Thursday, June 5, 2014

Designer babies: Hybrid human species ‘safe’ says report

it's all fun & games ...till yer monster starts chase~in yer ass huh, Herr Dr. Frankenstein

truther  
Shepard Ambellas
Highly controversial techniques would allow human embryos to be constructed from the DNA of 3 different people
In what will likely only lead to the inevitable, designer babies are set to become a norm on planet earth in the near future.
Image a world in which you can design your very own baby. One where you can pick your artificially planned newborn’s DNA from at least 3 different gene pools. A real life customized test tube baby. Possibly one which will resist certain inherent genetic flaws such as hereditary disorders, health problems and more. 1)  Well that’s just exactly what some scientists and British regulators are now pushing for by the year’s end.
Designer babies Hybrid human species ‘safe’ says report
In fact, Britain’s fertility regulator recently released a report which basically states that advanced scientific techniques to create a hybrid human embryo from the DNA of 3 people is not “unsafe”, thus opening the door to the genetic-modification of the human species.
The Associated Press reported on the matter, giving some insight into the scientists thought process: 2)
“Until a healthy baby is born, we cannot say 100 percent that these techniques are safe,” said Dr. Andy Greenfield, who chaired the expert panel behind the report.
The techniques are meant to stop mothers from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their babies and involve altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into a woman. Such methods have only been allowed for research in a laboratory, but the U.K. department of health has said it hopes new legislation will be in place by the end of the year that allows treatment of patients.
Not only is this information hard to chew on, but shockingly Britain may become the first country in the world to allow the controversial procedure. However, thus far nothing has really stopped scientists from doing anything. In fact, some are roaming mad men who play with deadly viruses on a daily basis. 3)

Over 150 human animal hybrids already made

According to the Daily Mail, at least 150 human animal hybrids have been made in U.K. labs.
An excerpt from the article reads: 4)
Figures seen by the Daily Mail show that 155 ‘admixed’ embryos, containing both human and animal genetic material, have been created since the introduction of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act.
This legalized the creation of a variety of hybrids, including an animal egg fertilised by a human sperm; ‘cybrids’, in which a human nucleus is implanted into an animal cell; and ‘chimeras’, in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.
Scientists say the techniques can be used to develop embryonic stem cells which can be used to treat a range of incurable illnesses.
Three labs in the UK – at King’s College London, Newcastle University and Warwick University – were granted licences to carry out the research after the Act came into force.
Ladies and gentlemen, people are now playing as if they are God.

International Men Of Mystery: How Discredited German 'Anti-Piracy' Company May Secretly Be Behind Malibu Media's Copyright Trollery

from the well,-look-at-that dept

Things have been getting more interesting on the Malibu Media front lately. The company, which is responsible for 40% of all copyright cases, has certainly faced claims of abusive and seriously questionable practices. But some new information suggests it goes much further down the rabbit hole of questionableness. Like Righthaven and Prenda before it, new accusations are coming out about some highly questionable shell games to try to hide what's really going on.

In this case, it's come out that behind all of Malibu Media's shady tactics, the folks actually pulling the strings (or, at least, heavily involved) may be the German company Guardaley, or one of its many sneaky shell companies. If you've been following copyright trolls for a while, you may recognize Guardaley as the shady company involved (secretly) in some of the original copyright trollery in the US, which was slammed in court for highly questionable technology that was at the center of its attempts to "identify" people to go after in the shakedown scam known as copyright trolling.

Guardaley had been laying low for a while, but back in April, Sophisticated Jane Doe over at FightCopyrightTrolls turned up Guardaley's secret playbook, which was clearly not meant for public consumption. It is... quite a read. It highlights the various shell games and individuals involved -- and also notes how Guardaley can quickly churn out cookie cutter legal filings against the various individuals it "sues" (with the entire effort actually focused on getting people to pay them to go away). And, astoundingly, it basically admits that Guardaley will supply bogus "experts" to support the claims in court. From page 35 of the presentation:
Okay, now jump back to January, in which one of the lawyers representing Malibu Media admitted that the "expert" company it uses, IPP (a Guardaley shell) worked "pursuant to an oral contingency fee." In other words, it was getting a cut of any money secured via these lawsuits and corresponding shakedowns. That's kind of a big deal: when your "expert witness" has a direct financial stake in the outcome, that means your expert witness is doing something very, very shady. No wonder Guardaley doesn't want the judges to question them too much.

For the past few months there had been some ongoing efforts to get various Malibu Media lawyers to reveal the details of their relationship with Guardaley/IPP and other related shells. Not surprisingly, Malibu Media lawyers are trying to block all of that. This finally resulted in an impressive filing from copyright troll fighter, lawyer Morgan Pietz, who accuses the company of champerty -- a scheme to "buy into" lawsuits, something that is at the very least frowned upon, but more frequently against the law. Furthermore, Pietz notes that Malibu Media should have been proactively disclosing Guardaley's interest in the cases, but has not -- instead highlighting how the company (actually, its lawyers) has been "fighting tooth and nail all attempts by defendants to inquire about these arrangements." He even calls Guardaley "the German computer guys."

Separately, the filing dismantles Malibu's bizarre attempt to avoid this whole issue by blaming it on some other guy in Florida.
Malibu concedes that it did [disclose this information] here, and counsel on the pleadings here in Maryland concludes that there could not possibly be any kind of breach of this duty because lead national counsel in Miami, not counsel here, negotiated the improper witness contingency agreement. Regardless of what local counsel here did or did not know, lead counsel in Miami, whose firm presumably authored the early discovery papers in the first instance, and who participated in the consolidated proceedings in this district before Judges Titus and Grimm, had a duty to make sure this fact was disclosed to the Courts here and across the country.
The filing then goes into significant detail about the whole mess, under the wonderful title:
International Men Of Mystery: Tobias Fieser, Michael Patzer, Daniel Macek, Patrick Achache, Guardaley & The Shell Companies, And The Software With A Name Nobody Seems To Know
The "software with a name nobody seems to know" involves constantly changing claims about what software is being used to identify people accused of infringement, along with the claims that this unnamed and ever-changing software is somehow infallible (despite Guardaley's tech being so discredited previously). In an amusing section, Pietz points out how quite clearly "fallible" the technology is:
In the letter Malibu submitted to Judge Titus and Judge Grim last year, they argued that IPP’s proprietary software was literally “infallible.” ... In the opposition to the instant motion, Malibu submits a declaration from Michael Patzer where he avers that “the PCAPs recorded the IP address 76.100.228 [sic] infringing Plaintiff’s copyrights.” That is incorrect. Mr. Patzer left out three digits in that IP address. This simply goes to show that no matter how “infallible” Malibu and Patzer think the software and corresponding proprietary system they designed may be, there is always room for human error, at either the input stage, or the output stage.
The filing highlights the similarities of these shell companies with the recent ruling against Prenda, and highlights increasing evidence of how the people above are really deeply involved in a bunch of shell games. It calls out evidence in a non-Malibu Media case, Elf-Man LLC v. Lamberson, which lays out more evidence of an incredible circle of shell companies. I won't repost it here, but it's worth reading, just to see some of the crazy chain of shell companies. This is not the whole chain of crazy, but just a snippet:
As the defendant’s own investigation revealed in Elf-Man, Crystal Bay Corporation, the company Macek (and Patzer?) supposedly “worked for” ... was a defunct South Dakota corporation, apparently incorporated in 2012 by a disbarred lawyer who, according to his website, “now specializes in creating ‘anonymous’ ‘shelf’ corporations.” .... The official address Crystal Bay Corporation registered with the South Dakota Secretary of State? It belongs to a mail forwarding company, and it is the same address given for the disbarred lawyer’s “Agent Services” company.... Same thing with the Stuttgart, Germany address given for Patzer and Macek: it corresponds to an office building in Stuttgart “that offers mail drop services and short term office rents, even by the hour.” ... The Elf-Man defendant also investigated the phone numbers given for Patzer and Macek. The regional code for Macek’s number corresponded to Karlsruhe, Germany. The regional code for Patzer was for a suburb of Karlsruhe....

The coup de grace from Elf-Man: when defense counsel there recently called the (Karlsruhe) phone number given for Macek in the initial disclosures in that case, the person on the other end of the line answered it “Guardaley.”
Boom. Also, there's the part in which one of the guys admits he works for one of these shell companies and then has to be lead by Malibu Media's lawyer into saying he didn't actually work for the company:
More importantly, the testimony Malibu complains Pietz omitted only further supports the argument that Guardaley = IPP = Excipio, and that Patzer, Fieser, and Macek are all part of the same organization. For starters, at the beginning of Patzer’s testimony, he first says “yes” when asked if he works at IPP Limited.... Malibu’s counsel then asks him a leading question, reminding him that “you don’t actually work for IPP, Limited. You said you work for a firm that provides these services to IPP, Limted, correct?” and Patzer confirms that.... However, throughout Patzer’s testimony, he constantly refers to “we” when it is clear he is referring to IPP. None of that suggests that Excipio is really a totally different company that should be credited as possibly more trustworthy than Guardaley; it suggests Patzer thinks of himself as working with Fieser at IPP.
And, of course, days after this was filed, the lawyer who had been representing the copyright holders in Elf-Man, Maureen VanderMay, suddenly filed a motion to withdraw as counsel, noting that "issues have arisen between Plaintiff's representative and counsel, the nature of which make it impossible for counsel to both continue with representation and comply with the governing rules of professional conduct." However, she refuses to detail those reasons, citing their "privileged and confidential nature," though says that if required to, she would like to do so under seal. It's not too difficult to put two and two together here, suggesting the likely issue is that VanderMay realized how much trouble everyone involved in this scheme may be in soon. And, anyone who witnessed both the Righthaven and Prenda debacles knows that random outside lawyers who help out are the first ones often thrown under the bus in these disputes.

There have been stories for quite some time suggesting Malibu Media was, in some ways, worse than Prenda. Now, it appears that it may have been Guardaley and its rotating crew of shell companies behind all of this all along -- something they'd mostly been able to keep quiet. However, it looks like the scheme may be starting to unravel. Now, we just need Pietz to put together one of his infamous org charts like he did with Prenda.http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140603/18021127448/international-men-mystery-how-discredited-german-anti-piracy-company-may-secretly-be-behind-malibu-medias-copyright-trollery.shtml


“You could be liable for $150k in penalties—settle instead for $20 per song”

Growing copyright cop Rightscorp hopes to be a profitable alternative to "six strikes."



Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock
Call them "RIAA-lite."
Six years after the US recording industry stopped seeking money from file-sharers, a new company is now preparing technology that could flood the Internet with "hundreds of millions of notices" to alleged copyright infringers.
Rightscorp, the company behind the campaign, already sends out thousands of notices to users, while making big promises to investors—and not-so-subtle threats to Internet Service Providers. The company's whole strategy is based on telling ISPs that they're likely to face a high-stakes copyright lawsuit if they don't forward the notices that Rightscorp creates.
It works like this: users accused by Rightscorp are found via IP addresses appearing in BitTorrent download swarms. If ISPs agree to forward Rightscorp's notices—and an increasing number of them are doing so—the users get notices that they could be liable for $150,000 in damages. Unless, that is, they click on a provided link and agree to settle their case at a low, low price. Typically, it's $20 per song infringed.

Enlarge / Rightscorp COO Robert Steele
LinkedIn
In an interview with Ars, Rightscorp COO Robert Steele said that asking for $20 per infringement is a "socially fair way to create a deterrent." The company hopes to make the cost of infringement more akin to a standard traffic ticket than a DUI, while still keeping the threat of massive statutory damages—up to $150,000 for one willful copyright infringement—in its back pocket. "Entertainers don't want to do that very often," said Steele. "They want to make people happy. For most people, a $10,000 judgment is a really tough thing. We're giving an opportunity for people to resolve the matter and recoup some loss to the creative, for a relatively small amount of money."
To make itself the Internet's premier copyright traffic cop, Rightscorp needs the help of Internet service providers. Steele and other Rightscorp executives insist that ISPs will help them, not because they want to, but because they have to. The company believes ISPs are obligated to forward their notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) if they want the "safe harbor" against lawsuits offered by that law (though this is an interpretation not everyone agrees with).
Rightscorp is a small company, with just seven full-time employees, but it's growing fast. The company went public in October, and it reported its annual financial results a few months ago. It had revenue of $324,016 during 2013, up from less than $100,000 in 2012. Rightscorp is on pace to blow that record away again, having collected more than $188,000 in just the first quarter.
Since Rightscorp splits its settlement cash 50/50 with its clients, those numbers mean that Internet users paid up almost $750,000 last year over its notices. The company's two anchor clients are large music labels: BMG Rights Management and Warner Brothers accounted for 25 percent and seven percent of Rightscorp revenue, respectively.
Even with those marquee colleagues, it remains to be seen whether Rightscorp will be a business success. At this point, it's still way in the red, with its growing revenue outweighed by $2.1 million in expenses last year.

Looking at the big picture, attempts to enforce Internet copyrights on a wide scale haven't generally been profitable. (Remember Righthaven?) The one big exception has been "porn trolling," and critics say the quick payouts in that field are driven largely by consumers who are too embarrassed to fight back. Rightscorp has ruled out that line of work, promising it won't go into the business of enforcing copyrights on adult material. "We're holding big American corporations accountable for something they are participating in that hurts people," said Steele. "We need the moral high ground."
In any case, many Internet users who don't know the name of Rightscorp may be learning it soon. The company has settled with 72,000 users who they say broke copyright laws, and it sent notices to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others. On a recent call with investors, Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec said the company is working with more than 70 ISPs, including five in the top 10. (Rightscorp won't disclose which ones.)
Only a few of the Rightscorp notices have been published. Last summer, a Charter subscriber posted one of 14 notices he received on reddit. The notice accuses the user of downloading a track from Daft Punk's newly released album, and it read in part:
Your ISP has forwarded you this notice.
This is not spam. Your ISP account has been used to download, upload, or offer for upload copyrighted content in a manner that infringes on the rights of the copyright owner.
Your ISP service could be suspended if this matter is not resolved. You could be liable for up to $150,000 per infringement in civil penalties.
In the same thread, another user said that Comcast forwards Rightscorp notices but removes the settlement details and links. If it's true that some big ISPs strip Rightscorp's notices down to their bare bones and then forward, Rightscorp may be overstating its case when it tells investors that five of the 10 largest ISPs "participate with us and our clients."

CSI: Repeat Infringers

Sabec and Steele co-founded the company in 2011. Sabec is an attorney with roots in the music industry. He worked with Dave Matthews and Hansen, and he later licensed intellectual property for the Jerry Garcia Estate.
Steele, meanwhile, is the tech guy. During the first dot-com boom, he made software to put AOL's Mapquest and Microsoft Powerpoint on early handheld devices. At Rightscorp, he's taken that knowledge and used it to build a system that searches file-sharing networks that use BitTorrent software.
"Just like Google has a crawler, we have a crawler," Steele explained. "It crawls the entire world, all the file-sharing networks. It finds all of the different seeders that are giving away our clients' products for free, all day long."
The 'seeders' that Rightscorp is looking for are IP addresses uploading pieces of files through BitTorrent. It's not complicated to find those IP addresses, but only an ISP has the records that connect those addresses to actual Internet users.
IP addresses change over time, and that's where Rightscorp's "secret sauce" kicks in. Steele said his company has a proprietary method of identifying particular users, without ISP cooperation, even when IP addresses get rotated over time.
That, Steele said, allows them to finger "repeat infringers" with certainty. Faced with such evidence, the ISPs are legally obligated to take action, up to and including cutting off Internet access. Under the DMCA, that's what those companies must do if they want to keep their "safe harbor" from copyright lawsuits.
"We're showing the ISPs that they have this potential liability," said Steele. "Their shield for liability is contingent on terminating repeat infringers. Prior to our company, there was no way to hold them accountable."
Rightscorp creates notices for every infringement and sends the notices to every ISP. Some ISPs don't do Rightscorp's bidding, but an increasing number do agree to forward the notices. (It also isn't clear how many may alter the notices or offer a lower level of compliance than Rightscorp would like.)
Steele wouldn't go into details about the technical aspects of how Rightscorp is able to track users even as their IP addresses change. But he did say that when he let ISPs know that Rightscorp had such an ability, they didn't believe him. "I said, oh, well, just look them up," he said. "They know who they've assigned the IP addresses to every time. Once we showed them we could pierce that veil, they saw that's potentially opening them up to this liability.
"It's a bit like watching CSI," he said. "When someone has been shot, they want to connect a gun to a slug. They fire a new bullet and say, 'Judge, there's a 99 percent chance this bullet out of the gun matches the bullet in the victim.' We can show a 99 percent chance of the same subscriber account [over two IP addresses]."
Rightscorp puts the data about what repeat infringers are up to in a Web-based "dashboard," where it can be looked at by both Rightscorp's copyright owner clients as well as ISPs.
The dashboard is a "groundbreaking" technology, he says. Rightscorp has filed five patents around its system for locating and tracking repeat infringers.
The system puts Rightscorp ahead of other companies using threats or lawsuits to do large-scale copyright enforcement, Steele said. The ability to identify with certainty repeat infringers makes Rightscorp "the only company to have legal leverage with ISPs, compelling the ISP to deliver settlement notices by leveraging the DMCA," according to the company.

A not-so-subtle threat

Without ISPs going along with its program, Rightscorp doesn't have a business. Of course, US ISPs are already in the process of creating a system that deals with repeat infringers. The "six strikes" system run by the Center for Copyright Information has just released the first major report on its activity, revealing that 1.3 million copyright notices were sent out under that system.
Rightscorp's financial filings suggest it believes that system won't be sufficient. "Graduated-response style interdiction is too costly to scale to any significant portion of total infringements and yields little or no results," the company stated in its annual financial statement. "ISPs have no incentive to participate in any meaningful way without copyright holders sending them notices."
The company relies on the threat of a lawsuit, but that seems unlikely to materialize. The "six strikes" regime itself suggests that ISPs and most entertainment companies are interested in détente, not brinksmanship.
Perhaps more important, as stated above, Rightscorp's interpretation of what the DMCA requires is open to debate. The law does require terminating the accounts of "repeat infringers," but there's a lot of leeway in how that might get done. Even the seemingly simple question of what constitutes a repeat infringer is open to interpretation.
So ISPs have to "adopt and reasonably implement" a policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers. But the statute doesn't detail how that has to be done, explained Jonathan Band, a technology policy lawyer who helped draft parts of the DMCA.
"It could be you have in place a system of forwarding notices, or you could have something else," said Band. "You could just wait for three strikes and then terminate the account, although from a customer relations point of view that wouldn't be the smartest thing to do." Some universities that provide Internet service will terminate it after just one "strike," he noted.
The bigger question is, who's a repeat infringer?
"Do they have to be adjudicated as infringers [by a court]?" asked Band. "Or is it enough for there to be a claim of infringement? That's a big difference." 
It's a big enough gap that copyright owners, for the most part, have decided not to gamble with high-stakes courtroom combat against ISPs. On the one hand, if a copyright holder beat down an ISP, entertainment companies could compel Internet providers to be tougher on infringing users. But if they lost, they could be in a worse situation, with ISPs taking an even more hands off approach.
It's also reasonable to assume that big ISPs wouldn't likely back down without a fight. Terminating a user account on a free website like YouTube is one thing; forcing out a subscriber who may be paying more than $150 each month for a bundle of TV and Internet service is quite another. A court ruling that leaned even slightly in the direction of compelling punishment of those high-value subscribers would get the full attention of ISP legal departments and budgets.

A decade-old precedent


The most relevant courtroom battle is from 2003: the RIAA v. Verizon case that went up to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. In it, record companies sought to compel Verizon to reveal the identity of a subscriber allegedly using the now defunct KaZaA file-sharing software. The record companies won initially, but the appeals court sided with Verizon, finding that the DMCA didn't require it to comply with the RIAA's subpoena. While that case certainly doesn't suggest a lawsuit would be an easy win for a copyright owner, it also doesn't rule out the possibility. If a court bought into Rightscorp's argument that its body of evidence was uniquely convincing, it could hold an unresponsive ISP liable. If a court was convinced that a service provider was unresponsive in the face of clear evidence of infringement, it could be held liable.
"If there are a bunch of notices about someone being an infringer, that could be enough to trigger the obligation to do something about their account," said Band. "If [copyright owners] say, 'We sent you three notices that this guy was a bad guy, and you didn't do anything,' then they could argue that whatever policy you had wasn't a good policy." 
RIAA v. Verizon is more than a decade old now, and it's telling that there aren't more examples of copyright holders pushing courts to detail ISP obligations in terms of protecting copyrights. In a way, the "six strikes" system that's now going into effect is a compromise, born of the fact that neither side has an incentive to push this issue to a final decision. There's no crystal clear answer.

Future ambitions 

That murky legal landscape hasn't stopped both ISPs and content industries from thriving. Yet it's also made room for one attempt after another at leveraging copyright law into for-profit Internet policing schemes. Rightscorp is merely the latest incarnation.
In the future, the company hopes to get more ISPs to comply—and it will expect more of those that are already cooperating, said Steele. Ultimately, Rightscorp is hoping for a scenario in which the repeat infringers it identifies aren't just notified by e-mail. Instead, Steele hopes to see those users re-directed to a Rightscorp notice right at the moment they open their Web browsers.
"You wouldn't be able to get around the re-direct page, and you'd have to pay a fine to return to browsing," he explained. The company is in discussions with four ISPs about imposing such a re-direct page, according to Steele. But the details about which ISPs cooperate with Rightscorp, and how much they cooperate, is a secret that the company guards closely.
The reality is, Rightscorp is a tiny company seeking to change the behavior of industry behemoths like Comcast and Verizon. And while it seeks to wield a "big stick" in the form of a potential copyright lawsuit, at the end of the day, it's the company's music industry customers who would have to take such a bold step.
In the meantime, Steele doesn't want his company to appear antagonistic. Instead, he paints an optimistic picture that more ISPs will be coming to his side voluntarily.
"Every month we get more ISPs that are forwarding the notices," he said. "It's a unique business model, but it works. We believe five years from now, worldwide, this is how file sharing will be remediated. And we'll be the company that does it, around the world."

Who’s in “The Militia”?

let me ask u,     ~ “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole of the people, except for few public officials.”     — George Mason

    I’m not a soldier, and nor am I a proponent of violent solutions to any problem when violence can be avoided. I don’t like the idea of combat, and nor am I looking forward to it, but I consider myself a member of the militia because once you grasp the big picture of our precarious reality, you’ll realize that there’s no place else to go. My joining the militia movement began with the realization that it’s all we have left, and knowing that in times like this, being a member of the militia also happens to be the civic duty of all Americans. 

    Demonstrators are beaten and gassed, the elections process is a farce, the courts will only run you in circles or imprison you, and any cop you meet might easily kill you on a whim, and get away with it. We have absolutely no effective way of petitioning our government for a redress of grievances, and “our government” happens to be doing all they can to destroy our nation.

    The fact of the matter is that our government has been subverted by those who have made obvious their desire to kill us all, and we have no one to turn to for salvation from this horror except ourselves. None of us likes the idea, and none of us can change what’s coming, but the more of us who are ready for it, the easier it will be for all involved parties, including you.         

    I’ve heard varying estimates, but it’s generally understood by people who understand these things, that for every soldier killed in war, there’s between six and ten civilians that die too. What that means is that when war comes to America, you’ll have no place to hide from it, but you’ll have better odds of survival by being a soldier rather than being a civilian. And that means that every American capable of fighting should be ready to do so immediately, if he’s not too dim-witted to grasp the basic arithmetic in that formula. It’s very simple. We’re all being attacked, and although soldiers carry the means of defending themselves, civilians rarely do.      
   
    Hiding in your basement won’t help you when they plow your house over with a bulldozer. Begging for mercy won’t help when they’re holding you on the edge of a mass grave to help you receive your good-bye bullet. And as much as I’d love to live in peace, and escape any horrors of war, a decade of discovery has taught me to accept the fact that war is coming to me, whether I like it or not. 

    You see, we’ve all been declared the enemy because we happen to be patriotic Americans concerned for our future, and because of this we’re seen as a hindrance to America’s transition to the full-blown communist dictatorship our “representatives” have sold us out to. We also happen to be the owners of the nation they’re trying to steal, so it’ll be very convenient to have all of us out of the picture. 

    If you’re one of the many people who are “working toward peaceful solutions”, I thank you for your efforts, and no one hopes that you find peaceful solutions more than I do, but please also consider the possibility of your efforts being futile, and that the ugly future we all fear may befall us. Surviving that ugly future will require preparedness.  

    I first became aware of the Patriot / Militia Movement as a member of the 9-11 Truth Movement, because in your search for truth, you’ll soon discover that there are precious few sources of information that both know the whole story, and aren’t lying about it. The Patriots are that source of information because since all of their goals demand that the truth be widely known, they’ll never have a motive to lie. No true patriot has joined the movement because they’ve sniffed out a profit to be made, or are trying to sell books or videos. (Alex Jones is NOT part of the patriot movement; he’s an infiltrator who’s lining his pockets) The Patriot movement has taught me a lot, and has given me a truer understanding of our Bill of Rights, and a new knowledge of our court system and history that’s been kept hidden from us all. As you’re probably discovering now, most of what’s important is kept hidden from Americans, and the Patriots are breaking that ice with the more complete, accurate, and relevant information than anyone else.         
    “From the Trenches World Report” and “Liberty Tree Radio” have become the sources I turn to for important news, information, and education, because I’ve seen all of them, and there are no better. Please tune in and stay informed for everybody’s sake. Much too much of the “alternative media” is only an extension of the mainstream media, with the same agenda of deceiving you. The sources I’ve linked are listener/reader supported, and their information is never skewed or censored to protect anyone’s financial interests. It’s strictly “truth only” rather than the info-for-profit / deception that’s come to dominate the alternative news lately, and that’s a very rare commodity these days. 

    And as reluctant as you may be to accept the fact that we’re going to have to defend ourselves from a violent attack, you’re gong to have to make that realization eventually, and the sooner you do, the better your odds of surviving this mess, and saving our country. 

    And there’s plenty of ways to become involved and be useful. If you can’t fight, you can probably farm, and produce food. Or you can collect what’s needed to treat a wounded Patriot, and make it portable. If you’re a doctor you can brush up on your battlefield surgery, and be ready to move. If you’re an electrician or communications technician, you can help with the independent communications system that’s being built right now. Your rusty old truck might be worth its weight in gold if it’s readied to provide logistical support. The point is that there’s a lot to be done, and if this country is going to survive, you’ll not only have to prepare physically, but you’re also going to have to prepare yourself psychologically for the harsh future that all of us spoiled Americans will soon confront.

    Stop falling victim to the endless “divide and conquer” tactics employed by those who seek to destroy this nation, put your petty differences aside, and start uniting with other patriotic Americans to save this country before we’re all killed. 

    We have about twenty times the number of people we need to win right now, but we’ll be able to end this madness and restore our republic quickly, and probably without a shot being fired, if we have a fighting force and all the necessary support personnel in every American community. 

    They’re only attacking because they think you’re a helpless coward, and they’ve spent the last thirty years trying to accomplish that with media conditioning. If we show ‘em that we’re still real Americans willing to fight for our country and our freedom, our enemies will vanish like shadows from a floodlight. We have them outnumbered by an unstoppable ratio, and they know it. Our enemy’s only hope lies in you being afraid and uninformed. All we have to do is show the world that America isn’t filled with cowards and idiots, and we’ll quickly have our country back as it’s supposed to be.   — Jolly Roger 

 “The most effectual way of preserving peace, is to prepare for war” — George Washington.        “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole of the people, except for few public officials.”     — George Mason