monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

A US Coast Guard officer has been arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack, court documents show.

Police found a cache of weapons and ammunition at the Maryland home of Christopher Paul Hasson.

The self-proclaimed white nationalist had drawn up a list of targets including prominent Democratic politicians, according to prosecutors.

He is said to have drawn inspiration from the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

"The defendant intends to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country," US District Attorney Robert Hur said in the court documents.

"The defendant is a domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct."

Prosecutors said that in a draft email from June 2017 Mr Hasson wrote: "I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth. I think a plague would be most successful but how do I acquire the needed Spanish flu, botulism, anthrax, not sure yet but will find something."

US media say the 49-year-old is a lieutenant at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington and lives in the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring.

The Coast Guard confirmed that a member of the service had been arrested but gave no further details.

Fifteen guns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition were found in Mr Hasson's basement flat along with illegal drugs, the attorney's office said.

A list of possible targets included Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer as well as media personalities including MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Joe Scarborough.

Since 2017 Mr Hasson had studied parts of a manifesto by Anders Breivik on how to amass firearms and compile a list of targets, prosecutors allege.

Breivik murdered 77 people in 2011 in two terror attacks. He killed eight people with a car bomb in central Oslo and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a Labour Party camp.

Mr Hasson was arrested on Friday on weapons and drugs charges and is due to appear in court on Thursday.

The cartoonish caricature of Lyndon LaRouche presented in the Washington Post obituary The Sun reprinted (“Perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche dead at 96,” Feb. 18) bore zero resemblance to the actual man with whom I have been proudly associated for nearly 59 years. But rather than undertake the tedious task of refuting each lie, whopper by whopper, I deem it far better to contrast the real LaRouche with the bogeyman depicted for the edification of credulous children in your newspaper.

The nub of the matter is quite simple. LaRouche designed and aggressively promoted a massive overhaul of the international financial system that entailed the use of Hamiltonian credit mechanisms, like National Banks, to redirect literally trillions of dollars of speculative capital into hard infrastructure and science driver projects that would sharply uplift both rich and poor countries alike. But of necessity, this would also mean writing off, canceling, huge sums of fictitious financial paper held by the most powerful families in the Western world.

These entrenched elites reacted to this perceived mortal threat to their political power in a manner strikingly similar to the antebellum Slavocracy’s outrage at the prospect of an Abraham Lincoln presidency. Multiple varieties of threats, physical and otherwise, slanders, and tons of manufactured hysteria had to be deployed, using paid, reliable assets in the journalistic and political classes, to neutralize the dangerous upstart. In LaRouche’s case, the hysteria of his adversaries grew in direct proportion to the increasing acceptance of his ideas worldwide.

Even as that process was barely beginning, in November 1973, a document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows the New York branch of the FBI matter-of-factly proposing to activate longstanding bureau assets in the Communist Party USA so as to “facilitate the elimination of the subject” (their exact words), referring to LaRouche. And it must be stressed: there is no need for connecting dots or reading between the lines. It’s spelled out in black and white.

Then, the following developments rapidly accelerated the desperation of the financial powers that be to “eliminate” LaRouche and his ideas. First, at the UN Development Conference of 1976 in Sri Lanka, a coalition of underdeveloped nations’ representatives, led by then-Guyanese Foreign Minister (and later LaRouche associate) Frederic Wills, publicly demanded a moratorium on their foreign debts, exactly as LaRouche had proposed. What gall to put feeding their children ahead of meeting the repayment schedules on usurious loans! By the early ‘80s, LaRouche had conducted a series of highly successful meetings with Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, mapping out strategies for their nations to buck the policies of the International Monetary Fund in order to industrialize. The City of London and Wall Street were not amused.

The final straw for these enraged financiers was LaRouche’s astonishing success of 1982-83 in recruiting President Ronald Reagan to his design for an anti-ballistic missile system based on speed-of-light technologies, otherwise known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” to its snide detractors. By eliminating the nuclear balance of terror with defensive systems that kill missiles, not people, the LaRouche-Reagan policy was rudely undercutting a key prop in the postwar globalist order — a huge step toward enduring peace, but not exactly the way to win friends in high places.

It was then that the “Get LaRouche” Task Force was assembled, charged with removing him by legal or other means. Spending the better part of a decade, and untold millions of dollars, this crew, prominently including (surprise!) current Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Mueller, fell flat on its face in its first attempt to frame up their target, when the truth accidentally popped out, and a mistrial was hastily declared. But they took much better care to rig a second trial, using methods that former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark called the most systemic perversion of the justice system he had ever come across. (Due to these considerations, Clark subsequently joined LaRouche’s defense team, despite definite political differences between the two men.)

Yet even today, a now-deceased LaRouche continues to haunt his adversaries. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the largest construction project in the history of humanity, is in reality a fast train upon which America can jump, on the way to reclaiming its scientific and industrial prowess. It does, however, threaten the zero-sum geopolitical schemes of the permanent warfare crowd, who have greeted its emergence with the most shrill shrieking and howling. As to its authorship, several Chinese spokespersons have been quite explicit and public: it is the direct outgrowth of work begun in the ‘80s and thenceforth by Lyndon and Helga (“The Silk Road Lady”) LaRouche!

That, in very abbreviated form, is the actual LaRouche story. As to the warmed over garbage rehashed by Timothy Smith, the experience of a former member of the Jordanian parliament, one Laith Shuebelliat, is highly instructive. Up to the early ‘90s, he had never had any direct encounter with LaRouche, but had read numerous second-hand accounts of his political movement in the mainstream press. Picking up a LaRouche pamphlet, he confessed that he expected to find a bigot, a crank, or worse, lurking within its pages. Instead, to his astonishment, he discovered the most profound and inspirational thoughts on history, political economy, etc, leading him to characterize LaRouche as not the Ugly, but rather the Lovely American.

Take the same test yourself. Go to LaRouche’s website(s), read his voluminous output of writings, and compare what you see to the vile effluvia emanating from his terrified opponents. Then ask yourself the more fundamental question: Why, even in his moment of death, does this man strike such fear and loathing among his powerful enemies? Congratulations! You’re now on the road to recovery from Media Derangement Syndrome.

Doug Mallouk, Baltimore

Population pressures are relevant contemporary events

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis opened a historic summit meeting Thursday morning devoted to the scourge of child sexual abuse, an issue that has for decades devastated and eroded faith in some corners of his vast church while being utterly ignored and denied in others.

...Bringing together church leaders from around the world at the Vatican, Francis said that the church was obliged to discuss the extent to which abuse was afflicting the church and humanity in a “sincere and in-depth manner.”

Michael Cohen Agrees to Testify Next Week, Setting Stage for a High-Stakes Hearing

Trump is trashing the Constitution.

“This is a deep intellectual problem that is plaguing this city, which is that we’ve had thousands of Americans die year after year after year because of threats crossing our southern border.”

— Stephen Miller, senior adviser to President Trump, in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Feb. 17, 2019

...But there is no evidence these claims are true. In fact, the available evidence suggests these claims are false.

Bezos Says Amazon Drones Ready to Deliver Mueller Report to Every American Household

We should all get a copy since we're paying for it.

RAYMOND ARROYO: Laura, what I don't like about both of these stories is we're judging the past in light of shifting moral, ethic, and cultural codes of today. We can't do that. You just can't.

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): They're either defacing statues or pulling them down.

ARROYO: Yeah.

INGRAHAM: And I've said this before, I'm going to keep saying this, this is what the Taliban does. The Taliban used to rip down historical markers, destroy churches, ISIS did the same thing, does the same thing. They don’t want any vestige of what was even if it’s bad. They don’t want any vestige even if it’s good they don’t want it.

ARROYO: But these are two iconic images of America. John Wayne and the sailor, release, freedom. They’re impugning America.