Guest Post by John W. Whitehead
Despite our best efforts, we in the American police state seem to be stuck on repeat, reliving the same set of circumstances over and over and over again: egregious surveillance, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, etc.
Unfortunately, few seem to pay heed to the warning signs blaring out the message: Danger Ahead.
Much like the Titanic, we’re plowing full steam ahead into a future riddled with hidden and not-so-hidden dangers, all the while ignoring the many warnings being issued about threats to our freedoms. However, as long as a permanent, unelected bureaucracy—a.k.a. the shadow government— continues to call the shots in the halls of power and the reach of the police state continues to expand, the crisis has not been averted.
Here’s a glimpse of some of the nefarious government programs we’ll be encountering on our journey through 2017.
Mandatory quarantines without due process or informed consent: Under a new rule proposed by the CDC, government agents will be empowered to indefinitely detain any traveler they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.
Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel: As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers such as pastors, teachers, hair stylists, bartenders, police officers and EMTs in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.
Tracking chips for citizens: Momentum is building for the government to be able to track citizens, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card or through microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin.
Military training to deal with anti-establishment movements in megacities: As a Pentagon propaganda video that is being used to train special forces makes clear, in the eyes of the U.S. government and its henchmen, the battlefield of the future is the American home front.
Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation: This year’s NDAA not only allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens by placing them beyond the reach of the Constitution, but it also paves the way for the government to crack down on anyone attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights by exposing government wrongdoing.
Threat assessments: Government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. It’s the American police state rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
War on cash: The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to do away with large bills such as $20s, $50s, $100s and shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
Expansive surveillance: In today’s surveillance state, we are all suspects to be spied on, searched, scanned, frisked, monitored, tracked and treated as if we’re potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.
Militarized police: Having already transformed America’s police into extensions of the military, the DHS, DOJ and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.
Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed: The military industrial complex that has advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, is the very entity that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire. The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s largest employer, with more than 3.2 million employees.
Attempts by the government to identify, target and punish so-called domestic “extremists”: The government’s anti-extremism program will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. To this end, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist before they can become actual threats.
Erosions of private property: Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.
Overcriminalization: The government’s tendency towards militarization and overcriminalization, in which routine, everyday behaviors become targets of regulation and prohibition, has resulted in Americans getting arrested for making and selling unpasteurized goat cheese, cultivating certain types of orchids, feeding a whale, holding Bible studies in their homes, and picking their kids up from school.
Strip searches: Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately.
Drones: As corporations and government agencies alike prepare for their part in the coming drone invasion, it won’t be long before American citizens find themselves to be the target of these unmanned aerial vehicles.
Prisons: America’s prisons, housing the largest number of inmates in the world and still growing, have become money-making enterprises for private corporations that manage the prisons in exchange for the states agreeing to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years.
Censorship: Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core First Amendment freedoms.
Fascism: As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.
James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best when he warned: “Take alarm at the first experiment with liberties.” Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago.
We are fast moving past the point of no return when it comes to restoring our freedoms. Worse, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government has been operating ten steps ahead for quite some time now, and we have yet to catch up, let alone catch our breath as the tides of change swirl around us.
You’d better tighten your seatbelts, folks, because we could be in for a rough ride in 2017.
Wind Of Change
Scorpions
I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of change
The world is closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers
The future’s in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of change
Walking down the street
Distant memories
Are buried in the past forever
I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams (share their dreams)
With you and me
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (the glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of change (the wind of change)
The wind of change
Blows straight into the face of time
Like a stormwind that will ring the freedom bell
For peace of mind
Let your balalaika sing
What my guitar wants to say
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams (share their dreams)
With you and me (with you and me)
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of change (in the wind of change)
What’s That Song About?
Music is everywhere. Every culture has it. It was always there. It records everything. It’s a living history. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but those who rock remember.
Friday, September 26, 2008
The Meine brothers, whom you and I know as a couple of serious guitar shredders who hail from Germany (aka The Scorpions), began writing this song in 1989 after a visit to Moscow. They were actually the first hard rock band ever to play in Russia. They returned the following year to play the Moscow Music Peace Festival. It was then that the words to this song were written. They were inspired by the site of thousands of Russians cheering them on, even though they were German. Lead singer Klaus Meine is quoted as saying, “Everyone was there: the Red Army, journalists, musicians from Germany, from America, from Russia – the whole world on one boat. It was like a vision; everyone was talking the same language. It was a very positive vibe. That night was the basic inspiration for Wind Of Change.”
It was the same year this song was written that the world changed forever. Modern history will record that in late summer of 1989, Communist Europe ceased to be. “Wind of Change” rose to be the unofficial theme song of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, late in the summer of 1989.
The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 and separated two German states for 28 years. West Berlin was free. East Berlin was not. The Wall was over 96 miles long and was actually two walls back to back. In 1975, the final modifications to The Wall were added, constructed from 45,000 sections of reinforced concrete each 12 feet high and 4 feet thick. It had 116 watchtowers, 20 bunkers, barbed wire, canine patrols, fakir beds (beds of nails under balconies) and anti-vehicle trenches that guarded a “no man’s land”…the death strip area in between the two walls. It was paved with raked gravel, which made it easy to spot foot prints.
When the border between East and West Berlin was officially closed at midnight on August 13, 1961. East Berlin was controlled by Josef Stalin and became a socialist state. Families were abruptly separated. People who commuted to work from East to West were instantly either homeless or without employment. At least 136 people are confirmed killed trying to escape from East to West Berlin (but there were probably many, many more “unconfirmed”), and countless documented and undocumented desperate successful and failed escape attempts.
Ironically, the collectiveness The Scorpions (and everyone else) experienced at the Moscow Music Peace Festival would not end when the Music Peace Festival ended. “Wind of Change” celebrated the political shift in Eastern Europe. Although “Winds of Change” wasn’t written specifically about the Berlin Wall, the feelings of the world and the lyrics of the Meines was somewhat of poetic foreshadowing. The Berlin Wall was an icon of the rule of tyranny and poverty behind the Iron Curtain, and it was one of the largest, most real, tangible, material objects that smacked the face of humanity and said that the Cold War was real…and it was so much more than simple politics. When the Berlin Wall came down, it signalled the beginning of total collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe, which would trickle all the way up to the very hub of communism: Mother Russia. The Cold War, which had gripped the world and glued us to the edge of our seats for five decades, was finally over.
In 2005, viewers of the German television network ZDF chose “Wind of Change” as song of the century. It is the highest ever selling song in Germany, and is frequently played with footage of the Wall coming down. This song is also widely known in Germany as the song of German reunification (and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, generally), even though it only rose to popularity two years after.
A key to some of the lyrics:
Moskva – the name of a river that runs through Moscow
Gorky Park – an amusement park in Moscow
balalaika – a musical instrument of Russian origin that is fretted and has three strings and looks an awful lot like a Gibson Flying V guitar.
Obama’s legacy.
Decide how you are going to (legally) deal with it and be prepared to put it into action.
Anon,decide how you are going to deal with it,really not worried about word in parenthesis.
I went to the doctor last week. His intake gal, asked me “Have I had thoughts about hurting myself”.
I said: No. But I have a list of people that…. She stopped me right there and said: Thank you, that’s enough.
I went to the doctor last week. His intake gal, asked me “Have I had thoughts about hurting myself”.
I said no,”I was going to call my ex on the holidays but hung up before she answered!”
This was funny but you guys be careful saying things like this.
A couple of years ago a buddy of mine was getting physical therapy at the clinic associated with a hospital & it’s associated complex.
The two physical therapists were asking him the same bs questions about violence & guns that lots of medical personnel ask nowadays.He joked that if people did not quit asking questions about guns he was going to shoot someone.One of the therapists drifted away while the other one kept working him.
About 10 minutes later they abruptly stopped working him & called him into the office where he was met by the administrator for the entire complex,it’s security director,and a couple of armed guards.
He was told not to ever come back onto the property & issued a trespass warning.
He immediately called me & a couple of other guys to meet him at his house to get his guns in case the security people called the cops & it turned into one of those situations where the cops seize your guns.
Luckily,the cops were not called & he just had to find new medical people but who knows how it could have ended.
The only doubtful comment above is the claimed Prison for Profit scheme: in Florida, we’re like the Old Lady Living in a Shoe; we have so many Black criminals we don’t know what to do. They are a bust for Africa, Haiti, etc; a bust as farm workers (after the War); they busted every liberal plan to help them; and they are a bust as prison workers. The Useless Idiots just want to release them, register them as Democrats and US sustain them as Black Block Voters. We need to convert expensive “Correctional Institutes” to Prison Farms where they produce food or starve like the rest of us White rural government tax slaves.
always loved the Scorpions–Klaus Meiner’s voice is amazing. Interesting trivia, the Scorpions were the #1 selling band during the 1980’s worldwide–not bad for a group most of the college kids never even heard of.
Been around in one form or another since the 60’s!
Love the Scorpions. They came out before my time but they cranked it hard in the 80’s. I do remember when they were the playing metal shows in Moscow and the crowds loved it. Metallica and Anthrax played there with Ozzy too but the Scorpions were the lead act. There videos on MTV were great. Posting a version of Winds of Change in Russian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMuCgdJUfqc
Burn the Sky live:
The rest of the shit is depressing AF because it’s true. We are not a free people. The government can fuck you over without consequence and the presstitutes wonder why there is hostility to the ruling class. Politicians bone the voters and blow the donors. False wars are a pretext to erode our liberties and now the nanny and nurse ratchet state are doing us in. Happy 2017.
A little Star Wars logic :”the tighter you grip something the more things slip through your fingers” . Time will tell if we are doomed to a police state as in 1984 or a continuation of animal farm like we have now !
Either way making America great again is quickly looking like a pipe dream , up in smoke !
Take notice in today’s world in many large situations we no longer repair or renovate , we demolish and rebuild on a firmed up foundation . Let’s hope it won’t be to bloody but my optimism is fading quickly !