In April 2014, hundreds of armed protesters gathered at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada to take a stand against the federal government.

While there are a number of arguments that are used by gun control advocates, one of the most common is that individuals do not need high-powered firearms because they will not stand a chance in a war against the federal government. However, four years ago, a group of armed men and women did come together to form a militia, as referenced in the Second Amendment, and they successfully stood up to the government agencies that were infringing upon their rights.

On April 5, 2014, an ongoing land dispute between cattle rancher Cliven Bundy and the United States Bureau of Land Management hit its peak when the agency and federal law enforcement began seizing cattle owned by Bundy that they claimed were trespassing on "federally-owned" land.

The dispute first began in 1993 when Bundy refused to pay for a cattle grazing permit to use the land near his ranch in Clark County, Nevada, after the BLM claimed that he must reduce the side of his herd to 150 and that the size of land where his cattle were allowed to graze would be severely restricted. Bundy argued that the federal government does not have the authority to own large amounts of land, which launched a legal battle that continued for the next two decades.

Maybe all the criticism of the New York Times's coverage of Israel's massacres in Gaza is having an impact. Today's news analysis, by David Halbfinger, is strikingly more balanced than the paper's previous reports. The article gives four paragraphs to Yousef Munayyer, who directs the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, who points out, accurately, that:

This is not a battle that protesters are coming to with guns. They're coming to it with their bodies and they're confronting very real policies of violent repression. The protesters paid with their lives to get people to question whether these policies are justifiable.

In this article, the Times also stopped being the stenographer for the Israeli army. It notes that of the 20 Gazans killed by Israeli soldiers on March 30, the first day of the protests, "Videos showed that some were shot as they had their backs turned to the fence."

Halbfinger also counters the Israeli contention that the Gazan demonstrators plan to invade en masse. He noted that this past Friday, April 6, although ". . . many protesters threw stones or rolled burning tires toward the fence, far more could be seen doing little more than standing around - chanting, singing and shouting."

The analysis does quote a retired Israeli general warning darkly that the barrier fence is "not as strong and robust as people might think." But then Halbfinger immediately adds his own rejoinder: Israel's soldiers are still "aiming rifles at unarmed people."

Americans are consuming more news than ever - and it's driving us further and further apart. That's according to a new paper from Neil Johnson, a physicist who now runs the University of Miami's Complexity interdisciplinary group, which is examining collective behavior in a number of fields.

Johnson and his team have found that when it comes to digesting news of any kind, Americans now exist in a state of pure polarization: the size of the extremes of the left and right are now so large that they outnumber those in the middle ground.


As a physicist, Johnson is used to seeing populations sorting into bell curves - think of heights and weights, he says. So one might expect that people would naturally sort into this normal distribution when it comes to ideology. Not so. It doesn't even matter whether news is real or fake, let alone left or right: The mere act of absorbing news that everyone else is seeing causes a polarizing effect.

"Even on issues for which there is no conceivable counter-evidence, a surprisingly large number of people may [take] an 'anti-crowd' viewpoint, e.g. the many people who believe the world is flat and attended the 2017 Flat Earth International Conference," Johnson and his team write. "Even within the community of professional scientists, there is a non-zero 'anti-crowd' that are skeptical about global warming."

The driving trends of the past decade are now reversing...

The saying "the worm has turned" refers to the moment when the downtrodden have finally had enough, and turn on their powerful oppressors.

The worms have finally turned against the privileged elites -- who have benefited so greatly from globalization, corruption, central bank stimulus and the profiteering of state-enforced cartels. It doesn't matter as much as the punditry assumes whether they are turning Left or Right; the important thing is that the powerless have finally started challenging their privileged overlords.

Though the Powers That Be will attempt to placate or suppress the Revolt of the Powerless, the genies of political disunity and social disorder cannot be put back in the bottle. It took a generation of rising inequality, corruption and the erosion of opportunity to create a society of the protected (the haves) and the unprotected (the have-nots), and rubber-stamping more regulations and distributing Universal Basic Income (UBI) will not rebalance a system that is irrevocably out of balance.

But the rise of resistance, as yet nascent, is only half the story: economic trends and cycles are turning as well, and even if the worms remain passively underground, these reversals will disrupt the status quo. The dominant narrative--the rightness, goodness and sustainability of endless growth of consumption and debt--will unravel, and the internal contradictions of this New Gilded Age (widening wealth/income/power inequality) will finally burst through the thin façade of stability that's been patched together over the past nine years of "recovery."

Many Americans believe that since Martin Luther King Jr. was such an outspoken advocate for peace that he chose not to practice his right to self-defense and own guns -- this is wrong.

Fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., his struggle for peace lives on.
When most people think of the great man, born Michael King on January 15, 1929, they see an advocate for peace, who is celebrated by the US government - honored every year in January, on the third Monday. However, what the government tells us and what this great man did are two separate stories - especially when it comes to gun rights.

Dr. King's position as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement began after his election as spokesman for the Montgomery Improvement Association in December of 1955. What also started in that December of 1955 was the FBI's investigation into him.

Like all those who stand against government-sanctioned violence, Dr. King was an enemy of the state. The fact that he's celebrated today by the same state that persecuted him is quite Orwellian. Equally as Orwellian is the fact that his death was used as the cornerstone for gun control in the United States.

What few people know, however, is that King was pro-gun. Many people believe that since King was such an outspoken advocate for peace that he didn't believe in the rights of others to protect themselves. This is wrong.

A couple was ambushed, arrested and detained for 13 hours with no explanation before they learned that the evidence against them consisted of a stack of papers that contained detailed screenshots of posts from their social media accounts.

The owners of a tactical supply company were violently arrested and then detained for hours with no explanation while their home was raided by a SWAT Team and their assets were seized - but the evidence used against them by police had nothing to do with alleged illegal activities.

In an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project, Sarah Leach said that she and her husband, Andrew, were ambushed and detained by police for more than 13 hours before they finally received an explanation for their arrest. The evidence the officers claimed to have against them came in the form of a previous error made by state police and a stack of papers that contained detailed screenshots of posts from their social media accounts.

"The raid was a result of two things, according to the Riverside Sheriff's Investigator who interviewed me after having detained me for 13 hours without charges; the fact that they were aware that California Highway Patrol had seized, and then given back to us, high capacity pistol magazines to the prior year, something they are calling an error on CHP's end. More disturbing were the stacks of printed pages from my social media accounts, particularly those things which criticize police and government overreach, police violence, my personal ideologies regarding self-governance and the inalienable rights we are afforded as human beings, and even memes and jokes they found, as parts of evidence to request a search warrant, including posts of a very subjective and ironic nature."

Many different sectors of the working class in France began massive strikes this morning, after railroad workers stopped work last night. Rail workers opposed to French President Emmanuel Macron's proposal to privatize the state-owned rail company SNCF are leading what has been called the biggest test of strength to date between Macron and the French working class.

Le Figaro labelled the strike "the railroad battle," while Le Monde wrote in worried tones that

"Train, airplane, and garbage workers once again have energy." It continued: "A number of sectors have been affected by a strike movement launched Tuesday, April 3. Their grievances are numerous within each category: Reform of the SNCF for railroad workers, demands for wage increases for Air France workers."

The SNCF expects the strike call to be followed widely. It anticipates that only one in eight high-speed TGV trains will run across France and only one in five regional trains. Initial reports indicate that eight in ten conductors are following the strike. Up to a third of flights will be cancelled today and electricity maintenance and garbage pickup will be limited as sanitation workers, electricians and gas workers halt work.

Le Parisien is concerned that the strike "will be very widely followed." There are increasing concerns within the trade unions and the bourgeois parties that the strike movement will link up with on-going strikes of postal workers in Hauts-de-Seine, the Gironde and Rennes. Workers at the retailer Carrefour also struck last weekend against job cuts.

If you want to understand what the "special relationship" between Israel and the United States really means consider the fact that Israeli Army snipers shot dead seventeen unarmed and largely peaceful Gazan demonstrators on Good Friday without a squeak coming out of the White House or State Department. Some of the protesters were shot in the back while running away, while another 1,000 Palestinians were wounded, an estimated 750 by gunfire, the remainder injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.

The offense committed by the Gazan protesters that has earned them a death sentence was coming too close to the Israeli containment fence that has turned the Gaza strip into the world's largest outdoor prison. President Donald Trump's chief Middle East negotiator David Greenblatt described the protest as "a hostile march on the Israel-Gaza border...inciting violence against Israel." And Nikki Haley at the U.N. has also used the U.S. veto to block any independent inquiry into the violence, demonstrating once again that the White House team is little more than Israel's echo chamber. America's enabling of the brutal reality that is today's Israel makes it fully complicit in the war crimes carried out against the helpless and hapless Palestinian people.

So where was the outrage in the American media about the massacre of civilians? Characteristically, Israel portrays itself as somehow a victim and the U.S. media, when it bothers to report about dead Palestinians at all, picks up on that line. The Jewish State is portrayed as always endangered and struggling to survive even though it is the nuclear armed regional superpower that is only threatened because of its own criminal behavior. And even when it commits what are indisputable war crimes like the use of lethal force against an unarmed civilian population, the Jewish Lobby and its media accomplices are quick to take up the victimhood refrain.

The proportion of Russian citizens who consider abortion unacceptable has tripled over the course of the past 20 years, from 12% to 35%.

The number that condemns adultery and same-sex relationships has also significantly increased, according to data from a recent Levada Center sociological survey. According to experts, the change in public opinion attests to the strengthening of traditional family values, Pravoslavie.ru reports.

The nationwide survey held in late December 2017 showed that the majority of Russians (68%) condemn extramarital sexual relations, while only 50% condemned it in 1998. The 2017 number includes 77% of women and 57% of men.

Hundreds of kilometres of traffic jams and huge crowds at train stations have built up today as SNCF goes on strike for the first time in its planned three-month stoppage.

Over 400 km of traffic jams were recorded before 8h00 across Île-de-France this morning, reported news source FranceInfo, as travellers tried to get around the train chaos. Authorities described the road conditions as "exceptional", and SNCF management said roads were expected to be "very disrupted" throughout the day.

Train stations across the country were packed, as some commuters had not given up on trying to get one of the few trains still running.

Around 12% of TGV were scheduled to leave as usual, along with 13% of Intercités. One in five TER services will run, including 6% of trains and 24% of buses. Over 90% of international Thalys trains will run, as will 75% of Eurostar services.