Kill the Messenger
From the editor…
I’ve been reading a fascinating book titled “The Pirate Hunter…The True Story of Captain Kidd.” The author, Richard Zacks, spent many hours combing historical records to put together this biography and history.
It shines a spotlight on people, society and life on the high seas 300 years ago.
Life aboard a ship…whether it was a privateer or official Navy ship was miserable. It was crowded, claustrophobic and dangerous.
Interestingly, however, it turns out that pirate ships were actually pretty democratic. The crew had a say in how they were treated.
By sharp contrast, life on a Navy ship was pretty much a death sentence for the deckhands.
Life was good for the officers and captains, but ordinary sailors were completely expendable, with one contemporary chronicler saying that 3 out of every 4 men on a ship died within two years.
They died from battle wounds, shipwrecks, floggings, scurvy, thirst and they starved to death in droves.
One Navy captain smuggled his cook’s wife on board to do his laundry, so his uniforms would always be spotless. His men were suffering from extreme thirst because of the water shortage, but by god his clothes were clean….a mind boggling example of how elites viewed the “lower classes” as beneath consideration….just like they do today!
This was the era of press gangs…Men were simply snatched and forced to become part of the Navy’s crews. When a man was press ganged onto a ship, it left his wife and children with no means of support and so entire families were impoverished and victimized by this cruel practice.
But it was the way of the world then….life was cheap and this was an era when watching public hangings was entertainment for the masses.
One story really baked my brain…it seemed so like what we are seeing today with whistleblowers!
Ship captains in the 1690s could accurately gauge their latitude, that is, their north-south co-ordinates, as long as the clouds weren’t too thick.
But in this era, longitude was the killer because there was no way to determine east-west co-ordinates because clocks at sea weren’t accurate enough.
During this period, a fleet of British Royal Navy warships, some of the most expensive and powerful vessels of the age, were patrolling the waters off the coast of England against the French in heavy fog that lasted for days.
Without the sun or stars to guide them the captain miscalculated the fleet’s location. A sailor approached Admiral Cloudisley Shovell and politely informed him that, by the man’s calculations, the ships were in danger.
Admiral Shovell immediately had the man hung for mutiny to reward him for the warning.
The next day four ships crashed into the rocks and two thousand men died.
The world is reeling as every day we learn more about the extent of government surveillance and spying on citizens everywhere….and they are ALL doing it, not just that bloated American bully down below us.
These spy programs are nothing new…stories have been coming out for years about ECHELON and how the NSA and the CIA had the ability to monitor of phone calls and emails.
It was common knowledge among citizens who were paying attention, but most of us are happy to just get through the day and so weren’t paying attention.
Our bad!
I, for one, simply assumed back then that the computers were looking for key words in order to rout out terrorists.
But that was before I realized that our governments themselves were the actual terrorists!
Yep. Sad to say, but it’s those fellows walking the corridors of power in their five thousand dollar suits that are behind most of the mayhem on our world….not guys hiding in caves in the middle east.
We owe our latest public knowledge of these illegal, unconstitutional and bat house crazy spook agendas to whistleblowers who are now fighting for their freedom and their very lives because the elites and the shadow government want to terrify us all into silence and submission.
Nothing like an appalling example of punishment to scare the crap out of the rest of us to shut us all up.
Bradley Manning, who released a number of classified files to WikiLeaks, including the horrific “Collateral Murder” video, has been held in solitary confinement since 2010.
His trial is being held right now, as I write this. The US government has demonized Bradley, and made it all about his “betrayal” of his country, and his supposed shortcomings as a man and a US citizen.
Manning himself has always said that he saw the US Military engaged in criminal acts and his conscience would not allow him to keep quiet.
Edward Snowden told the world about how the NSA was collecting everything …. All of our emails, phone conversations and whatever we do online.
There have been some interesting articles published that suggest that Snowden might in fact be a CIA mole, set up to discredit the NSA as these agencies are in bitter competition for power and control.
Because if these agencies are so all powerful…and they are…how the heck is Snowden staying free if he doesn’t have deep inside help?
Whatever the real story is, the whole world got woken up about the surveillance levels. But, once again the mainstream media is focussing on Snowden, his history, who he is, who his girlfriend is….by golly, it turns out she’s a real looker who was a pole dancer! Isn’t that interesting? Way way more interesting than the fact that our governments and military have all turned into rogues!
The story is about the hunt for the man, and the condemnation of any countries that offer him refuge. The mainstream media has stayed quiet about the fact that our hijacked governments have turned the world into a police state.
All this ranting and raving about national security and betrayal of state secrets is just blowing smoke up our collective skirts to keep us from focussing on the real issue … which is that our governments and ruling elites want nothing less than the total control and subjugation of everyone on the planet.
Have you ever known a woman who was married to one of those pathological liars…the kind of guy that is abusive both physically and mentally?
The wife just keeps hoping for the best, though, and she keeps pretending to herself that he might change, turn around, and actually be the man she thought she married.
But as long as she stays in the relationship the abuse will continue. By staying, she is basically saying that the abuse and the lies are OK.
This is what I feel is going on in the world right now. Our ruling elites, the banksters and corporations are the abusive male in the relationship with us regular citizens. And we just keep sucking up their lies as they continue to pillage the planet, impoverish people and take away our freedom, just like the wife who won’t see her man for the psychopath that he is.
It’s what we are seeing on a local level as well. We have trustingly put our faith in our provincial government to help our communities but, as we see every day now, the government has become a corporate tool interested only in profit.
Quality of life? What a quaint notion!
We need to collectively continue to wake up, and see these crimes against the planet and humanity for what they are.
To join the revolution don’t support the criminals!
Buy organic, grow your own food, don’t shop at big box marts and help to re-grow and re-connect our communities.
Free energy exists. Many other technologies exist that have been suppressed in the name of greed and profit.
Say no to shale gas and the pipeline….Say yes to saving nature and ourselves.
The world we save will be our own!
Stephanie Kelley
