucracies, pervasive spying, censorship, military conscription, the abolition of civil liberties, heavy debt, an explosive growth of government spending and borrowing, extensive excise taxation, nationalization of industries, socialist central planning, massive public indoctrination campaigns, the punishment and imprisonment of dissenters to the state’s rule, the shooting of deserters from its armies, the conquest of other countries, inflation of the currency, demonization of private enterprise and the civil society for being insufficiently “patriotic,” the growth of a military/industrial complex, a vast expansion of governmental pork barrel spending, the demonization of the ideas of freedom and individualism and those who espouse them, and a never-ending celebration, if not deification, of statism and militarism.

The average citizen has no interest in any of this.  The average citizen of a militaristic empire is nothing more than a taxpayer/supplier of cannon fodder in the eyes of the state.  Therein lies the state’s biggest conundrum:  How to go about getting the masses to go along with their own self enslavement as taxpayers and cannon fodder and cheerleaders for war.  The answer to this conundrum has always been the crafting of a series of lies about the “imperative” to wage war.  For as Bourne also wrote: “[A]ll foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war are . . . the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.”

Most people are “rationally ignorant” of almost all of what government does, and they are the most ignorant about foreign policy.  This allows politicians to lie nations into war with impunity, for they have always understood that “the moment war is declared . . . the mass of the people through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed [of starting a war] themselves (emphasis added).”  At that point “the citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the state once more walks in august presence, through the imaginations of men.”  Most destructively, “the patriot loses all sense of the distinction between state, nation, and government.”

LYING AMERICANS INTO WAR

As this is being written the U.S. government is spreading the tall tale that the Syrian government allegedly killed some 100 of its own citizens with poison gas.  President Obama announced last year, quite conveniently, that that is what would cause him to “cross the line” and wage war on the Syrian government despite the fact that the Syrian government poses no threat of harm to any American.  It is a replay of the last lie to start a war – the Bush administration’s lie that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” that somehow threatened Americans.  That was quickly proven to be a lie, but it was too late. As Randolph Bourne wrote, once a war is started most Americans become slavishly obedient to the warfare state and tend to believe all of is lies, no matter how spectacular they may be.  (The first Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s was partly “justified” by the lie that Iraqi soldiers were pulling the plugs in hospital nurseries where prematurely-born Kuwaiti babies were dying).

The War of 1812

Barely twenty years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified the “virus of imperialism” infected quite a few American politicians who believed it was their “manifest destiny” to invade and conquer Canada.  One of the congressional leaders of the early nineteenth-century war party, Henry Clay, celebrated the declaration of war on June 4, 1812, by declaring that “Every patriot bosom must throb with anxious solicitude for the result.  Every patriot arm will assist in making that result conducive to the glory of our beloved country” (David and Jeane Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American, p. 98).

Among the “official reasons” for the invasion of Canada in 1812 were the alleged “impressment” of American sailors by the British government, but that had been going on for decades, as Justin Raimondo has pointed out.  The tall tale was also broadcast that the “evil” British were encouraging Indians to attack American settlers.  The real reason for the war, however, was an impulse to grow the state with an imperialistic war of conquest.  The result of the war was a disaster – the British burned down the White House, the Library of Congress, and much of Washington, D.C.  Americans were saddled with a huge war debt that was used as an excuse to resurrect the corrupt and economically destabilizing Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.

The Mexican-American War

When James K. Polk became president in 1845 he announced to his cabinet that one of his chief objectives was to acquire California, which was then a part of Mexico.  As he wrote in his diary (online as “The Diary of James K. Polk”), “I stated to the cabinet that up to this time as they knew, we had heard of no open act of aggression by the Mexican army, but that the danger was imminent that such acts would be committed.  I said that in my opinion we had ample cause of war.”

Thus, long before the presidency of George W. Bush, James K, Polk advocated the neocon notion of “pre-emptive war.”  Polk recognized that the Mexican army had not committed any “act of aggression,” so set out to provoke one by sending American troops to the border of Mexico in territory that historians agree was “disputed territory” at the time because of a very dubious claim by the U.S. government.  None other than Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that, as a young soldier serving under the command of General Zachary Taylor during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, he understood that he had been sent there to provoke a fight:

“The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory furthest from the Mexican settlements, was not sufficient to provoke hostilities.  We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.  I was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive [President Polk] could announce, ‘Whereas  war exist by the acts of, etc.’ and prosecute the contest with vigor.”

Polk’s gambit worked; he did provoke the Mexican army.  In his war message to Congress he then declared that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. . . .  As war exists . . . by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”   This con game of provoking a war by showing up on another nation’s border, heavily armed with weapons aimed at the hoped-for belligerent, would be repeated many times in subsequent generations, right up to today’s provocation of a war in Syria.

The invasion and conquest of Mexico enabled the U.S. government to acquire California and New Mexico at the cost of some 15,000 American lives and at least 25,000 Mexican casualties.  It was an aggressive war of conquest and imperialism.

The American “Civil War”

In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln threatened “invasion” and “bloodshed” (his exact words) in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff tax on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier.  At the time, tariffs accounted for more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenue, so this was a gigantic tax increase.  This is how Lincoln threatened war in his first official oration:

“The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”

But of course the states of the lower South, having seceded, did not intend to “collect the duties and imposts” and send the money to Washington, D.C.  Lincoln committed treason (as defined by Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution) by levying war upon the free and independent states, which he always considered to be a part of the American union.  By his own admission (and his subsequent actions), he invaded his own country over tax collection.

The Republican Party of 1860 was the party of protectionism and high tariffs. The Confederate Constitution had outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether.  The result would have been a massive diversion of world trade to the Southern ports which would have forced the U.S. government to reduce its desired 50 percent average tariff rate to competitive levels (10-15 percent), depriving Northern manufacturers of this veiled form of corporate welfare, and depriving the government of the revenue it needed to pursue its “manifest destiny” of a mercantilist empire complete with massive subsidies for railroad corporations (among others).

Lincoln’s dilemma was that he knew he would be condemned worldwide for waging a bloody war over tax collection.  Another excuse for war had to be invented, so he invented the notion of the “mystical,” permanent, and non-voluntary union.  He did not want to be seen as the aggressor in his war for tariff revenue, so he hatched a plot to trick Southerners into firing the first shot by sending American warships to Charleston Harbor while steadfastly refusing to meet with Confederate peace commissioners or discuss the purchase of federal property by the Confederate government.  He understood that the Confederates would not tolerate a foreign fort on their property any more than George Washington would have tolerated a British fort in New York or Boston Harbors.

Quite a few Northern newspapers recognized the game Lincoln was playing.  On April 16, 1861the Buffalo Daily Courier editorialized that “The affair at Fort Sumter . . has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified” (Howard Cecil Perkis, Northern Editorials on Secession).  The New York Evening Day Book wrote on April 17, 1861, that the event at Fort Sumter was “a cunningly devised scheme” contrived “to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South.”  “Look at the facts,” the Providence Daily Post wrote on April 13, 1861.  “For three weeks the [Lincoln] administration newspapers have been assuring us that Ford Sumter would be abandoned,” but “Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.”  The Jersey City American Standard editorialized that “there is a madness and ruthlessness” in Lincoln’s behavior, concluding that Lincolns sending of ships to Charleston Harbor was “a pretext for letting loose the horrors of war.”

After Fort Sumter, on May 1, 1861, Lincoln wrote to his naval commander, Captain Gustavus Fox, to say that “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country [i.e., a civil war] would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”  He was thanking Captain Fox for his role in duping the Confederates into firing upon Fort Sumter (where no one was either killed or wounded).  He was thanking Captain Fox for his assistance in

starting the war.  Lincoln responded with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states and a four-year war that, according to the latest research, was responsible for as many as 850,000 American deaths with more than double that number maimed for life.

The Spanish-American War

Immediately after the “Civil War” the U.S. government waged a twenty-five-year war of genocide against the Plains Indians “to make way for the railroad corporations,” as General Sherman declared (See my Independent Review article, “Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality”).  Then by the late 1880s  American imperialists wanted to kick the Spanish out of Cuba where American business interests had invested in sugar and tobacco plantations.  An American warship, the U.S.S. Maine, was sent to Havana in January of 1898 to supposedly protect American business interests from an insurrection.  On February 15, 1898, a mysterious explosion sunk the ship, killing 270 sailors.  The Spanish were blamed for the explosion despite a lack of incriminating evidence.  “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” newspaperman William Randolph Hearst famously said to the artist Frederic Remington, implying that, armed with the artist’s illustrations, his newspapers would generate war propaganda.  The U.S. government waged war with Spain occupied Cuba for the next four years, making the world safe for American sugar and tobacco corporations.

World War I

In 1915 a German submarine sunk the RMS Lusitania, a British ship that was supposedly a civilian cruise ship.  About one-hundred Americans were on board, which enabled President Woodrow Wilson to copy Lincoln’s war tactic and use the sinking of the ship to argue for war.  Before the sinking of the Lusitania Wilson knew that the ship was carrying arms but refused to issue warnings to American passengers that, since Britain and Germany were at war, it could be risky to be a passenger on the Lusitania.  He used the sinking of the ship to excite anti-German hysteria and persuade the Congress to have the U.S enter the European war.  In 2008 a diving expedition discovered that the Lusitania held more than four million rounds of rifle ammunition, much of which was packed away in boxes labeled “cheese” or “butter” or “oysters.”

The Pearl Harbor Deception

Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, is a World War II veteran who had a career as a journalist with the Oakland Tribune and BBC for several decades after the war.  He researched his book upon discovering, in 1993, that the U.S. Naval Security Group Command had decided to place into public archives at the University of Maryland hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by U.S. monitoring/spying stations prior to Pearl Harbor.  These records had not been seen by anyone since 1941.

What Stinnett found was that, just as the vast majority of Northerners did not favor war on the eve of Fort Sumter in 1861, the vast majority of Americans eighty years later supported the America First non-interventionist movement led by Charles Lindbergh.  Eighty percent of the American public was non-interventionist in 1940-1941.  After Germany “made a strategic error” by signing a treaty with Japan,, a U.S. Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of Naval Intelligence apparently saw an opportunity to counter the America First movement by provoking Japan into attacking the United States and getting the public behind war.

Using the government’s own sources, Stinnett found that President Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted an Office of Naval Intelligence plan to provoke Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor with an eight-point plan, the most important of which was keeping most of the U.S. fleet parked as sitting ducks at Pearl Harbor.  When the commander of the U.S. fleet, Admiral James Richardson, objected to allowing his sailors to be slaughtered by the Japanese, FDR fired Richardson and replaced him with Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel.

FDR implemented the entire eight-point plan but kept Admiral Kimmel and General Walter Short, commander of U.S. Army troops in Hawaii, in the dark.  Over 1,000 Japanese messages per day were intercepted by the U.S. Navy, which knew in advance everything the Japanese were doing in the Pacific on their way to Pearl Harbor.  They knew in advance that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941.  Kimmel and Short were even given direct orders by FDR himself, Stinnett found, to “remain in a defensive posture” because “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.”

On October 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act that, among many other things, acknowledged that Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence about the Japanese fleet prior to the Pearl Harbor attack.  Kimmel and Short were fired by FDR after the attack, but were exonerated fifty-nine years later.

The Gulf of Tonkin “Incidents”

Shortly before his assassination in November of 1963 President John F. Kennedy had begun recalling U.S. military “advisors” from Vietnam.  His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was hell bent on waging total war in Vietnam.  Once again the American public had little interest in a civil war thousands of miles away in Asia, but were easily duped into acquiescing in one.  Once again the ruse involved mysterious occurrences involving battle ships in the middle of nowhere, where the only accounts of the incidents came from the U.S government.

The U.S. government began “covertly” supplying gunboats to the South Vietnamese army which were used to attack the coast of North Vietnam.  This was acknowledged in 1964 by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  In addition,

American warships hovered around North Vietnamese ports.  This included the USS Maddox.  Placing the ships in harm’s way was Johnson’s FDR-type strategy to provoke an attack by the North Vietnamese, and it succeeded.

Johnson falsely claimed that there was a second attack on the USS Maddox, but that is acknowledged to be a hoax.   Naval sonar picked up American propeller noise, and radar showed images caused by bad weather, not North Vietnamese gunboats.  Johnson nevertheless made a radio speech describing a second “attack” and called for military retaliation.  Soon thereafter he ordered air strikes.  In a 2003 television documentary entitled “The Fog of War” Robert McNamara admitted that the second attack on the Maddox “never happened.”

It may seem trite, but it is nevertheless true that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are bound to repeat its mistakes.  Americans are about to repeat the same mistake of squandering their blood and treasure on another military adventure (in Syria) that has nothing whatsoever to do with defending American freedom – or anyone else’s.

To study imperialism and anti-imperialism more intensely, consider signing up for my new five-week online course on the subject through the Mises Academy beginning the evening of September 9.

On July 23 I wrote about how the US reversed roles with the USSR and became the tyrant that terrifies the world. We have now had further confirmation of that fact. It comes from two extraordinary actions by Washington’s British puppet state.

David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, who is reporting on the illegal and unconstitutional spying by the National Stasi Agency, was seized, no doubt on Washington’s orders, by the puppet British government from the international transit zone of a London airport. Miranda had not entered the UK, but he was seized by UK authorities. http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-gay-greenwald-freedom-police-679/ Washington’s UK puppets simply kidnapped him, threatened him for nine hours, and stole his computer, phones, and all his electronic equipment. As a smug US official told the media, “the purpose was to send a message.”

You might remember that Edward Snowden was stuck for some weeks in the international transit zone of the Moscow airport. The Obama tyrant repeatedly browbeat Russia’s President Putin to violate the law and kidnap Snowden for Obama. Unlike the once proud and law-abiding British, Putin refused to place Washington’s desires above law and human rights.

The second extraordinary violation occurred almost simultaneously with UK authorities appearing at the Guardian newspaper and illegally destroying the hard drives on the newspaper’s computers with the vain intention of preventing the newspaper from reporting further Snowden revelations of US/UK high criminality.

It is fashionable in the US and UK governments and among their sycophants to speak of “gangster state Russia.” But we all know who the gangsters are. The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

This is extraordinary. It was the English who originated liberty. True, in 1215 it was the freedom of the barons’ rights from the king’s infringement, not the freedom of the commoner. But once the principle was established it spread into the entire society. By 1680 the legal revolution was complete. The king and the government were subject to law. The king and his government were no longer the law and above the law.

In the 13 colonies the Englishmen who populated them inherited this English achievement. When King George’s government refused the colonies the Rights of Englishmen, the colonists revolted, and the United States was born.

The descendants of these colonists now live in an America where their Constitutional protections have been overthrown by a tyrannical government that claims it is above the law. This raw fact has not stopped the US government or its puppets from continuing to cloak the war crime of military aggression in the faux language of “bringing freedom and democracy.” If the Obama and Cameron governments were in the dock at Nuremberg, the entirety of both governments would be convicted. 

The question is: are there sufficient brainwashed people in both countries to sustain the US/UK myth that “freedom and democracy” are attained via war crimes?

There is no shortage of brainwashed Americans who love to be told that they are“indispensable” and “exceptional,” and therefore entitled to work their will on the world. It is difficult to discern in these clueless Americans much hope for the revival of liberty. But there is some indication that the British, who did not inherit liberty but had to fight for it for five centuries, might be more determined.

The British Home Affairs Committee, chaired by Keith Vaz, is demanding an explanation from Obama’s lap dog, the British prime minister. Also, Britain’s watchman over anti-terrorism enforcement, David Anderson, is demanding that the UK Home Office and police explain the illegal use of anti-terrorism laws against Miranda, who is not a terrorist or connected to terrorism in any way.

Brazil’s foreign minister has joined the fray, demanding that London explain why the UK violated its own law and abused a Brazilian citizen.

Of course, everyone knows that Washington forced its UK puppet to violate law in order to serve Washington. One wonders if the British will ever decide that they would be better off as a sovereign country.

The White House denied involvement in Miranda’s kidnapping, but refused to condemn the illegal action of its puppet.

As for the UK’s destruction of press freedom, the White House supports that, too. It is already happening here.

Meanwhile, get accustomed to the police state: http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/now-big-brother-targets-your-fedex-ups-packages/

Abducted by bounty hunters, imprisoned without cause, denied due process of law, cleared of all charges yet forbidden to go home, scores of innocent men in the Guantanamo Bay gulag have been driven to resist in the only way they can – by staging a hunger strike.

Finding themselves irretrievably in the hands of an immensely powerful enemy that is entirely unburdened by moral scruples, the Gitmo hunger strikers have decided to pursue freedom on the only terms available to them: Either as living human beings, or as souls emancipated from bodies that remain unjustly confined, they will be free.

The despicable people who run the Caribbean prison are more than willing to allow their victims to kill themselves out of despair – or evento murder some of them and disguise the act as suicide. However, they will not countenance the act of self-slaughter if it is made as an assertion of self-ownership.

So since the hunger strike began in February, the gulag-keepers in Guantanamo Bay have employed the same tactic once used by their Soviet forebears in dealing with dissenters: They have been punishing the hunger-strikers by force-feeding them, an act widely recognized as torture. This involves shackling a victim to a restraint chair, immobilizing his head, and either forcing a feeding tube down his throat, or snaking it down a nasal passage through the alimentary canal into his stomach.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who underwent force-feeding after being arrested by the KGB and sent to the Soviet psychiatric gulag, has described the experience.

“In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow” – that regime’s functional equivalent of Gitmo – “I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.”

What Bukovsky described as a novel method is now standard operating procedure at Gitmo. In words saturated with pain, Bukovsky recounted that the effort to insert the feeding tube turned his nose into a bloody geyser, and wrenched tears from his eyes. His captors, determined to make him submit, were initially heedless of his suffering, and “kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit.”To understand the depravity of this procedure, and to appreciate the focused cruelty necessary to carry it out, it is worthwhile to view the demonstration video produced by Reprieve that features actor and activist Yasiin Bey (also known by the stage name Mos Def). The video re-enactment– in which Bey was reduced to a tearful wreck within less than a minute – shows the performer being shackled, confined to a restraint chair, and enduring the insertion of the feeding tube. It was released on July 8 – the same day that US District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington issued a ruling that she has no authority to force the military to end the practice. Apparently, this can only be done on the orders of the Dear Leader himself. The video, produced by the British human rights organization Reprieve, is unbearable to watch, but please – for the love of God – watch it.

Bear in mind that this Soviet-grade torture technique, which takes up to two hours, has been inflicted twice a day on victims who, unlike Bey, could not stop it.

Bukovksy endured this hideous ritual for ten days. He eventually outlasted his tormentors, who – unlike the American functionaries at Gitmo – retained some moral inhibitions over torture.

Eventually, he recalled, “the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: `Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It’ll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool.’ The doctor was in tears: `Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can’t do that.’ And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.”

We should take a moment to unpack this remarkable account. First of all, the Soviet doctor who carried out the force-feeding was afraid that she would be prosecuted for torturing Bukovsky. In contemporary – which is to say, Soviet – America, a doctor who enables can enjoy a lucrative pension and an appointment to a prestigious leadership position in a mainstream church. In Bukovsky’s case, the guards were eager to find some excuse to disobey orders to torture their victim, and were afflicted with decent shame over what they had done to him. I vehemently doubt that the same can be said of the supposed heroes stationed at Guantanamo Bay.

The inescapable conclusion is that the Soviet police state apparatus, while incontestably vile and murderous, was in some ways less depraved than the version over which Washington now presides. 

Pentagon spokesliar Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale dismissed Reprieve’s force-feeding reenactment as “a clever bit of cause marketing” and insisted that what was done to the heroic Yassin Bey “doesn’t comport with our procedures.” That latter comment is technically true, since there’s no evidence that Bey was beaten in his cell by a thugscrum of armored assailants and then beaten once again when he was returned to confinement – an omission that actually underplays the criminal violence that is part of the ritual.

At least 45 of the strikers have been subjected to force-feeding. After losing as much as a third of their body weight, they have been left frail and sickly – and thus are irresistible targets to the heroes who swarm the inmates in overwhelming numbers and beat them without pity. As was the case in the Soviet Union, operatives of the American Homeland Security State are drawn from a stygian talent pool in which sociopaths and sadists are common. The military personnel involved in torturing the Gitmo hunger-strikers must of necessity be the kind of people who revel in brutalizing innocent, helpless people. This is especially true of the depraved people who compose the Initial Reaction Forces (IRFs) – the SWAT-style squads used to carry out “Forcible Cell Extractions” (FCEs) of hunger strikers.

British citizen Shaker Aamer, who has been imprisoned at Gitmo since 2002 and cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, has described how he has been beaten by IRFs merely for requesting a cup of water.

“They come into my cell, slam me on the floor, shackle me, haul me out of the cell, put a bottle of water on my bed, pull me back in, and cut the shackles off – with a few thwacks in between,” Aamer testifies in a report published by Reprieve. Frightened of the abuse he would experience if he sought to take a shower, Aamer has resorted to using toilet water to cleanse himself.

“They wear white gowns with black uniforms with weapons,” testifies detainee Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani. “The outfits they wear are like the Darth Vader uniforms from Star Wars. They force me to lie on the concrete floor on my stomach. They stand outside the door and order me to bend my legs up at the back. Then they rush into the cell and sit on me. One will bind my hands, one my legs, and so on. I am not resisting or doing anything. I am just lying on the floor.”

If he offers any protest, or tries to invoke his rights in any way, Rabbani continues, he will be beaten and kicked as his assailants chant the shared refrain of police officers and rapists: “Don’t resist! Don’t resist!”

What is done in Gitmo won’t stay in Gitmo. The Regime’s offshore gulag has been a training academy for future law enforcement officers and prison guards. It has also been an experimental laboratory for techniques and strategies that will be imported into the mainland. This has happened many times before.

For example: the practice of waterboarding (aka the “Water Cure”), which had been used extensively by US occupation forces in the Philippines, was adopted as an interrogation method by many domestic police departments until the 1930s. Specialized military police units organized by US “military advisers” in Vietnam during the late 1950s provided the template used for the first SWAT team in Los Angeles in 1968. A recent 60 Minutes broadcast hymned the praises of police units in Springfield, Massachusetts that have incorporated the “counterinsurgency” methods employed by occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shutting down Gitmo would not mean an end to the practices that have been perfected there.

Force-feeding in US prisons is commonplace. William Coleman, a prison inmate in Connecticut, has been force-fed for the past five years. Coleman staged a hunger strike to protest what he insists is a wrongful domestic violence conviction. The state supreme court agreed that this was necessary to deter other hunger strikes, which are described as a threat to “prison security.” In California, prison officials can withhold food and water from critically ill inmates who reject “life-sustaining treatment,” but they claim the authority to force-feed inmates who stage hunger strikes. On August 19 a federal judge granted permission for California prison officials to force-feed 70 inmatestaking part in a hunger strike protesting the practice of solitary confinement — which in some cases can last for decades.

There is at least one case in which police obtained a warrant for what could be called force-feeding in reverse.

A recently revealed warrant issued by a Milwaukee judge ordered physicians to pump the stomach of a man named Terrance Fleetwood, who was suspected of swallowing a bag filled with cocaine. That warrant was signed at 1:45 a.m. on February 22 by Circuit Judge Ellen Brostrom – which means that she didn’t invest any deliberation into the matter at all. From her perspective, there is nothing remarkable, let alone objectionable, about ordering physicians to torture a suspect in order to extract evidence from his stomach. Doctors refused to carry out the procedure, called a nasogastric aspiration, without Fleetwood’s consent. By upholding their obligations under the Hippocratic Oath, they risked being arrested for obstruction and being imprisoned for contempt of court.

The police staked out Fleetwood’s hospital bed for five days, and failed to find any evidence that he had consumed cocaine. They eventually charged him with several offenses, including narcotics possession and obstruction. Prosecutors extorted a plea agreement from the victim that resulted in an 18 month prison sentence.

This was not the only example of what we could call the “Gitmo-ization” of domestic law enforcement.

In August 2008,  Niagara Falls County Judge Sara Sperrazza issued an order that Ryan Smith submit to a DNA test to see if he was involved in a pair of armed robberies. Smith gave the sample, but it was sent to the wrong lab and ruined.

A second order was issued without informing Smith’s defense attorney. Smith refused the second test. The DA’s office authorized police to use “minimum force” to compel Smith to submit to the test. The police used a Taser to break down Smith’s resistance and secure the sample.

The defense challenged the legality of this act. Judge Sperrazza ruled that it is permissible to use a Taser to enforce a court order, as long as the device is not used “maliciously.”

Using the device with clinical, dispassionate indifference to the rights of the victim would be perfectly acceptable, however.

In reversing that ruling last year, a New York State appeals court recognized that the Taser is an implement that can be used to inflect “extreme pain … with little or no injury” and ruled that the use of a Taser to extract the DNA sample was “unreasonable” because the suspect “posed no immediate threat to the safety of himself or the officers.” What this means, of course, is that next time police decide to employ a Taser in an interrogation they will invoke the all-sufficient claim of “officer safety” to justify torturing the suspect.

The comprehensive denial of self-ownership is the foundation of every totalitarian system. In contemporary America, no individual has any rights that those who operate on behalf of the malignant fiction called the State are required to respect – and the innocent have no right to resist under any circumstances, even to the extent of withholding DNA or blood samples or the content of their stomachs, or choosing to die rather than enduring imprisonment that is both interminable and illegal.

It is true that we don’t see systematic abuses of the kind that took place in Stalin’s Russia. What we see instead is the imposition of Stalinism on an “as-applied” basis – or what we could call “scalable totalitarianism.” The Regime that rules us is at least as bad as the one from which it supposedly saved us during the Cold War.

Over the last three years of coaching runners, I’ve reviewed hundreds of runner questionnaires. This is the exhaustive list of questions that allow me to dig deep into a runner’s background, injury profile, fitness level, schedule, racing history, and more so I can tailor their training to their personal needs. After hundreds of hours of reading through this information, a lot of common themes have emerged. In fact, I can boil them down to five popular mistakes that minimize the results of your hard work.

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Bradley Manning is the only combat veteran of the Iraq war whose service is worth honoring. Like hundreds of thousands of servicemen, Manning carried out unlawful orders to participate in an illegal war. Unlike any of the rest, he took necessary action to expose discrete criminal acts committed in the larger context of that illegal enterprise.

While serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning sometimes felt as if he were “watching nonstop snuff films,” according to a New York magazine profile.  His job consisted of sitting at a work station and evaluating Iraqis as targets. This meant “reducing a human being to a few salient points. Then he made a quick decision based on imperfect information: kill, capture, exploit, source.”

Unlike countless other U.S servicemen who took refuge in the idea that obedience to superiors immunizes criminal behavior, Manning tried to discriminate between “insurgents” and innocent bystanders, only to find that such distinctions do not exist when one is fighting a war of aggression. When he expressed concerns about this to his superiors, Manning was told to choke down such questions and get back to the task of killing people who resented being occupied by a prohibitively stronger foreign power.

In late 2009, Manning told a psychological counselor “about a targeting mission gone bad in Basra” in which an unambiguously innocent bystander was killed. That incident left Manning incapacitated with guilt and remorse. It’s quite likely that it also led Manning to confront the moral reality that every use of lethal force by U.S. personnel in Iraq was an act of murder.

Shortly after speaking with a psychologist about the Basra incident, Manning performed a heroic act in the service of his country and the rule of law by leaking the Iraq war logs and the notorious “Collateral Murder” video documenting the slaughter – by two U.S. Apache helicopter gunships – of twelve innocent civilians.

During the recently concluded show trial of Manning, the prosecution insisted that by publicizing the “Collateral Murder” video, the whistleblower had given material aid to the enemy. In fact, he had exposed a criminal policy imposed and carried out by the superior officers to whom he was expected to report such atrocities. Former U.S. Army Specialist Ethan McCord, who can be seen in the video attempting to carry two wounded children to safety – has testified that the crime documented in the video was the product of “standard operating procedure” dictating “360 degree rotational fire” in residential neighborhoods in retaliation for IED attacks on occupation troops.

When Manning became aware of war crimes, he was legally and morally obligated to report them – not just to his superior officers, who were at best aggressively indifferent to them, but to the public from whom those officers derive their supposed authority. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers witnessed war crimes, but as far as we presently know, Manning was the only soldier deployed to Iraq who had the character and moral courage necessary to avoid silent complicity in them.

Although Manning was acquitted of the charge of aiding the enemy – which carried a potential sentence of life without parole – he was convicted of 19 criminal counts, including five espionage charges, and could still find himself facing the equivalent of a life sentence. Prior to his trial, Manning was held for nine months in an especially severe form of solitary confinement that involved forced nudity, sleep deprivation, and persistent abuse. His treatment, which constituted torture, won him a reduction off 112 days from the prison sentence he will receive for the supposed offense of exposing officially sanctioned crimes.

If Manning had been a war criminal, rather than an honorable soldier who exposed war crimes, his pre-trial confinement would have led to dismissal of the charges against him – or his sentence being overturned.

Like Private Manning, Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins served in Iraq. He committed war crimes of the kind Manning helped expose to the public. He led an eight-man squad that kidnapped an innocent Iraqi man from his home, took him to a ditch and shot him in the face. They then planted a gun and a shovel and claimed that the Iraqi, a retired police officer, was a suspected insurgent.

Hutchins was sentenced to 11 years for murder. A military appeals court has overturned that conviction, claiming that his rights were violated when he was unlawfully detained without a lawyer for seven days. Hutchins was released after serving roughly five and a half years in prison. Manning has already spent more than three years behind bars. His father described the convicted murderer as a “scapegoat,” insisting that he “was unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The same was true of every other U.S. soldier who took part in the occupation of Iraq, including Private Manning. The difference was that Hutchins faithfully carried out orders to murder Iraqis, and Manning understood that the government that employed him is not exempt from the moral law.

Sgt. Ray Girouard is another war criminal who was granted leniency by the government that had employed him. Like Hutchins, Girouard commanded a combat unit that committed an atrocity – in this case, the murder of three handcuffed Iraqi detainees. Like Hutchins, Girouard was convicted on the testimony of his comrades, all of whom were given lighter sentences in exchange for testifying against their squad leader. And like Hutchins, Girouard claims that he is a “scapegoat” who carried out orders and then covered up for his men “out of loyalty” when they “messed up.”

Girouard commanded a May 9, 2006 mission in which he was ordered to “kill all military-age males” in an area described as a terrorist training camp. His unit dragged three men out of a house, zip-tied their hands, and called for a chopper. Girouard claims that when he left the house, “I [heard] this volley of gunfire…. I run back and see these three bodies lying on the ground with their blindfolds half-off. My guys are shouting, `They tried to escape. We shot them. They were terrorists. They were going to come back and kill us.’”

It should be acknowledged that attempting to kill foreign invaders who have occupied your country is not an act of terrorism. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that this account, if taken at face value, marked the soldiers under Girouard’s command as incurable cowards. Their behavior is eerily reminiscent of the conduct of police officers who lose bladder control and gun down unarmed citizens who are seen as a threat to “officer safety.” This isn’t surprising, given that the crime in Iraq was carried out by another branch of the Regime’s fraternity of armed bullies.

According to Girouard, he covered up the killings by filing a false official report claiming that the victims had attacked his men. That would make him an accessory to murder. However, the soldiers who carried out the murders later testified that they had done so under Girouard’s orders. One of them, Specialist Juston Graber, claimed that he had “finished off” a wounded detainee after being explicitly ordered to do so by Girouard.

After being found guilty of negligent homicide, Girouard was given a ten-year prison sentence. He spent three years in Ft. Leavenworth before his conviction was overturned and he was given a “general discharge under honorable conditions.”

“It’s such a blessing,” exulted Girouard after returning to his home in Sweetwater, Tennessee. “I get all my benefits and everything now.”

Such leniency is reserved for those who are faithful in carrying out imperial crimes. From the perspective of those who control the Regime, committing war crimes is a duty, but reporting them is a felony.

We probably know all the Google search tricks, but there are still things that Google can't tell us at first glance. Google's a Hercules, but we shouldn't be shortsighted not to spot the midgets. Yes, if you really want to go into those little hidden lanes of the web you need to keep a roster of alternative search engines close by. Here's a roll call of some search engines which can grab for you what even Google can't.

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What do great men like Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill have in common?

They all were proficient in Latin.

From the Middle Ages until about the middle of the 20th century, Latin was a central part of a man’s schooling in the West. Along with logic and rhetoric, grammar (as Latin was then known) was included as part of the Trivium – the foundation of a medieval liberal arts education. From Latin, all scholarship flowed and it was truly the gateway to the life of the mind, as the bulk of scientific, religious, legal, and philosophical literature was written in the language until about the 16^th century. To immerse oneself in classical and humanistic studies, Latin was a must.

Grammar schools in Europe and especially England during this time were Latin schools, and the first secondary school established in America by the Puritans was a Latin school as well. But beginning in the 14^th century, writers started to use the vernacular in their works, which slowly chipped away at Latin’s central importance in education. This trend for English-language learning accelerated in the 19^th century; schools shifted from turning out future clergymen to graduating businessmen who would take their place in an industrializing economy. An emphasis on the liberal arts slowly gave way to what was considered a more practical education in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

While Latin had been dying a slow death for hundreds of years, it still had a strong presence in schools until the middle of the 20^th century. Beginning in the 1960s, college students demanded that the curriculum be more open, inclusive, and less Euro-centric. Among their suggested changes was eliminating Latin as a required course for all students. To quell student protests, universities began to slowly phase out the Latin requirement, and because colleges stopped requiring Latin, many high schools in America stopped offering Latin classes, too.  Around the same time, the Catholic Church revised its liturgy and permitted priests to lead Mass in vernacular languages instead of Latin, thus eliminating one of the public’s last ties to the ancient language.

While it’s no longer a requirement for a man to know Latin to get ahead in life, it’s still a great subject to study. I had to take classes in Latin as part of my “Letters” major at the University of Oklahoma, and I really enjoyed it. Even if you’re well out of school yourself, there are a myriad of reasons why you should still consider obtaining at least a rudimentary knowledge of the language:

Knowing Latin can improve your English vocabulary. While English is a Germanic language, Latin has strongly influenced it. Most of our prefixes and some of the roots of common English words derive from Latin. By some estimates, 30% of English words derive from the ancient language. By knowing the meaning of these Latin words, if you chance to come across a word you’ve never seen before, you can make an educated guess at what it means. In fact, studies have found that high school students who studied Latin scored a mean of 647 on the SAT verbal exam, compared with the national average of 505.

Knowing Latin can improve your foreign language vocabulary. Much of the commonly spoken Romantic languages like Spanish, French, and Italian derived from Vulgar Latin. You’ll be surprised by the number of Romantic words that are pretty much the same as their Latin counterparts.

Many legal terms are in Latin. Nolo contendere. Mens rea. Caveat emptor. Do you know what those mean? They’re actually common legal terms. While strides have been made to translate legal writing into plain English, you’ll still see old Latin phrases thrown into legal contracts every now and then. To be an educated citizen and consumer, you need to know what these terms mean. If you plan on going to law school, I highly recommend boning up on Latin. You’ll run into it all the time, particularly when reading older case law.

Knowing Latin can give you more insight to history and literature. Latin was the lingua franca of the West for over a thousand years. Consequently, much of our history, science, and great literature was first recorded in Latin. Reading these classics in the original language can give you insights you otherwise may have missed by consuming it in English.

Moreover, modern writers (and by modern I mean beginning in the 17th century) often pepper their work with Latin words and phrases without offering a translation because they (reasonably) expect the reader to be familiar with it. This is true of great books from even just a few decades ago (seems much less common these days – which isn’t a hopeful commentary on the direction of the public’s literacy I would think). Not having a rudimentary knowledge of Latin will cause you to miss out on fully understanding what the writer meant to convey.

Below we’ve put together a list of Latin words and phrases to help pique your interest in learning this classical language. This list isn’t exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination. We’ve included some of the most common Latin words and phrases that you still see today, which are helpful to know in boosting your all-around cultural literacy. We’ve also included some particularly virile sayings, aphorisms, and mottos that can inspire greatness or remind us of important truths. Perhaps you’ll find a Latin phrase that you can adopt as your personal motto.Semper Virilis!

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I spent the summer of 1961 behind the Iron Curtain. I was part of the US-USSR student exchange program. It was the second year of the program that operated under auspices of the US Department of State. Our return to the West via train through East Germany was interrupted by the construction of the Berlin Wall. We were sent back to Poland. The East German rail tracks were occupied with Soviet troop and tank trains as the Red Army concentrated in East Germany to face down any Western interference.

Fortunately, in those days there were no neoconservatives. Washington had not grown the hubris it so well displays in the 21st century. The wall was built and war was avoided. The wall backfired on the Soviets. Both JFK and Ronald Reagan used it to good propaganda effect.

In those days America stood for freedom, and the Soviet Union for oppression. Much of this impression was created by Western propaganda, but there was some semblance to the truth in the image. The communists had a Julian Assange and an Edward Snowden of their own. His name was Cardinal Jozef Mindszenty, the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church.

Mindszenty opposed tyranny. For his efforts he was imprisoned by the Nazis. Communists also regarded his as an undesirable, and he was tortured and given a life sentence in 1949.

Freed by the short-lived Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Mindszenty reached the American Embassy in Budapest and was granted political asylum by Washington. However, the communists would not give him the free passage that asylum presumes, and Mindszenty lived in the US Embassy for 15 years, 79% of his remaining life.

In the 21st century roles have reversed. Today it is Washington that is enamored of tyranny. On Washington’s orders, the UK will not permit Julian Assange free passage to Ecuador, where he has been granted asylum. Like Cardinal Mindszenty, Assange is stuck in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

Washington will not permit its European vassal states to allow overflights of airliners carrying Edward Snowden to any of the countries that have offered Snowden asylum. Snowden is stuck in the Moscow airport.

In Washington politicians of both parties demand that Snowden be captured and executed. Politicians demand that Russia be punished for not violating international law, seizing Snowden, and turning him over to Washington to be tortured and executed, despite the fact that Washington has no extradition treaty with Russia.

Snowden did United States citizens a great service. He told us that despite constitutional prohibition, Washington had implemented a universal spy system intercepting every communication of every American and much of the rest of the world. Special facilities are built in which to store these communications.

In other words, Snowden did what Americans are supposed to do–disclose government crimes against the Constitution and against citizens. Without a free press there is nothing but the government’s lies. In order to protect its lies from exposure, Washington intends to exterminate all truth tellers.

The Obama Regime is the most oppressive regime ever in its prosecution of protected whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are protected by law, but the Obama Regime insists that whistleblowers are not really whistleblowers. Instead, the Obama Regime defines whistleblowers as spies, traitors, and foreign agents. Congress, the media, and the faux judiciary echo the executive branch propaganda that whistleblowers are a threat to America. It is not the government that is violating and raping the US Constitution that is a threat. It is the whistleblowers who inform us of the rape who are the threat.

The Obama Regime has destroyed press freedom. A lackey federal appeals court has ruled that NY Times reporter James Risen must testify in the trial of a CIA officer charged with providing Risen with information about CIA plots against Iran. The ruling of this fascist court destroys confidentiality and is intended to end all leaks of the government’s crimes to media.

What Americans have learned in the 21st century is that the US government lies about everything and breaks every law. Without whistleblowers, Americans will remain in the dark as “their” government enserfs them, destroying every liberty, and impoverishes them with endless wars for Washington’s and Wall Street’s hegemony.

Snowden harmed no one except the liars and traitors in the US government. Contrast Washington’s animosity against Snowden with the pardon that Bush gave to Dick Cheney aide, Libby, who took the fall for his boss for blowing the cover, a felony, on a covert CIA operative, the spouse of a former government official who exposed the Bush/Cheney/neocon lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Whatever serves the tiny clique that rules america is legal; whatever exposes the criminals is illegal.

That’s all there is to it.

Previously, I erroneously titled my column as "SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis. more>>

We won't see a headline like that on the Fourth of July, but we should. The Onion, as usual, has it right.

Command line is more powerful because you can do  lot with them,  you can tell your computer exactly what you want and get the appropriate answer, while GUI application can only tell your computer...

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If you're itching give Android a try but don't necessarily want use your whole computer for the task, the best option is to run it in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.

Is this the first Google Image Search Easter Egg? Search for [atari breakout] and you can play Atari's Breakout game. It's an arcade game introduced in April 1976. The game has an interesting story that involves Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and it influenced Steve Wozniak's design for the Apple II computer.

"In the game, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen. A ball travels across the screen, bouncing off the top and side walls of the screen. When a brick is hit, the ball bounces away and the brick is destroyed. The player loses a turn when the ball touches the bottom of the screen. To prevent this from happening, the player has a movable paddle to bounce the ball upward, keeping it in play."

Google uses image search results for [atari breakout] instead of bricks, so the game is self-referential.




{ via TechCrunch, thanks Florian K. }

. . . today because the CIA claims that the Syrian government is doing a Saddam Hussein, i.e., "using chemical weapons on their own people."  King Obama announced that that would be the line in the sand -- if they used chemical weapons on their own people -- and so the neocon talking heads are all screaming their heads off in indignation over the fact that the U.S. government has not yet gone to war with Syria.   (So far, not one of them has volunteered for the U.S. military, however).

Sickening line of the night:  The Bimbo of the Day on Faux News announced that "He [Obama] is hearing that voice to intervene for humanitarian reasons."

The creepy and odious Charles Krauthammer called it Obama's "Hamlet moment."  If he doesn't go to war, said Faux News' Dr. Strangelove, then it will be just like Shakespeare's Hamlet "and you know what happens with Hamlet, everyone dies."

The Party Line on Faux News is that "our allies" in the Middle East are demanding war, but "we" are just sitting here doing nothing.  Allies?  Plural?  Who are these allies?

Great.  Now Syrians will have a reason to commit terrorist acts against Americans.

Using the Windows desktop involves managing windows. Some people may use full-screen windows, but power users know that the key to being productive is having multiple windows visible at a time, whether you're using multiple monitors or the side-by-side Aero Snap feature in Windows. Sadly, the Windows desktop still lacks many useful window-management features. However, you can get many great new Windows desktop features by installing third-party utilities.

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The idea for this article was seeded by my nephew who wanted a quick rhyming poem for his class assignment. I was really surprised as the dreaded Writer’s Block halted me in my tracks and stopped me from coming up with good rhyming words and dashing of an off-the-cuff poem. It took me some time, but I did manage to compose a good one. It will have Milton and his buddies rolling in laughter, but I think they won’t be throwing eggs at me from up there.

I am sure you know that creating rhyming poems – though high on the cheesy scale – has its uses. From birthday cards to classroom assignments, from Valentine endearments to Facebook status updates, rhyming words to make a poem is an “in-demand” art form. I reckon that if aspiring poets can have their poetry apps and poetry get-togethers on the web, we amateurs can do with a bit of rhyming help. These rhyming tools might spew out terrible poems, but you just might like the wordplay.

Rhyme Brain

Rhyme Brain opens with a simple but attractive interface. It is a multilingual rhyming generator that speaks Dutch, Spanish, Russian, German, French, and English. Type in your word in the large box and press enter. Rhyme Brain generates and displays rhyming words in the language of your choosing. Rhyme Brain uses machine learning to match keywords with their phonetic equivalents. The results also include near-rhymes and slant rhymes (imperfect rhymes). Rhyme Brain can also supply you with portmanteaus and alliterations.

The rhyming generator has 2.6 million words in its database to match your supplied word against.

B-Rhymes

B-Rhymes says that it is a rhyming dictionary that’s not stuck up about what does and doesn’t rhyme. It tries to match rhyming words that sound good together. B-Rhymes generates half-rhymes that follow phonetic principles though they may rhyme according to syllables. B-Rhymes does give you a chance to walk away without sounding too commonplace with your poems. B-Rhymes supplies each rhyming word with a pronunciation and a score that indicates its rhyming strength.

You also might like to try out the B-Rhymes iPhone and Android app.

Reggie Loves to Rhyme

The Scholastic site seems just the thing for kindergarten students, though it is a good teaching aid. Reggie Loves to Rhyme is interactive with fun colorful pictures and sounds. It is designed like a game. As you can see from the screenshot, children will have to pick a room and entering that, they have to pick objects to make them rhyme with another object within that room.

Scholastic is one of the oldest and largest educational companies in the world with a global reach of 150 countries.

WikiRhymer

WikiRhymer is a neat community powered website in the best traditions of contributory wikis. Rhymes can be sourced under pure rhymes, end rhymes, near rhymes, near-end rhymes, and mosaic rhymes categories. WikiRhymer has a forum going for it where you can discuss poetry, songs, and anything else that has to do with vowel chimes. The site is small because it is new, but here’s hoping it grows with some exposure.

The site has been founded by a song writer (Bud Tower).

Word Central

You just have to take the word for it…because it comes from Merriam-Webster. One of the oldest and respected names in the English lexicology space has a well-designed dictionary meant for kids. Word Central has a dictionary, a thesaurus, a rhyming words dictionary, and interactive games. The rhyming dictionary presents a long list of words that possibly rhyme with your keyword. I tried out a few words which aren’t so commonplace; the results were impressive. It is to be expected that a resource like Merriam-Webster will have a large index of words to draw from.

According to the FAQ, the online version contains more than 70,000 entries, 730 color illustrations, 300 word history paragraphs, 170 synonym paragraphs, and abundant examples showing how words are used in context.

Rhymes & Chimes

Rhymes & Chimes has an attractive façade to go with its name. The rhyming dictionary’s mission is to become the largest human-edited rhymes collection on the web. Results are broken down according to syllables (1 to 3), and you can also search for the word’s translations, its uses in phrases and quotes, along with other conversions as you can see in the screenshot. One of the unique features is that it also gives you citation styles for different types of documents.

 What Rhymes With?

What Rhymes With is a straightforward dictionary without any frills. You can use the search to quickly find words that rhyme with each other. The dictionary searches by pronunciation. The results are returned in an easy to read flat format. Words are also hyperlinked which you can click to drill down to more rhymed words.

Think of these seven tools as archetypal of this type of word usage. These seven are definitely some of the neatest I came across in my research. I didn’t have to dig deep because rhyme dictionaries are as common as dimes. Though, good ones as these are rare. Don’t forget to check out what my friend Ryan reviewed a few years back – a powerful, free rhyme generator called VersePerfect that you can download and use.

The seriousness with which these tools are developed and used flies in the face of my article title. Why terrible poems? You can use it to write lyrics and good poems. Do you? Please comment if you augment your creativity with any rhyme generators.

Image Credit: Poetry via Shutterstock

The post It’s Fine To Rhyme – 7 Online Tools For Rhyming Words & Writing Terrible Poems appeared first on MakeUseOf.

It can be pretty challenging to shop for beef if you don't know the difference between a shoulder blade steak and a center ranch steak. The difference in cost, size, and preferred cooking method can throw off even the best home cook. Thankfully this handy chart makes sure you're always prepared when buying and cooking beef. More »