NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear readers:

As we come to a close of 2018, and enter into 2019, just a few days from our press time is our memorable celebration of one of our most ancient celebrations in mankind: Christianity, I want to wish you all MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR! I bring to you this great article, written by John F. McManus, about how this memorable celebration of peace and love, is being challenged by atheists in the whole society. Marvin R.

by John F. McManus

The Christian beliefs of America’s forefathers and residents supplied the bedrock upon which the United States was built. But the Founding Fathers who did the building never intended to use the power of government to favor any particular religious view. They knew that religion would be necessary to guide the conduct of the people. So they carefully balanced the need for government with the need for religion.

When the Founders insisted in the First Amendment that there should be “no law respecting the establishment of religion,” they never intended to create a Godless state. They knew that temporal happiness would flow from the peoples’ religious views that bound them to moral principles. The government would be ruled by law, they believed, and the people would be limited by a freely accepted moral code such as the Ten Commandments.

George Washington summed up what the Founders expected when he stated: “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

The sound foundation written into our nation’s beginning resulted in self-reliant people possessed of virtue anchored in religion. It was a benign fostering of religious consciousness, not a mandate issued by government.

But times are changing. For many years, individuals and organizations have worked to destroy the beneficial influence of religion. One of the most notable casualties is the downgrading of Christmas. Converting the birth of Christ into a celebration featuring snowmen and reindeer, and substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas,” indicate that the birth of the Babe in the crib is under attack. And the attack comes from the courts, not just in the commercial life of the nation.

It was in 1958 that New Jersey’s large Bamberger’s department store departed from longstanding practice and substituted various United Nations symbols and emblems in place of its traditional Christmas displays. Other than some raised eyebrows, no serious objections were raised and a campaign to have other stores do likewise in 1959 was begun. But the infant John Birch Society (formed in December 1958) learned of plans to have other area stores follow the Bamberger lead. A hastily created letter-writing campaign aimed at storeowners and managers in the region succeeded in persuading them, even Bamberger’s, to display the customary Christmas decorations.

However, the war on Christmas continued and court rulings started banning anything even hinting at the religious meaning of the great day. Soon, the most brazen perversion of the annual celebration saw promotion of UNICEF greeting cards in place of traditional Christmas cards. Many of UNICEF’s offerings had been created by known Communists. More letter-writing by Birch Society members and friends put an end to that.

By 2005, FOX news host John Gibson authored an entire book about the campaign attacking Christmas. His The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought awakened many. But the war continued. We now find religious floats no longer in annual Christmas parades. Corporations have told employees to offer “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” when dealing with the public. For many, a “Christmas Tree” has become a “Holiday Tree.” And manger scenes with the Babe in a crib surrounded by Mary, Joseph, the Magi, and some shepherds no longer appear on property housing public buildings thanks to challenges raised by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Reliance on a tortured meaning of the First Amendment has become a battering ram used to diminish and ultimately ban the true meaning of Christmas. Who gains in this campaign? The obvious answer is those who want to remake our nation’s fundamentals so the United States can fit nicely into a UN-led new world order.

Ask a non-Christian American if he or she is harmed by Christian fellow Americans who live according to the moral strictures of the Christian religion. Be prepared for a speedy negative response. What George Washington stated so many years ago is a correct analysis of human nature. Expecting morality to prevail without religion is an absurdity. And we add that an absence of morality is a huge step toward creating conditions where a would-be ruler will deal with chaos by establishing tyranny.

Like many similar traditions that have made America the envy of the world, keeping the real meaning of Christmas alive cannot be overstated. Merry Christmas to all!

(John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society).

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear readers:

The following article, written by Jay Symopoulos for the The Free Thought Project site and published in May, take us to a different level of understanding of what could cause an interruption of the electrical grid in the country. Has anyone of you ever imagined anything like this could happen and what would be the devastating consequences for most of the services that we all depend on? – Marvin R.

A shocking report, commissioned by Congress and carried out by the Department of Defense on Electromagnetic Pulse, has just been declassified showing the extreme threat the US faces from an EMP attack

by Jay Syrmopoulos

Washington, D.C. – A newly declassified report by the recently re-established Commission to Assess the Threat to the from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack warns that the threat posed by an EMP attack could jeopardize “modern civilization,” return a lifestyle last seen in the 1800’s and leave millions of people dead across the United States.

The executive report, entitled Assessing the Threat from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), predicts that the smallest EMP attack on the US electrical grid could have a devastating effect on the supply chain for at least a year or more – depending upon the scale of the attack – starving much of the country of electricity, water, food, transportation and telephone/internet service.

“A long-term outage owing to EMP could disable most critical supply chains, leaving the U.S. population living in conditions similar to centuries past, prior to the advent of electric power,” said the newly declassified July 2017 report.

“In the 1800s, the U.S. population was less than 60 million, and those people had many skills and assets necessary for survival without today’s infrastructure. An extended blackout today could result in the death of a large fraction of the American people through the effects of societal collapse, disease, and starvation. While national planning and preparation for such events could help mitigate the damage, few such actions are currently underway or even being contemplated,” added the executive summary.

The new report in many ways paralleled the previous commissions’ recommendations but included the distinct possibility of an EMP from a potential atmospheric nuclear blast by Russia, China or North Korea rather than solely focusing on solar events.

The Washington Examiner reported that “three reports on the issue have been declassified by the Pentagon and seven more are awaiting clearance.”

A declassified report from Peter Vincent Pry, a former member of a previous EMP commission, advisor to the current commission, and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security notes the potential magnitude of an EMP catastrophe.
In his report, entitled “Life Without Electricity,” Pry highlights the extreme devastation expected:

• Social Order: Looting requires dusk to dawn curfew. People become refugees as they flee powerless homes. Work force becomes differently employed at scavenging for basics, including water, food, and shelter.

• Communications: No TV, radio, or phone service.

• Transportation: Gas pumps inoperable. Failure of signal lights and street lights impedes traffic, stops traffic after dark. No mass transit metro service. Airlines stopped.

• Water and Food: No running water. Stoves and refrigerators inoperable. People melt snow, boil water, and cook over open fires. Local food supplies exhausted. Most stores close due to blackout.

• Energy: Oil and natural gas flows stop.

• Emergency Medical: Hospitals operate in dark. Patients on dialysis and other life support threatened. Medications administered and babies born by flashlight.

• Death and Injury: Casualties from exposure, carbon dioxide poisoning and house fires increase.

The executive report notes that the scenario proposed by Pry could potentially be a long-term situation due to damage the EMP which would make repairing the electrical grid much more difficult.

“The United States — and modern civilization more generally — faces a present and continuing existential threat from naturally occurring and man-made electromagnetic pulse assault and related attacks on military and critical national infrastructures. A nationwide blackout of the electric power grid and grid-dependent critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, sanitation, food and water supply — could plausibly last a year or longer. Many of the systems designed to provide renewable, stand-alone power in case of an emergency, such as generators, uninterruptible power supplies, and renewable energy grid components, are also vulnerable to EMP attack,” said the 27-page report.

The report urges coordination between governmental agencies to harden protections, which many experts have testified could be done relatively cheaply, an EMP czar to oversee readiness, and running simulation EMP attacks against current systems to test preparedness.

“With the development of small nuclear arsenals and long-range missiles by new, radical U.S. adversaries, the threat of a nuclear EMP attack against the U.S. becomes one of the few ways that such a country could inflict devastating damage to the United States,” concluded the report. It added, “It is critical, therefore, that the U.S. national leadership address the EMP threat as a critical and existential issue, and give a high priority to assuring the leadership is engaged and the necessary steps are taken to protect the country from EMP.”

Furthermore, the report notes that despite the attention given to the issue by the Trump administration, there is federal infighting, with the DoD, which has already factored EMP protection into its current planning, failing to distribute information to private and civilian agencies attempting to make similar preparations.

The reality is that an EMP could be delivered from a small ship off the coast of the United States, thus meaning that states that are without operating ICBM programs could still deliver a devastating attack that kill millions and, at least temporarily, take the US back to being an 1800’s agrarian society.

This should serve as food for thought when we choose hostile aggression with other nations over international diplomacy. Rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars yearly on managing an expansive military empire meant to control the flow of goods and money for multinational corporations, perhaps the money would better spend on the actual defense of the United States by preparing for the potential eventuality of an EMP incident here at home.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

Dear readers:

If most of you, who had followed the political campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had any questions o there was a vacuum of information regarding the new Mexican president’s real political or philosophical perspective, this article, written by Luis Gómez Romero, will bring some light to you. This article was written two days before AMLO was consecrated as the new Mexico’s leader. Marvin R.

But how he will use that power is a worry given the events of the last five months

by Luis Gómez Romero

Five months after he won a landslide victory in Mexico’s 2018 presidential election on promises to “transform” the country, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be sworn into office on Dec. 1.

The prolonged transition period – currently one of the the world’s lengthiest – has given Mexicans a preview of what presidential leadership will look like under López Obrador: aggressive.

Since its July 1 general election, Mexico has effectively been run by parallel governments with very different agendas. President Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s conservative and highly unpopular outgoing leader, has all but disappeared from the public eye, even as tensions with the United States over the treatment of Central American migrants run high.

Meanwhile, López Obrador has been increasingly visible, offering asylum and temporary work permits to refugees, pushing his legislative priorities and deciding the fate of major infrastructure projects – though, strictly speaking, he cannot follow through on any of these decisions until after his inauguration on Saturday.

The president-elect’s disregard for constitutional restrictions has many political analysts in the country, myself included, concerned about how he will use his executive power once in office.

Since July, López Obrador has unilaterally called two “people’s polls,” circumventing a constitutional requirement that all popular referenda be approved by the Supreme Court and administered by the national election authority.

In October, his Morena party hired a private polling firm to ask Mexicans in 538 towns near the nation’s capital to vote on whether to cancel Mexico City’s controversial, extravagantly over-budget and environmentally disastrous – but much-needed – new international airport.

Seventy per cent of the nearly 1.1 million people who cast their ballots wanted to scrap the $13.3-billion project, which López Obrador had harshly criticized on the campaign trail.

Opposition lawmakers and protesters retorted that Mexican law requires a 40% voter turnout for a popular referendum to be considered binding. López Obrador polled 1.1 million people in a country of 130 million.

Nonetheless, the president-elect immediately announced the termination of the airport project in favor of revamping an unused military airport north of the capital.

As engineers, academics and the business sector also denounced the decision to scrap the new airport, the Mexican peso plummeted amid investor concern about national stability.

López Obrador responded to criticism with a populist evasion, saying simply that “the people are wise.”

A month later, López Obrador’s transitional government called another unconstitutional referendum to decide the fate of another major infrastructure project. In late November, 900,000 voters determined that the Mexican government should build the Maya train, a 1,500-kilometer rail line that would connect five southern Mexican states and the Yucatán peninsula.

Not consulted prior to the referendum: the Mayan communities traversed by the proposed railroad and who, by law, must be included in all decision-making that impacts their indigenous territories.

Nonetheless, López Obrador has declared that the rail project will be completed by the end of his six-year term.

López Obrador’s misuse of direct democracy to expand his executive powers while not even president sends worrisome signals about how he will govern Mexico.

The Mexican presidency is already an enormously powerful office. It was designed that way in the 1920s by the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which ruled the country virtually uncontested for nearly the entire 20th century.
After 80 years in power, the PRI lost the presidency in 2000 but was restored to power with President Peña Nieto in 2012.

López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who has unsuccessfully run for president twice before, won this year in large part because he promised to make Mexico’s centralized, stagnant political system more inclusive and consultative.

He pledged to root out corruption, reduce violence, restructure Mexico’s energy sector, respect the human rights of migrants and spur growth in the country’s most impoverished areas.

Legislatively, López Obrador will have the power to push through his transformative agenda.

His political party, Morena, secured majorities in both the Mexican Senate and lower Chamber of Deputies in July’s election. That also gives López Obrador the right to replace up to two justices on Mexico’s Supreme Court.
But some recently announced policies have surprised Mexicans who thought they elected a leftist champion of workers rights and social inclusion.

As part of his plan to slash public spending and eradicate corruption, López Obrador has released an austerity budget that includes laying off 70 percent of non-unionized Mexican government workers. An estimated 276,290 public employees will lose their jobs, according to Viridiana Ríos, an expert on the Mexican economy.

Bureaucrats who remain will be asked to work from Monday through Saturday for over eight hours a day.

López Obrador justifies the downsizing by quoting Benito Juárez, the celebrated indigenous president who ruled Mexico from 1858 to 1872. Juárez thought public officials should live in “honorable modesty,” avoiding idleness and excess.

Few doubt that Mexico’s government bureaucracy is bloated, and that expunging the rampant corruption of Peña Nieto’s PRI will require serious restructuring. However, the working conditions López Obrador proposes violate Mexican labor standards, which guarantee job security and an eight-hour work day.

There’s a logistical problem here, too. Implementing López Obrador’s ambitious policy agenda asks a lot of Mexico’s federal government. The president-elect now intends to transform his nation with an underpaid, overworked and understaffed bureaucracy.

López Obrador has angered other supporters by breaking a key campaign promise.

As a candidate, López Obrador pledged to reduce violence in Mexico by de-escalating the country’s war on drugs. Rather than using soldiers to fight crime, as Mexico has done since 2006, he said he would professionalize the Mexican police and grant pardons to low-level drug traffickers willing to leave their illicit business.

The security plan was underdeveloped, and when pressed for details on the campaign trail, López Obrador simply responded that Mexico needs “justice,” not “revenge.”

But voters recognized the sound logic behind his diagnosis. Numerous studies show that Mexico’s military crackdown on organized crime actually caused violence to skyrocket.

The number of criminal groups operating in Mexico surged from 20 in 2007, the year after the full-frontal war on drugs began, to 200 in 2011, according to the Mexican university CIDE. By last year, Mexico had 85 homicides a day – the highest murder rate since record-keeping began in the 1980s.

López Obrador has since radically changed his strategy for “pacifying” Mexico.

On November 14, the president-elect released a National Security Plan that continues to rely on the Mexican armed forces for fighting crime. Lawmakers from his Morena party have introduced a bill to create a National Guard, a new crime-fighting force that would combine military and civilian police under a single military command.

Mexican political pundit Denise Dresser has dubbed López Obrador’s strategy as the current cartel war “on steroids.” Security expert Alejandro Madrazo wrote in The New York Times that the decision is a “historic error” that squanders the opportunity to have a national dialogue about the role of the military in law enforcement.

Mexicans gave López Obrador a mandate to revolutionize the government so that it finally works for them. The president-elect’s power grabs, austerity budget and U-turn on security are early signs that he may not deliver the transformation they so eagerly await.

(Luis Gómez Romero is a senior lecturer in human rights, constitutional law and legal theory at the University of Wollongong. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license).

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear readers:

Right on the day of celebration of Thanksgiving, I bring two different perspectives of why this holiday is something that we should not feel proud of. One is from Alexandra Wilts and Chelsea Ritschel, and the other one by Nicolo Breedove. – Marvin R.

The holiday is viewed by many to be a celebration of the conquest of Native Americans

by Alexandra Wilts and Chelsea Ritschel

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a special, beloved holiday for eating turkey – or a vegetarian main course option – and spending time with friends and family.

However, for others, the celebration is deeply controversial – as Thanksgiving has a contentious history that goes far beyond when the first feast was held.

In addition to a holiday steeped with cultural appropriation, the period of history in America is frequently white-washed – which leads many Americans to ignore the holiday.

Thanksgiving is considered by some to be a “national day of mourning”

Like Columbus Day, the holiday is viewed by many to be a celebration of the conquest of Native Americans by colonists.

Many Native Americans see Thanksgiving as an embellished narrative of “Pilgrims and Natives looking past their differences” to break bread.

Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin said: “One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.”

Americans are frequently guilty of cultural appropriation in their celebrations

Young children are taught about Thanksgiving in school, where they often learn of the first feast through crafts and drawings. In addition to depictions of turkeys, the Mayflower and the Pilgrims, many children decorate Native American headdresses – which frequently bare no resemblance to the headdresses, clothes and feathers worn by the Wampanoag Indians.

These inaccurate historical references are perpetrated each year, making the battle for equality and accurate representation an ongoing one for Native Americans in America.

Happy National Genocide (Thanksgiving) Day!

by Nicole Breedlove

In 1637 the body of a white man was discovered dead in a boat. Armed settlers — which we tell our children were God fearing, gentle, sharing, kind Pilgrims — invaded a Pequot village. They also set the village, which included many children, on fire.

Thanksgiving has never been a celebratory holiday in my family. Whenever my family did cook we always gave thanks that all the Native Americans weren’t wiped out when Columbus “discovered” America. I never understood why my family was so against Thanksgiving. In school we drew turkeys with our hands and it was a happy time. It meant a couple of days off from school. My teachers made it seem like Thanksgiving was a holiday to look forward to. The New York City public education system told me what Thanksgiving was all about. I was very careful to regurgitate what they taught me when tested so I wouldn’t get a failing grade. When I was older though I was told the truth by my family.

My great, great, great, great grandfather was a part of a band of Black Indians in Florida, hence my unique and Native American-sounding last name. It seems I come from a long line of warriors and activists. I am a revolutionary not by choice but by lineage. When I did finally learn, there was no stopping me. Whenever someone asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving I proudly stated that I no longer celebrate it. Thanksgiving day should be known as National Land Theft and American Genocide Day.

I learned that in 1637 the body of a white man was discovered dead in a boat. Armed settlers — which we tell our children were God fearing, gentle, sharing, kind Pilgrims — invaded a Pequot village. They also set the village, which included many children, on fire. Those who were lucky enough to escape the fire were systematically sought, hunted down and killed. While many, including historians, still debate what exactly happened this day, also known as the Pequot Massacre, it directly led to the creation of “Thanksgiving Day.” This is what the governor of Bay Colony had to say days after the massacre, “A day of thanksgiving. Thanking God that they had eliminated over 700 men, women and children.”

William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut stated, “Gathered in this place of meeting, they were attacked by mercenaries and English and Dutch. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth were shot down, The rest were burned alive in the building. The very next day the governor declared a Thanksgiving Day. For the next 100 years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.”

When I finally found out the origins of Thanksgiving it made me nauseous. Never again will I celebrate a holiday I know nothing about until I investigate its origins. I am very thankful, pun intended, that I learned about the origins of this holiday. It is a reminder that history can be rewritten and if told enough times eventually becomes the truth!

People always tell me to forget the past. I should just let it go and move on. Why do people of color always have to forget?! Would you tell a Jewish person to forget about the holocaust and just move on?! Would you tell the family of those who lost their lives on 9/11 to just forget about it?! So why are our tragedies forgettable and others are not?! I WILL NEVER forget! I will ALWAYS honor those who lost their lives unjustifiable.

So when you sit down to dinner this year, look at your family, serve the food and tell each other what you are most thankful for, think about the origins of Thanksgiving. Think about the countless Native Americans who lost their lives so you can carve a turkey and get the best deals on Black Friday. Say a prayer for them, especially the children, who died simply because of the color of their skin.