Aquileo | Henry Mark Holzer

2025-10-28T12:12:00.000-06:00

GOLD AND MONETARY FREEDOM

Apparently my essay of October 26, 2025, on the subject of gold confiscation hit a chord because the reaction was more than I expected. One result was requests for more about gold. Here is one of my oldies.

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Gold and Monetary Freedom

By
Professor Henry Mark Holzer

Even though the price of gold has just hit an all-time high, the elites, collectivists, and statists persist in deprecating the precious metal as a store of value and a hedge against the rampant inflation they have wreaked on the rest of the world and soon will have loosed upon the United States.

They will never learn!

The following is testimony I delivered to the United States Gold Commission (of which Ron Paul was a member), created by Congress purportedly to investigate whether America should return to the gold standard. [Bracketed material has been inserted for clarification.]

Good morning Dr. Schwartz [Executive Director of the Commission, and a colleague of Milton Friedman] and members of the Commission. As you know, I am not an economist but rather a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School in New York City. My field is constitutional law, and I have lectured and written extensively on the legal aspects of gold and the nature and scope of government monetary power. For example, two of my books are entitled, respectively, The Gold Clause and Government's Money Monopoly. [Both are now available from Amazon]).

I must confess to a certain ambivalence this morning because, while I appreciate having been invited to testify before this Commission, at the same time I feel like the lawyer who must tell a court that it lacks jurisdiction.

I have come here to say that despite this Commission's good faith, it cannot discharge its Congressionally delegated task--to ". . . make recommendations with regard to the policy of the United States Government concerning the role of gold in domestic and international monetary systems . . . ."--without first understanding, and then admitting, some hard truths about our Nation. Let me explain.

Dr. Allan Greenspan has written [before he changed his mind] ". . . that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other." ("Gold and Economic Freedom," The Objectivist, Vol. 5. No. 7, July 1966, p.1). Of course, he is correct: economic freedom--more specifically, for our purposes, monetary freedom--is an indispensable prerequisite to any meaningful financial use of gold.

However--and this is the core of the Commission's problem--today there is little economic freedom in America. And almost from our first day as a Nation, there was little monetary freedom; now, there is none.

As to economic freedom, tax laws have redistributed wealth on the basis of need and otherwise removed from productive use capital necessary for reinvestment, diverting it to countless ends disapproved by those from whom the money was taken.

Antitrust and fair trade laws have, contradictory and impotently, attempted to compel competition and protect consumers from themselves. Instead, such laws have caused business decisions to be predicated not on marketplace considerations, but on guesswork as to how bureaucrats and judges would interpret unintelligible laws.

Labor laws have created compulsory unionization, with its many attendant problems for unwilling employees and employers--and contributed greatly to America's steady decline as the world's preeminent industrial power.

Wage and hour laws have required private employers to establish pay scales and working conditions mandated, not by the free market and mutual agreement, but by government fiat.

Restraints on the use of private property are commonplace--in the name of zoning and so-called civil rights.

Liberty of contract is substantially restricted--in the name of equalizing bargaining power and the so-called public interest.

To understand our lack of monetary freedom, it is necessary to go back into history. With the birth of our Nation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, our Founding Fathers created a new government which possessed expressly delegated powers. Congress was the recipient of legislative power, and in the monetary realm it was authorized only to borrow money, to coin money and regulate its value, and to punish counterfeiting. The Constitution also expressly barred the states from coining money, emitting bills of credit, and making anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts. Clearly, when the work was finished in that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, as to monetary affairs at least the delegates had substantially resisted the siren song coming from the unfree and semi-free statist European political systems.

But the resolve of America's leaders soon began to ebb. Less than four years after the Convention, the scope of our government's monetary power divided our Nation's leaders at the highest level. Congress wanted to charter the first Bank of the United States. The question was whether the legislature possessed the power, and President Washington sought opinions from his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. It is popularly believed that the two disagreed. Actually, on the issue of government power, they were in complete agreement--in principle. Hamilton held that Congress's few delegated monetary powers were sufficiently broad to encompass chartering the bank, especially if those powers were "loosely" interpreted, and that Congress even possessed extra-constitutional powers beyond those which had been specifically delegated. Although Jefferson denied to Congress the bank chartering power, he would have granted it to the states--thus sharing Hamilton's statist premise about the power of government over monetary affairs. When the Bank Controversy was over, Hamilton's view prevailed. Washington signed the bank bill, and for nearly thirty years afterward few people noticed that the monetary power of Congress had grown considerably.

Congressional power expanded nearly thirty years later, when Hamilton's views about its extra-constitutionality became part of the bedrock of American constitutional law. In 1819 John Marshall's opinion for the Supreme Court in M'Culloch v. Maryland expressly held that in monetary affairs, the government of the United States was, like the monarchs of Europe, "sovereign."

That sovereignty was never more apparent than throughout the Civil War's "greenback" episode, a story too well known to the members of this Commission to recount here. Suffice to say that in order to fight the war, the northern government of President Lincoln created legal tender and simply forced individuals to accept greenbacks, no matter what they thought the paper was worth. As usual, the Supreme Court of the United States was a willing accomplice to Congress's usurping of non-delegated, extra-constitutional monetary power. In the first important legal tender case to reach the Court, Hepburn v. Griswold, while a bare majority held that the act could not be applied to a debt contracted before legal tender became law, every one of the justices (majority and dissent) nevertheless agreed on the underlying principle: that Congress possessed a broad monetary power whose outer boundaries were far from clear. Less than eighteen months later, Hepburn was overruled by Knox v. Lee, and legal tender was expressly held to be constitutional.

By the time of the last legal tender case some years later, nearly three centuries had passed since the 1604 English Case of Mixed Money had approved Queen Elizabeth's sovereign power to debase her coinage. Yet despite the fact that in America we had created a different kind of political system, despite a written Constitution that narrowly circumscribed the power of our government, the foreign sovereign who had been repudiated by the colonists seemed to have been replaced by a domestic one--at least in monetary affairs. The idea that monetary power belongs to the sovereign was conceived in Europe. If, despite the United States Constitution, that idea was born in America in John Marshall's M'Culloch decision (midwifed by Hamilton's opinion to Washington in the Bank Controversy) and reached its majority in the Legal Tender Cases, then its maturity came in three Twentieth Century cases.

In Ling Su Fan v. United States, the Supreme Court concluded that attached to one's ownership of silver coins were "limitations which public policy may require," and that the coins themselves "bear, therefore, the impress of sovereign power."

Two months later the Court went even further, at least in dicta. Noble State Bank v. Haskell held that a state bank could be forced to help insure its competitors' depositors against insolvency. In the course of his opinion for a unanimous Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes actually went so far as to admit that government monetary power was indeed omnipotent: "We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control."

Holmes's dictum very nearly became a reality in the early days of the "New Deal," when, in a statist orgy of rules, regulations, proclamations, executive orders, resolutions, decrees and manifestos, America's banks were ordered closed, her dollar was devalued, her gold standard abandoned, private ownership of gold was illegalized, and gold clauses were nullified. Although only the gold clause issue reached the Supreme Court, when nullification of the clauses was upheld it was crystal clear that the Court had de facto approved of all the New Deal's statist exercises of raw government power--based on a chain of precedents running back inexorably to Noble State Bank, Ling Su Fan, the Legal Tender Cases, M'Culloch, the Bank Controversy, and thence to the Elizabethan Case of Mixed Money. Ironically, but not surprisingly, in little more than three hundred years, a round trip had been completed: from an English monarch's unlimited monetary power, to the reposing of identical power in the hands of a supposedly free representative democracy. When the smoke of the Gold Clause Cases had cleared--to the profound detriment of individual rights--the government of the United States unquestionably controlled every aspect of this Nation's monetary affairs: money, credit, banking, gold, the securities business, and more.

In the nearly fifty years since then, that control has both deepened and become considerably more sophisticated (as in the Bank Secrecy Act), emulating other contemporary societies which we rightly disparage for their lack of freedom.

Dr. Schwartz and members of the Commission, I have come to Washington today to say that the United States--its government and its people--can not have it both ways. Either we have monetary freedom and a gold standard, or no monetary freedom and no gold standard, though mine may be a lonely voice crying in a wilderness of omnipotent government, I emphasize that there is no middle ground.

If this Commission wishes to recommend a gold standard, it must first understand the nature and scope of our Nation's lack of economic and monetary freedom, and then communicate that understanding to the American people. Only then, and in that context, can a gold standard recommendation from this Commission have any real meaning.

Indeed, should this Commission recommend that a gold standard be instituted, and should Congress and the President take the unlikely follow-up step of introducing one, even then, a gold standard resurrected under today's economic and monetary controls would not be worth the paper it was proclaimed on. Until the government of the United States once and for all pulls out of the economic and monetary affairs of its citizens--whether there be a gold standard or not--we cannot have economic, or monetary, freedom. Without it, what we have instead, as uncomfortable as this may be to admit, are revocable privileges--which are the antithesis of individual rights.

Thank you.

I delivered this testimony to the United States Gold Commission on November 12, 1981

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Is there a right to own gold

2025-10-26T12:36:00.000-06:00

Confiscation Of Gold

With the price of gold escalating, commentators are finally beginning to wonder about confiscation. Indeed, just yesterday one wrote that "gold in the hands of the American public has never been confiscated, never can be, and never will be."

Oh?

Because of this erroneous assertion, I'm reprinting here a blog I wrote back in the day.

Will Private Gold Be Confiscated?

“Inflation” is “an increase in the supply of currency . . . relative to the availability of goods and services, resulting in higher prices and a decrease in the purchasing power of money” (Encarta Dictionary; my emphasis.) According to Webster’s Dictionary of the American Language, inflation is “an increase in the amount of money in circulation, resulting in a relatively sharp and sudden fall in its value and rise in prices.” (My emphasis.)

Ultimately, there is only one actor who can “increase” “the supply of currency” or “the amount of money” and only one way it can be done: a government, which possesses a monopoly on the “creation” of money, literally prints more paper currency and moves it into the stream of commerce.

If on Monday the money supply is X, and if on Tuesday the government doubles the amount in circulation, Monday’s and Tuesday's money is worth ½ X.

Historical examples of runaway inflation abound: the German mark after World War I, when postage stamps cost millions; the Chinese currency during the civil war in the 1940s, when it literally took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. Today one need look only at the once-prosperous African nation of Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe government has printed so much money that it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on.

The late classical economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his On the Manipulation of Money and Credit that “[i]nflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with [classical] liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.”

Thanks to the credulousness of our recent “compassionate conservative” president and a compliant, if not complicit, Congress, who handed nearly a trillion taxpayer dollars to his lame-duck, unelected treasury secretary with unchecked power to dispense it any way he wished, and the advent of the Obama Administration with its own grandiose plans to spend trillions more trying to spend their way out of this recession, we are facing serious, perhaps devastating, inflation— because there’s only one way the now-in-charge Collectivists/Statists/Socialists/Communists can get that kind of money: Print it!

Typically, one way to hedge rampant inflation, some believe the only way, is through ownership of gold, either physically or through enforceable claims on gold.

However, gold and the gold standard has long been maligned by the supporters of fiat money because it is an existential threat to government induced inflation. Indeed, its current quasi-free market price reflects serious concern about inflation.

But not all is well with gold, especially gold ownership.

Unfortunately, most Americas are under the illusion that they have a right to own gold. They are mistaken. America’s history, and the financial situation today, proves that our government has usurped omnipotent power over monetary affairs, one major consequence being that private ownership of gold has never been a right, and remains today a mere privilege revocable at will.

For a thorough historical discussion, see the [seminal] 1973 Brooklyn Law Review article “How Americans Lost the Right to Own Gold, and Became Criminals in the Process,” by Professor Emeritus Henry Mark Holzer:

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2025-07-25T21:08:00.002-06:00

July 25, 2025

Treason

By Henry Mark Holzer

Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution clearly provides that: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." [My emphasis.] The federal treason statute tracks the constitutional provision.

As explained in the Holzers' book "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (www.amazon.com), the Supreme Court of the United States, has interpreted the constitutional and statutory crime of treason to require four elements for indictment and conviction: (1) an intent to betray the United States by "levying" or "adhering," (2) an overt act, (3) proved by two witnesses, and (4) "providing aid and comfort."

In Hanoi Jane's case, she traveled to North Vietnam during hostilities, made broadcasts (tapes of which were relentlessly played to our POWs), held press conferences, provided photo ops for the Communists, attacked the United States and its leaders on Radio Hanoi, exploited American prisoners of war with whom she met, fraternized with North Vietnamese military and civilian leaders — and was thanked for her efforts by grateful, top level Communist leaders. This is why "Aid and Comfort" concludes that, given the law of treason and given Fonda’s conduct, there was more than sufficient evidence to support an indictment. Conviction or acquittal would have been up to the jury, which should have convicted.

That is because most essential element of the crime of treason, a question of fact for a jury, in the Fonda situation, in the cases of terrorists, and today's "Russia, Russia, Russia" conspiracy, is intent.

Only in rare cases can criminal intent be proved through direct evidence (for example, from an admission by the defendant). Because intent is a state of mind, almost always it must be proved indirectly. In the crime of treason, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the requisite element of intent can be inferred from a defendant’s overt acts. In Fonda’s case, a jury could have concluded from all that she said, and did, that her intent was to betray (i.e., harm) the United States.

Thus, the "Russia, Russia, Russia" alleged conspirators (probably not Obama) can certainly be indicted and convicted by a federal jury.

Or not!

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2025-06-04T09:10:00.000-06:00

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/06/what_lies_beneath.html

What Lies Beneath

By Joan Swirsky

When I was a nursing student decades ago, a doctor friend told me about an interesting case in which he performed a routine yearly checkup on a 12-year-old boy, including blood and urine tests, and to his surprise, this healthy-looking preteen had blood in his urine. The doctor promptly ordered an intravenous pyelogram (IPG) — now in medicine’s dinosaur museum — which revealed that in one of the youngster’s kidneys, the renal medulla — the innermost region — and the renal cortex — the outermost region — were reversed, and as a result, the aberrant kidney took four hours longer to collect and then empty the body of urine.

But the doctor told me that the funniest thing was his mother’s reaction. “She said, ‘How did this happen? What did I do?’ And I told her that maybe she had the same thing, but she never had an IPG!”

Speaking of kidneys, I learned years later that a distant relative found out in his late forties, again as the result of a modern medical test, that he was born with only one kidney! And sticking with the theme of hidden phenomena, I recently learned that a former neighbor went to a neurologist with hand tremors, and the MRI the doctor prescribed revealed a hemangioma — a cluster of blood vessels — in his brain!

“How did this happen?” he asked the doctor.

“It might have been there for twenty years,” the doctor said, “even maybe since you were born!”

LESSON: There are approximately eight billion people in the world, just about all of whom know nothing about what’s going on inside of their bodies — an undiscovered tooth high in the gum, an insect embedded in the skull, an undetected stroke. I even knew a man in his eighties — a friend and neighbor — whose doctors found a deeply lodged bullet!

What does all this have to do with politics? Everything!

After World War II, the unspeakable, malignant horrors of the Holocaust were revealed for all the world to see: six million Jews, from infants to centenarians and everyone in between, rounded up, crammed into suffocating cattle cars, hauled off to concentration camps, and gassed to death in Hitler’s crematoria, effectively eliminating half of the microscopic Jewish population of 12 million in the entire world.

Surviving Jews all over the world dared not tell their children of this catastrophe, the better to shield them from lifelong paranoia, dread, and depression.

But what followed — from the war’s end in 1945 to the miraculous advent of Israel becoming a state in 1948, and for about a decade or more beyond — was encouraging to these protective parents. Not one word of Jew-hatred or vicious stereotypes or calls for the death of the Jews.

Aha, these naïve Americans — and Jews throughout the world — believed. Humanity has learned its lesson. We finally, at last, after almost 4,000 years, have nothing to worry about. Baruch Hashem!

What Lies Beneath

What Jews didn’t realize was that it was not benevolence or compassion or empathy that motivated the behavior of many in the outside world, but rather the self-interested preservation of the image they wanted to convey — of decency, tact, discretion, moral clarity.

But just like the clandestine kidney and the hidden hemangioma, the pathology — of Jew-hatred — was there, probably, as the above-mentioned doctor speculated, for decades!

Inculcated early — in homes, houses of worship, schools — and magnified when the State of Israel was established, it was mostly manifested in certain institutions, professions, even country clubs that enacted quotas that excluded Jews, in a few vicious media stereotypes and in personal insults.

But it wasn’t destructive enough to stop this minuscule minority — most of whom fled to America with no money and no knowledge of the English language — from flourishing wildly in every avenue they pursued. From science and medicine to business to law to literature and other arts, the list is long.

When denied entry into medical schools, they built the finest hospitals in the country...to this day! When denied entry into top law firms, they established their own. When denied opportunities in the entertainment industry, they literally created Hollywood.

By the 21st century, Jews had more than arrived. Although still a tiny minority of 5.8 million — or 2.4 percent out of a total population of 345 million — they have occupied several seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, served in great numbers as U.S. senators and members of Congress, enjoyed full professorships at America’s top colleges and universities, contributed mightily to America’s health through their discoveries and innovations, and founded massively successful businesses, among them Dunkin Donuts, Dreamworks, Estee Lauder, Facebook, Google, H&R Block, Home Depot, Starbucks, Slim-Fast, and on and on and on. And in recent headlines, in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s Final Four, three of the coaches were Jewish.

The Cesspool Erupts

Then October 7, 2023 happened.

To be accurate, this subhuman-initiated catastrophe was preceded by a phenomenon never before seen in America: the entrance of blatant, virulent, noxious Democrat antisemites not only being elected to the U.S. Congress, but blaring their toxic, Jew-detesting Israel-loathing racism for all to see and hear.

And without one single solitary word of disapproval from a sitting Democrat, including nine Democrats in the Senate — and Senate minority leader Charles Schumer — and 21 Democrats in the House. And don’t let them tell you they sent out press releases of disapproval. They mean nothing!

The sole defender of Israel and condemner of his party’s racism has been Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.), whom the rest of the Democrat party has now marginalized, if not dismissed.

Even worse than this Democrat travesty, which was ultimately rejected by 77 million people in their thunderous election of President Trump last November, is the true pandemic of antisemitism that has transcended the clandestine kidney and the hidden hemangioma.

Now the once hidden hatred is out in the open. World leaders, most recently in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada (but they are not alone), have given us a vivid picture of their psychological and racist hatred of Jews from their metaphorical X-rays, sonograms, MRIs, and PET scans. They have let us look inside their hearts and minds to see clearly their hatred — and probably jealousy — of Jews and of their biblically inherited homeland, Israel, is again, as the aforementioned doctor speculated, from birth, and no doubt in their DNA!

Here, Yonah Elias skewers these moral cowards.

The Lesson

There is not a baby in the world born with hate in his heart. Hate is taught. Hate is learned. What we have been witnessing — really since Obama made his ignominious debut in our body politic — is that the hate that is learned has remarkable staying power. It transcends education and objective reality and cold, hard facts. It is animating and energizing. After our most powerful emotion, fear, come jealousy and hate, which are often in desperate competition.

And there’s nothing quite like the bandwagon effect to mobilize these haters into action. Hence the great number of people who conveniently forget that it was Israel who was savagely attacked by the terrorists whose very charter pronounces genocide as its major goal!

But history doesn’t change. The world hated Jews when they were defenseless, and now, they especially hate Jews when they fight back. And prevail!

From now on, when you look at the pro-terrorist politicians and media whores and United Nations shills, don’t be surprised. Just shrug your shoulders or turn to your friend and say: “Hemangioma, probably since birth!”

Joan Swirsky is a New York — based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com

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2025-05-26T10:06:00.001-06:00

Solemn Memorial Day, Not Happy Memorial Day

Henry Mark Holzer

I send these remarks every year close to or on Memorial Day because they are a useful reminder that the Day is not a “happy” one. As well intentioned as some people are, associating the word “happy” with Memorial Day is not appropriate.

Memorial Day, the last Monday in May each year, is a federal holiday established to remember those who died while members of our country’s armed forces (unlike Veterans’ Day, which celebrates those who served).

With the Day’s genesis in Decoration Day – when volunteers laid flowers at graves of the fallen – Memorial Day is not a time for family barbecues, baseball games, or garage sales.

It’s a Day for all Americans – those who wore our Nation’s uniform and those who were not so privileged – to memorialize by thought and deed the heavy, irredeemable price deceased Americans have paid . . . and how much we owe them for what they lost in every war from the Revolution two-hundred-fifty-years ago to our government’s shameful flight from Afghanistan.

Memorial Day is very different from America’s birthday. Independence Day (not the “4^th of July”) should be celebrated with fireworks, patriotic songs, and loud band concerts.

But not Memorial Day, a time of remembrance too solemn an occasion to be “happy.”

Requiescat in pace.

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2025-04-30T21:32:00.002-06:00

Jane Fonda opened her big mouth again. See "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam.

See janefondasite.com

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2024-12-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

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2024-11-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

Shall We Not Revenge?: A Jon Willard Novel (Jon Willard Novels Book 6) Kindle Edition

by Henry Mark Holzer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

Book 6 of 6: Jon Willard Novels

See all formats and editions

WHAT CAN A GOOD LAWYER DO WHEN
THE LAW COLLIDES WITH JUSTICE?

During the Vietnam War, many American POWs were tortured to produce propaganda and intelligence.

Or for fun.

The worst North Vietnamese guard was nicknamed “Torque.” His worst crime was the deliberate murder of an Air Force colonel.

Thirty-five years later, the CIA learned that after the war, the sadist had escaped Vietnam and faked his way into the United States as a refugee.

With the president’s blessing, the CIA director concocted a plan to find Torque and try him for first-degree murder in an American court.

The government then drafted New York criminal defense attorney Jon Willard to prosecute.

At the trial, Willard faced a mysterious federal defender named Danielle Hong.

But Hong's devious but dramatic courtroom tactics ended the trial with a shocking twist that even wily legal veteran Jon Willard never saw coming...

Don't miss these previous suspenseful courtroom novels in the Jon Willard series:

Book 1: THE PALADIN CURSE by Erika and Henry Mark Holzer

Book 2: A FOOL FOR A CLIENT by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 3: JUSTICE DELAYED, IS JUSTICE DENIED by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 4: ABUSE OF POWER by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 5: THE RIGHT TO DIE by Henry Mark Holzer

And don't miss Erika Holzer's previous bestselling novels, also available on Amazon:

Freedom Bridge -- a gripping Cold War spy thriller, chosen as a Literary Guild featured selection, and . . .

Eye for an Eye -- a white-knuckle vigilante crime thriller, which became a major motion picture starring Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland, and Ed Harris.

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2024-09-23T08:50:00.000-06:00

By my friend Joan Swirsky. Every Jew worldwide should read it.

September 23, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/suicidal_jews.html

September 23, 2024

Suicidal Jews

By Joan Swirsky

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, and mental illness.

But how to explain group suicide? There are numerous examples, going back to 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
In 1978, 918 Americans — including 276 children — ingested cyanide in the Peoples Temple, after being exhorted and compelled to do so by their cult leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana.
In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale — Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, whereas others — particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader” — simply followed orders.  In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

Currently, out of a worldwide population of eight billion people, there are about 15 million Jews — approximately seven million in Israel, almost seven million in the United States, and one million throughout the world.  This is, by any measure, a few grains of sand compared to the massive total population of the world.

According to U.S. voting patterns, Jews are overwhelmingly liberal — up to 80 percent — which means they vote in huge numbers for leftists like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.  These people’s staffs have comprised, almost exclusively, career antisemites, who have done everything in their power to effect anti-Israel policies like the Iran nuclear deal, knowing that the fanatical mission of the mullahs in Teheran was — and is to this day — to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate every Jew in existence.

As Karin McQuillan explained in “Leftist Jew Hatred Has Come to America,” “the Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives.  Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.”

But they won’t jump off the bandwagon, she wrote, because that would mean “losing your friends, being shunned at synagogue, and stunting your career[.] ... [C]hanging party affiliation is such a tall cliff, it feels suicidal, that is the loss of their entire identity.”

McQuillan quotes the estimable Daniel Greenfield: “There is no future for Jews on the left except as collaborators in anti-Semitism.”

Look no farther than the full-bodied ideological and financial support that liberal — suicidal — Jews lend to virulently anti-Israel organizations, many of them founded and financed by leftist Jews, such as the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, the fascistic Antifa, J Street, If Not Now, Americans for Peace Now, B’Tselem, Bend the Arc, Breaking the Silence, New Israel Fund, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the newspaper The Forward (recently defunct), Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine, Reform Action Center, T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights), Jewish Voice for Peace, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, et al.

Why? Because it’s hard to be a Jew, and liberal Jews are simply not up to the task.  The desperate need to be liked, accepted, admired, and embraced is the historical downfall of weak Jews.

That is why so many Jews adored President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who stacked his administration with Court Jews and then stabbed every Jew in the world in the back, refusing refuge to the few who escaped Hitler’s murderous onslaught by turning away thousands from our shores and sending them back to their grisly deaths.  And he counted on — who else? — weak liberal Jews and a complicit leftist media — to cover for his mortal sins!

WHO HATES THE SUICIDAL LIBERAL JEWS?

Black leftists. According to historian Rafael Medoff, “American Jews played a significant role in assisting the African-American community throughout the past century — having a central role in creating the NAACP, building more than 5,000 schools for rural African Americans from 1914 to 1932, and participating actively in the black civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.” But when the Black Power movement arose in the mid-’60s, the first people blacks irrationally turned against were the Jews.
The World Council of Churches, which represents 350 member churches in 110 countries, and half a billion Christians throughout the world, fully embraces the vicious Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) campaign to destroy Israel.
Amnesty International, which obliterates Jewish history. The organization, as you can read here, has gone full-blown antisemitic.
Doctors Without Borders prides itself on its neutrality but consistently launches venomous anti-Israel political campaigns.
Airbnb, an American company offering short-term lodging services to lease or rent internationally, removed all listings of Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria (AKA the West Bank), although not in other disputed territories owned by Turks in Cyprus, Moroccans in the Sahara, Chinese in Tibet, or Russians in the Crimea, et al.
The American Friends (Quakers), who “boast” of their history of nonviolent activism, yet work to destroy the Jewish people and their ancient homeland, Israel, by inciting others to strive for Israel’s annihilation, often through violence.
The unhallowed halls of academia are a hotbed of virulent antisemitism throughout the country, with Columbia University leading the pack.
The Anti-Defamation League under the leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Soros employee and Obama official. As Daniel Greenfield expresses, “[o]nce upon a time, the ADL was a Jewish civil rights organization. Now it’s just another generic lefty group that pretends to care about Jewish causes only long enough to fleece some of its donors. As the Left goes antisemitic, the ADL is becoming a threat to Jews.”
The United Nations, a cesspool of tin-pot dictators and antisemites on 1st Avenue in N.Y. City, which has a virtual fetish with the “Palestinian” issue, and just the other day issued a Resolution calling for the Old City of Jerusalem to be free of Jews, which passed by a 124-14 margin.
The heads of the Women’s March: Linda Sarsour (“nothing creepier than Zionism”), Tamika Mallory (“white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy”), and Carmen Perez — all ardent admirers of hate preacher and head of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan (Jews are “termites”). All of them share Ms. Mallory’s sentiment that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, as do Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and many others who have joined this hate fest, and let’s not leave out Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who has called these Jew- and Israel-haters “the suffragists of our time.”

We Jews are taught by our sages to accept and embrace all Jews, no matter their flaws or shortcomings. We are a tiny people, and only by understanding the imperative for unity will we survive. Look for the good in even the most egregious behavior of our fellow Jew — does he help the poor, take in the widow and orphan, donate generously to charity, etc.? Then accept that Jew, embrace him, love her.

In Genesis 12:3, God tells Abram (before he becomes Abraham): “I will make you into a great nation[.] ... I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”

Personally, I don’t embrace the quisling Jews and other antisemites who opt for the toxic American liberalism that vilifies Jews and Israel. I curse them. And I promise them that their determination to destroy the Jewish state — because of their rancid hatred and obsessive jealousy — will fail as thunderously as all attempts over the past 5,000 years have failed.

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.

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2024-08-22T09:39:00.003-06:00

We the Living Special Event - Sept 24, 2024

For your information.

HMH

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2024-08-10T09:24:00.000-06:00

The second edition of FAKE WARRIORS by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer is available on Amazon in print and on Kindle.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Why are there Fake Warriors?
2. Who are the Fake Warriors?
3. What harm do Fake Warriors cause?
4. How do Fake Warriors get away with it?
5. How can Fake Warriors be identified and exposed?
6. How can Fake Warriors be punished?
7. What is the Stolen Value act?
8. What was the Supreme Court's ruling on the constitutionality of the Stolen Value Act's Section 704(b)?
9. What is the Fake Warrior Act of 2012 and why is it indispensable?
Conclusion.
Notes.
Appendices.

The book thoroughly explains the phenomenon of Mr. Walz and the countless Fake Warriors who have cheated their way to Stolen Value.

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2024-06-14T15:05:00.000-06:00

JOHNNY CASH

FLAG DAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfzJ8UBr-c0

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2024-06-07T13:56:00.000-06:00

Great legal report about injustice in NYC. Please forward. (I am not the author.)

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Following Donald Trump’s conviction in New York—for allegedly causing 34 incorrect purpose tags to be entered in the Trump Organization’s private, internal account register with an intent to defraud and unlawfully interfere in the 2016 presidential election—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took a victory lap. He calmly explained that the trial was an ordinary example of what his office does every day, without “fear or favor,” and had simply done its job. Bragg lied.

Bragg ran for office on the promise he would get Trump. To do so, Bragg charged him with a low-level misdemeanor, for which the statute of limitations had already run, alleging that the Trump Organization “falsely” recorded $430,000 of payments to Trump attorney Michael Cohen in its accounts as “legal fees” or “legal expenses” rather than as “hush payments” or “repayment of hush payments.” Then he added 33 counts by separately charging each entry. Finally, he revived the statute of limitations and upped the potential crime to a Class E felony (the lowest of New York’s five felony classes) by alleging that Trump had “falsified” these business records with the intent to “commit another crime.” The indictment did not disclose that crime.

The prosecution later informed the defense that the other crime would include a violation of Section 17-152 of New York State Election Law, a misdemeanor whose statute of limitations also had expired. Article 175.10 of New York State’s Penal Law does in fact provide that combining the misdemeanor of falsifying records with an intent to commit another misdemeanor is sufficient to raise the crime to a Class E felony, extend the statute of limitations, and increase the penalties.

Section 17-152 provides that “Any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” The prosecution declined to disclose the “unlawful means” they were alleging and claimed they were not required to do so. During the trial, the prosecution talked about a criminal scheme to “corrupt” the 2016 presidential election, but carefully avoided calling it “fraud.” Fraud in a presidential election is a federal crime, beyond the jurisdiction of local prosecutors. Federal prosecutors previously concluded that no election crime occurred, and even Bragg had balked at prosecuting Trump until liberals berated him into doing so.

Legal experts have been unable to find even one example of another New Yorker indicted under Article 175 for mislabeling its private, internal accounts, or anyone anywhere tried by a state prosecutor for violating federal election law.

In violation of New York ethics rules, trial court Judge Juan Merchan donated money to “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” It wasn’t a lot of money, just enough to make his views known. His daughter is a Democratic political operative. Whether through secret coordination or common purpose, Bragg’s prosecution team, led by Matthew Colangelo—until recently the third ranking lawyer in Biden’s Justice Department—collaborated with Merchan to bring about an unprecedented violation of due process for the purpose of interfering in the 2024 presidential election.

This essay has nothing to with Donald Trump, or what anyone thinks of him. It is about an attack on the core of the American justice system. Some refer to the trial as “rigged” or a “kangaroo court.” To me, it was a Star Chamber, akin to a pre-determined Soviet or Putin political prosecution.

There is no indication that the jurors failed to follow their oaths. Sadly, they were useful idiots. Duped. Props in a Kabuki dance choreographed by the prosecution and judge. Merchan violated his sworn duty to protect the rights of the defendant in a criminal trial, and in a coup de grâce delivered jury instructions and a verdict form that virtually ensured conviction. As added protection, he gave the jurors a week off before deliberating so they could hear from their families, friends, and news media about how important it was to democracy that Trump be convicted.

The trial focused on testimony about Trump’s lawful, if salacious, behavior in allegedly having sex in 2006 with porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and then paying or knowing about payments to buy their silence. There was conflicting testimony about whether Trump’s motivations were to protect his wife, or benefit his campaign, though the gravamen of the prosecution’s case was that these lawful actions somehow improperly influenced the 2016 election. Only convicted and inveterate liar Michael Cohen testified that Trump knew what was entered in the Trump account register.

Former Trump fixer Cohen, who pled guilty to an election law violation to curry favor with federal prosecutors, and former American Media Inc. President David Pecker, whose company signed a non-prosecution agreement admitting election law violations to curry favor with federal prosecutors and facilitate its sale, each testified that Trump had violated federal election law. Cohen supposedly violated election law by paying Daniels for her silence, and Pecker by paying McDougal to write articles for AMI-owned National Enquirer that were never published. Under prosecutors’ questioning, both Cohen and Daniels purported to educate the jury about federal election law, an arcane subject about which neither appears to know very much. In reality, neither was guilty of violating election law, because their payments were not campaign contributions.

Finally, after the defense rested, the prosecution began to identify to Merchan, as part of the process of drafting jury instructions, the specific predicate crimes they alleged formed the “unlawful means” under Section 17-152. In their closing arguments, after the defense had no further opportunity to address the jury, prosecutors for the first time explained their theory that Trump violated Section 17-152 in three ways: (1) by violating federal election laws, (2) by providing incorrect tax information, even if it did not reduce his taxes, and (3) by falsifying some of the records that formed the basis of the initial counts.

Typically, a defendant appeals errors made in a state criminal trial through that state’s appeal process. Here, it is possible the U.S. Supreme Court might accept an appeal on the grounds that Trump’s conviction improperly interferes in the 2024 election. The likelihood of that is low, unless at the sentencing hearing on July 11 Merchan imposes significant restrictions on Trump’s movements or speech and refuses to stay the restrictions pending Trump’s appeal to the New York appellate court. I don’t expect Merchan to do that. Instead, I expect that Trump’s appeal likely will be heard after the election within the New York court system.

I believe it is very likely that Trump’s conviction will be overturned on the basis of reversible errors. While I have tried cases in federal and state courts, including in New York, I also considered the views of experts I respect, including Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Turley, and John Yoo. There may be evidence or testimony of which I am unaware. However, based on the information available to me, I believe the reversible errors include:

1. The Sixth Amendment to the federal Constitution and Article III, §16 of the New York Constitution require that a defendant receive adequate notice of the crimes being charged so that he can prepare a defense. Waiting until the last hours of a case, after the defense has rested, or has no further right to speak to the jury, cannot satisfy this fundamental protection. The prosecution may argue that it provided a general statement of its direction and its intention to rely on Section 17-152, even if it declined to disclose the predicate crimes on which it would rely. That is unlikely to satisfy the Sixth Amendment or Article II, §16.

2. Merchan instructed the jurors that they did not have to unanimously agree on what Trump had done to violate Section 17-152. Instead, he said that if all 12 jurors concluded Trump had committed any of the three possible crimes cited by the prosecution, that would be sufficient. New York rules and the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020) require a unanimous verdict for a felony. While playing lip service to this requirement, Merchan broke new ground apparently on the premise that the defendant is not entitled to due process regarding the State’s burden in proving the specific predicate crime(s) that violate Section 17-152.

3. The verdict form conspicuously omits any information about the three potential predicate crimes. I believe the information was omitted because the prosecution’s case only supported (weakly) conviction for alleged violations of federal election law, and Bragg has no jurisdiction to obtain a conviction based on federal election law.

4. Bragg also lacks jurisdiction to prosecute federal tax crimes and never gave the defense notice it was charging Trump with committing a federal or state tax crime. There has been no reporting that the prosecution introduced evidence that Trump provided incorrect information to any taxing authority. The alleged false records were internal Trump Organization records.

5. As a matter of law, the same allegedly incorrect records used for the initial misdemeanor cannot also constitute the second crime.

6. As Merchan agreed, Cohen’s guilty plea to election law violations, and AMI’s non-prosecution agreement, could not be introduced as evidence of Trump’s guilt. Merchan made a mockery of this requirement by allowing the prosecution to introduce both in order to impeach Cohen’s and Pecker’s credibility—a nonsensical ruling since the prosecution would not impeach its own witnesses. The defense, which might have an interest in doing so, objected to admitting the information.

7. Prosecutors were permitted to elicit testimony from Cohen and Pecker that they had violated election law by making payments to Daniels and McDougal, though neither is an election law expert. When the defense sought to allow former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) Chairman Bradley Smith to explain the relevant election law, Merchan prohibited him from doing so, thereby excluding key exculpatory evidence and utterly failing in his duty to protect the defendant.

8. During closing arguments, Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said that the election law violations to which Cohen pled guilty were committed at Trump’s direction and for his benefit. Merchan permitted this, and took the final step to gut his instruction that Cohen’s guilty plea was not evidence of Trump’s guilt by characterizing Cohen as Trump’s “accomplice.” However, Cohen did not commit an election law violation, and the indictment did not include a conspiracy allegation, which is found in the later-disclosed Section 17-152. Further, to obtain a conviction of federal election law, it must be proven that the defendant acted willfully. No evidence was introduced at trial that Trump even thought about election laws, and Merchan’s jury instructions did not describe the “willful” requirement.

9. In New York criminal trials, relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is merely outweighed by the danger of prejudice, without even the typical requirement that the danger be “substantial.”

10. As a matter of law, none of Trump’s alleged affairs, payments to Daniels and McDougal, the NDAs, or the payment for unpublished articles are unlawful. Testimony relating to the foregoing was intended to embarrass and prejudice Trump and had no probative value. Daniels further testified that her alleged sex with Trump was possibly non-consensual. That assertion is inconsistent with years of Daniels’ interviews on the subject, is irrelevant to the alleged crimes, and is so highly prejudicial that the defense moved for a mistrial. Though Merchan rejected the motion, he acknowledged that Daniels had gone too far in her testimony.

Pecker’s testimony had no probative value on crimes within Bragg’s jurisdiction and was highly prejudicial because it questioned Trump’s principles regarding marriage and sexual partners.

11. Merchan instructed the jury that, in order to prove an intent to defraud, the state does not have to prove that Trump acted with the intent to defraud any particular person or entity, and that it would be sufficient if Trump had a general intent to defraud the voting public. Although there is limited caselaw in New York that supports this formulation for monetary fraud, New York has consistently refused to extend other frauds to include a general fraud on the public.

12. As a matter of law, these business entries could not have formed the basis for an election fraud in 2016 because the undisputed evidence is that FEC reports based on the payments, if any, were due to be published in 2017, after the election.

13. There is a reasonable argument that, as a matter of law, the business entries were not false. Not only did Cohen render legal services for the Trump Organization during the relevant period, but total payments to Cohen were considerably more than the $130,000 he paid to Daniels.

These errors, along with others, go to the heart of the case. Bragg set out to get Trump. Merchan put his full weight on the scale to ensure the outcome. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll following Trump’s conviction found a net loss of support for the former president that could sink his election prospects, regardless of whether his conviction is overturned years from now.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton directed the creation of the fraudulent Steele dossier. In 2020, the Biden campaign lied about and assisted in suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop, and defrauded voters by soliciting intelligence officials to falsely claim it was Russian disinformation. In 2024, the administration is engaged in widespread lawfare against Trump and his allies. Clearly, Democrats are far better at weaponizing the justice system, media, and Deep State than the Republicans are at preventing them from doing so. The outcome is destroying the American justice system.

Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and has served as a director and C-suite officer of public and private companies. Spivak has written for National Review, the National Association of Scholars, and Huffington Post. He was chairman of the Editorial Board of the Knowledge Exchange Business Encyclopedia, and a long-time director of the RAND Corporation Center for Corporate Ethics and Governance. He received his A.B., M.B.A., and J.D. from Columbia University.

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2024-05-24T11:17:00.003-06:00

Solemn Memorial Day, Not Happy Memorial Day

Henry Mark Holzer

I send these remarks every year close to Memorial Day because they are a useful reminder that the Day is not a “happy” one. As well intentioned as some people are, associating the word “happy” with Memorial Day is not appropriate .

With the Day’s genesis in Decoration Day – when volunteers laid flowers at graves of the fallen – Memorial Day is not a time for family barbecues, baseball games, or garage sales.

It’s a Day for all Americans – those who wore our Nation’s uniform and those who were not so privileged – to memorialize by thought and deed the heavy, irredeemable price deceased Americans have paid . . . and how much we owe them for what they lost in every war from the Revolution two-hundred-forty-eight years ago to our government’s shameful flight from Afghanistan three years ago.

Memorial Day is very different from America’s birthday. Independence Day (not the “4^th of July”) should be celebrated with fireworks, patriotic songs, and loud band concerts.

But not Memorial Day, a time of remembrance too solemn an occasion to be “happy.”

Requiescat in pace.

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New Henry Mark Holzer Jon Willard, Esq. novel: THE RIGHT TO DIE

2023-10-27T11:15:00.000-06:00

“MY WIFE IS DEAD.”

That’s what Santa Fe surgeon Dr. Robert Roybal managed to tell the 911 operator.

When the sheriff and district attorney responded to the call, the doctor said he would speak only to New York criminal defense lawyer Jon Willard.

Because of their past relationship, within twelve hours Willard was sitting across from Roybal in Santa Fe. He listened to the physician’s anguished story of his wife’s battle with terminal bilateral ovarian cancer, and of her death the night before.

After carefully reviewing the facts, the district attorney declined to prosecute. But politicians with their own agenda overruled him.

Willard's nemesis, the new attorney general, indicts Dr. Robert Roybal for the first-degree murder of his wife.

For several reasons—especially because Willard fervently believes in the right to die with dignity and without pain—the lawyer agrees to defend Roybal. The media quickly calls it "the Mercy Killing Case."

But will there be mercy for Willard’s client—or for himself?

As the right-to-die case ignites into a blazing public controversy, not only will Jon Willard’s reputation be at risk.

So will his own life . . .

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLW7QTK8

Don't miss these previous suspenseful courtroom novels in the Jon Willard series:

Book 1: THE PALADIN CURSE by Erika and Henry Mark Holzer

Book 2: A FOOL FOR A CLIENT by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 3: JUSTICE DELAYED, IS JUSTICE DENIED by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 4: ABUSE OF POWER by Henry Mark Holzer

And don't miss Erika Holzer's previous bestselling novels, also available on Amazon:

Freedom Bridge -- a gripping Cold War spy thriller, chosen as a Literary Guild featured selection, and . . .

Eye for an Eye -- a white-knuckle vigilante crime thriller, which became a major motion picture starring Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland, and Ed Harris.

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2023-10-27T10:57:00.001-06:00

Amazon.com The Right to Die A Jon Willard Novel (Jon Willard Novels Book 5) eBook Holzer, Henry Mark Kindle Store

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The key to Joe Biden

2023-08-22T18:18:00.000-06:00

In a nutshell (no pun intended) self-esteem is the rational belief and confidence in one's own ability and value.

At least as an adult, to the other day's shameful demonstration of its absence in Maui when predictably he told a fire story yet again about himself, he has had little if any.

His pathetic search for authentic self-esteem has been ugly to watch and near fatal to bear.

But it explains why Joe Biden is Joe Biden.

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Twenty-fouryears of Barry?

2023-08-22T18:05:00.000-06:00

8: Barry, as his transformative self.

4: Barry as Biden, a deranged incompetent, but dangerous criminal non-entity.

8: Barry as Michelle, still not proud of their country.

4: Barry as vice president?

24 years of the Obamas?

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Coming soon to a surgeon near you . . . .

2023-07-31T10:39:00.002-06:00

For almost twenty years (1948 – 1966) the country that brought us Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, medical experiments on POWs and sex slaves had brutal eugenics laws.

Recently, it was reported by The Japanese Times that thousands of nonconsenting men, women, and children were sterilized.

A new parliamentary report from Japan has revealed that approximately 25,000 people were sterilized under the country’s former eugenics laws, the majority of whom did not consent. Some of the victims were children.

“Approximately 65% of the people sterilized were forced to undergo the procedures. Children as young as nine years old were among the victims, and many of them believed they were being treated for a legitimate illness.”

“People with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, or hereditary disorders were among those forcibly sterilized, as the Japanese government wanted to prevent the births of so-called ‘inferior’ children. Japanese politicians also wanted to cut population rates due to food shortages after World War II. Though the law ended in 1966, eugenic propaganda continued to spread long after; The Japan Times cited a high school textbook from the 1970s which said the government was working on the ‘country’s eugenics to improve and enhance the genetic predisposition of the entire public.’”

The United States of America had its own eugenics laws.

As I wrote in The “Living Constitution and the Right to Die (Amazon and other publishers:

"The callous remark of Justice O.W. Holmes, Jr.— “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”— was made in his less than three-page majority (8–1) opinion in the 1927 United States Supreme Court case of Carrie Buck v. Bell, Superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded."

Immediately below are the relevant parts of Holmes’s opinion for the Court. [The italics, ellipses, and bracketed words are mine.]

Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.

[T]he superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck … for the purpose of making her sterile. * * *

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony…. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.

She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case ….

An Act of Virginia … recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.

The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse. [My emphasis.]

[A]ny party may apply to the [Virginia] Supreme Court of Appeals, which, if it grants the appeal, is to hear the case upon the record of the trial in the Circuit Court and may enter such order as it thinks the Circuit Court should have entered. There can be no doubt that so far as procedure is concerned the rights of the patient are most carefully considered, and as every step in this case was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute and after months of observation, there is no doubt that in that respect the plaintiff has had due process.

Please note the following sentence’s dichotomy between procedu[ral] and substantive law, which, as we shall see, play a crucial role in why Americans have no constitutional right to die.

The [plaintiff’s] attack is not upon the [statute’s] procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment [of the Virginia court] finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck “is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization . . . . * * * We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives [see In Memoriam and Selective Draft Law Cases, above. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]

It would be strange if it [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices … in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]

Thus does Holmes’s opinion reek of a defense of eugenics. It has been estimated that as many as 70,000 Americans, men and women alike, were sterilized until 1944, most of them because of the widespread belief that eugenics was a solution to reduce reproduction of certain “undesirables.”

Buck v. Bell has never been overruled by the Supreme Court of the United States.

For additional information about Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell, see Jennifer Senior’s March 6, 2016, New York Times review, Imbeciles on the Supreme Court and Justice Not for All by Adam Cohen. The following quotations are from Ms. Senior’s review. [Bracketed words are mine].

Ms. Buck was neither epileptic nor feebleminded. As time would prove, she was of perfectly average intelligence. She was simply uneducated and luckless—a poor white girl from

Charlottesville who’d had a baby at 17, most likely because she’d been raped by the nephew of her foster mother. Rather than risking scandal, her guardians thought it best to get rid of her.

Nor was Ms. Buck part of three generations of so-called imbeciles.

Of all the tools to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, sterilization was by far the most efficient. During the Progressive Era, a number of states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, including California and Connecticut. So bullish was Dr. Priddy to do the same for Virginia that he worked in concert with a methodical, meticulous local lawmaker, Aubrey Strode, to design a statute that would withstand the test of the highest court of the land. Ms. Buck was the test case.

We learn early on that Ms. Buck’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, had close personal and professional ties to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded—the superintendent paid his legal fees—which meant he [the lawyer] made no efforts to mount a serious defense for his client.

Justice Holmes [was] himself an eager eugenicist, as were a few of his Supreme Court colleagues.

So too are many of today’s politicians, academics, teachers, physicians, writers, and others who yield coercive power.

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The consequences of being asleep at the wheel.

2023-07-21T09:09:00.003-06:00

The Coup We Never Knew

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did borrowed money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then, and with impunity, did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it suddenly legal for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures? No, of course not.

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why? And today, the current administration (Biden) is blaming former President Trump for that disaster!

What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie under oath with impunity?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely labeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we neither knew about nor recognized.

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The Third and Fifth of July

2023-07-02T13:09:00.001-06:00

Just another two days on the calendar.

Independence Day, one of the most important days in the history of the world, should be celebrated (and be referred to) accordingly.

We can hope that remembrance and understanding of this day signals the beginning of the American spirit's rebirth and its blessing of individual rights and limited government.

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Justice Thomas on race . . . and hope

2023-06-30T10:18:00.002-06:00

The SCOTUS recent 6-3 opinion in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College is approximately 231 pages long.

In it, appears a lengthy concurring opinion by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. After he demolishes the dissents of Associate Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, his concluding paragraphs are as follows:

The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy [v. Ferguson]. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.

The Court's opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter [v. Bollinger] is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.

Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation's equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U.S. at 298, 75 S.Ct. 753 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).

While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.

(HMH emphasis.)

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Constitution, Article III, Section 3 . . . and the Bidens

2023-06-30T08:42:00.001-06:00

"Treason against the United States, shall consist . . . in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort . . . ."

The information already unearthed by various committees of the United States House of Representatives concerning Hunter's and Joe's dealings with China are more than enough to take a treason prosecution to a federal jury.

See, "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam," by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer. (Amazon and elsewhere.)

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Hunter Biden, Ted Kennedy, and the Chappaquiddick quickie plea

2023-06-20T10:21:00.004-06:00

Almost immediately after Kennedy crashed his Oldsmobile into the water, saved himself, and his female companion died, he took a plea before a small-time judge to leaving the scene of an accident.

Though the legal question of whether the plea immunized him on double jeopardy grounds from every conceivable charge that could have arisen from that episode was never litigated, it could have.

So, the question arises, whether Hunter Biden's misdemeanor plea(s) will immunize him from other potential tax charges related to his "business" deals.

It depends on the words of the plea deal.

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The Legal Philosophy of Justice Clarence Thomas: Establishment Clause of the First Amendment

2023-05-30T11:24:00.000-06:00

On its face . . . [the statute] is not a law "respecting an establishment of religion." This provision [in the statute] does not prohibit or interfere with state establishments, since no State has established (or constitutionally could establish . . . ) a religion. Nor does the provision require a State to establish a religion: It does not force a State to coerce religious observance or payment of taxes supporting clergy, or require a State to prefer one religious sect over another. It is a law respecting religion, but not one respecting an establishment of religion. (Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709 (2005). [Emphasis HMH.]

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