IT’S BEING acknowledged everywhere — now by Wired magazine and the SEO Theory newsletter. Google Groups is totally broken.

It began well. Google acquired the Deja News archive of Usenet postings from 1995 forward, and then added 1981-1994 material from Marc Spencer’s archive. If somebody said it in a newsgroup, you could find it by searching Google Groups. You could search by author, by keywords, by newsgroup, by date range, or by exact phrase. It was as it should be.

But then Google decided to kluge its own “discussion groups” onto Usenet, and began emphasizing “new communities” or some such cliché at the expense of Usenet archiving, which has been all but abandoned. Some entire newsgroups have been ditched without explanation. And searching by author or exact phrase? Forget it. If you get any results at all, they’ll be woefully incomplete.

Google Groups is in violation of its own terms of service, which state in part “The Service contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981.” To Google: Fix, please. Or remain evil.

Here’s a copy of the letter I sent last September to groups-support@google.com — to which they still haven’t bothered to respond:

Dear Google:

I notice that some political discussion groups, including alt.politics.nationalism.white, on Usenet are no longer accessible via Google Groups. The message one gets when trying to access these newsgroups is that they were “removed” because they violated Google’s terms of service.

How can an unmoderated Usenet group violate anyone’s terms of service? It’s a Usenet newsgroup, for goodness sake. It can’t do anything of its own accord, much less “violate” anything. It’s just a feed of opinion and news messages, which in my view Google promised to carry and archive when you bought DejaNews.

I need access to the archived messages in these groups, going back many years, for my research. (Example: I need to see all messages posted by a particular person in order to find a particular post of historical or political importance. How can I do this if the Usenet archive has been suddenly rendered incomplete by your unilateral and inexplicable “removal” of an entire newsgroup and all its archives going back decades? This is grossly irresponsible. In addition, your Usenet archive search function is no longer working properly, when it works at all.)

While I see nothing in your terms of service that an entire newsgroup could possibly violate, I do note that you are in violation of the very first item in the Google Groups Terms of Service:

“The Service contains the entire archive of Usenet discussion groups dating back to 1981.”

Were these Usenet groups removed in error? Can the error be corrected and the archive restored? If not an error, please explain your reasoning and provide me with the names of the specific individuals behind this removal, along with these individuals’ contact information.

With good wishes,

Kevin Strom.

Here we see HD Radio sidebands on either side of an analogue FM broadcast signal, as shown on a spectrum analyzer.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

WITH 2010 APPROACHING, CNET just released its “The Decade’s 30 Biggest Tech Flops” anti-awards, and “HD Radio” was among the “winners.”

HD Radio was not only doomed from the start, it was such a serious blunder that it may well lead to the death of thousands of radio stations and the permanent stunting of the industry itself.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of digital radio.

Using modern firmware-upgradeable codecs, orthogonal FDM transmission, and a network of community transmitters in a dedicated digital band, great things could have been done:

1. In every community, all signals would have been full-quieting with no noise or multipath distortion. There would have been no more disparity in signal or noise levels between 50-kW powerhouses and 250-Watt locals or 10-Watt student stations — all would have had perfect, full-quieting signals within the community’s coverage area.

2. There would have been no more need for any licensees to sign off or go to absurdly low power at night as obtains presently among AM stations. And former AM stations would no longer suffer from crippling skywave interference at night.

3. Depending on how much spectrum was allocated and the ratio of talk to music programming (with their different bit rates), at least four to eight times as many stations could have been allocated to each community as now exist, leaving open the possibility of free and independent public access and non-profit “free radio” style programming, greatly expanding listening choices (and points of view in news programming) for everyone.

4. As stations migrated to the new band, even more channels would become open on the existing AM and FM bands, making them more listenable and viable again and allowing even more space for non-profits and those who want to broadcast for the love of it instead of just for monetary gain.

Digital community-transmitter-based radio in a dedicated digital band thus could have been a tremendous success and a revolutionary improvement.

But we didn’t get real digital radio.

Instead we got IBOC (In-Band On-Channel, now deceptively labeled “HD Radio”), a technical turkey which delivers almost none of the benefits above and increases interference to boot.

Why did this happen?

Another radio station off the air, bankrupted by increasing monopolies in the industry and failure to meet the challenges of digital audio. "HD Radio" isn't helping -- in fact, it was designed to further marginalize small local stations like this one, stifling independent voices.

Because the money-men didn’t want the benefits of item (1) above. They already owned the 50-kW powerhouses. They didn’t want the 10-Watt student station to suddenly have an equal signal to theirs. They didn’t want the mono AM daytimer to suddenly have 20-kHz digital stereo with no audible noise and be on 24 hours a day as in item (2).

And the money-men didn’t want dozens of new independent channels to be available to listeners as in item (3) above.

So they chose IBOC, where the digital signal piggybacks on top of the existing analogue signal, right on the same frequency. IBOC gives distinctly inferior results. IBOC causes significant interference. IBOC on AM is unlistenable and very nearly useless.

But IBOC gave the money-men the one thing they wanted most of all: It preserves the inferiority of the smaller broadcasters. In fact, amid a sea of IBOC hash from the big boys, it accentuates their inferiority.

The end result of this shortsightedness will be bankruptcy for many stations, fewer and poorer choices for the listeners as conglomerates gobble up the remains, and a huge migration away from AM and FM broadcasts and to audio delivery via satellite and the Internet.

The Learned portrait of Virginia Poe, left; on the right the Traylor Miniature, showing a very young Edgar Poe.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THIS YEAR marks the 200th birthday of the great poet and thinker Edgar Allan Poe. Today, October 7th, is the day of his mysterious death 160 years ago in Baltimore. And last month marked the 174th anniversary of his marriage to his beloved Virginia.

Not too long after Poe’s birthday in January of this year, someone very dear to me gave me a surprise present: two gift boxes from the Poe Museum in Richmond, one decorated with a reproduction of the famous Learned portrait of Virginia Poe (pictured, left) and the other (on the right) having on its lid an image of a very young-looking and clean-shaven Edgar Allan Poe — an image I had never seen before. The portrait is oval and in a thin oval gilt frame. Inside the lid of the second box is written “Edgar Allan Poe – Robert Lee Traylor.”

I have been a reader and student of Poe since the age of 11, but this portrait was one I had never seen. The only references I could find to “Robert Lee Traylor” and a Poe portrait were as the owner of a very different Poe picture, a daguerreotype.

And exhaustive searches of the ‘Net, comprising thousands of articles and representations of Poe, didn’t come up with this portrait or any reference to it. It seemed quite a mystery to me.

But a helpful scholar at the Poe Museum provided the answer:

“I know the portrait of which you speak. It is called the Traylor Miniature, after the Poe collector Robert Lee Traylor, who once owned it. (This is not to be confused with the Traylor Daguerreotype, which was one of the two original daguerreotypes taken at a sitting in Richmond in September 1849. Of these two daguerreotypes, the Thompson is the better known and more widely reproduced, while the Traylor was badly damaged in a cleaning attempt around 1900.)

Edgar Allan Poe: the Sartain engraving

“The Traylor miniature is an oval watercolor on ivory measuring 2.5 x 2 inches. It is not a life portrait but an idealized image probably derived from the 1885 Sartain engraving of the Osgood oil painting of Poe. The sideburns have been removed to give Poe a more youthful appearance, but the shadow under the nose and hairline are among the points of strong similarity between this painting and the Sartain image.

“The picture’s known history only goes back to 1905, when the Bendann Brothers art dealers in Baltimore consigned the piece to the Bell Book and Stationary Company in Richmond. Traylor purchased it shortly afterwards. The piece is said to have come to Bendann’s from an owner in Annapolis. Although his statement is unverified, Traylor claimed that the miniature had been acquired from a lady in Baltimore who had been a friend of the Poe family. Traylor also claimed the piece had once been owned by Poe himself, though this seems very unlikely.

“James A. Harrison considered the piece an authentic life portrait done when Poe was nineteen, but, in 1926, James Southall Wilson dismissed it as a synthetic likeness.

The Deas portrait

“The Poe Museum owns the miniature, which was last displayed in our recent exhibit Poe Face to Face: Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe. If you would like to learn more about the portraits of Poe, you might be interested in finding a copy of The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe by Michael Deas.” (Deas is also the highly talented artist who created the painting used in the recent Edgar Allan Poe U.S. postage stamp. — K.A.S.)

Another mystery surrounding portraits of the Poes was the question of why there was only only one known image of Virginia Poe. It was a miniature painted by an unknown artist, supposedly immediately after Virginia’s death. The famous Learned portrait is simply a more painterly and artistic rendering of that image, executed many years later. There have been illustrations and engravings made of this image, but all are essentially copies of the one original.

Virginia Poe by Sully

But Poe researcher and author Cynthia Cirile has stated that more — perhaps many more — portraits of Virginia were painted and engraved during her lifetime, two by the renowned painter Thomas Sully. According to Cirile, Virginia modeled for, among other assignments, fashion spreads in Graham’s Magazine as a young woman and was even somewhat famous for her work. But irrational religio-social conventions, which saw modeling as a “scandalous” vocation, caused her family to “hush up” the facts of her work after her death. Cirile, who says that a daguerreotype of Virginia has also been found and will be included in her upcoming book, writes:

“[T]he absurdity of imagining that Poe waited till his wife was dead to have her image taken is simply absurd. The truth was that many paintings and engravings of Virginia were extent, though they were not publicized at the time. Virginia did sit for daguerreotypes, though so far, I have only discovered one of them, which dates to c. 1845.

The Rundell Virginia Poe, by Sully

“The reason for all this lying was to keep Virginia’s ‘image’ as pure and virginal as her name itself. The Poe family did not want it known that Virginia had modelled, because at that time, modelling for painters/artists was thought a sluttish thing for women to do. Of course, now, we see how inane this idea is-but, 150 years ago, that was indeed the common feeling about such things.

“But, there’s no hiding Virginia’s face, or uniquely serene attitude. She’s very easy to identify. Here, I give an instance of a painting of Virginia by the painter who was like an uncle to Virginia, Thomas Sully, taken when she was perhaps 13 years old. From this painting, we get some idea of what Virginia really looked like.

“In 1875, the same year Edgar was reburied, the cemetery in which she lay was destroyed and her remains were almost forgotten. An early Poe biographer, William Gill, gathered her bones and stored them in a box he hid under his bed. Gill’s story was reported in the Boston Herald twenty-seven years after the event. Gill says that he had visited the Fordham cemetery in 1883 at exactly the moment that the sexton Dennis Valentine held Virginia’s bones in his shovel, ready to throw them away as unclaimed. Gill took the remains and corresponded with Neilson Poe and John Prentiss Poe in Baltimore, and arranged to bring the box down to be laid on Edgar’s left side in a small bronze casket. Virginia’s remains were finally buried with her husband’s in 1885 on January 19 — the seventy-sixth anniversary of her husband’s birth and nearly ten years after his current monument was erected. The same man who served as sexton during Edgar’s original burial and his exhumations and reburials was also present at the rites which brought his body to rest with Virginia and Virginia’s mother Maria Clemm.

“It is important to remember that this Leonine Virginia made her mark on the world, quite separate and apart from her famous husband. Her look, as I said, became ‘The Look’ for women of the mid 19th century, and many emulated and admired it.

“It’s also important to remember that while Virginia was a victim of tuberculosis, she was an active participant in life, and shared a very ‘open’ and controversial lifestyle with her husband. Their lifestyle would be as controversial now as it was then.

“Virginia Clemm Poe was beautiful; she was adored; she was exalted. Long Live Virginia Poe…”

Let us today pay homage to Deist, cosmotheist, and racial-aristocratic thinker Edgar Allan Poe, and to Virginia Clemm Poe who inspired and sustained him and his art. Let us rededicate ourselves to raising up new generations which will be capable — biologically and culturally capable — of understanding him, and of creating new worlds of imagination and reality that Poe could only dream of.

Mahadev Desai (left) and Gandhi meet with other Indian nationalists in 1939

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THIS WEEK Google replaced their normal search page graphic with one depicting Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known as Mahatma (Sanskrit for “Great Soul”) Gandhi, in recognition of his birthday, which is now celebrated as the International Day of Non-Violence. Gandhi’s movement of civil disobedience was a significant factor in India’s successful quest for self-determination and the ultimate withdrawal of Britain from the Indian subcontinent.

Barack Obama praised Gandhi on Friday, saying “Gandhi’s teachings and ideals, shared with Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1959 pilgrimage to India, transformed American society through our civil rights movement. The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action movement for Indian independence which he led. We must renew our commitment to live his ideals and to celebrate the dignity of all human beings.”

Many people, Obama included if he’s sincere, see Gandhi and his movement in very simplistic and essentially mythological terms: Gandhi’s movement, they believe, was a “struggle for equality” within a multiracial paradigm. Actually it was the opposite of that.

Mohandas Gandhi wanted his people, the native people of the Indian subcontinent, to be free of the British Empire. He wanted his people to have their own country. He wanted them to have their own government, answerable to no other people. He wanted self-determination for his folk: their own territory, their own leaders. And he looked at this situation in explicitly racial terms.

Though there was much greatness in it to be sure, the British Empire outside the Anglo-Saxon dominions like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, was a multiracialist empire which forced differing peoples together against their will, crushing their self-determination and freedom largely for crass economic reasons. Sound familiar?

What Gandhi was most emphatically not doing was seeking “equality” under the Empire. He was not saying “We are all the same. Therefore give us equal incomes, equal schooling, equal housing and we will all live in harmony and brotherhood as one people.” That is what representatives of the new world empire, like Obama, his handlers, and the billionaire moguls who long preceded them, wish he had said.

What Gandhi was saying was that his people were unique and worthy of survival — and in order to secure their survival they must rule themselves and possess their own territory. Hence his two-word slogan for his movement — his command to the British Empire — “Quit India.” His was no M.L. King-like quest for a chimerical “fairness” enforced by central authority in an equally chimerical race-blind society. Quite the opposite! He said in essence that this land belongs to me and my people — and you, your race, your bureaucracy, and your Empire should just get out.  Ultimately, they did exactly that.

Gandhi’s parallels in the Black community are Robert Brock and Marcus Garvey and Sharity Ross-Petit — not King.

Gandhi expressly stated his belief in maintaining the purity of not only his race, but all races, when he gently chided White nationalists who only cared about their own racial integrity and who crudely lumped all non-Whites together. He wrote in 1903:

“We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone.”

Gandhi also stated in his Indian Opinion newspaper, referring to a then-current issue in multiracial South Africa :

“The petition dwells upon ‘the co-mingling of the colored and white races.’ May we inform the members of the Conference that so far as British Indians are concerned, such a thing is particularly unknown. If there is one thing which the Indian cherishes more than any other, it is the purity of type.”

Greater India, even after the British left, was an artificial construct encompassing several peoples, and it’s not clear to me to what extent Gandhi recognized that further partitions would be necessary. But that’s a subject for another day.

Empires — from the ancient Assyrians in Palestine, to Tito’s Yugoslavia, to the Communist Chinese in Tibet — invariably say that they force differing peoples under one rule — their rule — “for their own good”… to “bring peace”… to make everyone “equal.”

And they invariably condemn any person who wants his people to be free of the empire’s rule — whether Gandhi or Jefferson or the Dalai Lama — as a “troublemaker,” a “hater,” a “terrorist,” or the like:

How dare Gandhi advocate breaking the King’s laws! We’re all subjects of the Crown, Indian and Briton, and Gandhi is a hooligan and criminal!

How dare the Dalai Lama insist that Tibetans should have their own territory and their own government, answerable only to Tibetans! How dare he call for an end to the mass importation of Chinese into Tibet! That’s anti-Chinese — that’s racist! (Of course, once you understand the Maxim of Self-Determination, you can easily see it’s nothing of the kind. The Maxim reads “Every people which considers itself to be a people should, to the maximum extent possible, live under its own government.”)

There is much to be learned from Gandhi and his efforts to gain self-determination for his folk. But we must see that struggle for what it was — a distinct people’s fight for a separate, distinct nation — before we can even begin to learn.

As analogue TV is phased out, the media moguls have pinned their hopes on over-the-air digital video. But, in time, Internet video will eclipse the moguls and their networks.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE LOGO IMAGE I’m using this month on kevinalfredstrom.com is my little tribute to the end of analogue TV broadcasting. Though most of my work has been in the radio and print media, I have produced or appeared in videos, including Richmond, Virginia’s Race and Reason program, the Revilo P. Oliver memorial film, and others.

As we mark the end of analogue television broadcasting in the United States, it’s good to remember its beginning — and its inventor Philo Farnsworth. When his wife Elma Farnsworth, who worked closely with her husband, died in 2006, I published this piece on NationalVanguard.org:

Television Pioneer Elma Farnsworth Dies at 98
2006-05-02 21:05:15

Widow and assistant of Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television, has died today.

by Melanie M. Carroll

Philo and Elma Farnsworth working with an early television camera.

ELMA “Pem” Farnsworth (pictured) — who helped her husband, Philo T. Farnsworth, invent the system for encoding pictures and sound together on radio waves which we know today as television — died in Salt Lake City today at age 98. Mrs. Farnsworth was one of the first people whose images were transmitted via television in 1927, when she was 19.

Mrs. Farnsworth, who married the inventor in 1926, worked by her husband’s side in his laboratories and fought for decades to assure his place in history after his 1971 death. The first-ever TV transmission took place on September 7, 1927, in Farnsworth’s San Francisco lab, when the 21-year-old inventor sent an image to a receiver in the next room.

The White inventor said the inspiration for his invention had come seven years earlier, while he was plowing a field on his family’s Idaho farm. He visualized an image being scanned onto a cathode ray tube — then used only for oscilloscopes — the same way that his field was plowed: row by row.

Mrs. Farnsworth recalled that morning in the lab “like it was yesterday,” she said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. “It was a very small screen, about the size of a postage stamp, an inch and a half square. At first, we were stunned. It was too good to be true. Then Phil said, ‘There you have it — electric television.”‘

According to the book Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television by Donald G. Godfrey, “the first human images transmitted by Farnsworth were of his wife and her brother, Cliff Gardner. A 3 1/2-inch-square image of his wife with her eyes closed was transmitted on October 19, 1929, Gardner wrote. The book lists her as ‘first woman on TV.’”

Sadly, credit for his pioneering work was almost taken from Farnsworth when Jewish-controlled conglomerate RCA under David Sarnoff, with a potential profit in the hundreds of millions if they prevailed, claimed the innovation was the work of one of its house engineers. But in 1935, the courts ruled that Farnsworth was the real inventor.

Nevertheless Farnsworth received little recognition or monetary compensation in later years, because of what some say was purposeful revenge by the Jewish establishment for his defeat of Sarnoff. Many scholars also blame Sarnoff for setting back the development of FM radio for decades — because it threatened the AM networks and AM receiver technology in which RCA was heavily invested — and for thereby causing the suicide of the White inventor Edwin Armstrong, who created FM radio in 1933.

According to Godfrey, Philo Farnsworth gave his wife credit as co-inventor, saying, “my wife and I started this TV.”

Mrs. Farnsworth’s 1990 autobiography, Distant Vision, tells the story of the battle between Sarnoff and the creative man whose work, we now must admit, has been appropriated and grossly misused by his enemies.

Interestingly, Farnsworth, who also invented a nuclear fusion device later in his career, predicted HDTV and solid-state flat-screen technology in a 1957 interview: “[W]e think we can eventually get in excess of 2000 lines instead of 525 … and do it on an even narrower channel … which will make for a much sharper picture. We believe in the picture-frame type of a picture, where the visual display will be just a screen. And we hope for a memory, so that the picture will be just as though it’s pasted on there.”

Even though amplitude-modulated vestigial sideband television transmission is now gone from the U.S. commercial airwaves, television itself is being revolutionized by the Internet, which — if the would-be censors continue to be stymied — bids fair to free us from the “gatekeepers” of New York and Hollywood that have controlled and limited our choices for so long.

Television Pioneer Elma Farnsworth Dies at 98
News/Comment; Posted on: 2006-05-02 21:05:15

Widow and assistant of Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television, has died today.

by Melanie M. Carroll
and V-News correspondents

Elma “Pem” Farnsworth (pictured) — who helped her husband, Philo T. Farnsworth, invent the system for encoding pictures and sound together on radio waves which we know today as television — died in Salt Lake City today at age 98. Mrs. Farnsworth was one of the first people whose images were transmitted via television in 1927, when she was 19.

Mrs. Farnsworth, who married the inventor in 1926, worked by her husband’s side in his laboratories and fought for decades to assure his place in history after his 1971 death. The first-ever TV transmission took place on September 7, 1927, in Farnsworth’s San Francisco lab, when the 21-year-old inventor sent an image to a receiver in the next room.

The White inventor said the inspiration for his invention had come seven years earlier, while he was plowing a field on his family’s Idaho farm. He visualized an image being scanned onto a cathode ray tube — then used only for oscilloscopes — the same way that his field was plowed: row by row.

Mrs. Farnsworth recalled that morning in the lab “like it was yesterday,” she said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002. “It was a very small screen, about the size of a postage stamp, an inch and a half square. At first, we were stunned. It was too good to be true. Then Phil said, ‘There you have it — electric television.”‘ (ILLUSTRATION: Mr. and Mrs. Farnsworth working with an early television camera.)

According to the book Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television by Donald G. Godfrey, “the first human images transmitted by Farnsworth were of his wife and her brother, Cliff Gardner. A 3 1/2-inch-square image of his wife with her eyes closed was transmitted on October 19, 1929, Gardner wrote. The book lists her as ‘first woman on TV.’”

Sadly, credit for his pioneering work was almost taken from Farnsworth when Jewish-controlled conglomerate RCA under David Sarnoff, with a potential profit in the hundreds of millions if they prevailed, claimed the innovation was the work of one of its house engineers. But in 1935, the courts ruled that Farnsworth was the real inventor.

Nevertheless Farnsworth received little recognition or monetary compensation in later years, because of what some say was purposeful revenge by the Jewish establishment for his defeat of Sarnoff. Many scholars also blame Sarnoff for setting back the development of FM radio for decades — because it threatened the AM networks and AM receiver technology in which RCA was heavily invested — and for thereby causing the suicide of the White inventor Edwin Armstrong, who created FM radio in 1933.

According to Godfrey, Philo Farnsworth gave his wife credit as co-inventor, saying, “my wife and I started this TV.”

Mrs. Farnsworth’s 1990 autobiography, Distant Vision, tells the story of the battle between Sarnoff and the creative man whose work, we now must admit, has been appropriated and grossly misused by his enemies.

Patrick J. Buchanan

by Kevin Alfred Strom

PATRICK BUCHANAN utters truths that no one else in the  mediasphere dares utter. For that I admire and like him.

But Buchanan has one foot inside establishment “conservatism,” and, whether due to a desire to placate that segment of his following or because of the wishful and anachronistic thinking that old men are sometimes prey to, he will at times speak as though America was still the old American Republic — as though “conservatives” like Dick Cheney were still “holding the line” against subversion and alien influence — as though America had not long since been converted into the multiracial, multicultural empire that he fears will “arise” — and as though Dick Cheney were any less a faithful servant of the empire than Obama.

A good example of this is his recent column “The Get-Cheney Squad,” in which he justifies U.S. torture of Islamist prisoners-of-the-empire and threats to kill their children because these “rough methods” “saved American lives.” He bemoans “the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals.” Wake-up call, Pat: Huge numbers of people who would rather be found dead in a ditch than be called a leftist have come to believe 1) that our wars in the Middle East are illegitimate, and 2) that our ongoing mass slaughter of innocents and anti-Zionists there is unnecessarily creating millions of enemies of America and the West, and 3) that the architects of this madness are indeed war criminals.

The phrase “national security” should today make decent men’s hearts tremble with visions of SWAT-suited JTTF thugs hauling patriots off to federal prison on false charges (as happened to me and many others) and CIA drone missiles roasting every resident of entire apartment blocks (as happened a few weeks ago to little notice in the press except for cheers that “we” “got” a suspected Taliban official along with the unmentioned dead families). Instead Buchanan gets warm flag-waving fuzzies when he hears the phrase.

It seems that, aware as he is of the neocon/liberal-minority/Jewish power nexus, in part of his consciousness he is still a 1960s Cold Warrior with Communists replaced by “terrorists.” In part of his mind America is still America.

Jean-Baptiste Say, economist and exponent of the attainment of truth through logic and observation

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE FACT THAT the fetid “economic stimulus” nonsense that continuously emanates from the professional plunderers in Washington is accepted by intelligent people is disturbing to me.

The idea that politicians can actually give us “free” anything — especially “free money” — is a perennial fallacy that would be laughed out of elementary school if real economics were taught to our children, as it should be. The acceptance of that fallacy by the manipulated and ignorant mob will surely deprive us of our freedom — and our children of their rightful inheritance.

The antidote to ignorance is education. For any intelligent child who is approaching the age of reason and who has somehow learned to read well despite the best efforts of the modern “educators,” the great work of the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, will provide the grounding in economics that he or she needs.

Thomas Jefferson admired Say greatly, writing in 1817: “In France, John Baptiste Say had the merit of producing a very superior work on the subject of Political Economy. His arrangement is luminous, ideas clear, style perspicuous, and the whole subject brought within half the volume of [Adam] Smith’s work. Add to this considerable advances in correctness and extension of principles.”

According to the Locke Institute, “Jefferson advised using Say’s Treatise on Political Economy at the University of Virginia. It was the seminal economics text in almost all the large number of new private universities in America. Say was dominant after the ‘late unfortunate unpleasantness between the States.’ Therefore American leaders were saved from Ricardianism, and were educated in market economics before Carl Menger and the Austrian Revolution.”

Reading Jean-Baptiste Say, as a friend of mine says, also trains the mind in logic — something all too rare these days, especially for young people whose feelings are manipulated daily by skillful media propagandists — and who are then are encouraged to make political decisions based on those feelings. A generation that had read and understood the works of Say would have been mentally inoculated against the economic and other blandishments of a Barack Hussein Fetchit.

Frédéric Bastiat, whose book, The Law, can teach us to resist demagogues who would steal our freedom

Another Frenchman whose economic writings deserve a wider audience is Frédéric Bastiat, whose The Law is a classic of the philosophy of human liberty and economic good sense.

Some will object to these Frenchmen’s support for free trade. One might argue “Didn’t the tariff (which provided almost all the funds needed to run the federal government back when America was still America) protect our workers from slave labor competition and obviate any need for income taxes?” True. I think that Say and Bastiat are right about free trade within the commonwealth of Euro-folk, which is largely what they were talking about anyway. But I believe it is wrong to extend their ideas to allow “free trade” with the near-slave laborers of the Third World.

Economics, when properly understood, is not a dry subject at all. It is the story and science of human action and human freedom. Understanding it will greatly help you understand that most mysterious of Earth’s social species — the human being.

Television, the book section of the daily press, the major publishers, and libraries are all places where information must pass the scrutiny of a “gatekeeper” before you are allowed to see it. They are places where Jean-Baptiste Say and Frédéric Bastiat and Jefferson and Mencken and Oliver are crowded out by the likes of Philip Roth and Charles Krauthammer and George Soros.

But, so far, the Internet has no significant gatekeepers. The information revolution has made the works of the best minds of the West available again. Take advantage of the situation, for yourself and your children.

A Treatise on Political Economy

The Law

The Jewish Strategy by Revilo Oliver, Professor of the Classics at the University of Illinois

by Kevin Alfred Strom

QUITE A FEW READERS have written to ask about the availability of Revilo P. Oliver’s posthumous book, The Jewish Strategy, which I published in 2002. Almost all print copies of this book were stolen from me — and quite possibly destroyed — by the same individual who worked with the government to falsely accuse me of heinous crimes.

Though my reduced economic circumstances don’t allow me to bring out a new print edition at this time, I have recovered the PDF file from the printer (almost all of my computer files were stolen, too, including the original Framemaker files for this book and an unpublished book by Dr. Oliver on the John Birch Society) and I am happy to offer it as a free download. If you have learned or otherwise benefited from my efforts, please consider making a donation using the link in the upper right-hand column of my site.

The Jewish Strategy is a concise 101-page book on the Jewish people and their strategies, conscious and unconscious, to assure their biological survival, written from an uncommonly rational point of view by University of Illinois Classics professor and writer, the late Revilo P. Oliver.

The Jewish Strategy is not an ordinary book. Dr. Oliver, who was one of the founders of both National Review and the John Birch Society in the days when those entities still stood for the survival of Western culture and Western Man, gives us insight into the genesis, ancient and modern history, and probable future of the Jewish nation-state-people. Dr. Oliver states:

“The international race… by arduous, intelligent, and indefatigable work for more than twenty-five centuries, has, through its own efforts, made itself the major world power today.

“History provides no parallel for that stupendous accomplishment. It must be regarded with respect, even awe.”

Historian Mark Weber states that this book is “a very good one-volume, not-too-lengthy look at the Jewish strategy through the ages — from the perspective of a man who’s just about uniquely qualified to write on the subject.”

Weber continues: “The recent discussion about Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ has brought up the hostility that’s existed over time — on occasion, anyway — between Christian and Jewish interests in history. One of the values of this book by Revilo Oliver is to show that this same tension — this same strife — has existed in non-Christian societies as well. It’s not unique to Christian societies.

“Very often in the context of The Passion Jewish commentators have said in essence, ‘Well, you see, the problem of anti-Semitism is really rooted in Christianity and that’s why the Gibson film is really dangerous.’ Well, that’s really inaccurate. That’s just wrong, because the same tension and the same problems — the same difficulties that we’ve seen in Christian history, in Christian Europe, and the United States to some degree — have also been present wherever Jews have existed in large numbers in non-Christian societies. Right now, of course, this obviously exists in the Arab Muslim world, but as Oliver points out, it also existed in the Roman and Hellenic world before Christianity was really a factor.”

Read The Jewish Strategy and decide for yourself. And, if you enjoy wit and irony, Oliver’s Uber-Menckenesque style will not disappoint.

download the book

more from Revilo P. Oliver

One of the anthrax letters. Were the anthrax attacks the result of a disgruntled scientist or a murderous intelligence agency?

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE GROUND-BREAKING investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks by researcher Robert Pate, The Anthrax Mystery: Solved, is now back on line at anthraxattacks.net — its original venue on the Web.

While I was forcibly detained by the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) under false charges, hackers took advantage of the situation to deface the site and delete all its content. When I regained my freedom, I restored the site from backups, whereupon the hackers struck again — this time attempting to destroy not only Mr. Pate’s work but mine as well. Now every single word and note of the original article has been restored.

In addition, Robert Pate’s hard-to-find essay on the hidden truth about the 9/11 attacks — The Missiles at Ground Zero — has also been added to the site.

Mr. Pate’s investigative work is especially important today, since the dramatic failure of the FBI’s case against their first “person of interest,” Steven Hatfill, and the equally dramatic suicide of Bruce Ivins and the FBI’s unilateral declaration without trial or hearings of any kind that Ivins was the perpetrator and that the anthrax investigation is now officially closed.

It’s both interesting and gratifying to me — as one who has been on the receiving end of horrible, life-wrecking lies from the U.S. Justice Department — to see how many people are skeptical of the Justice Department’s glib allegations of guilt directed at the conveniently dead Dr. Ivins. As Robert Pate points out, only Israel’s intelligence and assasination agency, the Mossad, had the motive, means, and opportunity to carry out these murders and attempted murders. And Mr. Pate shows conclusively that Steven Hatfiill was meticulously set up as a “fall guy” several years prior to the actual attacks, in a continent-spanning effort — hardly the act of a “lone wolf” disgruntled or profit-seeking scientist employed full-time and under constant security screening.

Almost as soon as the first anthrax letters reached their destinations, that same Justice Department was ready with an explanation: evil White “racists” dun it. On October 28, 2001, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that:

“Neo-Nazi extremists within the US are behind the deadly wave of anthrax attacks against America, according to latest briefings from the security services and Justice Department. …’There are a number of strong leads, and some people we know well that we are looking at,’ the Justice Department said. ‘These are groups organised into militia and “survivalist” movements – which pull out of society and take to the hills to make war on the government, and who will support anyone else making war on the government.’”

The article goes on from absurdity to absurdity, with the usual chiming in from the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s paid “experts” and others, and even makes the oft-repeated but preposterous claim that Timothy McVeigh, whose co-conspirator Nichols had a non-White spouse, was a “White racist.” The Guardian article, viewed with the benefit of eight years’ hindsight, shows us just how seriously we should take the government’s pronouncements on the subject.

Robert Pate’s work will not only make you a well-informed citizen on the subject of the deadly anthrax letters — but you’ll learn much about the 9/11 attacks, Israel’s foreknowledge of Atta and company, Michael Chertoff, and the largest spy ring ever captured on American soil.

In these days of rampant government disinformation, we must educate ourselves about the history of our own times, or we will become the pawns of those who would use us as cannon fodder in their dishonorable wars.

The bodies are counted just after Valentine's Day, 1945, in the aftermath of the Dresden Holocaust. American author Kurt Vonnegut was there. Emerging from a shelter into the smoldering ashes of the firebombed city of civilians and refugees, he told a fellow survivor "I'll never trust my government again."

by Kevin Alfred Strom

RABBI DAVID Kaufman quoted my essay and radio broadcast on the Dresden Holocaust in his column recently. His bias stands out like Bertie Wooster’s white suit. Kaufman is an unabashed Zionist, and told the Des Moines Register last month that his concern over events in Iran is motivated by “Iran’s threat to Israel.” That’s ethnocentric and probably wildly overblown, but at least it’s honest. (Many of Rabbi Kaufman’s fellow Zionists would prefer to conceal the truth about their motivations, instead telling us that their real concern is with “democracy in Iran,” a chimera if there ever was one.)

Considering his origins and his Zionism, one would expect Kaufman to write as he did: To him, my essay telling the world about this horrific war crime — where more innocents were killed in one day than were killed in all of England during the whole of World War 2 — wasn’t about remembering that needless sacrifice of life at all. No, says Rabbi Kaufman, it was really about me harming Jews and Jewish interests — even though I never once mentioned Jews in my article.

He concentrates mainly on one isolated paragraph in my piece: “Despite the fact that they could clearly see that the marked target area contained hospitals and sports stadia and residential areas of center city Dresden, the bombers nevertheless obeyed orders and rained down a fiery death upon the unlucky inhabitants of that city on a scale which had never before been seen on planet Earth. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were literally consumed by fire, an actual holocaust by the true definition of the word: complete consumption by fire.”

Rabbi Kaufman responds, somewhat hysterically: “Look at that last sentence! ‘Hundreds of thousands of innocents,’ ‘an ACTUAL holocaust by the TRUE DEFINITION of the word.’ The reason that Dresden is a haven for Neo-Nazi groups is that it has been created as the anti-Jewish holocaust, a demonstration that, in essence, the Germans got it worse that the Jews ever did. The repeated use of the term ‘holocaust’ by Strom in his article is precisely to argue that this, DRESDEN, was a holocaust and NOT what the Jews PRETEND to have been one.”

Never mind the fact that the real definition of the word “holocaust” is exactly as I stated it. Never mind the fact that innocents died in this totally unnecessary firebomb attack by the multiple thousands — even if you accept the Rabbi’s own Dresden death toll, at least an order of magnitude more that died in the 9/11 attacks, and far more than died that day in all the concentration camps run by all the belligerent powers on both sides combined, even if you accept the highest figures out there.

Demonization

I don’t think it helps the human condition for either Europeans or Jews to play the “my people have been persecuted more than your people” game, Talmudically quibbling about numbers. I don’t think it helps the human condition to demonize other peoples, such as by calling Zionist Jews “the Synagogue of Satan” or “Zionazis” or the like, or by calling racially conscious Europeans “neo-Nazis” or “haters.” (I don’t think that attending the now-traditional candlelight vigil to commemorate the victims of the Dresden Holocaust — and many of the attendees lost wives, husbands, parents, grandparents, or children there — makes you a “hater” of any kind. Except maybe a hater of war. Just look into what Kurt Vonnegut said about Dresden. Read or watch his Slaughterhouse 5. He was there.)

I think two of the most important aspects of the human condition these days are 1)  the question of whether or not distinct peoples are going to continue to exist in a world increasingly dominated by tyrannical “multicultural” empires and faceless globalist corporations; and 2) the related question of whether human evolution itself can continue under those conditions.

Self-determination for all, or “just us”?

I don’t criticize Rabbi Kaufman for his ethnocentrism or his desire for self-determination for Jews. Every race, every ethny, needs a healthy dose of concern for its own survival: Any people that does not make its own survival one of its highest values will simply cease to exist. But the Jewish power structure has a history of denying self-determination to other peoples, and denigrating their ethnic solidarity, calling it racial “hate” even when it clearly is no such thing. The power structure that puts out shrill propaganda claiming that “there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people” also promotes the idea that “there’s no such thing as the White race” and sometimes even insists on putting the word race itself within quotation marks.

That power structure wants to ensure that non-Jewish societies around the globe are multiracial and legally “race-blind” — policies which facilitate the maintenance of that same power structure’s colonies in those societies, and its ownership of media and financial structures there as well.

Meanwhile, the Zionist state is an openly racial state, with its main justification being the supposed uniqueness of the persecution Jews experienced during World War 2. It is to defend the public perception of Jewish wartime suffering as somehow unique that impels Rabbi Kaufman to wax angry over my article.

A Better Way

What would help the human condition would be for all of us, Rabbi Kaufman and friends included, to recognize that we are subject to the natural law of life expressed by biologist Raymond Hall: “Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” Professor Hall did not exclude humans from that law, saying “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”

I would say one or the other or both.

With our technological power  and scientific knowledge we have the ability to force the peoples of the world to live in multiracial, money-and-power based empires that are “democratic” only in the farcical sense of the word, obliterating all genetic and cultural uniqueness as we do so — with disastrous results for human biodiversity,  evolution, and progress. That’s what we’re doing now.

But we also have the power to forge a new world based on the Maxim of Self-Determination: “Every people which considers itself to be a people should, to the maximum extent possible, live under its own government.” Such a paradigm is not a threat to anyone except the power elite and its illegitimate rule.

Right now the leadership of the world’s wealthiest ethnic group, Rabbi Kaufman’s ethnic group, is on the side of that power elite, and in fact is the leading element within it. They believe — falsely — that they can only survive in a world where all nationalism is suppressed, except their own Zionist nationalism. They’re leading the West to a demographic disaster that will ultimately consume them as well.

I’m not sure if the Rabbi Kaufmans of this world understand that. It’s about time they did. Those of good will among them might change sides. To do so, they’ll have to give up the myth of the uniqueness of their suffering and embrace a more realistic and humane view: All peoples have endured untold death and suffering at the hands of those who would rule them. It’s time to grant self-government and independence to all who want it.

Unconditional empathy with the victims of the Dresden Holocaust would be a baby step in that direction.

Iran's President Ahmadinejad flashes a victory sign after being reëlected by a wide margin. Before the election, even Western opinion polls showed him winning two to one. What is the real source of the post-election chaos?

added commentary by Kevin Alfred Strom

ACCORDING TO physicist and writer James Miller, the four forces pushing for war with Iran are:

1) ISRAEL (The Israel Lobby is working overtime to get Americans to fight another war on their behalf. The work of the CIA and MI6 is clear in fomenting chaos in Iran and yet another “rainbow-colored revolution” in a country currently without Zionist supervision.);

2) NEOCON GLOBAL IMPERIALISTS (The neocon goal is to expand the American empire and help their Israeli friends and cousins. Forty per cent. of the world’s energy comes from Middle East oil. Both Zionists and neocons are overrepresented in the American mass media — Fox News is the most egregious example — so reasoned voices for peace are seldom heard.);

3)  THE OIL LOBBY (There is big money to be made by tapping into Iran’s massive crude oil reserves.); and

4) THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX (That is, war profiteers — war is big business, very big. War profiteers simply accuse their critics of being “unpatriotic” and “standing in the way of freedom and democracy.” The happy-face rainbow-colored revolution would also establish the “right” of Western media moguls to set up their multibillion-dollar propaganda mills in the the conquered territory, too, effectively controlling any nascent “democracy.”)

It is to the shame of the U.S. Congress and the honor of Congressman Ron Paul that his was the sole “no” vote opposing the recent sabre-rattling “condemnation” of Iran.

Soon, I predict, Western intelligence will provoke or cause an “intolerable outrage” — allegedly committed by Iran — justifying an all-out push for war. For the sake of peace and freedom, I pray that they do not succeed.

A montage of Liberty Dollars, which may have been the most successful of all U.S. alternative currencies to date. Despite repeated Treasury assurances that their efforts were perfectly legal, the creators of this truly honest metal-backed money found themselves under arrest.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

I’VE MENTIONED ALTERNATIVE currencies — usually private efforts to help the local or national economy without resorting to debt, usurious interest, the banks, or the Fed — in a supportive way on this site before.

Recently I learned that the creators of some of the most interesting and successful alternative currencies — the Hawaiian Dala, the California Bear, the Chambersburg Dollar, the Evansville Dollar, the Liberty Dollar, the Peace Dollar, and the Ron Paul Dollar, among others — have been arrested by the FBI (for totally bogus charges under statutes intended to stop counterfeiting). They are Kevin Innes, Bernard von NotHaus, Sarah Bledsoe, and Rachelle Moseley.

For the “crime” of trying to create honest money to give people an alternative to the colossal confidence rackets called the Federal Reserve and the commercial banking system, these good people now find themselves facing the very real possibility of living the rest of their lives in a hellhole federal prison.

The New Peace Dollar

They deserve support. One thing even those of us living on a very low income might do is buy a quantity of their Peace Dollars (available in a low-cost copper version for those who can’t afford the silver ones) and spread them around your community. As their makers tell us, as a private currency these coins are good for peace and bad for war, since they can’t be used to fund the Iraq war — or any war, for that matter.

The Liberty Dollar folks weren’t trying to do anything illegal, and in fact kept the relevant authorities informed of what they were doing, even asking them for legal opinions — Claudia Dickens, spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, said “There’s nothing illegal about this.” After the Treasury Department’s legal team reviewed the currency, she reiterated “As long as it doesn’t say ‘legal tender’ there’s nothing wrong with it.”

The Hawaiian Dala

“It’s not counterfeit money,” according to Ron Legan, Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle, Washington, Secret Service field office. Amazingly, the Liberty Dollar folks find themselves charged under statutes intended to prevent counterfeiting — though they never made any claim that Liberty Dollars are government currency, and they do not even slightly resemble U.S. coins or bills. Logan investigated and concluded that the Liberty Dollars are well within the boundaries of American monetary guidelines. “We determined there wasn’t a federal currency violation,” he said. Apparently a rogue and politically-motivated element in the Department of Justice disagrees.

The shrinking value of the dollar (click for a larger chart). Since the Federal Reserve and official U.S. currency were "liberated" from the discipline of silver and gold, the dollar has steadily lost value -- and that loss has recently accelerated (Bush war and Obama inflation losses are too recent to be fully shown in this chart). This represents one of the greatest thefts in history, mostly from honest working folks who can ill afford the loss.

If we had an honest government, the best way to issue money and credit would be to issue it directly to the people (instead of allowing the banks or the government to create it for themselves) through a National Dividend. Clifford Hugh Douglas wrote of the idea in his groundbreaking work Social Credit. But absent honest bankers or honest politicians, private labor-based or asset-based currencies are excellent alternatives.

There was nothing fraudulent or criminal about Liberty Dollars or Peace Dollars or Hawaiian Dalas, or their creators. How many other banks or governments — or currency issuers of any kind — offer to give you more dollars whenever necessary so that the value of your money, measured in silver, will always stay the same? That’s exactly what the Liberty Dollar folks do.

It is the ultimate expression of hypocrisy for the master-counterfeiters of the world, and the flagrant debasers of the dollar (now worth less than 4 cents in real terms) to place these good people under arrest and indictment.

Get your Peace Dollars from libertydollar.org today!

US navy sailors line up beneath the First Navy Jack flag during the USS Kitty Hawk Departure Ceremony, August 2008.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

PROOF WE ARE ruled and “protected” by dangerous morons can be found in this document, entitled “Crisis Controlled,” from the Virginia State Police (VSP), authored by Trooper John R. Wright.

Not only is the whole essay written on about a fifth-grade level of literacy and intelligence, not only does it characterize anyone, left or right or otherwise, who questions the constitutionality or morality of our current rulers as a “terrorist,” but it wraps itself in smarmy authority-worshipping “patriotism” of the most repellent variety imaginable, which is the opposite of real patriotism.

Typical extracts include the characterization of peaceful seekers of independence (be they Black or Amerindian or White), anti-abortion activists, and pro-individual-sovereignty folks as “terrorists” — and the description of a White male merely taking notes in public with a “Say No to the New World Order” bumper sticker on his car as a “suspect” worthy of being reported to the good and completely non-terrorist folks at the FBI or the U.S. military.

This official “safety” document also places those who belong to “single issue groups” or who engage in “civil disobedience” in the category of “low-level terrorists.” The First Navy Jack, still in official use, with its “Don’t Tread on Me” device is also, incredibly, shown as a terrorist symbol — presumably because, in addition to Navy veterans, some advocates for a restoration of American liberty also fly it.

Grotesque stereotypes are used, too — Muslims are represented by Osama bin Laden, independent-minded White people are represented by sieg-heiling “neo-Nazis,” and the system itself is represented by a solemn lit candle “in remembrance of” the 9-11 attacks that the system failed to prevent.

This publication could safely be disregarded as a pathetic example of the herd mentality if it weren’t coming from a source which has the power of force behind it — force which is only legal when it is used to protect our freedom, but which, sadly, is used for many other purposes today. I am sure that the goons of Lenin’s NKVD were often just as stone-dumb and moronically trusting of their superiors as Trooper Wright evidently is.

Wright, of course, is not to be blamed for the creation of the anti-freedom attitude he so slavishly follows, doubtlessly in search of career advancement. But he perpetuates and advances tyranny, as do those who ignore such outrages.

I saved a copy in case the VSP pulls this from their site.

James Madison and the Constitution, portrayed in a sculpture at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

by Kevin Alfred Strom

SOME PEOPLE — most notably lobbyists for the world’s wealthiest ethnic group — would like to see “speech codes,” which make it a punishable offense to criticize persons who belong to certain “protected classes,” enacted into law in the United States.

These pressure groups have already gotten their way in many European countries, and people have gone to jail and had their lives ruined and their families devastated merely for telling the truth as they saw it — for saying that some racial groups commit a disproportionate amount of crime, for example; or for suggesting that some wartime propaganda stories might be exaggerated.

Any attempt to legislate our free speech away — and many have been made — would be unconstitutional and therefore the legislation itself would be illegal. Of course! That’s the way it’s supposed to work in the land of the free.

But absent honorable citizens and honorable judges to bring down such pretended “laws,” the illegal legislation might stand. Many blatantly unconstitutional statutes and illegally adopted amendments stand today. For example, it’s unconstitutional on its face for the federal government to be involved in any way whatsoever with education. Yet its tentacles are now everywhere in education, from pre-kindergarten on up. And it’s obviously illegal under the supreme law for the feds to own or run General Motors. Yet we let it stand.

One of the things that the Founders explicitly wanted to avoid was an omnipotent legislature.

They didn’t want the majority of representatives to be able to make any law that the majority wanted.

They didn’t want the majority of the population to have its way, if its “way” was outside the very limited powers given to the federal government.

They didn’t want the “will of the people” — which just means whatever the unthinking mob thinks it wants at any given moment — to rule. (Contrast that with what Obama and the equally repellent Republicans say almost every day.)

They didn’t want those things because they were against tyranny — and the tyranny of the majority is every bit as bad as the tyranny of a king or dictator. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights and that’s especially why we have the Tenth Amendment.

In addition to restoring the authority of the Constitution, I’d enjoy seeing a mechanism that would severely punish legislators who knowingly introduce or otherwise support legislation that is unconstitutional. It would make the bastards a lot more careful. The executive and judicial branches, when complicit, should not be immune, either.

Of course, if “speech codes” or other kinds of tyranny were introduced by successful amendment of the Constitution, they would become constitutional by definition.

And when zealots, politicians, criminals, and the media conspire together it’s possible to get amendments illegally adopted, as the 14th Amendment certainly was. John Curran was right. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

WE ARE A SOCIAL species, and no man or woman lives utterly alone and disconnected from his or her fellows. But what do we do when the society we live in does wrong? When it goes so far wrong we find it absolutely morally repugnant? That’s the dilemma posed by a young academic scientist who recently wrote that he loves teaching, but that every university he might work for accepts funding from the federal government, which he believes is immoral. He says:

“My dilemma is this. I would prefer to avoid Federal funding. There’s definitely private funding out there, but I’m starting to think there’s a huge distortion of the science/academic market because of all the Federal funding; universities take a cut of funding sources and (as far as I can tell) most of the available funding is Federal. If an academic scientist wants his department to be happy with him in the form of them getting more money, he needs Federal funding. Otherwise, he would look nonproductive compared to the scientists who don’t get mildly nauseous when thinking about collectivism.

“But I have to be an academic because I must teach. Aaargh! I seem to be totally screwed. I should have either not become a real liberal or not a scientist, or I should have that elective surgery to have that teacher gland removed.

“I need your help in the form of ideas. Please! What can be done?… Despair and fatalism are also quite welcome — at least then I know better what I’m up against. Signed, Dave.”

Dear Dave — We all have to live in a world in which the social systems in which we are inevitably enmeshed are not of our choosing.

We must travel on roads produced by a political system that murdered hundreds of thousands in insane wars, roads made by often-crooked contractors.

We must attend government schools operated by the same political system, schools which often inculcate deplorable myths. (Or we could use the only major alternative, church schools, which, while superior in some ways, inculcate their own myths).

We practically have to drive automobiles, produced by subsidized corporations (think socialized road costs), of which there are so many that they definitely damage the environment.

I could go on.

Not only do I share your belief in liberty, but I also believe that a very large portion of “public policy” and law are not only completely immoral, but actually illegal. In addition, my family and I have been directly and grievously harmed by the actions of the federal government.

I don’t want to do anything — anything — that results in any aid or support, not even a dime, to the criminals in Washington. What to do?

I see two possible alternatives. 1) Work within the system, but do something with a large fraction of your time and money — more than the system gets — to radically change things. Or 2) leave the country and try to find a social system that is less objectionable than “ours.” (There is little or no  hope of finding a truly libertarian system, since the evolutionary grade of humankind is, sadly, too low for that, and getting lower. But one might find a place where, even if nominally a despotism or “democracy,” they leave you alone for the most part.)

Good luck with your moral dilemma.

John Kennedy delivering his State of the Union address, 1963, fasces displayed behind him.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

IF YOU WATCH FOX NEWS or read political blogs you probably have a headache from all the accusations of “fascism” bouncing back and forth from left to right and back again. “Obama’s a fascist!” “Rush is a fascist!” “Bush is a fascist!” “The Zionists are fascists!” “Your grandmother’s a fascist!” “Kevin Strom is a fascist!” And then we have that ridiculous neologism “Islamofascism.”

Modern Republicans and Democrats both misuse the term “fascist” — and to such a degree that the misuse has started to be enshrined in dictionaries.

In the broad sense, the term (from the Latin for “bundle”) just refers to the strength of a united people — as in the ancient Roman story in which a father asks his sons to gather sticks from the forest and bring them to him. Taking the wooden rods one at a time, he easily breaks each of them in two. But when the very same rods are bound together — symbolizing a united family or people — they are unbreakable.

The symbol of the French republic.

The fascist symbol, or fasces, usually with the rods bound around an axe to signify authority, thus became the symbol of the Roman Republic and its ideals. It was also used by the French republic, was adopted by Mussolini’s 20th century Fascist movement, and was also used by the United States during the same era — among many others.

The U.S. dime displayed the fasces on its reverse from 1916-1945; and it is displayed prominently to this day in the main chamber of the U.S. Congress.

It’s also a prominent element of Daniel Chester French’s highly idealized sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial.

In the narrow sense, fascism means specifically the socio-political movement popularized by Benito Mussolini and to some degree carried on into more recent times by the Movimento Sociale Italiano.

Reverse of the U.S. ten-cent piece, 1916-1945.

It was characterized by the ideal of the state as expressing the will of the people, with the people being an organic, natural entity, not divided into classes with differing economic interests but instead with each sector of society (such as farmers, laborers, administrators, merchants, et cetera) able to elect its own legislative representatives. In practice, many compromises were made with allies and with the old order of things.

The central government and ruling party had a lot of authority under Italian Fascism, and that is really the only similarity real fascism shares with the pop-definition of the word. But other central governments and parties past and present had similar or greater degrees of authority — such in fact being the norm for almost all human societies throughout history.

Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French: Lincoln's hands rest on two large fasces.

The pop-definition of “fascist” is roughly “big, bad, scary, and mean authoritarianism.”

“Fascist” is used by the Democrat gang to refer to the Republicans and their often authoritarian views on (among other things) war, drugs, and sexuality — and by the Republican gang to refer to the Democrats and their often authoritarian views on (among other things) freedom of association, financial privacy, and taxation.

It’s misused that way because both sides think they can make brownie points by scaring voters with the spectre of authoritarianism from the rival gang.

Here’s the truth: both modern Republicans and modern Democrats score pretty high on the authoritarianism scale — somewhat higher, I’d say, than the Movimento Sociale Italiano.

Prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba: What crimes have they committed that Bill Clinton and George Bush have not?

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE NEOCON TALK HOSTS like Hannity and Limbaugh and their coevals from the “liberal” side are making a lot of noise about the “terror suspects” who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo without trial and without legitimate charges for nigh onto a decade now.

The Republican shills say “we’ve got to be firm with these terrorists and protect Amurrica!” The Democrat shills claim to stand for the Constitution and “American values” by calling for the closing of Gitmo, though lately some have waffled on that. Both are liars, but millions of deluded Americans identify with one side or the other and have a rah-rah-for-our-team attitude, slavishly following the blogs and talk shows that keep them agitated, angry, blind to reality, and supporting one wing or another of the Evil Empire.

Most of these good folks fail to see that the Federal monster in Washington has two heads, Democrat and Republican, and it matters but little which is the current face of tyranny. Either way, we get more centralized power, more laws, more wars for Zionism, and more cheap labor for profits uber alles.

The inmates at Guantanamo? Most of them committed no crimes, unless fighting in a war for their religion or people as they saw it after being invaded by a superpower is a crime. Some of them didn’t even do that — they were just “fingered” by someone as a “bad guy.” And now with the supposed “testimony” tainted by the dishonorable torture used in our name, we’ll never know the truth about those accusations.

If we’d stop the insane wars we started in the Middle East, we wouldn’t have much to worry about from foreign Islamists anyway. George Bush was the world’s top al-Qaeda recruiter and it looks like Barack Hussein Fetchit wants to follow in his footsteps. If you want to know why that is so, take a close look at AIPAC and how they have both parties fawning all over them.

You can divide Islamists into two groups: 1) those who stay in their own nations and try to make their governmental system match their religious vision (and it’s a system I wouldn’t want to live under, by the way); and 2) those who immigrate to the West en masse and are trying to change our societies.

I say we shouldn’t allow (2) to occur at all, and returning to a racial basis for citizenship would instantly solve that problem — but the Muslims who stay in their own countries as in (1) should be left alone to live as they see fit.

But America is doing the reverse of what we should be doing. We encourage mass immigration into our own and other Western nations,  and we smear those who want to stop it with the nonsense term “racist.”

And we’re making unholy war on the Muslims who are staying in their own part of the world and minding their own business, slaughtering them by the hundreds of thousands.

That’s a formula for disaster.

IT WAS RECENTLY reported that a London bank had laid off some employees — nothing unusual about that these days. But there was a buzz of discussion about the fact that, horror of horrors, they had supposedly laid off foreign workers in greater proportion than British ones. One writer said that the bank “should be reported to the Equalities Commission.”

One sees the same kind of furor amongst the TV-watchers here in America if a business fails to favor some members of, as the Newspeak expression goes, a “protected class” — like homosexuals or non-Whites. The only real difference is that our Commissars are called “EEO officers” instead of “Equalities commissioners.”

But it doesn’t matter what they’re called. Only in an insane or 1984-style world would there be such a thing as an EEOC or an “Equalities Commission.”

I’m no friend of the banks — in fact, commercial banking as it exists today differs little from a legalized con game. But employees and employers, if there is to be even a moderate degree of freedom in this world, ought to be able to decide with whom to associate (or not associate) with absolute freedom.

Employment should require the agreement of two parties — employer and employee. If one or the other disagrees on terms, they peacefully go their separate ways. Except for voluntary associations like unions, no third party should have any say or standing whatever.

The government interference started when corrupt and paid-off police and government officials cruelly suppressed the efforts of employees to form organizations of their own. So the union folks — some of them innocent of any anti-freedom agenda, though totally oblivious to the principles involved — decided that the only way to get fair treatment was to get and use governmental power for their side. And they did, in spades — spawning endless laws that violate the Constitution and the principle of free association; laws which have been exploited by venal politicians, multiracialist change-agents, and others.

But their laws are pretended laws, and the principle of free association remains. If I want to hire only Pakistani-speakers or women, that’s my business and no one else’s. If I will work only for companies that agree that I can bring my dog to work, that’s also no one else’s business. If I will work only for companies that recognize a employee’s union that I am comfortable with, that’s not the government’s business either.

If an employer wants to hire only English-speakers — or only Spanish-speakers — or only brunette women between 20 and 40 with Master’s Degrees, it seems either tyrannical or insane to criminalize that.

Yes, I know that some Black- or Arab-owned businesses would, given the chance, hire only their own people. And so would many White-owned businesses. But that’s a good thing. Ninety per cent. of the racial conflicts in this world could be solved voluntarily and peacefully if free association were restored. It’s Nature’s way, in addition to being freedom’s way.

But the law disagrees with you! some would say.

And there we have the crux of the problem — not that the “law disagrees” with me, but that it is widely believed (and even more widely pretended) to be constitutional and wise to have laws which interfere with free private agreements between parties.

With “the law” as it is now commonly believed to exist, you have hundreds of factions and interest groups trying to use legislation or tortured interpretations of legislation to force one group or another to cough up money, or or hire more members of group X — and it all ends up with a judge or demagogic attorneys making subjective determinations of “what is best.”

That kind of arbitrary use of force or threatened force is pretty close to exactly what the authors of the Constitution were trying to avoid. And it sure as Hell isn’t freedom.

James Madison, father of the United States Constitution. He opposed democracy, saying democracies are "as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths," and sought to protect us from the tyranny of an omnipotent legislature. Sadly, with the demise of the Tenth Amendment, Madison's dream has died.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

THE MAIN DEFENSE the Founders set up to protect Americans from the tyranny of kings — and the tyranny of the majority — was the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It says, in effect, that the central government possesses only those powers expressly granted by the Constitution and no other powers whatever. And that is how it was understood and applied until the second Roosevelt demanded and received Lenin-like economic power (“for our own good,” of course) and supine judges allowed it despite its obvious illegality.

(Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s arrest of the legislature of Maryland to prevent them from “voting wrongly,” and the imposition of several pretended Amendments to the Constitution while states were under military dictatorships — so-called “Reconstruction” — and their citizens disenfranchised, were also completely illegal, among many other things.)

Washington meddling in and controlling local public education? Absolutely prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

Washington telling employers who they must hire? Absolutely prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

Washington controlling your ability to sell your home or land to whomever you choose? Absolutely prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

Washington telling you what substances you can or cannot consume? Absolutely prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

Washington authorizing a consortium of private banks (like the Federal Reserve) to control all money and credit? Absolutely prohibited by the Tenth Amendment.

All the other sections of the Bill of Rights prohibit the federal government from doing one thing or another, respectively. But the Tenth is like all the other Amendments on steroids. It prohibits Washington from doing anything, except those things specifically called for in the rest of the document.

However, by torturing and twisting the words of the preamble (‘…yeah, we can do just about anything that “promotes the general welfare,” right?’) and by other means, the Tenth Amendment has been rendered null and void for all practical purposes. Those who did this said they needed the extra powers to do us all a lot of good.

But, in the process of trying to do good (if indeed that was ever their intention), they also blatantly lied, outrageously broke the supreme law of the land, rendered almost all of their Acts and Bills totally illegal, and caused the regime in Washington, whatever party is in power, to be quite illegitimate and utterly unlawful.

A screen shot showing the free crossfading and audio processing plugins in use. The meters shown are separate software used for comparison of input and output levels.

by Kevin Alfred Strom

I’VE RECENTLY BEEN EXPERIMENTING with two plugins (for the popular audio player Winamp) which can create superb music mixes for personal listening, and can even form the core of an Internet or over-the-air broadcast station. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with broadcasting and radio in one way or another for four decades now, so these virtual devices really caught my eye.

The first add-on is Sqrsoft’s free Advanced Crossfading (ACF) plugin, which not only eliminates gaps between songs, but also takes out the several seconds of silence that sometimes plague the beginning and end of downloaded mp3s that you might get from iTunes or Shareaza or your friends’ thumb drives, and that’s not even mentioning its main function — mixing the very last seconds of one track with the first few seconds of the next track, just like a radio station disc jockey might do.

The second is the Sound Solution (SS) v1.1 audio processor by Alessandro Tomassini, a truly amazing piece of free software which can do almost anything that $5,000 FM broadcast audio compressors and limiters can do. One of the main problems with listening to downloaded mp3 and wma files is the wide variation in level that one encounters — one track will be so soft you have to turn the volume nearly all the way up, while the next is recorded so hot it might cause permanent hearing loss at the same setting as the first. SS solves this, and can also make your audio stream more consistent for broadcasting over the ‘Net or via an FM broadcast transmitter large or small.

Advanced Crossfading

ACF is highly configurable, and I found it necessary to decrease the mix buffer size to 8000 ms to avoid white noise and pops on long crossfades. I also tinkered with the maximum and minimum mix time settings as well as the gap killer adjustments, with the end result being a crossfader that does equally well on classical or pop/rock music, with or without jingles between the music tracks. Classical listeners probably will prefer to keep the gaps between pieces, so ACF is most useful for listeners to other genres.

The plugin doesn’t just mix tracks at predetermined intervals — it “listens” to the beginning and end of every track before it is played, and calculates the best timing and duration of the crossfade based on the parameters you set.

ACF automatically converts files with different sample rates to your selected sample rate (in my case, 44.1 kHz), but there is a caveat. I tested ACF with files of 32, 44.1, and 48 kHz rates. Although the upconversion from 32 kHz sounded fine, downconverting from 48 kHz gave a very strident and grainy sound — definitely not recommended. For best fidelity, I suggest using ACF to mix only files with the same sample rate as the ACF output setting — which, since almost all of your music is going to use this rate anyway, will probably be 44.1 kHz.

Good Results

With the settings I eventually settled on (which you can download here and put in your program files\winamp\plugins folder along with the plugin itself after unzipping) I was able to make some very satisfying mixes with never a failure. Most of the time, it sounds like there’s an attentive DJ with a good ear for the right mix point running the show. The plugin’s weakest point is on prolonged, very slow fadeouts, where it tends to let the fade go on too long and defaults to the minimum mix length you’ve set. One could ameliorate this by setting a longer minimum mix length, but I didn’t want to do that since then it wouldn’t work well with very short jingle tracks between songs. All in all, I am somewhere between satisfied and amazed by what the Sqrsoft people have accomplished.

ACF is an output plugin, so it normally wouldn’t have been possible to add final processing (for broadcast audio level control, for example) after it — but the Sqrsoft engineers thought of that. They knew the potential broadcast uses of ACF, so they thoughtfully included the ability to follow the ACF plugin by a final DSP module of your choice. And a good choice, which works well with ACF, is our next subject.

Broadcast-Type Audio Processing

The first multiband audio compressor/limiter in the world, the Discriminate Audio Processor (or "DAP") by Mike Dorrough, circa 1973.

The second free add-on I’ve been working with is Sound Solution v1.1 by Alessandro Tomassini. Having worked with broadcast audio devices from Langevin equalizers and CBS Labs Volumaxes (or is that Volumaxi?) to Orban Optimods, I can say with some authority that what Mr. Tomassini has packed into a free plugin is nothing short of astonishing. It is very nearly the equivalent of a late-model FM broadcast audio processor — for free.

SS might seem intimidating to a novice, with its near total control (via multiple sliders, buttons, and meters) over its input leveler, multiband limiter/compressor/expander, two-band peak limiter and clipper, and stereo expander. But it supports presets, so a knowledgeable user can tweak SS for a particular application, and then send the resulting preset file to anyone, who can then overwrite the equivalent file in his own program files\winamp folder.

One warning about SS:  the default setting might not provide the effect you want at all — it sounds like something between WPGC-FM in its bang-the-needles Dorrough DAP days and WLPL-FM in its four LA-3s in stereo-series days. Super-compressed top-40 FM, in other words: fun to play with, but  not for everyone.

Also, the SS plugin takes about 30 seconds to initialize — you’ll be convinced it’s not working at all, then suddenly it will kick in. But once it does engage, it is smooth, reliable, and glitch-free for continuous use. There is also considerable latency, so be aware that the meter readings you’re seeing and adjustments you’re making are for the audio you will hear in several seconds. Again, once you’ve got it adjusted and running, that has no negative impact on the user.

Capabilities

It’s possible to approximately emulate broadcast FM or recording processors of almost any imaginable type with this plugin. You can make it sound like a classical FM station with an Orban Optimod 8000 (RMS compressor, no multiband, and two band limiter) or a recording studio “glamorizer” (leveler, low-ratio multiband compressor/equalizer, light limiter with no clipping), a “hot hits” format FM station (like the default preset), or almost anything you can think of.

The one thing SS can’t do too well is final AM broadcast processing. For that you would want symmetry control, brick-wall adjustable low-pass filters, NRSC compatibility, and the ability to completely eliminate FM preemphasis-related limiting. But for a casual user of a small college carrier-current operation or an antique radio dealer’s demo AM transmitter, SS can do a pretty fair job with the right adjustments.

If you use SS in a live announce environment (such as with Winamp’s line in plugin or something similar fed from a mixing desk), be aware that the announcers will go crazy if they listen to the off-air output (because of the delay introduced by SS), so the headphone amps should run off the local mixer’s program feed.

I created a preset file you can download, unzip, place in the Winamp folder, and use with Sound Solution that I call WB4AIO Good Sound. It uses the leveler followed by the multiband compressors operating at a very gentle 3:1 ratio and pretty slow time constants. The peak limiter is turned down to almost invisibility and the clipper and stereo enhancer are turned off.

This gives a pretty aggressive level control — so files varying from barely audible to superhot come out sounding almost equal to the ear — while retaining cleanliness of sound and a great deal of short-term dynamic range. This gives a very open and non-fatiguing result as long as your source files are clean; distorted audio will sound worse than ever when processed. An interesting benefit is that some dynamics actually appear to be added to some overproduced, superclipped modern CD tracks, giving them a more pleasant sound.

Listen to It

If you want to hear what this combination sounds like, I created some files (pretty big .wma files, about 10-12 Mb each) of scoped music (meaning just the first and last bits of the songs are used, to show you what the mixes and dynamics sound like), one with jingles and one without jingles that you can download and listen to with your favorite media player. The original levels on these songs varied tremendously.

Though purists might complain that the wishes of the CD’s engineer and producer are being overridden, for casual listening and Internet radio this preset produces well-controlled yet pleasant audio. The multiband compression brings out details in the mix that you might never have noticed before. For all songs, but especially for murky mixes, it gives an effect approaching remixing and remastering.

My amateur radio QSL card; I named the preset after my callsign.

The WB4AIO Good Sound preset even works well for FM microbroadcasting (where precise peak control is not enforced) as long as your FM receiver is fairly broadband. My Boston Acoustics table radio and Bose Wave Radio sound great using this preset feeding a little Belkin FM adaptor. A Mercedes ML-series FM car radio was too selective for this preset though, and gave distortion on strong sibilants.

For those requiring tight peak control, I made another downloadable preset called WB4AIO Good FM, which uses the same settings except for the fact that it uses more peak limiting, 75 microsecond preemphasis, and clipping. It works better on narrow FM receivers and sounds as loud as many pop-music broadcast stations, with the sacrifice of some openness and short-term dynamic range. If you want to sound like a top-40 screamer, though, Mr. Tomassini’s default setting is probably better.

The combination of these two plugins makes Winamp into a powerful tool to mix your songs into a seamless, professional-style soundscape.

*   *   *

Kevin Strom, Italian pop star Aurelio Fierro, and Italian Melodies producer and host Pino Cicala in the WEAM, Arlington studios, May 1984.

Kevin Alfred Strom began working in radio broadcasting in 1975, was a staff engineer under Milford K. Smith at Washington, DC’s WPGC from 1976 to 1978, and was chief engineer at WEAM, Arlington, from 1978 to 1984. Since then he has worked as a broadcasting consultant, program producer and host, and editor and publisher. He holds amateur radio license WB4AIO. Some of his favorite ham radio activities include building and modifying AM and SSB amateur gear for better performance and fidelity, and engaging in free-ranging discussions on 160, 75, and 40 meters.

A tip of the hat to fellow AM amateur radio operator Mike Dorrough, KO6NM, inventor of the first multiband broadcast processor, the Dorrough DAP (Discriminate Audio Processor — see, I told you discrimination could be a good thing!); and I hereby dedicate the tweeter-burning highs in my audio chain to Dave Wenger, K3ZRF, whose supermodulated Viking Valiant on 3870 kHz in the 1970s and beyond was an inspiration to me.