I’ve been following the U.S. government’s prosecution of Scott Warren with more than casual interest. Warren is the 36-year-old geography teacher who gave food and water to two desperately hungry and thirsty Central American migrants lost in the Arizona desert last year. As part of the recent crackdown on migrants, the government wanted to teach all of us the lesson that migrants are so subhuman they must be left to starve. Over the last couple weeks, he’s been on trial before a jury of his peers in Tuscon for felonies associated with his kindness that could have landed him in jail for ten years or more..
The case reminds me of two other similar situations I am more than a little familiar with. The first is the prosecution of Vernon Hershberger, the Wisconsin raw-dairy farmer who sold members of his community raw dairy products, despite very serious legal limitations on their distribution in his state. He felt it was his right to provide these products privately to individuals who for a variety of health reasons needed raw dairy. After a week-long trial in 2013 where a guilty verdict could have meant more than two years of jail time, he was acquitted by a jury of his peers, several of whom were so moved by his efforts that they joined the Hershberger food club so they could access raw dairy. It was a major validation of the notion of food rights—our right to access and distribute the foods of our choice, in any way we wished. Despite that and other validations, the U.S. Justice Department recently announced its intention to target private food clubs for prosecution.
The second case is one involving my aunt, Inge Joseph, who as a teenager was trapped in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. During the first week of January 1943, she attempted to escape France for Switzerland, together with a group of four other teens. The five of them got caught in a snowstorm as they attempted to cross the border late one night, and were captured by border patrol agents on the French side. Inge escaped by jumping out a bathroom window, got help from some French resisters, and continued on her trek into Switzerland, which was officially neutral, and had taken in several thousand Jewish refugees from France.
As she walked toward Geneva on a bitterly cold night, and came within sight of the city lights, she was stopped by a Swiss soldier, who took her to a police station for processing. In the Swiss scheme of things, she was another migrant. Except that she was a migrant in very serious trouble, because on January 1, 1943, just days before Inge and her group came to the border area, Switzerland had toughened its laws affecting migrants—it had too many and couldn’t handle them all was the reasoning (sound familiar?)—requiring them to not just make it across the border to qualify for asylum, but to get several miles into Switzerland. Inge hadn’t gotten far enough into Switzerland, and so was being returned to France, where the odds were real that she’d be rounded up and shipped off to Auschwitz.
Here is how Inge recalls the rest of that evening, in the memoir I co-authored with her: “The soldier who was driving me back to the border felt sorry for me. He stopped the jeep in front of a small farmhouse and told me he would ask his wife to fix me something to eat. I definitely didn’t want to accept food from him to salve his guilt. I told him I wasn’t hungry, but he insisted and woke up his wife.
“We sat at a round wooden table in their small farm kitchen as he told her my story and how I was to be returned to France. She asked him to let me remain with them to help with the house and the children. He hesitated. Clearly, he was considering giving in to his wife’s suggestion. ‘Please,’ she said.
“I sat there silently, hoping against hope. The silence hung there as hours seemed to pass.
“ ‘No,’ he sighed finally. ‘Too many forms have been filled out. We will be discovered. I must carry out my orders.’
“Much as I would have liked to have eaten the soup his wife had heated, I tersely refused….
“The obedient soldier drove me back to the border, lifted up the barbed wire, and I climbed through. I did not notice the French soldier behind me until I was about five steps back into France. He arrested me for illegally passing the frontier and not carrying identification papers or a permit to travel. As if any Jew would willingly try to sneak across from Switzerland to France!” (Inge was eventually able to escape to Switzerland late in 1943, but three of her friends who had been captured at the border that snowy night in early 1943 died in Auschwitz.)
Of course, none of these situations—that of Scott Warren or Vernon Hershberger or Inge Joseph—was really about food. They were about much bigger things, like freedom and human dignity and basic decency.
The good news for Scott Warren is that American defendants still have the right to a trial by jury in the U.S. His trial ended a couple days ago with a hung jury and thus a mistrial, which means he remains free, unless the government decides to re-try him and can get a jury to rule unanimously that he is guilty of a criminal act by providing food and water to two starving migrants. The bad news is that one or more jurors actually voted to convict Warren of a felony and have him sent to prison, for having acted as a decent human being to starving migrants.
Pick the religious text of your choice: The Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Buddha’s teachings—they all preach kindness to the hungry stranger in your midst. Yet many hundreds of years later, with each religion having millions of devotees, we still get easily hooked by rulers spouting crude ideologies calling on us to deny food and basic decency to certain groups of people our rulers have decided to turn into scapegoats. Shame on us for falling for their lies and hatred.
By the way, more than 70 years after the fact, Switzerland came to its senses and honored its resisters, its Scott Warrens, in ceremonies I was invited to (see photo at top). I expect the U.S. will eventually go through a similar soul searching about its recent behavior toward migrants–hopefully in less than 70 years.
Trump is innately cruel. He has a personality defect and is mentally very ill.
What blows my mind is that Christians would tolerate one minute of him. Instead they revere him. His invitation for foreign nations to contact him and share anything that would hurt his political advisories is an act of treason and against our constitution.
The prosecution of an American for providing assistance to a person that was dehydrated and hungry defines Trump as a human. Greed, selfishness, totalitarian dictatorship leaning, friends of Putin and North Korea’s dictator.
It is most scary for me to see how America has slipped over the last 2 years. Slipped from its high moral and ethical standing in the world to a place highly in question.
Last weekend I flew a mission for Liga, flying doctors. I also cared for those in need, hungry for help. I was in Mexico and I assisted with 175 very poor people in need.
Compassion is the sign of humanity.
Lack of compassion, greed, lying, cheating, low morals, no ethics, narcissism, aligning with murdering dictators…. where are the words??
I am becoming more and more upset that the democrats are not moving immediately for impeachment!!
Gross violations of law require immediate removal for office and immediate prosecution under our laws.
There is a place in hell for Trump.
As a mongrel who “legally” immigrated to the U.S. in the 70s, I want to let they white folks know that they should not be embarassed at all about trying to defend your borders from immigration of non-white races. They should definitely publicize this story to all countries with destitute/desperate non-white races to help curb the motivation to come here. This amounts to a slow genocide of the remaining pure white race(whether Canada, Europe etc).
Interesting that mr. Gumpert brought up the Old Testament(an extremely racial/racist text…1611 KJV edition) to support his pro- or immigration tolerant perspective. The Old Testament taught pro-white(Hebrew) aggregation & the New Testament is only for the 12 Hebrew(lily white) tribes and Jesus railed against the Edomites/Judeans. I don’t see much tolerance in either text(1611 non-politicized version). The Koran is pro-mongrelization, and Buddhism is another realm.
RAce aside, current immigration is more about dropping the wages of the current native population for the benefit of native-traitor employers. Why is it legal to pay a “hard-working” immigrant a low wage to do “dirty work” vs paying a native “lazy” citizen a high wage to do a dangerous job(Automation is another topic). The immigrant still has to pay the same for real estate & food. And if they can only afford cheap versions of food/living quarters etc with that wage, eventually they will need aid/assistance for the problems associated with living “in poverty.” And only the potilically-powerless native employees end up picking up the tab, not the native-traitor employers.
Not a fan of Trump, but I see that he just agreed with the native-traitor employers to INCREASE immigration(up to 1.2 million) a year. He’s no friend to the whites(or the descendents of stolen Negroes). You want to stop desperation in those other countries, find out who is stealing the wealth and assist those desperate folks in “oxidizing” them, ja know? You’ll find out that foreigners rule over them anyways, esp. in Mexico/Central/South America/Africa/parts of Asia.
I don’t see how Hershberger’s situation relates to removing Jews from Europe, but that issue seems to be brought up a lot.
I suspect Trump is just as much a white supremacist as you are. But much as he despises non-whites, he probably despises inflation even more, because inflation has the power to decimate our economy (and his reelection prospects). That explains his “traitorous” support, as you put it, of increased immigration of high-skilled foreigners. Not enough whites have the skills required by our fast-growing information-technology-based economy; a lack of skilled labor will drive up wages (and inflation) faster than anything, and that’s the problem America’s economy faces long term. So he and his racist supporters need to grit their teeth and bring in lots of Asians, Latinos and other brown-skinned people who have the technical skills our economy desperately requires. Inflation will steal wealth much faster than any of the conspiratorial fantasy figures you no doubt blame.
David: I don’t know why your comment section seems to attract political partisanship and the occasional nut case. Your posts are always thoughtful and informative. This case is so clearly an injustice, it would be wrong not to give it press. But this sort of thing went on under Obama, under Dubya, under Clinton. et al., ad nauseum. Blaming it on Trump is a distracting waste of time. As terrible as the Republicans are, it is the Democrats who are truly frightening. Just yesterday Cuomo shredded the First Amendment in New York. Here in California it is the Democrats who are poised to eliminate the ability of physicians to make medical decisions about their minor patients, and give it to a state bureaucrat. This has been happening in most of the states since 2015, and it is always led by Democrats, a wholly-owned subsidiary of pharma. I was a loyal Democrat for forty years, but the forced vaccination bill (SB 277) drove me away. I am disgusted with both parties. It really matters little for whom we vote. Meanwhile American children are very ill from the chemical onslaught. Read Anne Daschel’s (in Age of Autism) amazing list of articles from the U.S. and UK on the horror show that public schools have become. In some states 25% of the children are special ed. In our time this was a very small number. Only 29% of 18-24-year-olds are fit for military service. I’m no fan of what the military does, but this should be a wake-up call. We are headed for societal collapse, all in the name of the revenue stream for the business model which is quaintly called “health care,” but has nothing to do with health. Meanwhile, Nero fiddles.
Very well said Gary, Politics is becoming increasingly polarized thanks to a growing egocentric obsession with controlling what people say, do and think. The most unnerving thing however about the Democrats, and this would equally apply to the Liberal Party in Canada, is that they are increasingly leaning towards a Godless totalitarian radical left wing way of thinking… As far as Como’s act of tyranny is concerned… so much for the “separation of church and state”. It appears that the “church of modern medicine” hold the greater sway in this instance…
Gary, I agree with you about forced vaccinations. I don’t know enough to have a view on vaccinations per se, but I do know that in general using force to get people to use a medical procedure is as bad as using force to prevent people from eating the foods of their choosing. The public health and medical professions have used fear mongering (aided an abetted by the media) to rile the public up on vaccinations, even worse than they ever have in riling people up to get raw milk banned. And unfortunately, the Dems have been front and center on this (though my understanding is that the CA governor, a Dem, has put the brakes on the CA forced vaccination legislation). The Republicans haven’t been angels on this, though. Remember Trump’s campaign talk against forced vaccination; that all evaporated once he was elected (along with his talk in favor of food rights). He and his cronies appear to be all in on forced vaccination and against food rights.
There’s a real opportunity here for the Dems, because, contrary to what you suggest, they aren’t tyrannically oriented, especially in comparison to those now in power; Trump is regularly defying the U.S Constitution at will (on his wall, on Congressional subpoenas, on cavorting with the enemy, etc.). I’m not sure what your beef with Rep. Adam Schiff is–Trump regularly smears him, beginning with his name, when all Schiff is doing is trying to pursue legitimate investigative leads. I read his responses to Trump’s smears, and he is well reasoned and always resists the temptation to sink to Trump’s level, and start name calling and such.
David: First, I must say it was a moving story, the tale of the miraculous survival of your aunt. We must ever be on guard against the forces of evil. Those forces are alive and well in the world, not least here in the U.S. We should all be alarmed at what New York is doing to Rabbi Handler’s Hasidim community. Rabbi Handler is correct in what he says, as is Robert F, Kennedy, Jr. As far as your response to my comment, where do I start? I presume you read only mainstream media (which I gave up when those forces of evil passed the forced vaccination bill here in California). Thus you likely don’t know the backstory of the Russian-collusion hoax. My own congressman, Devin Nunes, helped uncover this sordid political operation as chair of the Intelligence Committee until the current Congress was seated. It began with a cabal at the highest levels in the Obama White house, including the ringleader, John Brennan, the DOJ, and FBI, including James Comey, and three of the seventeen intelligence agencies, and including a working relationship with elements in British intelligence. The DNC, in aid of the Clinton campaign, hired FusionGPS to compile the phony Steele dossier; those rogue elements then used this to get FISA warrants to wiretap members of the Trump campaign team. I’m not making any of this up, David. I’m no fan of the new attorney general, but he is actively investigating this criminal meddling in the 2016 election by elements at the highest levels of the Obama administration in aid of the Clinton campaign. You can bet Brennan, Comey, and others have lawyered up. There will almost certainly be indictments forthcoming. Yes, Trump often says cringe-worthy things, and yes, rather than draining the swamp, he has brought in a fresh batch of alligators, and some retreads, like Elliot Abrams. And yes, he has sold out his voters, just like his eleven predecessors. As for Adam Schiff, he sponsored a resolution in Congress denying that vaccine injury exists, and got the tech giants to begin actively censoring any content which doesn’t agree with the actual source of of misinformation on vaccines-the CDC. This man is exceedingly dangerous.
Gary, all I can say is that it’s very difficult for any of us to fully appreciate the role of an independent judiciary and law enforcement, which allow the FBI to investigate suspected breaches of national security, including sabotage of the election system. I suspect that Trump was the most surprised of anyone to learn that American intelligence knew as much about his contacts with the Russians as it knew or came to know (in excess of 100 contacts between his campaign and assorted Russian government officials and oligarchs close to the government, according to the Mueller Report). He no doubt figured no one would be any the wiser of his various contacts with Russians, including obtaining Hillary Clinton’s emails (via Wikileaks, which got them from the Russians).
Rather than admit even the tiniest bit of wrongdoing (including more than 40 indictments of his aides), he has tried to discredit the independent judiciary and law enforcement. So his response to the public exposure of his highly questionable behavior in working with an enemy state has been to fire the head of the FBI (Comey), cruelly taunt his own attorney general (Sessions) for recusing himself, and nearly fire the independent prosecutor (Mueller). It’s called obstruction of justice, and he may still have to face consequences for that. To muddy the waters on this and other evidence, he now wants a further investigation of the investigators.
So far, the supposed conspiracy you refer to that Nunes “uncovered” has turned out, in assorted Congressional inquiries, to be nothing. Everything was done by the book, approved by judges. Now Trump has pushed his new AG to do yet another investigation of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. My guess is it will turn out much like the investigation and special commission he launched after the 2016 election to uncover voter fraud–a big fat nothing.
The danger in all this effort to discredit the FBI, CIA, judges, etc. is that it slowly undermines their independence. Once that happens, there is no one between any president and everyone he deems an enemy. In countries controlled by a tyrant (like Russia, China, Turkey) the investigators and judges are simply tools of the emperor. I don’t think we want the FBI and military to be secret police, run by any president, no matter what his/her ideology. That’s the end of the rule of law.
David: I have no dog in this fight. I have no political bias in favor of, or opposing either of the political parties in this matter. I just want the facts. Have you read the documents (such as emails and texts) the Intelligence Committee uncovered from the DOJ and FBI? Do you know how many at the FBI have been fired over this? You are naive if you think all the members of these agencies, especially in high management positions, are pious choir boys. Most public servants are decent, honorable people, but not all. They are human, after all, just like us. Devin Nunes is one of the good guys. So is Micheal Horowitz, the Inspector General of the DOJ, and a Democrat. A straight shooter. He and his team of 500 investigators have uncovered damning information about some of these rogue employees, which has led, in McCabe’s case, to his firing. He is now looking more deeply into this clearly political operation. Everything I wrote in my comment is a verifiable fact, in the public record. There will be indictments, certainly of Brennan, and likely of others. You likely know very little which is factual about this matter because the media simply will not report it (except Fox; I don’t watch Fox, or any of the rest of them, nor read any newspapers). What the media gives is political spin. If it bleeds, it leads. The perpetrators of this operation were pretty casual in covering their tracks because they thought Hillary would certainly win, in which case Mueller would have had more time with his grandchildren. Rod Rosenstein, the recently retired acting AG on this matter, and also a Democrat, appears to be a straight shooter, too, and may play a key role in bringing to justice the perpetrators of this tawdry affair, and restoring public confidence in the FBI and DOJ. There is evil in this world, David, and we must never forget, never forget how easy it is to arise and for us not to see, in its banality, in Hannah Arendt’s apt and memorable phrase. The tiny group of white-supremacists who are Trump supporters, while having views anathema to all the rest of us, are inconsequential, because they are vanishingly few in number, and they have almost no power (which comes from wealth). The true evil we face comes from our federal government. The gold standard in science is the Randomized Controlled Trial. The importance of having a control group is essential in determining the positive or negative value of any treatment. Not one vaccine currently licensed has ever been tested using a control group. Verifiable fact. I have dived deeply into the rabbit hole on the topic of vaccines (I’ve read twenty books, hundreds of papers on PubMed, and watched hundreds of interviews of parents of vaccine-injured children and physicians and scientists) and I am as certain that the Earth revolves around the sun that the act of vaccination is dangerous quackery, like at least half of clinical practice, including statin drugs, radical mastectomy, and many others. VAERS data shows that the MMR produces seizures at five times-500%-the rate that measles does. David, you’re one of the good guys; I deeply appreciate your reporting of and advocacy for real farming, but I advise a healthy skepticism of all that you read or hear in the media. And read Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article on Operation Mocking Bird. This should be required reading in every high school English class in the land. Sorry that this is 1/4 inch wide and ten miles long; such is WordPress. Meant to post it as a new comment.
Gary, you ought to provide some links to your alternative media. Much of what you describe has been in so-called mainstream media, including WSJ and NYTimes. We’ll have to see if any indictments/convictions result from Nunes, whom even many Republicans consider a joke. There was lots of talk about going after Hillary on things like nuclear deal and Clinton foundation. So far, nothing, despite more than 2 years of Trump Justice Department. As you say, not all the law enforcement and judges pure. You don’t mention it, but Comey seriously damaged Hillary’s campaign by twice announcing publicly that FBI investigating her emails. No indictments, but the suspicion certainly cost her support. I’d still rather have overseers like McCabe, Comey, Rosenstein, even Jeff Sessions, than leaving it all to the political fascists or socialists who happen to be in power.
As for Adam Schiff and vaccination, what he’s said has been repeated by dozens and dozens of pols at both federal and state level. Doesn’t make it right. As I’ve said, there’s a hysteria on the vaccination issue that’s tough to break through in our current political environment.
Finally, you may want to read the Mueller Report for a reality check. It’s all based on serious digging by serious investigators. May give you some insights on what Nunes (and Trump) were trying so hard to hide.
Ken: The Church of the Greenback Dollar. The Church of Scientism (“sounds like science”). We are seeing the full fruition of Operation Mocking Bird (see Carl Bernstein.org for details). You are correct about the current political stance of the Democrats. That Adam Schiff character is the creepiest of them. What Cuomo did was sell the children to Merck for a fancy new building in Albany and 155 jobs. Politicians are so easy to bribe these days!
David: You’re right about that. The worst thing about Trump, apart from the pharma insiders he’s appointed to all the HHS positions, and Ms. Torture at CIA, are the noecons-Bolton, Pompeo, and the notorious Elliot Abrams. We have thoroughly screwed up Central America and the Middle East. War with Iran would be catastrophic, and I think cooler heads at then Pentagon will put the brakes on that. It would deeply damage the world economy. It would be truly catastrophic for Israel, as Iran has sufficient, accurate conventionally-armed missiles to hit every one of their cities, and they would respond with nukes. The Israelis know that, too. Perhaps nothing more than bluster, but I don’t trust Netanyahu and the rest of his right-wing government any more than I do Trump. I sure do like Israelis, and wish them no ill, despite the horrors their government is inflicting on the Palestinians. Most of the information about the Russian-collusion hoax has come directly from my congressman by email, in the form of committee-meeting transcripts and videos, and analysis of the classified stuff. It really was a political dirty trick, and nothing more. As for Hillary getting the get-out-of-jail-free card for keeping highly classified material on an unsecured server, if she wasn’t a Clinton, she would have received the Chelsea Manning/Julian Assange treatment-thrown in a dungeon. You see, Bill Clinton has been a CIA asset since his days in Arkansas. This is why they are coated in Teflon. Despite my opposition to many of his economic views, I was a Bernie voter, because he is an honorable man. I vote for character over policy. It was the DNC who gave us Trump, because Bernie likely would have beaten Trump. If you’re curious about what the CIA is capable of, read David Talbot’s excellent, and fully referenced, “The Devil’s Chessboard.” As for the issue of vaccine policy, it is more horrifying than most people know. It is destroying the nation. Read what RFK, Jr. has written on Children’s Health Defense. He is a truth-teller; a man of great courage; nevertheless betrayed by family members in The Boston Globe in an op-ed last month, and now a horrifying “joke” in The Onion. And read Anne Daschel’s compilation of newspaper articles from the U.S., UK, and Ireland about school districts everywhere who can’t afford the rapidly-rising costs for special ed services, and teachers who face violent acts from elementary-school children. We hung a few after the doctor’s trial at Nuremburg for just this sort of crime-medical experimentation on unwilling people, which is law in all states, with essentially no exceptions now in five. The Nuremburg Code hasn’t the status of statutory law anywhere in the U.S., so they get away with it, despite there not having been any sort of public-health crisis in the U.S. in many decades. Are you all right with powerful politicians spouting propaganda, which is repeated by all the media? Alarmed we all should be, and disgusted with the media. Who pays for the care of all these damaged children? In nearly all cases, the parents. The first wave of autism is now aging out of public educational services, and there is no place for them to receive the sorts of services they require. This situation is dire, and the ostrich approach won’t help.
The soul-searching you call for can’t come soon enough! It’s appalling that Scott Warren was even charged with a crime, as well as that the jury didn’t find him innocent. Thank you for keeping us aware of this issue, David.
I am no big fan of dope *; but it’s worth considering the arguments in this advertisement promoting ‘artisanal craft producers’ of marijuana as they parallel what’s happening with REAL MILK : consumers appreciating that milk produced by CAFOs is not all the same. And being willing to pay premium prices if they feel they get their money’sworth for the alternative
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-investor-appeal-in-craft-cannabis/
* my take on it now – a lifetime since my hippie daze – is
“if you practice being stupid, you’ll get good at it’.
In Canada, at least you can grow a few plants in your backyard, without being in jeopardy of being prosecuted/ going to gaol for simple possession of something made by God
David: Here is Adam Schiff, on the Floor of the House last Thursday, June 13, 2019:
“There is no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases and the dissemination of unfounded or debunked theories about the dangers pose a great risk to public health.”
This is what is quaintly called “The Big Lie.” Every single vaccine package insert, just like every single pharmaceutical-drug package insert lists in full the possible adverse events recorded in clinical trials prior to approval, and for most of them, this includes death and disabling injury. All vaccines are liability-free. For injury compensation one must first know about the system-and few doctors do-then battle pit-bull DOJ attorneys in a years-long process. Nevertheless, this system-which captures <1% of the actual injuries-has paid out over $4 billion in compensation for “life-threatening” and “disabling” diseases and death over its 31 years. This is a raw milk and wholesome food blog, so this is my last comment on politicians. I’m just trying to make it clear that it is a mistake to trust politicians; that Adam Schiff is every bit as dangerous as Trump. He is acting here as a propagandist for pharma.
David: Here is a partial list of sources of information I use:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former high-ranking intelligence professionals, headed by William Binney, formerly of the NSA, and one of our best and brightest. Another member is Ray McGovern, retired from the CIA.
Occasioally RT News covers topics our media shuns, though I don’t use it often.
AgeofAutism.org, founded by the late, great Dan Olmsted, one of the best journalists I’ve ever read. This covers all topics related to vaccine injury.
childrenshealthdefense.org Founded by RFK, Jr., and I believe J.B. Handley.
Architect and Engineers for 9/11 truth. There is currently a grand jury in the Southern District of New York examining the overwhelming evidence that the collapses of the buildings, especially building 7, was an inside job. This is led by survivors, with the assistance of the above organization. There is no doubt in my mind; there was no forensic examination at the collapse site; all the steel was shipped off to China; a new Pearl Harbor it was. As for the hijackings, they were no doubt real.
nomorefakenews.org John Rappaport, who has some keen insights into the mass brainwashing we have all been subject to since Operation Mocking Bird went into operation.
CDC.gov Yes, they often lie, but sometimes tell the truth.
Highwire with Del Bigtree
lewrockwell.org I ignore the right wing political stuff for the occasional gem, and there is an occasional gem.
drmalcolmkendrick.org Heart disease blog by a fine Scottish GP. I highly reccomend it to anyone interested in good health.
sharylattkisson.org A fine journalist. I recommend her two books, “The Smear,” and “Stonewalled.”
I have long been an avid reader, and long a skeptic of pretty much everything. This began in fourth grade, with the fourth-grade-teacher-from-hell, intensified during the Vietnam era, when we were all draft bait, and come to fruition after being damaged by Medicine. Never again will anyone fool me. I’ll probably never again vote for anyone for President, though I’ll be voting for Tulsi Gabbard in the primaries.
“never again will anyone fool me” you say? one of the elementary in your take on 9-11, is the notion that “as for the highjackings, they were no doubt real” … think again. Mark Twain said “it’s easier to deceive someone than it is to convince them they have been deceived.”
what’s amusing in this particular rant, is : Mister Gumpert is a cardcarrying member of the Eastern Establishment media. You won’t last long on his forum, peddling anything that smacks of “conspiracy theory” if it deviates from the Central Party Line. A good place to start testing the EVIDENCE is with the known facts around the official version that : ‘a full-size passenger plane hit the Pentagon’ flown by a camel jockey whose expertise with aeroplanes was limited to a few lessons on a Piper Cub
and on it goes from there
myself = after many many hours studying the topic, I’m in the “No planes hit the Towers” camp. More reasons to accept that, than going along with the utterly absurd proposition that a few thousand gallons of kerosene on fire, took down millions of tons of structural steel.
sn’t a theory about right wingers conspiring that
Gordon S Watson: We’ve all seen the two planes hit the two towers far too many times for any reasonable person to deny that it happened just as we observed. As for the Pentagon, nobody in the public knows much, because no video footage (which certainly does exist) has ever been released. It is not necessary to deny that the hijackings took place to trust the overwhelming evidence that is impossible to bring down a a steel-framed building, designed and built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (at the time they were designed, the largest commercial aircraft in use). with a kerosene fire. There have been many fires in steel-framed buildings, some of which fully engulfed them, but in not a single case have any of them collapsed. This is one of the most preposterous lies ever told, and a grievous insult to the victims and their survivors. My own hypothesis is that the perpetrators of the planned demolition knew in advance of the hijacking plot-the signals-intelligence apparatus we have is very sophisticated. Bin Laden had threatened on more than one occasion to hit U.S. buildings with aircraft. There need not be a connection between the hijackers and the collapses. I don’t think there is. The architects and engineers who have investigated the collapses are very bright, highly-trained professionals who have no other agenda than truth. Hopefully the federal grand jury in Manhattan will bring some resolution, although they will be completely stonewalled by all relevant government agencies.
with respect for your sincerity, Mr Ogden, I daresay you did NOT ‘see 2 planes hit the World Centre towers’. IN FACT … what you’ve actually viewed, is ; computer-generated images, on a tv screen far removed from ground Zero in NY City, so many times that you now cannot distinguish the what’s in your mind, from reality.
Do you recall seeing the nose of one of those purported planes sticking out the far side of the building, after “impact”? … the notion that a thin tube of aluminium alloy pierced through a wall of tons of structural-grade iron beams, each of which was 3 inches in cross section, is highly UN-reasonable. that particular aspect of the overall fable is a good place to start your UN-learning of the Big Lie. Or = go back and read the facts now available proving that F D Roseveldt conspired to bring Japan into World War 2, even as he campaigned telling voters that he would NOT send “your boys to war”. Put that alongside the Project for the New American Century = the War party = salivating for ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ ( their term ) … just before the World Trade Centre towers were bombed. I said bombed from below ground level with mini-nukes. The mushroom clouds above them says everything you need to know
You’ve spouted so many conspiracy theories here that it’s hard to keep up with them. The Pearl Harbor one is so old I guess maybe it’s now new. Anyway, one of those theories you latched onto, about the murders of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, has now come up against the reality of the rule of law in the U.S. The parents of the murdered children have been pursuing the conspiracy crazies in court, and are now scoring victories for defamation, and getting apologies from the crazies now that it is costing them $$$:
https://www.apnews.com/c595b9e6ccb84b969d59c5b270f58cce
“A Wisconsin judge issued a summary judgment Monday against authors James Fetzer and Mike Palacek, a ruling that was separate from the settlement between Pozner and the book’s publisher. A trial to decide damages has been set for October.
“Pozner has been pushing back for years against hoaxers who have harassed him, subjected him to death threats and claimed that he was an actor and his son never existed. He has spent years getting Facebook and others to remove conspiracy videos and set up a website to debunk conspiracy theories.
“Lately, the fight has been joined by others who lost relatives in the Dec. 14, 2012, school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. After quietly enduring harassment and ridiculous assertions for years, some have changed their approach, deciding the only way to stop it is to confront it. Their efforts have turned the tables on the hoaxers, including Alex Jones , host of the conspiracy-driven Infowars website.
“Victims’ families scored another victory Tuesday when a Connecticut judge imposed sanctions on Jones for an outburst on his web show against one of the families’ lawyers.
“Judge Barbara Bellis on Tuesday ordered the Infowars host to pay some of the relatives’ legal fees and prohibited him from filing motions to dismiss their defamation lawsuit against him.”
Mister Gumpert : see if you can muster the fair-minded-ness for which journalists USED TO BE famous, and read the definitive work for thyself before your automatic reflex sneer at anything outside the Central Party Line
Day of Deceit the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor
A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.
Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages of closely detailed reference notes.
This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. … Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
There was an awful lot going on at that time. Just for starters, Japan had already invaded China, Germany had invaded Poland. The U.S. Congress refused to vote funds to help England, or refurbish American navy. So not surprising there was maneuvering going on by Roosevelt, things like Lend Lease (to England). After the fact, we nearly always find wars weren’t exactly the way they seemed at the time. Vietnam war started based on Guid of Tonkin attack by North Vietnam on American ships that apparently never happened. Second Iraq war based on “weapons of mass destruction” that were never found. All “conspiracies”? Or deception of varying degrees?
David: While there is much that is simply not true published both online and in the mainstream media, the quote about a “new Pearl Harbor” is factual, and comes from a document called “The Project for a New American Century.” Sandy Hook was a terrible tragedy, and those who have attacked parents and other victims deserve whatever the courts hand out.
David: One more I forgot: judithcurry.org. She is a climate scientist andProfessor Emerita from Georgia Tech. I’ve had a lifetime love of the process of science, and I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge from her. This is another area where the media has behaves very badly (out of ignorance and politics). Climate is a chaotic. non-linear system of vast complexity. Uncertainty renders predictions about the future little more than speculation, although warming is most likely to continue as it has been doing since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th Century. Slowly enough to plan for, to adapt. We are not doing much on this score, though, because of politics. The left claims we’ll all be dead in 12 years (echoes of Paul Erlich decades ago), and the Right takes the opposite tack.
The Biggest Little Farm [Official Trailer]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfDTM4JxHl8
Fake Food, Fake Meat: Big Food’s Desperate Attempt to Further the Industrialisation of Food
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/fake-food-fake-meat-big-foods-desperate-attempt-to-further-industrialisation-food/?fbclid=IwAR3O7Nmf0yXS2nJp4n5imOe5tG3GzIZ_Ed12Eeha1PoNV2a0PKU5wJVYeDM
excellent discussion = the Freedom Free For All guys interview Sonia Barrett on talking about ‘Synthetic Food is here’
the Savory Institute response to being slagged by Impossible Burger. A very good overview of the real issues. In a nutshell = regeneratively-grazed beef that restores ecosystems undermines their bogus environmental green-washed PR campaign =
http://www.savory.global/impossible-impact/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=%5BRuminations+-+Vol++6%5D+Holistic+Management+vs++plant-based+protein&utm_campaign=Savory+Monthly+News+-+June+19
For the record, I did not play a role in this development:
How the Impossible Burger got its remarkable start at Rutgers
https://www.rutgers.edu/impossible-burger-rutgers-origin
I did not know about it … Interesting news 🙂
David: Another source I peruse from time to time is censored.news, which has links to a lot of different sites. Some of this is fringe stuff, but mostly it has stories and issues not covered elsewhere. I like to look in all the nooks and crannies. With discernment, it is possible to glean truth in the most unlikely places.
David,
Congrats to you. Somehow you have created quite a magnet for those deeply absorbed into conspiracy theory.
Wow. Quite a collection of alternatve history.
Mark: Evidence. The overwhelming amount of evidence (for the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7, especially 7, being planned demolition), presented to him by the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, along with 12 family members of victims, compelled U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, under 18 USC 3332 to convene a federal grand jury to investigate. It is the mainstream view which is alternative history, like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the JFK and RFK assassinations, WMD in Iraq, and many others. If you choose to believe that governments don’t lie, that is your choice, but history has shown it to be the case that they do so with regularity when it suits their agenda. Paul Schrade, RFK’s aide, was there, and wounded by bullets from Sirhan’s gun. He knows Sirhan couldn’t have been the assassin because he was in front of RFK, and the fatal bullets came from behind, to the head at close range.
Mark: Here is the link to the story I mentioned above:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sept-11th-legal-breakthrough-us-attorney
Mark, as the biggest raw milk producer in America, I dare say you are not the typical blog reader and undeniably have ulterior motives. Calling it a conspiracy theory does not mean it’s false any more than believing it blindly accepting it which is just plain ignorance. Dig deeper you should know better after all your experience in espionage.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2019/06/15/mission-impossible-maker-plant-based-burger-struggles-meet-chains-demand/qCJcuQUyGhhr6iuRtibOXL/story.html
David: Don’t forget incompetence, greed, and stupidity. Andrew Cockburn wrote a fascinating article for the June “Harper’s” (“The Military-Industrial Virus”). It is worse than a colossal waste of money; it is producing an unfit military. If we had to fight a war with the F-35 (a $400 million plane planned for $129 million, intended to replace the F-16), we might very well lose. The Seventh Fleet is not in the best of shape either, undermanned, and with incompetent commanders and broken equipment.
Gordon S. Watson: Plenty of eye-witnesses saw those planes hit the towers as well. In order to find justice for the victims of this heinous crime we must accept as factual, what is clearly factual. There were four planes hijacked. Two hit the Twin Towers. I see no reason to doubt the Pennsylvania crash was the third. As for the Pentagon, the maneuver-corkscrewing down from altitude to ground level to bulls-eye the side of the building, while exceedingly difficult even for an experienced pilot, is certainly within the realm of possibility. Of course they have raised suspicion by not releasing relevant information, such as video footage, but that is how the bureaucracy operates. Stonewall. If it was a missile, or something else, what happened to the fourth plane? What is terrible about all this pointlessly wild speculation, is that it detracts from the worst element of this infamous crime-the collapses of not only the Twin Towers, but WTC Building 7, which received no impact from an airplane, merely office fires from debris from the Twin Towers. The evidence is voluminous and incontrovertible, in my judgement, that the collapses were pre-planned. Building 7 pancaked down just as the Twin Towers did. Impossible any other way than planned demolition. I am familiar with explosives from routinely using them in heavy construction long ago. While Timothy McVeigh did park a truck packed with NCN (nitro-carbo-nitrate, which is also used as fertilizer) outside that federal building, it is not possible for that bomb to have caused that amount of damage to the building. NCN, like most explosives, must be tighly-confined to have explosive power; this is why gunpowder can be so lethal when it is confined inside the jacket of a bullet, but basically is fireworks otherwise. Something else, something sinister was going on in Oklahoma City. Thermite is different. It burns so hot, it cuts through steel like it was butter. While there are military applications, in civilian use it is almost exclusively used to implode buildings past their useful life. These buildings collapse in a way similar to the three Manhattan buildings. Residues of microscopic spheres produced only by thermite, many thousands of them, were collected from multiple sites throughout the debris field from the collapses. Smoking gun. There is much more evidence than this, including multiple accounts from first responders of a series of explosions just prior to collapse (thermite is ignited by conventional explosives). It took them seventeen years, but the victim’s families finally have a hope for justice, with the presentation of all the evidence before a grand jury. Citizens can usually be relied upon to sift evidence competently. The implications of the truth finally coming out about this are horrendous. Cheney was no doubt up to his eyeballs in it, but the CIA guards all the skeletons in its closet with a vengeance. There is also some evidence of the involvement of Israeli intelligence.
Mr Ogden, as I’ve said more than 0nc’t on this forum : the nature of evidence is that it can be tested. If it cannot be tested, it isn’t evidence. If “it’s clearly factual” then you’ll have no problem naming two people who were eyewitnesses to 2 planes which = supposedly = flew into the World Trade Centre Towers. And I want their contact information so I can call them up and get statements from them. failing that, you’ve got a handful of nothin’. Same with “plane” [sic ] which ostensibly hit the Pentagon … “…within the realm of possibility” ? Bill Lear is on record saying it’s impossible. And he’s one of the very few pilots in the world who’d know whereof he speaks.
once you admit that it was a guided missile, the whole official story comes un-glued
you want a “smoking gun” ? Do some due diligence… compare the pics of clouds from Hiroshima / Nagasaki and other atomic bomb tests, with images from New York City that day. No mere co-incidence it’s called “Ground Zero”.
uh oh … at the very end of your hypothesis, you’ve “said the Secret Woid”… as old Groucho Marx used to say. And we simply cannot have that unmentionable canard floating around cyberspace. There goes your FaceBook privilege
me : I’d rather talk about the criminal conspiracies ( plural ) going on with price-fixing of foodstuffs. 2 words : Dean Foods. I rest my case
Gordon S. Watson: You seem to be confused about or misunderstand both the scientific process and the process of reasoning itself. Observations by the senses, combined with curiosity about those observations, and a desire to understand and explain them, leads to hypotheses. The testing of those hypotheses utilizes evidence, the whole body of evidence. Evidence cannot be tested, only examined. A single black swan invalidates the hypothesis that all swans are white. Your implication that not a single, credible eyewitness saw two aircraft approach and strike the Twin Towers is preposterous, a distraction from the search for the truth of the collapses of those three buildings. The Twin Towers were engineered and constructed explicitly to be able to withstand the impact of a large commercial jetliner, nor is burning jet fuel, or anything else in those offices, capable of raising steel anywhere near the temperature necessary to cause it to fail. The crime of the century. Wild claims, such as some you have made here, serve to obstruct and obscure the search for truth.
Mr Ogden … so the take-away, is = you do not have the names and contacts for at least 2 real people who actually say airplanes fly into the towers?
OK, let’s test a crucial element of the Central Party Line re 9-11 … show us so much as a nut and bolt off the 2-ton Rolls Royce fanjet engines from the airplane which – according to the official version – was flown into the Pentagon by a cadet who had less than 20 hours practice on a Piper Cub.
Produce so much as a handful of the remains of the bodies of a hundred + passengers SUPPOSEDLY on that plane. Produce so much as a fragment of the tail, or wings, of the 30″ tons of aluminium airframe … or would you have us believe that every single fragment of it ‘evaporated on impact’… is that it?
Point being ; once a person starts thinking for himself, the official version of 9-11 is laughably impossible… false in part / false in whole
why this matters at all to a raw milk forum, is because it PROVES how unspeakably corrupt the government is, in every aspect, and which applies to the control of the food system. It’s NOT sheer negligence or unforseen consequences from good intent. America is ruled by people who hate us
Addendum to my previous comment: While it might take some work to locate very many direct observers of the first plane to hit the tower, by the time the second one hit the second tower, there would have been thousands of pairs of eyes focussed on the fire in the first. Or are you claiming there were no fires?
Mr Ogden. it is not appropriate to take up space on this raw milk forum going ’round something so far off-topic.
If you’re capable of handling ‘very strong meat’ have a look at the precis on Henry Makow’s website today [ June 20 2019 ] re : what happened in NY City on 9-11. Not me saying it … rather, Dr Alan Sabroski, Marine corps veteran, Vietnam veteran, Director of Studies at the US War College
the pic on Makow’s Twitter feed is especially ironic = the distinctive mushroom cloud from a micro-nuke billowing out of one of the Towers, captioned “jet fuel?”
And for those curious about what and whom Gordon is referring to:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Henry_Makow
https://www.henrymakow.com/2019/06/israel-did-9-11-a-whos-who.html
Vera: While rationalwiki is a propaganda outlet, like wikipedia, it appears this guy is a pretty nasty character. Ad hominem means shoot the messenger, ignore the message; I don’t think it has a place in a civilized discussion, so I will leave it at that. He may evidence of value, but I make it a policy to ignore what obvious anti-semites say. The stealth antisemites are the ones to worry about. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
mr Ogden … .your reading comprehension is poor = you missed the part about Dr Alan Sabroski being Jewish … “has any man hated his own flesh?” Sabroski Phd taught at the War College. He didn’t come up with this opinion about arising from innate “anti-semite-ism’. Rather, it’s his professional opinion based on more and better information about it than you nor I have. … it is possible to bring rational criticism of the Zionist / Israeli state without necessarily being an anti-shem-ite
are you at all interested in REAL MILK, or what?
Gordon S. Watson: Agreed, our government is utterly corrupt. Our rulers don’t hate us, though. They simply love their wealth, but otherwise have no qualms about doing anything at all to protect it. No moral compass. They own the media, so the majority of the public knows not what they are up to, which is diabolical evil. Congressional leaders know what they are up to, but are too cowardly or frightened by real or perceived threats from these scoundrels to do anything about it.
No moral compass you say!!!
Do they not have a conscience… a human attribute described as “an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of their behavior”? If they do, then why is there such a disconnect from it? What prevents them or people in government if you will from being concerned with the rightness or wrongness of their behavior? Is it not because they are governed by a philosophy that caters to their materialistic ego, nurture arrogance, and as such inflames psychotic/self-centered, amoral behavior? Is there a philosophical principal/teaching that might serve to correct mankind’s disjointed corrupt behavior?
Gordon S. Watson: I didn’t go to that website, but I did read some of Dr. Sabrowski’s writings. He is a scholar with some uncomfortable views. He may very well be right. I would be very surprised if Mossad wasn’t deeply involved in the events of that infamous day. Spies are nearly always a slimy bunch. But geopolitics is outside my area of interest, which is mainly medical quackery, especially vaccination, so I’ll leave it there. Just like vaccine policy, we are not allowed to criticize Israel, AIPAC makes certain of that by branding any criticism as antisemitism (good old ad hominem again). He must be near the top of their list of enemies, and likely shunned by his former colleagues. Meanwhile, the First Son-in-Law has both a top-secret security clearance and a second job as an agent of a foreign power.
Ken Conrad: I suspect it is largely as mundane as our humanness. When I say “no moral compass” I’m speaking of the super wealthy. As for the deep state, which is basically the permanent government of countless bureaucrats, they are mostly just like us, trying to feed their families, protect our loved ones, and so forth. Easiest path is to simply put the head down and move forward, not make waves. Dr. Semmelweiss was utterly destroyed for having the temerity to suggest that doctors wash their hands before going from the morgue to the delivery room. Dr. John Snow was ridiculed for suggesting that something we can’t see (the cholera bacerium) caused disease, until he was proven right. Wegener was ridiculed by none other than Albert Einstein for suggesting the Earth’s crust was composed of moving plates floating on molten magma. We now know he was correct. Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s career was destroyed, to save GSK and the UK government’s MMR program for suggesting a link between the MMR and autism. We now know that there really is a link. The vaccine court has compensated at least 83 cases of vaccine-induced autism, the most well-known being Hannah Poling. How many people know the British High Court quashed all charges against the leader of Dr. Wakefield’s team (of thirteen researchers) at the Royal Free Hospital, Professor John Walker-Smith, one of the world’s leading pediatric gastroenterologists, and restored his license to practice medicine? How many people know that the findings in the retracted Lancet paper (of gut dysfunction co-morbid with autism, now considered to occur in 70-90% of cases) have been replicated numerous times? Replication does not often happen in medical or any other scientific research. Dr. Wakefield has that rare quality of moral courage, and is doing good work in support of knowledge of good medicine here in the U.S. There are countless examples in history of scientists having been viciously attacked for findings that were correct but went against prevailing orthodoxy and bias. William Harvey waited thirteen years before publishing his findings that, yes, we do have a circulatory system, because it went against Church doctrine (Galen’s view of how blood was created and used in the body). We are all imperfect, and Operation Mockingbird has filled our heads, at least since the early 1950’s with often subtle propaganda, much more subtle than Pravda ever was, which has warped our view of reality. The Soviet people were subject to the same sort of fear-mongering as us, but, in their case it was easier to see through, and ultimately it was the destruction of their economy by the military-industrial complex there which destroyed the Soviet Union. Anyone who doubts the Polio Scare of the 50’s was a propaganda operation should read “Dissolving Illusions,” by Suzanne Humphries, MD, and Roman Bystrianyk. For a better understanding of the old, and new Red Scare, Andrew Cockburn’s recent Harper’s article sheds light on it. The vast sums sucked out of our economy with little military value by the military-industrial, along with the mass poisoning of our children by the world’s most bloated vaccine schedule will bring us down, too. The health of Americans under 30 today is the worst in our modern history.
Ken: I should add that lack of moral compass also applies to some politicians; perhaps it is a prerequisite to clawing one’s way to power. On the other hand, while humans are capable of the most despicable horrors, most people, most of the time, behave honorably, and with kindness towards others (except when driving a car).
Gordon S. Watson: Thank you for that link. I had the great pleasure and honor of hearing Alan Savory speak in 2016. His insights into the role of herbivores in healthy ecosystems are profound. The restoration of grasslands worldwide, and returning farming to proper ecological principles is absolutely key to restoring the health of the Earth, providing a good living for farmers, and providing food for humans.
Gordon S. Watson: Thank you for that link. I had the great pleasure and honor to hear Alan Savory speak in 2015. His insights into the role of herbivores in healthy grassland ecosystems are profound. Profound for farming and feeding humans, as well. Our only hope for healing Earth’s grasslands and developing productive food systems, so attacked by industry, of course. I often think of the term “mimic nature” as the foundational, underlying principle to living well, and in my role as a humble but avid gardner. I’m only missing the crucial animal inputs, so must get them from elsewhere, uncertain as to their quality.
I completely agree. Alan Savory is one of the best specialists in his business and his knowledge is amazing!
That’s because he was humble enough to accept learn from his mistakes…