Note taken from: Daily Dose with Jack Harrison — 10/30/15
When you’ve been diagnosed with rectal cancer, it’s not just your butt on the line.
It’s your very life at stake.
When you’re choosing your treatment, the one thing that matters most — really the ONLY thing that matters at all — is which one will cure your cancer and maximize your lifespan.
You’d think your surgeon would have the same goal.
The sad reality is he’s more likely to push the surgery that’ll maximize his profits instead. He’ll try to razzle-dazzle you with minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, promising smaller incisions… faster recovery times… fewer days in the hospital… and less pain.
Notice something missing from that list? Outcomes!
Pain levels and recovery times don’t matter a lick if the cancer isn’t completely eliminated and comes back. And now, TWO new studies show how minimally invasive surgery falls short by two of the most important measures.
Both studies find that minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery removes tumor tissue with precision and without much damage to healthy tissue 82 percent of the time in cases of advanced, but still curable, rectal cancers.
That might sound pretty good until you see that traditional surgery has success rates of 87 percent and 89 percent, according to the two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big difference, 82 percent versus 89 percent.
But when you’re locked in a battle with the Big C, you need every edge you can get — because this is a life-or-death decision.
So don’t cut corners when your own rear end is on the line. Don’t choose the surgery that promises that fastest recovery or the least amount of pain. Choose the procedure that’s most likely to work — and if it turns out your cancer needs surgery, that means sticking with the tried-and-true.
And if you don’t have cancer I have two pieces of advice.
First, thank your lucky stars. And second, get your butt into gear and schedule that colonoscopy you’ve been putting off. It could help assure you never get handed that dreaded diagnosis.
It’s the only screening that can detect potentially cancerous growths and treat them on the spot.
For some important tips on how and when to get a colonoscopy, read this free report from the Daily Dose archives.
Bringing up the rear,
Jack Harrison
Perhaps the arrogance has surfaced from witnessing of our many years with lack of leadership. Interesting short video on Trump’s perspective…25 years ago… It may make people more determined to vote for him. Too bad no one listened to him 25 years ago, this Country would be on much more solid ground today if they had!!! His viewpoint today is the same as it was back then. His political views haven’t changed. Donald Trump: Uncovered Interview from over twenty-five years ago.
The international currency manipulator and profiteer George Soros is the puppeteer behind countless nefarious schemes.
That’s George Soros in the chair on the right. Soros hosted Obama’s first presidential campaign fund-raising soiree.
In 2008, Soros was the first to host a fundraiser in his New York penthouse for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Through his foundations, Soros funds countless leftwing causes. We know Soros funded black protests and riots in Ferguson and Selma. See:
Now, the prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orban is accusing Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying…
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Posted in Uncategorized
Posted on October 31, 2025 by Rick Wells
It was entirely predictable that the last act of Speaker John Boehner and the first act of Speaker Paul Ryan would be a seamless continuation of the assault on the American people; that‘s what Congress does these days. It’s also no surprise that the assault included a capitulation to the wishes of the anti-American tyrant in the White House, for the same reasons.
The power of the purse is being discarded for the remainder of the Hussein Obama nightmare, as is any pretense of financial responsibility in a deal which Senator Jeff Sessions has discovered looks remarkably similar to one co-authored by Paul Ryan back in 2013. The wolves aren’t just guarding the hen house, they’ve taken it over. It’s a complete abdication of responsibility and duty to their constituents, one which Sessions reminds his Congressional counterparts there is no need to rush to complete. He reminds them of their duty, something they seem to have forgotten, to the people of the nation. On Tuesday Sessions wrote:
WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, issued the following statement after outgoing speaker John Boehner and President Obama unveiled a two-year deal to suspend the debt limit, waive federal spending caps and raid workers’ payments into their Social Security Trust Fund:
“Once again, a massive deal, crafted in secret, unveiled at the 11th hour, is being rushed through Congress under threat of panic. Once again, we have waited until an artificial deadline to force through that which our voters oppose.
At its core, this deal with President Obama does two things: First, it lifts federal spending caps for the next two years – including a $40 billion increase in spending on the federal bureaucracy. Second, it waives the federal debt limit through March of 2017, allowing for approximately $1.5 trillion to be added to the debt – ensuring no further conversation about our debt course or any corresponding action to alter it.
It appears this deal is built on the same principles as the Ryan-Murray budget deal from 2013. It exchanges instant increases in federal spending for distant savings, as much two decades down the road, that are likely to never materialize. It funds increased spending through increased revenues – violating a core budget principle by collecting more money to expand an already too-large federal bureaucracy. And it trades the termination of today’s spending limits for the promise of new spending limits ten years from now.
The spending caps in law today were pledged as part of the 2011 Budget Control Act agreement to lift the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion. It represented a bipartisan commitment to cap spending at a fixed amount. This deal shatters that commitment by spending $80 billion more than we promised over the next 2 years.
The deal also uses a common gimmick where alleged savings in an entitlement program are used to boost unrelated spending in the federal bureaucracy. Any savings found to entitlement programs faced with insolvency must be used to shore up those programs – not to surge spending somewhere else. Yet this deal claims illusory savings from Disability Insurance and increased pension insurance fees in order to boost bureaucratic budgets. Perhaps even worse, the deal attempts to stave off the shortfall in fraud-ridden Social Security Disability by plundering from the Social Security Trust Fund for retirees. One hundred and fifty billion dollars in funds will be siphoned from Americans’ payroll retirement contributions and redirected to the mismanaged disability program.
Finally, this deal cements the unacceptable precedent that every dollar of increased defense spending should be matched with a dollar of increased non-defense spending. This is upside-down: if an emergency requires more defense spending, common sense says we should seek to identify reductions, not hikes, to spending in non-defense accounts.
The people want an end to wasteful Washington spending. Lifting the budget caps and raising the debt ceiling through 2017 only ensures that our ineffective bureaucracy continues its wasteful ways while momentum in Washington for debt reduction stalls out. It eliminates a powerful opportunity to advance the case for financial discipline.
The deadline is artificial and can easily be pushed back with a short-term measure if needed. Republicans should insist that any vote on spending caps or the debt ceiling be delayed until the House has chosen a new Speaker – and until there has been a full conversation among our conference and, most importantly, our voters. There is no urgency to pass a 2-year deal. GOP voters are entitled to have their representatives represent them – not act as opposing counsel, urging them to capitulate to the President’s demands. Whether it’s spending, debt, crime, immigration or trade, it is time for us to start fighting for what our voters want – instead of demeaning their just concerns about the future of our country.”
November 2, 2025
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/11/walter-e-williams/left-liberals-love-election-fraud/
Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that’s because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I’ve never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities.
There is another area where the attack on ballot-box integrity goes completely unappreciated. We can examine this attack by looking at the laws governing census taking. As required by law, the U.S. Census Bureau is supposed to count all persons in the U.S. Those to be counted include citizens, legal immigrants and non-citizen long-term visitors. The law also requires that illegal immigrants be a part of the decennial census. The estimated number of illegal immigrants ranges widely from 12 million to 30 million. Official estimates put the actual number closer to 12 million.
Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy — namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.
Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation scholar and former member of the Federal Election Commission, has written an article, “How Noncitizens Can Swing Elections: Without Even Voting Illegally.” He points to the fact that 12 million illegal aliens, plus other aliens who are here legally but are not citizens and have no right to vote, distort representation in the House. Spakovsky cites studies by Leonard Steinhorn of American University, scholars at Texas A&M University and the Center for Immigration Studies. Steinhorn’s study lists 10 states that are each short one congressional seat that they would have had if apportionment were based on U.S. citizen population: Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.
On the other hand, states with large numbers of illegal aliens and other non-citizens have congressional seats they would not have had. They are: California (five seats), Florida (one seat), New York (one seat), Texas (two seats) and Washington state (one seat). Moreover, the inflated population count resulting from the inclusion of illegal immigrants and other non-citizens increases the number of votes some states get in the Electoral College system, affecting the actual process of electing the president of the United States.
There is a strong argument for counting non-citizens, whether they are here legally or illegally. An accurate population count is important for a number of public policy reasons as well as national security — we should know who is in our country. But as professor Mark Rozell, acting dean of the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, and Paul Goldman, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, say in their Politico article, there is no “persuasive reason to allow the presence of illegal immigrants, unlawfully in the country, or noncitizens generally, to play such a crucial role in picking a president.”
Hans von Spakovsky concludes his article saying, “It is a felony under federal law for a noncitizen to vote in our elections because voting is a right given only to American citizens. It is a precious right that must be earned by becoming a citizen. Giving aliens, particularly those whose first act was to break our laws to illegally enter the country, political power in Congress and allowing them to help choose our president strike at the very heart of our republic and what it means to be an American.”
Posted in 2016 Election, Politics
BY J.D. PENDRY FROM JDPENDRY.COM
Bacon makes everything taste better. It still tastes good even after the World Health Organization decided this food staple is giving me colorectal cancer. Now I do not eat bacon every day, but on most mornings scrambled eggs with cheese and a few strips of bacon get me going. That and copious amounts of coffee, which I hear is also bad for me but they have lain off that one since walking around with a coffee cup in your hand became a fashion accessory. Yes, even the salad gets some real bacon in it. Lettuce counteracts the effects of the bacon much in the same way that a diet soda pop counteracts the effects of a double cheeseburger and fries.
I have undoubtedly consumed tons of bacon, processed meat and red meat. Just last year I had my periodic colorectal cancer screening. The Doc told me it looks so good up in there that I did not need come back and see him again for ten years. You would think that something calling itself the World Health Organization could find better uses for its time. Apparently I am now 18 percent more likely to get cancer than a vegan. I also like hot dogs with chili and onions, bratwurst, smoked sausage, steak, ribs, cheeseburgers, cheese steaks, and fried bologna sandwiches and now after all of these years I learned I am giving myself cancer. Well dip me in a vat of five alarm chili.
Do you recall some years ago when another of these studies determined that artificial sweeteners used in soda pop also caused cancer. The tests showed it caused cancer in lab rats. Not long after this report came out it was determined that for an equivalent amount of that given to the rats, a human would have to consume about 7 cases of diet soda a day for I do not recall how many years, but it was a bunch. Another dilemma. Diet pop gives you cancer sugary pop gives you diabetes.
It is beginning to look like the only reasonable course of action is a diet of organically grown lettuce and bottled water. But if we all pursue that course the methane levels will become dangerously higher and spontaneous human combustion could become a real problem. Not to mention global warming. Just consider the poor polar bears. I am not taking on the guilt burden for wiping out the polar bear population so I will have to take my chances with bacon. Thick sliced, thin sliced, maple cured, hickory smoked and fried in its own aromatic grease. Ten years from now I will re-visit the roto-rooter doc and see how I am doing.
For those of you that might be in a panic about this and have probably thrown out the bacon and made your cancer screening appointments I want you to think about some things. The possibilities that you might die in your sleep increases a hundred fold every night when you go to bed. Do you know the staggering amount of people who are seriously injured by falling at home? Well, you certainly increase your chances of being one of them just by getting out of bed every morning. By venturing outside the likelihood that you will be run over by a garbage truck or bus increases tremendously. And in your car? My goodness what if the seatbelt fails or the air bag explodes in your face while you are driving down the interstate at 70 miles per hour! Maybe you should not get out of bed or get into it for that matter and stay in the house. Never leave it.
I think I will have a double bacon cheeseburger, chili cheese fries and a large diet pop. Then I will partake of the next thing most certainly to kill me. The presidential debates.
© 2015 J. D. Pendry American Journal All Rights Reserved.
REPOSTED FROM PERSONALLIBERTY.COM
The Barack Obama regime has shown once again who it believes are the real terrorists.
The Russian intervention in Syria has revealed what I (and others in alternative media) have been stating for months: that the U.S. war (so-called) on ISIS has been a sham from the beginning.
Since ISIS graduated from the JV team to varsity, the regime has repeatedly told us that ISIS is a threat that must be dealt with. And it was doing so through its plan to conduct an air and drone war, spend hundreds of millions of dollars training and arming a handful of “moderate rebels,” dropping arms randomly across the region, and providing fleets of white Toyota pickups to be outfitted with machine guns. Yet it took only days of Russian airstrikes to do what months of U.S. “action” couldn’t: drive ISIS fighters to cut off their beards and run for their lives to try to blend in with the populace.
Those so-called “moderate rebels” the regime and the neocon war hawks like Senile John McCain and his trained monkey, Lindsey Graham, enlisted or sought to enlist to topple the Syrian government on behalf of the Saudi oil sheiks and our Israeli masters are/were mostly al-Qaida and al-Nusra terrorists. But since they were “our” terrorists, the administration and a handful of U.S. allies have been funding them while telling us they were the good guys.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government and its allies have also been actively funding and arming ISIS. In other words, ISIS was controlled opposition. The U.S. “war” on it has been all for show. The regime obviously does not view ISIS or al-Qaida as terror groups because if it did, it would not be aiding and abetting them.
All the while, the regime has worked overtime to expedite the immigration of some of these same Islamists from the war-torn Syrian region (and other parts of the Africa and the Middle East) into the U.S. (and Europe) without so much as a FBI background check equivalent to the type Americans are subjected to if they want to buy a firearm.
The regime’s leader — the undocumented usurper currently despoiling the People’s House — and his anointed successor — the most vile and corrupt woman in the history of American (at least) politics — are now calling for an Australia-like firearms confiscation action on lawful American gun owners while his regime drops arms and ammo willy-nilly across the Middle East sandscape. And this is the same regime that funneled guns to Mexican drug lords and narcoterrorists through Operation Fast and Furious, and to al-Qaida terrorists in Syria through Benghazi, Libya (an operation for which Ambassador Chris Stevens, Information Officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty paid with their lives).
Now the Obama (no)Justice Department has created a new domestic terrorism czar and whole department to battle the newest greatest threat — behind nonexistent global warming — to America: the white Christian male gun-owning liberty lover. The new department is the evolution of a Department of a Homeland Security program begun in 2009 targeting liberty-loving Americans. That program morphed into a training program in 2013 that instructed local law enforcement to devote extra scrutiny to Christians who believe the Bible is God’s word, Christian “fundamentalists” (whatever those are), Americans who believe the country was founded on godly principles and those who believe the Constitution stands as the law of the land. In training materials, DHS has lumped Christians and Constitutionalists in with a group it calls the sovereign citizen movement, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi skinheads, and identified them as requiring special surveillance by law enforcement.
“Domestic terror groups pose a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda, a Justice Department official said Wednesday,” proclaimed CNN.com on Oct. 15. “To help combat them, the department has created a new counsel that will coordinate the investigation and prosecution of anti-government and hate groups.” (Obviously, CNN is in on the scam that is ISIS and al-Qaida, though the network doesn’t tell you that when its talking heads are promoting the so-called “war.”)
And who defines what constitutes “anti-government and hate groups?” The notoriously pro-Marxist anti-American Southern Preposterous Lie Center (known in some circles as the Southern Poverty Law Center), which deems anyone who doesn’t embrace cultural Marxism and the latest social justice warrior cause du jour perversion as a hate group that should be “disappeared” into the bowels of the NDAA’s dungeons. Its designation of the pro-family, pro-traditional Family Research Council as a “hate group” prompted the deranged homosexual activist Floyd Corkins to barge into the FRC offices with the intent to slaughter its employees.
For instance, in 2012 the Preposterous Lie Center issued a “summer list” of activists heading up the “radical right.” Among those named were Tenth Amendment Center executive director and sometime Personal Liberty Digest® contributor Michael Boldin.
Boldin’s sin is that the TAC “is on the far right, opposing a whole array of federal laws and regulations. It has gained wide support among hard-line libertarians …” He “evidently runs the organization from his home,” the SPLC exclaims, as opposed, I guess, to a palatial estate like the one the so-called Poverty Law Center occupies in the heart of Alabama’s capital, Montgomery, that includes six stories, cost $24 million to build — not counting a $5.5 million addition — and takes up most of a city block.
Given that Boldin advocates nullification of unconstitutional laws, drawing on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions drafted by the notorious un-American activists James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, it’s easy to see where the SPLC’s allegiances lie.
In a 2013 report, the Preposterous Lie Center named a list of “haters” in a “(non)ntelligence report,” titled “The Year in Hate & Extremism.” The list consisted of the following “racists” and “extremists”: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.); Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.), who has said Obama could be impeached for executive actions on gun control; Sheriff Richard Mack; The Oath Keepers (current and former military and law enforcement who have vowed to uphold the oath they swore to the Constitution); former Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin; Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel Action; Tony Adkins of Conservative-daily.com; Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and FreedomWatch; the Family Research Council; Joseph Farah of WND.com; Donald Trump; and unnamed lawmakers (but you know who you are) in Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee who proposed laws that sought to prevent federal gun control from applying to their states.
Back in June, The New York Times proclaimed on its opinion pages that:
Law enforcement agencies around the country are training their officers to recognize signs of anti-government extremism and to exercise caution during routine traffic stops, criminal investigations and other interactions with potential extremists. “The threat is real,” says the handout from one training program sponsored by the Department of Justice. Since 2000, the handout notes, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists, who share a “fear that government will confiscate firearms” and a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
To that end, the Obama regime has doubled down on government spying (“legitimized” by the George W. Bush regime under the misnamed Patriot Act) and has embarked on an effort to nationalize police and create a host of thought crimes and the new terrorism czar to oversee their enforcement.
As John Whitehead writes for The Rutherford Institute:
[T]he concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives — to identify and deter potential extremists — in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Clearly, to the current regime, if you are white, are Christian, own guns, believe the Constitution is the law of the land and not what a majority of a group of nine robe-wearing Satanists say the law is, oppose oppressive totalitarian government, advocate for low taxes and/or are against the Federal Reserve, etc., you are an anti-government extremist — a domestic terrorist — worthy of indefinite detention or worse.
REPOSTED FROM RAWCONSERVATIVE.COM
A California state bill was just signed in to law by Gov. Jerry Brown, that will register and allow illegal aliens to vote in US Elections. The New Motor Voter Act (A.B.1461) that is now law in California, automatically registers residents of California to vote at the DMV. According to the law and a report by the Washington Times, “The New Motor Voter Act automatically registers to vote all eligible voters when they obtain or renew their drivers licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles instead of requiring them to fill out a form.”
“The goal is to ease barriers to voting, but election-integrity advocates warn that the measure could inadvertently add millions of illegal voters to the rolls given that California allows undocumented aliens to obtain drivers licenses.” California state officials are praising the law and Alex Padilla, California’s Secretary of State says, “Citizens should not be required to opt in to their fundamental right to vote. We do not have to opt in to other rights, such as free speech or due process. The right to vote should be no different.” State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez from San Diego said, “This bill will lead to millions more registered California voters, which means more people we can talk to.”
The RAW Scoop is this. Critics of the law have called it for what it really is. Absolute and complete voter fraud and corruption on a grand scale. Stephen Frank from California Political Review issued a statement saying, “A.B. 1461 assures corruption of our elections. Our elections will look like those of Mexico and other corrupt nations and honest people will stop voting, since illegals will out vote them.” Linda Paine of the Elections Integrity Project says, “Citizens must oppose this treasonous attempt to turn California into a form of government that gives control to non-citizens.”
As you may have read, we broke a story back in August on voter fraud that the mainstream media has refused to cover. You can see it HERE Our election process is corrupt enough in the United States without the need for “Legislated Corruption” that California just implemented. In a state that controls 55 Electoral College votes and is loaded with Illegal Aliens and Sanctuary Cities, it is highly unlikely that California will ever be “Red” again. What this law will do, is guarantee millions of illegal popular votes, completely skewing the results in to the Democratic column forever. It will also be the start of many other “Blue” states moving towards a similar law. We need to make it known that this hostile takeover by Illegal Immigrants cannot be allowed to continue. I am sick of the “rights” argument. If you are here illegally, you have no rights. Including the right to vote. This law is scandalous and shameful to say the least…
Posted in illegal aliens
Tagged Governor Jerry Brown a good communist, Jerry Brown breaks the law of the United States, Jerry Brown buys votes with illegal alien invaders, Jerry Brown gives illegal aliens the right to vote in California, Jerry Brown needs to be impeached, Jerry Brown sucks up to Obama
Every society in history has been hinged on compatible systems of social structure, economics and politics. And, every unique society is regulated by a compatible legal system that settles all disputes between its citizens. In the Western world and especially in America, this is revered as the “Rule of Law”.
On August 26, 2026 the New York Times blasted out the headline, Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty. In short, Obama was to use Executive Orders to entangle the U.S. in a global “treaty” on climate change, without consulting the U.S. Senate. However, the Constitution requires the Senate to vote on all treaties and the bar is high: It takes a two-third vote to approve.
To the globalist, the Constitution is out. The Rule of law has collapsed. Reflexive Law has surpassed it all. The balance of this article will show you how and why.
If you are saying “Huh?”, you had better read every word of this report and figure it out, because this might be the most important shard of evidence ever revealed about the wrenching transformation of American society.
Obama’s principal adviser and “negotiator” on this so-called climate accord was John Podesta, and this whole treaty-by-executive-order debacle can be laid squarely at his feet. Until just recently, Podesta was a member of the Trilateral Commission. He was Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff in the 1990s and the original instigator of Executive Branch policy of using Executive Orders to bypass Congress on certain issues. Clinton, also a Trilateral member, created many such EO’s to side-step Congress, and Congress unfortunately let him get away with it.
Enough about Podesda. Just remember that he was the prime mover in what I am about to reveal.
The NYT article stated,
To sidestep that requirement [of a 2/3 Senate vote], President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.
While doing some research for my book, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation, another book had caught my eye and so I impulsively bought it. The title was Greening NAFTA by Markell and Knox and it was published in 2003 by Stanford University Press. According to the book, there was a supplemental agreement to NAFTA (1992) called the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), which established the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC). The CEC was “the first international organization created to address the environmental aspects of economic integration.” (1)
I intended to put the book in my library for some future date, but since I more recently had a five hour plane flight and needed something to do, I hastily threw it into my briefcase on the way out the door. On the first leg of the flight, I skimmed the book, underlining a few things, but otherwise it generally put me to sleep. On the return flight 10 days later, I picked it up again and flipped the pages thinking it would be more of the same, only to fall on a chapter toward the back titled, “Coordinating Land and Water Use in the San Pedro River Basin.” The San Pedro River is in southern Arizona, and it just so happened that I had owned a ranch on that same river when I first got out of college in 1968, and so I knew the area like the back of my hand. Now I was really interested!
The San Pedro River Basin was the first instance of CEC involvement because it was a small and relatively unimportant area, and because the headwaters of the San Pedro River originated in Mexico, just south of the U.S. border. Greening NAFTA explained,
Under Articles 13 and 14, the Secretariat can accept and review citizen submissions alleging that one of the three countries is not enforcing its existing environmental laws. (2)
In fact, the San Pedro submission (i.e., complaint) came not from a citizen at all, but from the radical left-wing environmental group based out of Tucson, theSouthwest Center for Biological Diversity (SCBD). The mere accusation that the area was in violation of their preconceived ideas of normalcy was enough to set off a devastating chain of events that changed the San Pedro River Basin forever. Here is where the plot thickened. The authors explained,
Article 13 can be characterized as an example of postmodern, “soft” or “reflexive” international law because it seeks to influence public and private behavior without the threat of the enforcement of traditional, sanction-based “hard” law. (3)
I had only heard (obviously not understanding it) the term “soft law” before, but what was “Reflexive Law?” The author treated them as synonyms. After a another round of digging, I found the fountainhead of Reflexive Law in the following article, Towards a Theory of Law and Societal Development, written by a professor of international law in Sweden:
Another sociologist of law who have dealt with legal development in stages is Günther Teubner. He has in an article in Law and Society Review 1983 put forward a theory that the law moves from formal to substantive law and onwards to something he calls reflexive law. Teubner agrees with Nonet-Selznick that we have passed a stage of formal law, which is consistent with the concept of autonomous law, and after that have entered a stadium of material law. Teubner does think the transition from formal to material law should be divided into two types. A “genuine” material law which is used to realize specific, concrete values, what Teubner calls for substantive law and another type of material law which Teubner has labeled reflexive law. This latter legal form is characterized by constitutive and procedural rules that put limits on legal developments without specifying concrete material values to be realized. Teubner summarizes the characteristics of reflexive law by putting it in relief to the formal and substantive law as follows:
Reflexive law affects the quality of outcomes without determining that the agreements will be reached. Unlike formal law, it does not take prior distributions as given. Unlike Substantive law it does not hold that certain contractual outcomes are desirable. (4)
So we see that Reflexive Law is just over 30 years old, and yet it has since become the principal means by which to collapse the traditional Rule of Law, based on actual laws, in the United States and in the Western world. Furthermore, Reflexive Law starts without first determining exactly what agreement will be reached, but moves forward anyway to see how far the participants can be pushed.
Hard law, which we are all familiar with, specifies clear outcomes when it is violated. If you speed, you get a ticket. If you commit armed robbery, you go to jail for a specified period. This is the traditional Rule of Law upon which our Republic and Constitution is based. Laws are created by a Legislative Branch, executed by the Executive Branch and adjudicated by the Judicial Branch.
Greening NAFTA then spelled out exactly what Reflexive Law entails:
Reflexive law tries to align systematically legal rules with norms that the relevant actors will internalize. It builds on the realization that the reasons why people actually obey law ultimately lie outside formal adjudication and the power of the state to enforce rules. (5)
Again, Reflexive Law starts out with desired outcomes, created by unelected and unaccountable actors, for which there are no laws. Yes, they could appeal to Congress to create legislation, as would be required by the Constitution. At the end of the reflexive process, described below, the actual outcomes depend on how well the stakeholders “internalize” what is proposed. In other words, there is no actual legal process at all, but rather a jawboning process that cons actors into compliance.
“Information disclosure” is a principal policy instrument of Reflexive Law. That is, the analysis produced is presented with its “recommended outcomes.” Public meetings are then held to build consensus between individual citizens and other “actors”. In the case of the San Pedro River Basin study, the CEC enlisted the University of Arizona’s Udall Center to hold these public meetings. In sum, there was zero consensus among actual citizens of the area, as the book simply notes, “Public comment was emotionally divided on the reduction of irrigated agriculture.” (6) Really? In fact, the farmers and ranchers in the area were beyond livid, but the real purpose of the public meetings had nothing to do with getting their voluntary consensus. Rather, the meetings were designed to publicly abuse them until they submitted.
The Greening NAFTA authors were very blunt about this:
This experience reveals two powerful incentives at work: shame and the desire to be virtuous while saving money or increasing profit margins. In a post-Holocaust world, human rights NGOs have effectively used shame to induce compliance with universal human rights norms. Also, voluntary pollution reduction has been achieved when it is internally profitable for an industry to reduce its discharges or an industry anticipates increased regulatory or public pressure to reduce them from the disclosure, such as through public shaming. Shaming works well with pollution, especially toxic pollution, because it draws on deep, perhaps irrational, fears of exposure to the risk of serious illness and an innate abhorrence of bodily injury. (7)
What of the farmers and ranchers who refused to be shamed into consensus during the Udall Center public hearings? After all, they had zero input into the CEC’s study and subsequent “recommendations”, nor were they consulted prior to the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity’s original complaint. Well, they were simply offered other incentives that they were helpless to refuse or refute:
Two concrete incentives that have successfully induced landowner cooperation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are fear of a worse regulatory outcomeand immunity from liability for changed conditions.(8) [Emphasis added]
In the end, the farmers and ranchers succumbed to the Reflexive Law process when the regulatory bullies showed up with threats of what would happen to them if they did not buckle under to the CEC’s demands. These actors included the Bureau of Land Management, manager of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA) and the U.S. Department of the Army. Accompanying them were several NGO’s, including the Nature Conservancy and the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. The federal threat was “We will bankrupt you with regulations.” The NGO threat was “We will bankrupt you with lawsuits.”
This is “Reflexive Law” and it is 100 percent antithetical to the American Republic, the Rule of Law, the U.S. Constitution and the entirety of Western civilization. Because compliance has always been posited as voluntary, nobody has been alarmed enough to look any further at it. However, I will point out that almost every global imposition has been based on the voluntary aspect of Reflexive Law. Agenda 21 depended upon voluntary compliance, which is often referred to as “soft law” among its critics, who have not perceived the deeper meaning of Reflexive Law. Sustainable Development in general is always proposed to be a voluntary program. All of these are based on Reflexive Law. But, once it gets its tentacles into your personal property and local community, you will be involuntarily squeezed until you “voluntarily” comply. There is no legal process available to defend yourself, your property, or your rights.
Now let’s examine the NYT article mentioned at the start of this article.
To sidestep that requirement [two-third vote of the Senate], President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path. (9) [Emphasis added]
Did your alarm bells ring? Obama delivered us into an international Reflexive Law arrangement that has no actual legal basis in fact, and that is why they think they are justified in ignoring the Senate. After all, the Senate deals with “hard law” while Podesta and gang deals with “Reflexive Law.” Furthermore, they will use the principal “name and shame” policy tool of Reflexive Law to smoke out the resistance for public shaming. Subsequently, from what you now know about how Reflexive Law is enforced in the end, those holdouts will be offered a “deal that they cannot refuse”, namely, much worse regulatory outcomes, international lawsuits and entanglement, trade sanctions, etc.
The NYT elaborated further:
American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.
Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts. (10) [Emphasis added]
There is not a single shred of doubt that anything other than Reflexive Law is pictured here. It spits in the face of traditional Rule of Law that our country was founded upon and operated under until 1983 when this treasonous legal system was conceived — by a German, no less. For all intents and purposes, Reflexive Law has caused the utter collapse of Rule of Law as we know it.
Don’t even begin to think this is anything less than blatant, for the article concluded with the frank braggadocio :
“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate. (11) [Emphasis added]
Magic, indeed: Merriam-Webster defines magic as “the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.”
To copycat Paul Harvey’s famous radio program sign-off, “Now you know… therest of the story.”
Cathy
chulai1968
Truth Prevailing
Publius Huldah
Freedom Rider
Christian Zionist
radioroger2015
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Steve
