French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that his country and Britain will urge the United Nations to work towards the establishment of a “safe zone” in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to protect humanitarian operations.
“This is of the utmost importance. This will provide a framework for the United Nations to act in case of emergency, “Macron said in comments published by the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. According to Macron, this safe zone will allow the evacuation of people who wish to leave Afghanistan.
Asylum-seeking migrants are pictured at a makeshift camp after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered to uphold an immigration policy implemented under former President Donald Trump that forced thousands of asylum seekers to stay in Mexico to await U.S. hearings, at El Chaparral crossing port with the U.S., in Tijuana, Mexico August 25, 2021. REUTERS/Jorge Duenes/
MEXICO CITY, Aug 26 (Reuters) – The United States has urged Mexico to clear ad-hoc camps housing thousands of migrants in border cities due to concerns they pose a security risk and attract criminal gangs, officials familiar with the matter said.
Facing domestic criticism over a jump in illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has pressed Mexico to curb the flow of migrants to help ease pressure on the nearly 2,000 mile (3,200 km) frontier.
Two of the biggest camps to have sprung up in northern Mexico are in the city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, and in Tijuana,…
BEIJING, Aug. 27 — China will send troops to participate in the “Peace Mission 2021” joint anti-terrorism military exercise attended by militaries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states, according to a written statement released by the Chinese Ministry of National Defense on Friday.
The exercise will be held at the Donguz training ground in Orenburg Oblast, Russia from September 11 to 25.
The exercise is a routine one within the framework of the SCO, which aims to deepen the defense and security cooperation among SCO member states, improve their ability to respond to new challenges and threats, and jointly maintain regional peace and security.
Defining and building freedom in our lives, relationships, associations, and communities is a vital necessity in this unforgiving time of troubles. Freedom is being hunted by a complex junta of corporate and political rulers and America is devolving into a land of serfs where everyone who isn’t a ruler is a slave.
We must not allow the controversies and blaring breaking news headlines distract us from the fundamentals or keep our eyes off our true course, we must resort, again and again, to the sacred and just standards of freedom as intended by our Creator. If you do not have this focus and intentionality you will become too easily distracted by the bogeyman fears and utopian promises and by your own partisan identity to notice yet another war crime against the cause of freedom.
Leaving behind the sophistry and nuance of wordsmiths who may debate the meaning of freedom in some sort of bloodless, academic, and detached tone, we should define freedom in a more practical, everyday manner.
For Freedomists, freedom is the domain of the free, people created in the image of God and who own an inherent spiritual sovereignty from which all other individual and shared forms of sovereignty are derived. In practical terms, freedom is a condition in which most all decisions and common norms or standards that govern your life emanate mostly from you, then those you freely associate with, then your very local community of all your fellow citizens, and, finally, and in a minor capacity, the states, the corporate world, and the federal government.
From the perspective of how one obtains and maintains freedom, and all these things must be voluntary, not imposed, it is necessary to exercise and achieve civic and moral virtue, liberty as defined by the original spirit and intent of the US Bill of Rights, and independence through material autonomy and self-reliance at the individual to local scale. In short, one needs virtue, liberty, and independence to obtain and maintain freedom, but the pursuit of these things must be strictly voluntary.
Whatever bogeyman you fear or whatever utopian promises you crave, if the policies and actions devised materially hinder one’s ability as an individual in free association with others to obtain the conditions of and exercise the practices of virtue, liberty, and independence, then one is committing a crime against humanity. Everything must be judged through this litmus test: does it IMPEDE any individual in free association with others from exercising or obtaining virtue, liberty, or independence?
The condition of freedom, obtained and maintained through virtue, liberty, and independence, is a condition every person and every community of people own all sovereign authority as unto God to seek and obtain and then maintain without hindrance. Every hindrance thereto is in fact a crime against God Himself, whose own sovereignty is conveyed to and through each individual human being.
We define freedom in these terms. We understand the world of sophists and philosophers, the world of pundits and politicians, will continue to debate freedom, often in stark partisan rhetorical terms with all participants missing the point and only using freedom as a cover for their hidden agenda.
One might argue, and many do, that the left wants “freedoms” that obliterate independence, the right want freedoms that obliterate virtue. Whether or not you see it this way, neither the left nor the right in American politics has advanced the cause of freedom or consistently lived up to the freedom standard as defined by virtue, liberty, and independence. For example, the right gave us “the Patriot Act”, the left gave us the IRS!
Building freedom is not easy or simple. To build freedom one must also engage in civic and political activism, at least to try and mitigate the overstep of corporations and the state, both of which wield an unhealthy amount of power and tend to make the three standards of freedom difficult to obtain.
The above being said, it is urgent that you understand that the foundation of freedom building is that which you do as an individual and in free association with others. If your civic and moral virtue is lacking, why do you think a more civically and morally virtuous person will rise to power in the corporate and political worlds which essentially run your life? Without your own respect for the liberty of all, sans favoritism or prejudice, how then can you expect such respect for yourself from more power corporate and governmental authorities? Without the intentional and deliberate pursuit of your own material independency how can you expect independence from the influence and control of the corporations and government?
If we want to build freedom we cannot eschew civic or political activism, but neither must we allow ourselves to be or feel limited to these venues of action. Understanding and using virtue, liberty, and independence first as an individual and then in freewill participation with others is the foundation of building freedom in your own life, relationships, and associations.
Perhaps you should more diligently study what freedom is in its standards and what practices one must engage in to actualize those standards in a meaningful way in your own life. Building freedom is a deliberate act that will be an inconvenience and sacrifice, especially because this present sociocultural and socioeconomic structures, governed by corporate and political rulers from the top down, is designed to keep people down as serfs. For those who refuse to be serfs, just using what is convenient and handy and trying to fit in isn’t a viable option: only rulers are served and serfs are managed by these structures and arrangements. If you neither seek to be ruler nor accept your role as a serf, then everything from how you spend your time and money to who you do this with just radically change.
Everyone who doesn’t have a way of defining freedom that is similar to this way we are defining it and who doesn’t actively seek to build it, even when it is not convenient, is a serf or a ruler, and is most likely a serf. Don’t be a serf. Define your freedom and build your freedom in your own life and relationships, be deliberate and intentional, and make respect for freedom the litmus test for who your inner circle are.
Politics should reflect culture and not the other way around, but in a dysfunctional society, politics dictates culture from a top-down position and often through some combination of manipulative, coerciolve, or outright authoritarian measures. To fix this in the long term requires a building of alternative sociocultural and socioeconomic structures that somehow become independent in a material way from the politicized structures, but in the short to mid term, merely abdicating the political arena is not a solution.
Today politics, that is ideological agendas, are guiding most American institutions, from monopoly corporate cartels like Silicon Valley to the so-called press and academia, and even much of the church establishment. Political policies, laws and regulations, are driving a societal devolution to libertine anarchy, the atomization of individuals, the breakdown of faith and family, and the increasingly monopoly power of one party and a few corporations.
The Supreme Court ruling on “gay marriage” did not in any sense flow from culture, but most people embraced it rather than defy it and the culture bowed to politics in a really gross manner that further erodes faith and family. Everyone who thought they could prop up marriage and family by purely cultural activities and that this would somehow prevent the state from using “gay marriage” to assault religious freedom and further atomize the individual within a hedonistic culture, was wrong.
The issue as to whether two adults can form any bond they wish and the issue as to whether other adults must recognize that bond are separate, but the Supreme Court enshrined a new definition of marriage, which has always been a sociocultural construct, which it is now “illegal” to even speak against. Politics intruded into the family and transformed marriage into a purely political institution dictated and regulated by the state. The goal was never for people to choose who they loved, it was to eliminate the sanctuary of the home and the sanctity of marriage which offer a ready-made bulwark against totalitarianism.
Our stance on marriage has always been that different sociocultural groups should be free to define marriage and family on their terms without state intervention, beyond enforcing any contracts made. On the other hand, no group or person should be forced or coerced in any way to accept or validate any form of marriage they feel morally opposed to. The goal of the Supreme Court was not to enshrine a right to self-determination in such matters, it was to shift the definition of marriage on ideological grounds and to positively force that definition on everyone. In short, the goal was to end marriage as a sociocultural construct outside political control.
So now we have culture literally being created through ideological litmus tests as to that which is allowed. Your sociocultural and socioeconomic reality and norms are coming through a combination of politically engaged monopoly corporations, who control the economy and discourse in a monopolistic manner, and by politicians and government bureaucrats, whose edicts replace the normal and organic process of consensus and freewill participation in sociocultural and socioeconomic structures outside the control of corporations or the state.
To simply say, as the late Andrew Brietbart once said, that “politics is downstream of culture” is wishful thinking. His emphasis on getting into various structures, like the media, entertainment, and academia, was generally sound, but the channels by which one might re-take these hijacked structures are limited and controlled by authoritarian ideologues.
Political and especially local civic engagement coupled with the intentional creation of alternative parallel sociocultural and socioeconomic structures that reflect our Judeo-Christian worldview and way of life are equally necessary to begin carving out new gaps for freedom where political control over culture is largely absent.
Former Democratic leader on the California State Senate Gloria Romero endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder this week because of his position on education.
“I chose Larry Elder I think largely because of his understanding of education, the experience that he’s lived, being an African American youth, man, and I went with him,” Romero told The Federalist in an interview on Thursday. “He has spoken eloquently on the failure of the education system and why school choice is so important, especially for communities of color.”
Romero’s endorsement is just one of the newest developments in the Golden State’s close upcoming recall election that will determine the fate of Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. There are a lot of reasons why Newsom could be recalled, including his tyrannical COVID-19 rules, his failure to address the state’s energy crisis, and his hierarchical hypocrisy through it all, but Romero said his flippant attitude towards schools is the…
This is a headlines report on the continued crisis in Myanmar, following the February 21 coup by the military that has launched the nation into civil war. The junta is attempting to transition to a legitimate permanent status as the reality of govoernment in Myanmar, a reality that kills any semblance of a democratic-republican form of government. Myanmar would be a military government going forward, with the military not promising to even consider elections for at least two more years.
The question is, has the Junta won the hearts and minds of enough people to help them coercive the few who are not won over? By the headlines you will see in this report, I think it might be fair to say signs point to no on that front. Myanmar is of particular interest to me because of its testing of a theory that the technological is on the side of the small scale. Where ideational conviction meats physiological reality, will a people who reject fundamentally the authority imposed on them be able to resist the advantage of death force that near-monpolistic powers can exert against their ‘citizens?’
Myanmar is a key bellweather for the reality of power of tech. Does it still favor centralized large-scale systems, or can large-scale systems no longer prevent small-scale systems from, in a sense, offer a better product, be it less restricted governance that offers reasonable security and pluralistic equality or a neighborhood factory that prints you an open-sourced video console that plays open source video games for a quarter of the cost of the large-scale systems but with the same, if not more, quality.
That’s quite a leap from Myanmar to Video Gaming, and I don’t mean to undermine the tragedy befallen in Myanmar and the real cost of life and quality of living so many in that nation are suffering today. But the connections are relevant, as I see them, and speak to the signficance of this moment in human history unfolding in Myanmar. You have a highly developed people, where even the lower middle class has access to high quality, low-cost tech, and many people in that country who know already how to create self-sustainability, from defense to farming are emerging and leading even as we speak.
They have the theoretical physiological means to overcome the Junta. They have the social constructs that make it easy for them to sustain the moral undergirding such defiant social acts require. They are used to not being under so much control. They have the means to convert material to self-sustaining use being a highly technologically-developed country. Thus, they are the perfect storm for a people who dissent from being controlled by a centralized authority that commands large-scale advantages over what might resist them.
Myanmar’s army chief said on Monday that he is considering changing the country’s electoral system from the existing majoritarian model and toward a form of Proportional Representation (PR).
Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing, who ousted the country’s elected civilian administration in a coup on February 1, made the remarks during a meeting in Naypyitaw with members of his military council, according to state-run media.
In accordance with the country’s military-drafted 2008 Constitution, Myanmar currently uses First Past the Post (FPTP), a system in which the candidate who receives the most votes is the winner of the parliamentary seat in question.
Min Aung Hlaing said that the PR system would be “all-inclusive” and allow for constituents’ voices to be better represented.
“It is necessary to consider the Proportional Representation—PR—system with all participants. It is necessary to amend the way representatives are elected and the election system….
But she was kind-hearted, he says, and became upset when the first protester to die, a young woman called Mya Thwe Thwe Khaing, was fatally shot in the capital Nyapyitaw a week after the coup. Her death was widely mourned and triggered further anger against authorities.
With the February 1 coup, the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, sought to turn back the clock on the country’s nascent democratization. They opened Pandora’s box instead. Between the nationwide protest movement paralyzing the economy and the entrenched insurgencies, challenges mount against the military.
Analyses so far have considered the likelihood of Tatmadaw defeat in the context of a unitedfront of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs). However, an underexamined element of the Myanmar crisis is how individual EAOs can exploit the chaos to inflict asymmetrical damage on the Tatmadaw. Nowhere is this more apparent than the military successes that the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has achieved under the coup, and the KIA’s potential to…
Myanmar’s security forces have killed more than 1,000 civilians since the military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi from power six months ago, according to an advocacy group.
The country has been in turmoil since 1 February, when the armed forces seized power in a lightning coup, triggering dissent as protesters demanded a return to democracy.
Security forces responded with bloody crackdowns, using live rounds against civilians. But anti-junta mobs – some of whom have formed self-defence groups – are still taking to the streets daily in flash marches.
Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – an activist group that verifies the deaths and mass arrests under the regime – said the number of people killed by security forces reached 1,006 on Wednesday.
“As long as the military is in power they will continue to kill youths, professionals like doctors and teachers, men, women and children,” said Ko Bo Gyi, AAPP’s joint secretary.
On August 3, Myanmar’s UN representative received an alarming tip-off from one of his New York-based countrymen, who has been acting as a volunteer bodyguard: there was a plot against his life.
“I received information that someone was being paid to injure or kill me,” Kyaw Moe Tun, who denounced his country’s junta after it carried out a coup in February, told the Financial Times in a video interview.
The 52-year-old diplomat alerted the US mission to the UN and the FBI. Within three days, US authorities had arrested Phyo Hein Htut and Ye Hein Zaw, two Myanmar citizens and charged them with conspiracy to attack a foreign official.
The FBI claim the men were working with two unnamed co-conspirators, one in Thailand and one in the US, to hire and pay hitmen to attack Kyaw Moe Tun to force him to resign. The assassins were to “finish him off” if he resisted.
According to Phyo Hein Htut’s indictment, the Thailand-based co-conspirator, an arms dealer,…
Aug 21 (Reuters) – Myanmar’s military government has arrested two more local journalists, army-owned television reported on Saturday, the latest among dozens of detentions in a sweeping crackdown on the media since a Feb. 1 coup.
Sithu Aung Myint, a columnist for news site Frontier Myanmar and commentator with Voice of America radio, and Htet Htet Khine, a freelance producer for BBC Media Action, were arrested on Aug. 15, Myawaddy TV reported.
Sithu Aung Myint was charged with sedition and spreading false information that Myawaddy said was critical of the junta and had urged people to join strikes and back outlawed opposition groups.
Htet Htet Khine was accused of harbouring Sithu Aung Myint, a criminal suspect, and working for and supporting a shadow National Unity Government.
BBC Media Action said in a statement it was concerned about…
Noise from the nearby pagoda roused Aung and his family before dawn on April 9. Peering out his window, he saw dozens of soldiers shouting and cursing as they streamed onto trucks, rifles slung across their chests. It was barely 4 a.m.
The engines of dozens of vehicles revved to a start and took off, with soldiers following on foot. Suddenly, Aung’s power cut out, plunging his neighborhood in the city of Bago into darkness. Aung tried to check Facebook and WhatsApp, hoping others would know what was going on, but mobile Internet was down, too.
He hurried his wife and two young sons into a small bedroom where they huddled together, determined not to be seen or heard. The sound of gunshots pierced the silence. The family emerged briefly some 14 hours later, peeking out their windows when they heard the rowdy chatter and din of the engines return.
The soldiers were back. With them were dozens of limp, bloodied bodies, piled up on the flatbed trucks.
Van Thawng Thawng’s phone buzzed as a series of notifications lit up the screen.
“Has anyone spoken to Ezekiel?” someone was asking in the Chin Student Union Facebook group, an organisation representing students from Myanmar’s northwestern Chin state. But no one had heard from the 20-year-old union leader.
A week later, on April 14, a friend called Van Thawng Thawng to tell him that Ezekiel’s body had been found.
They believed he had been beaten to death by security forces. Van Thawng Thawng was devastated.
“I just feel really stressed and angry, especially towards the military. Because Ezekiel is not the only one,” said Van Thawng Thawng, a former Chin student who serves as the general secretary of the same union. “One of my classmates was detained and another was killed trying to save his sister at a protest, and my mom, uncle and grandmother have all died in the last few months.”
While Van Thawng Thawng’s mom passed away from a long battle with cancer, he…
The regional organisation, ASEAN, comprising Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, and Myanmar, promotes economic, political, and security cooperation among members.TheASEAN charterincludes democracy, good governance, and human rights, which theoretically opposes the values of the military regime.However, ASEAN also prizes their characteristic policy of non-interference into domestic politics.
The bloc is not monolithic, and so is often divided on issues, especially regarding internal issues of member states.Therefore, while well situated in the eyes of foreign nations, their structure and competencies limit their capacity to intervene directly.They may only take action if decisions are unanimous; even a view held by a majority grouping is not actionable.However, a solution is imperative as prolonged violence may spillover and thus, ASEAN’s reputation for maintaining regional peace and security.
Elon Musk has been recorded basically describing a future in which artificial intelligence replaces humanity, for him any form of consciousness existing is fine even if humanity itself disappears. The path to this “progress” is authoritarianism, using things like universal basic income to keep those who have lost jobs to robots happy. He dreams of replacing carbon based like with artificial silicone based intelligence.
The time to jump off the train men like Musk are guiding is right now, but the path isn’t simple and direct.
Creating parallel, alternative structures that engender material independency from the present ruling class is an essential. Using the organic cohesiveness that shared nationhood, as a spiritual and not a racial or political construct, is going to be vital to making these alternative structures viable and robust without becoming as authoritarian as those they are meant to help people escape from.
Musk’s stance here is essentially authoritarianism, including “universal basic income”, which is basically a system of abject dependency that can only end with you as a human being becoming a mere cost to the ruling class who don’t need your labor but use basic income to keep you from rioting or something. Population control and genocide are the logical extensions of this.
The vision we call “Upadaria” foresaw this world emergence of authoritarianism as a cooperation between monopoly corporations and political power holders, the ruling class. This vision also foresees the solution, which is the intentional creation of alternative structures that engender material independency from the systems used by the ruling class to control people and turn them into modern serfs.
The worldview of Western Civilization in its genesis and foundations may be solid and good, because it is largely a Judeo-Christian worldview rooted in ancient truth and open to great advancement through logic and science. But in order to preserve the essence of the core ideational framework of Western Civilization one must think of constructing the genesis structures of a new civilization. We cannot save the West. This and other extant moribund civilizations will collapse into a totalitarian morass and we cannot change this.
The only way to escape the starkly authoritarian vision men like Musk envision and embrace, because they stand to gain thereby, is to begin now building our own alternative structures that stand outside the influence and control of men like Elon Musk, a man who represents the zeitgeist of a dying civilization. But, we further propose, without the organic cohesiveness of shared nationhood, and an intentional shared nationhood at that, we will struggle to create truly decentralized structures that prevent the emergence of authoritarianism for generations to come.
Through the vision of Upadaria and its frameworks and blueprints we have the tools and ideas needed to promote and nurture the development of these alternative structures for human flourishing. Such a comprehensive and internally cohesive ideational framework coupled with a strong shared identity anyone can adopt is what is needed BEFORE alternative structures can be created.
For many, as they become acquainted with the vision of Upadaria, the choice will be between being reduced to a useless person on basic income, dominated by a ruling class who use AI and robots to produce fantastical wealth for them, and being free and self-sustaining in a way that nurtures your dignity, respects your rights, and engenders your flourishing.
Nine attorneys aligned with former President Donald Trump who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging Michigan’s 2020 presidential election results will have to pay financial penalties and face other punitive actions for their legal effort, a district court judge ruled on Wednesday.
“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker wrote in her scathing decision on the case.
“It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an
allegedly fraudulent election,” she wrote. “It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”
The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by the attorneys — including Trump backers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood — which sought to decertify…
OKLAHOMA CITY (CBSDFW.COM/AP) — Republican U.S. Sen. James Lankford would seem to have all the conservative credentials he’d need to coast to re-election in deep-red Oklahoma.
A devout Baptist, Lankford was the director of the nation’s largest Christian youth camp for more than a decade. He speaks out regularly against abortion and what he describes as excessive government spending. And his voting record in the Senate aligned with former President Donald Trump’s position nearly 90% of the time.
But like several other seemingly safe GOP incumbents, Lankford, who didn’t even draw a primary opponent in 2016, finds himself under fierce attack by a challenger in his own party. The antagonist is a 29-year-old evangelical minister and political newcomer who managed to draw more than 2,000 people to a “Freedom Rally” headlined by Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, at which…
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