Archive for January, 2010

TSA Wants Kids and Grandmas Naked

John Tate | Campaign for Liberty

After a lone Nigerian would-be terrorist tried to detonate explosives in his underclothes Christmas Day on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, TSA immediately grabbed for even more invasive power over American citizens.

Most disturbingly, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to implement full-body scans at the nation’s airports-allowing unelected bureaucrats to virtually strip-search and gawk at kids, moms, grandmothers, grandfathers — you and all other American passengers — through your clothes.

Predictably, misinformation on the graphic nature of the images and ability of TSA personnel to copy, photo, and save the images poured forth from TSA flaks.

I have included direct contact information for the TSA at the end of this post. Call them today and let them know how disgusted you are with their latest plan to invade our privacy.

It’s a peeping tom’s dream, and a nightmare for those of us who believe in the great American principles of liberty, restrained government, and privacy.

Unless we stop this outrage, TSA agents will be snooping at the undergarments of such “threats” as American kids, grandmothers, and grandfathers. And if you or they refuse? You will be physically searched by TSA employees just like a criminal after being arrested.

The TSA’s dirty little secret is the agency has been pushing for full-body imaging since 2002 and even introduced the technology at a handful of airports in 2007-without ensuring that passengers knew they were being watched in this manner.

As Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said, “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

Despite self-serving assurances from the TSA, these full-body scans are an unconstitutional, unacceptable intrusion into the privacy of American passengers nationwide.

Last year, Campaign for Liberty Director of Development Steve Bierfeldt sued the TSA for detaining him for carrying cash. Because Steve so strongly stood up to them, the TSA backed down from its unconstitutional searches of passengers’ non-terrorism-related property.

But such victories for liberty are rare in today’s America and must be fought for by a vigilant public jealous of its liberty.

We now risk losing the gains we have made against the surveillance state, all because of the “systemic failure” of the federal government-as Obama himself called it. Now the TSA wants to know far more about us than just the amount of cash we’re carrying.

Use the numbers below to contact them today as we show the TSA that the freedom movement will not sit idly by in this fight.

Just as Big Brother advocates jumped on the intelligence failure of 9/11 to nationalize airport security, they once again want to use their own failure as an excuse for more power.

But we know that this latest move will not keep us safe. So far, it has been passengers and flight crew who have stopped such incidents as this and the attempted “shoebombing” of December 2001.

They can keep stripping away our privacy and liberty, all to foil the last attack, but the terrorists will continue to circumvent any of their freedom-crushing “security” measures.

As Judge Andrew Napolitano has explained, “Airline travel is safer today because pilots have guns, cockpit doors are like bank vaults, and the passengers have become courageous. All this was done by individuals in the private sector, not by the government. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if the feds had not stripped us of our natural rights to keep ourselves safe-by keeping and bearing arms-9/11 would never have happened.”

If we want to diminish the threat of terrorism and fly more safely, we can restore the Second Amendment, hand airline security back to the private sector, and end our government’s policy of foreign interventionism.

Contact the TSA’s “Office of Civil Rights” by phone toll free at 1-877-EEO-4-TSA (1-877-336-4872) or (800) 877-8339 (TTY) and by email at TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Let us do our part to show Washington and the TSA that Americans not only deserve and want both, but that we will not stop until our privacy and all our other freedoms are secure.

Symbolist Egypt – the Meaning Behind the Magic

This video features John Anthony West speaking at a conference; it only recently became available on the web. The video was excerpted from a conference called Return to the Source : Rediscovering Lost Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom.

In the lecture, he explains his theories on ancient Egypt, detailing the manner by which his truly independent perspective was developed: his influences, experiences and how his understanding of symbolist Egypt evolved over the many years of his career.

Architecture does in stone what music does in sound; in other words, its visual vibrations that are affecting us. We’re inside the symphony, as it were, when we’re inside a sacred space. We’re being affected emotionally by the vibrational nature of that particular building.

So when we go into an Egyptian temple, we are resonating to its harmonies and proportions and so-on. The great sages of the past understood that each of the cosmic principles, which are the gods as it were. The gods are not some strange animal headed beings, they are the embodiments of cosmic principles and those cosmic principles are inextricably related to certain interplay of numbers which give rise to geometry, harmony, proportion and measure.

When you know the secrets of the numbers and secrets of the principles, you are able to produce a building that will evoke within the emotional center of the beholder, that particular principle.

–John Anthony West