Why Is Washington Doing That?

Is anyone out there tired of having tricks played on them by their own government? It seems like we are always only getting half-truths, misleading statements and being blamed for everything which goes wrong. Let me give you an example of this. I was watching a CNN newscast and they had two experts on. One was a General and one a Colonel. They were asked about Iraq and what was the cause of the problems there. The General blamed us. He said the people lost interest in the war and that is why the troops were mostly pulled out and that was why Iraq was in such a mess today. The Colonel on the other hand said we should not have had troops there in the first place and even if Saddam Hussein was a bad man, it isn’t our job to remove dictators from countries all over the world and this guy was 100% correct. Blaming us is nothing new, I remember when NASA was asked why we stopped sending people to the moon and the reply was it was the fault of the people, they had lost interest. It is so easy to blame us for everything and use this as an excuse to cover up the real reasons for what the government does.

They’re a sneaky bunch in congress, but I am sure you all knew this by now. Under the new budget rules there was not supposed to be any increases in the budget and yet the House just passed a bill giving an increase of 89 billion dollars to the military in the form of an emergency fund. According to Ron Paul a Republican, "The Republican majority resorted to trickery to evade the meager spending limitations imposed by the 2011 budget control act – limitations that did not, as often reported, cut military spending, but only slowed its growth."  Why did they do this? The talk is Washington wants to maintain its pseudo-empire around the world. Debates on the war in Syria have been blocked and the war on ISIS has never been authorized. Why must we always be at war, doesn’t this signal something is wrong with the way we do things? After World War II there was really no peace. The Cold War started and then we had all those other wars, the small ones and a war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is time to stop all this fighting and concentrate on getting our economy going, but unfortunately the amount of money we are spending on the military is killing the economy.

The US government has been reportedly putting a lot of money into perfecting brain scanners. These new machines if perfected may make lie detectors look like toys. It is said they will use “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging” or (FMRI). From what I have read about this subject it seems the detection would take place when certain parts of the brain light up with activity. A light in one area may indicate a lie while a light in a different area might signify the person is telling the truth. It seems to now be a matter of decoding the areas which light up and decipher their meanings. If used properly and lawfully this might become an indispensable tool if there is no way to beat it, but as we know even lie detectors can be fooled and it seems to me the way to beat a machine like this is to believe what you are saying, so maybe hypnosis might be the way to do it. What I worry about is the misuse of technology like this. I would hate to see a machine created which could somehow be hidden and monitor what everyone is saying.

One of the things I have to wonder about is what did the government expect when we sent people into the Ukraine? We knew there were Russian speaking people in part of the country who considered themselves more Russian than Ukrainian, we also knew the Russians had their biggest naval base in the Ukraine. Did we think the Russians would just sit back and let us take over the Ukraine and make it a part of NATO? I ask these questions because I don’t see how Russia and China joining together in a currency deal which will hurt the dollar is a surprise. Our allies also joined in with them which I think we might also have expected. It is now being thought that since Russia and China have formed this monetary alliance they will become the world’s strongest economy. One financial expert stated, “The transition from the usual scheme of payments in major currencies is not a quick process, but with ascertain political will and sufficient mechanisms of hedging currency risks in exports and imports it is quite feasible.” In other words things might work out very well for Russia and China at the expense of the dollar. In 2014 the use of the Yuan rose by 9% in international trade. Great Britain and Germany have signed up with the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or (AIIB) despite US objections.

One has to wonder what is next now that a Federal Appeals Court has ruled NSA spying on us in bulk is illegal. Will the government just continue to do it anyway? This is one of the programs which whistleblower Edward Snowden had told us about. The court stated that such collection of bulk phone records is, “unprecedented and unwarranted.” The congress has until June 1, 2015 to review the part of the Patriot Act which authorizes this.

Glenn Greenwald a famous journalist, lawyer, author and commentator has been working with news agencies about how government agents infiltrate the Internet with the purpose of manipulating, deceiving and destroying reputations. It is said he found out about this from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. One tactic is to put up false information on the Internet for the purpose of destroying the reputation of a person considered a threat. Another tactic is to use things like social science to manipulate the outcome of discourse. Posting data which is then attributed to someone who had nothing to do with it is called a false flag operation. Then there is the false victim who pretends to be the victim of an attack by someone who really didn’t attack him at all. This false victim then post all sorts of negative information about a person on many different sites making him look very bad. Originally these disclosures had to do with the British government, but it is now being said it also applies to our government and this is not hard to believe, given its track record.

The Federal Government is not the only government which seems to be against us. Lately state governments have done some really hurtful things to their citizens. North Carolina has evicted a woman from her own property, because she lives in a tent behind her house which was flooded with 10,000 gallons of raw sewage about 10 years ago. She had reached a settlement, but didn’t want to hook up to the sewer line after that tragedy so they used a camping law against her. Then there is the man who was catching rain water in a barrel. The man lives in Oregon and was arrested. An elderly 88 year old window was continually having a football land in her yard in Blue Ash. Finally she kept the ball and the police came and arrested her. There are still plenty of state laws on the books which can be used to arrest residents. In Michigan it is illegal for a woman to get a haircut without permission of her husband or father. It is now illegal to buy used goods in Louisiana with cash. There are enough crazy laws on the books where anyone of us can be arrested if the state so desires.