Writing for Freedom

Orwellian State Medicine

2012-01-06T02:54:00.000-12:00

A brain surgeon called into Mark Levin's radio show to report on a conference he recently attended in D.C. Under Obama's flavor of state-controlled health care, he says, patients will be regarded as "units," and those over 70 needing advanced neurosurgical intervention may be given "comfort care" instead of a needed operation. Here's the point: The decision will not be the doctor's to make. It will be made by an "ethics" committee of administrators, or what Sarah Palin called a Death Panel. All this and much more because people have been convinced that freedom doesn't work.

Sister Liz Mackie gets well-deserved recognition

2011-06-21T08:37:00.000-12:00

I have the honor of being one of Liz Mackie's brothers. Here's a story today about her recent retirement and her work helping families with cancer kids.

Liz Mackie rifles through an enormous folder and pulls out a yellowed Herald newspaper clipping.
"This is Ben Suggett," she says, pointing at the 1995 photo of the then eightyear-old boy. "I was at his wedding three summers ago," Mackie adds with a beaming smile.
Ben is just one of the hundreds of children Mackie has taught at Jamie's Preschool, a special school for kids with cancer, their siblings and other children with compromised immune systems.
"I keep in touch with the majority of the families over the years as much as I can, because I love everyone of the children I have had the honour of teaching," says Mackie.
On Wednesday -the last day of classes before the summer break -the 60-year-old "ageless" grandma with a teenager's figure is retiring after 19 years at the preschool run out of the basement at St. Andrew's United Church on Heritage Drive S.W.
Mackie says she initially declined the offer to work at Jamie's.
"I said no because I had all of these preconceived notions that working with kids with cancer would be very sad," says Mackie. But she was urged to meet the children before deciding.
"So I went and met the kids and I basically started right away and never left," she says, with a laugh.
Mackie looks around the STARS gym where the children go every Thursday to run around, jump on trampolines and just be normal kids. "This is a place of joy. It's a place of hope and it's a place of love. These kids and their parents have had an enormous impact on me," says Mackie.
"I've received so much more than I've given."
That last statement is one that the owner and founder of Jamie's Preschool and the parents Mackie has "come to love" disagree with adamantly.
"Liz is just a treasure," says Sheri Ewing, who started the preschool in 1986, when her own son, Jamie (who is now 28), was battling cancer and couldn't be around other children for fear of catching colds and the like.
"She is so much more than a great teacher who comes in to work three days a week. She goes way beyond the call of duty. She has the moms over to her house for regular potluck dinners, she takes them on spa days and is there for them 24/7," says Ewing.
Brandi Dickman simply calls Mackie "a godsend" and her "mentor."
Dickman met Mackie when her second child, Callim, was diagnosed with a neuroblastoma tumour the size of a grapefruit in his gut in September 1996. He was just nine months old.
While Jamie's is undoubtedly a safe place for children with weak immune systems to have a sense of normalcy as they undergo cancer treatments, Mackie has also turned it into a refuge and community of caring for the parents and siblings as well, says Dickman.
"In a life of crisis and chaos, Liz made Jamie's Preschool a sunny rock in a stormy sea," says Dickman, who recently became the community and events coordinator at the preschool.
Sadly, Callim passed away on his wish trip to Disneyland in February 1999 when he was just three.
"Liz was there for me every step of the way," recalls Dickman. "I would call her at 2 a.m. and I knew I would wake her up, but she never seemed to mind. She always knows when to just listen or when to say something. Liz has been the rock to so many of us because she exudes a kind of confidence to desperate parents."

Candace Cooke agrees. Even though her son, Kaidan, died four years ago at the age of 18 months, after a one-year battle with infant leukemia, she still brings her preschool-aged children -Isla, 3, and Ashton, five months, to the school to be a support to other moms living through the hell of having a child with cancer.
"After Kaidan died, Liz came to see us every day," says Cooke, 37, who has another son, Josh. "I was breaking down all the time, saying I didn't think that I would ever be happy again. Knowing that she had gone through this with other people really helped me a lot. It helped me believe in a future. She was just so warm.
"I used to call her in the middle of the night and just bawl away on the phone. I remember I called one time and I couldn't even talk and she just stayed with me on the phone and said, 'I'm here, Candace, I'm here.'"

Read the rest of the article.

Destroying lives in the name of immigration

2011-06-16T00:35:00.000-12:00

The state is not merely a bunch of bumbling, corrupt fools. When it regards matters as deadly serious, it turns arrogantly vicious. Lew Rockwell underscores this point in an article about state jackboots busting an honest enterprise in the western US.

The owners of Chuy's Mesquite Broiler in Phoenix and 13 other locations around western states have been kidnapped from their popular restaurants and dragged to jail. This will be followed by trial, and certain personal bankruptcy. They could face 80 years in prison. In the raid, "Homeland Security" stole their computers, their accounting and employment records, and walked out the door — just like a gang of thieves. The only difference is that these thugs operate under the cover of the law.

And what evil did these restaurateurs do? Were they poisoning people, stealing customers' wallets, secretly running an assassination conspiracy, sending in the predator drones against people they hate, or what? To lock anyone away for life is a shocking sentence, so surely the punishment must fit the crime. Psycho sniper murderers have gotten less.

What they are alleged to have done is to hire people who don't have the proper bureaucratic forms filled out for them. That's all. Nothing more. It is being done in the name of immigration enforcement and cracking down on illegals. The workers themselves are untouched by any of this. Their benefactors — and the benefactors of society — are the ones being targeted with police-state tactics.

"The Sovereign State of Congress"

2011-06-13T00:56:00.000-12:00

Gary North worked as a staffer for Congressman Ron Paul of Houston in 1976 and wrote an essay about his experiences a year later that was published in Remnant Review. "The rules and regulations that are strangling the citizens of the United States do not apply on Capitol Hill. They know what they are doing at least to this extent."

Read the full article.

Bilderberg 2011

2011-06-12T15:19:00.000-12:00

What do Jeff Bezos (founder & CEO of Amazon), Chris R. Hughes (co-founder of Facebook), Eric Schmidt (Executive Chairman, Google), Charlie Rose (TV interviewer), and David Rockefeller (Former Chariman of Chase Manhattan Bank) have in common?

They were all attendees at the 2011 Bilderberg Meeting in St. Moritz, Switzerland, according to Prison Planet.

Watch this YouTube video for more information.

Homeowner forecloses on BoA

2011-06-05T01:26:00.000-12:00

The bank tried to foreclose on a house that a couple had paid cash for. The bank prosecuted and lost, and the judge told the bank it had to pay for the couple's court fees.

"After more than 5 months of the judge's ruling, the bank still hadn't paid the legal fees, and the homeowner's attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank's assets."

Woman screams for help during TSA pat down

2011-06-02T15:17:00.000-12:00

And her son captured it on video.

"Mr. President" aka "The Führer"?

2011-05-26T03:34:00.000-12:00

There will soon be no official restrictions on what the president can do. As usual, most Americans could care less.

Osama bin Laden speaks - in 2001

2011-05-11T06:31:00.000-12:00

"I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people." - Usamah Bin-Ladin

Ron Paul: Declare victory and leave

2011-05-09T23:24:00.000-12:00

With the announced killing of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. should withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, says Ron Paul. "There is no reason for our presence in the region – unless indeed it was all about oil, nation-building, and remaking the Middle East and Central Asia."

Hopefully bin Laden does not get the last laugh. He claimed the 9/11 attacks were designed to get the US to spread its military dangerously and excessively throughout the Middle East, bankrupting us through excessive military spending as he did the Soviets, and to cause political dissention within the United States. Some 70 percent of Americans now believe we should leave Afghanistan yet both parties seem determined to stay. The best thing we could do right now is prove bin Laden a false prophet by coming home and ending this madness on a high note.

Welcome to 1984, Americans!

2011-05-09T23:14:00.000-12:00

Bin Laden's death serves too many agendas not to be seriously questioned, says Paul Craig Roberts.

Everyone knows we killed bin Laden. How could it be otherwise? We – the indispensable people, the virtuous nation, the world's only superpower, the white hats – were destined to prevail. No other outcome was possible.

No one will notice that those who fabricated the story forgot to show the kidney dialysis machine that, somehow, kept bin Laden alive for a decade. No doctors were on the premises.

No one will remember that Fox News reported in December, 2001, that Osama bin Laden had passed away from his illnesses.

If bin Laden beat all odds and managed to live another decade to await, unarmed and undefended, the arrival of the Navy SEALS last week, how it is possible that the 'terror mastermind,' who defeated not merely the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with those of America's European allies and Israel, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, airport security four times on the same morning, etc. etc., never enjoyed another success, not even a little, very minor one? What was the 'terror mastermind' doing for a decade after 9/11?

Chomsky on bin Laden

2011-05-09T15:22:00.001-12:00

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky writes:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

bin Laden knew too much to stand trial

2011-05-09T15:11:00.000-12:00

He was a "creature of American foreign policy," as Butler Shaffer describes him. Killing him Mafia-style and feeding his carcass to the fishes eliminates any possibility of a singing canary.

What about the various reports years ago claiming bin Laden had died of natural causes? Well, no one remembers those anymore, and besides, the Taliban has confirmed his most recent death. But what does that mean? If OBL is in fact still alive, he could very well prefer letting the world believe he's dead.

But what if Vito Obama really did make the hit on a real, live bin Laden? Why would the U.S. want to kill the man who's been the excuse for fattening the MIC? In a word, ratings. And besides, the MIC doesn't need OBL anymore.

Commentaries on the Osama bin Laden Murder

2011-05-06T02:25:00.004-12:00

Go to the usual mainstream sources for the triumphalism, etc., and the solemn memorials. Here I present views that challenge the "correct" reactions and viewpoints.

In no particular order:

When Liars Murder A Dead Man - Becky Akers

Bigger Than bin Laden – America’s New Public Enemy No.1 - Gerald Celente

The Agendas Behind the bin Laden News Event - Paul Craig Roberts

Doug Casey on Obama Killing Osama Interviewed by Louis James

Why bin Laden’s Ghost Is Smiling by Eric Margolis

Osama bin Laden’s Second Death by Paul Craig Roberts

Ron Paul — "Osama Bin Laden Is Dead... Time To Come Home" (video)

The US Is Editing 'The Killing of Osama' Film by Jack D. Douglas

Show us the shooter by Pepe Escobar

Media Scrambles as Bin Laden Story Crumbles by Alex Newman

My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death by Noam Chomsky

Dead Men Tell No Tales by jfl

Egypt shut down net with a switch

2011-02-10T08:06:00.000-12:00

From Wired.com:

The Egyptian government shut down most of its country’s internet not by phoning ISPs one at a time, but by simply throwing a switch in a crucial data center in Cairo.

That according to a February presentation to the Department of Homeland Security’s Infosec Technology Transition Council, obtained by Wired.com.

The presentation — made by Bill Woodcock, the research director of the Packet Clearing House — argues that the Egyptian Communciations Ministry acted quite responsibly in the procedure it used to cut ties from the net, after the shutdown was ordered by Egypt’s much-feared intelligence service.

Further:

The presentation concludes that the ministry’s course of action in obeying the orders may have some positive effects in the future: “Itʼs unlikely that Egyptʼs communications ministry will ever be asked to ﬂip that switch again.”

Here’s the timeline in the report (verbatim):

Tuesday, January 25:
Amn El Dawla, the State Security Intelligence Service, orders the blocking of Twitter, which was largely accomplished.

Wednesday, January 26:
The State Security Intelligence Service orders the blocking of Facebook, and DNS is blocked but this is not completely effective.

This was the second time they had tried to have Facebook blocked, but the previous attempt had been successfully countered by the communications ministry.

Arrests of people posting to the El Shaheeed and Yom Elsawra 25 January groups on Facebook begin.

Read the rest of the article.

If Egypt has a switch, what does the high-tech U.S. government have?

Thomas Edison on Success

2011-02-09T03:57:00.000-12:00

From today's article on Mises.org, "How Thomas Edison Succeeded":

"What do you think is the first requisite for success in your field, or any other?"

"The ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary."

"Do you have regular hours, Mr. Edison?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "I do not work hard now. I come to the laboratory about eight o'clock every day and go home to tea at six, and then I study or work on some problem until eleven, which is my hour for bed."

"Fourteen of 15 hours a day can scarcely be called loafing," I suggested.

"Well," he replied, "for 15 years I have worked on an average of 20 hours a day."

When he was 47 years old, he estimated his true age at 82, since working only eight hours a day would have taken till that time.

Mr. Edison sometimes worked 60 consecutive hours upon one problem. Then, after a long sleep, he was perfectly refreshed and ready for another.

A Run for Breakfast

Mr. Dickson, a neighbor and familiar, gives an anecdote told by Edison that well illustrates his untiring energy and phenomenal endurance. In describing his Boston experience, Edison said he bought Faraday's works on electricity, commenced to read them at three o'clock in the morning and continued until his roommate arose, when they started on their long walk to get breakfast. That object was entirely subordinated in Edison's mind to Faraday, and he suddenly remarked to his friend: "'Adams, I have got so much to do, and life is so short, that I have got to hustle,' and with that I started off on a dead run for my breakfast."

"I've known Edison since he was a boy of 14," said another friend; "and of my own knowledge I can say he never spent an idle day in his life. Often, when he should have been asleep, I have known him to sit up half the night reading. He did not take to novels or wild-western adventures, but read works on mechanics, chemistry, and electricity; and he mastered them too. But in addition to his reading, which he could only indulge in at odd hours, he carefully cultivated his wonderful powers of observation, till at length, when he was not actually asleep, it may be said he was learning all the time."

Not by Accident and Not for Fun

"Are your discoveries often brilliant intuitions? Do they come to you while you are lying awake nights?" I asked him.

"I never did anything worth doing by accident," he replied, "nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.

"I have always kept," continued Mr. Edison, "strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions. I have never had any time to put on electrical wonders, valuable only as novelties to catch the popular fancy."

"I Like It — I Hate It"

"What makes you work?" I asked with real curiosity. "What impels you to this constant, tireless struggle? You have shown that you care comparatively nothing for the money it makes you, and you have no particular enthusiasm for the attending fame. What is it? "

"I like it," he answered, after a moment of puzzled expression. "I don't know any other reason. Anything I have begun is always on my mind, and I am not easy while away from it, until it is finished; and then I hate it."

"Hate it?" I said.

"Yes," he affirmed, "when it is all done and is a success, I can't bear the sight of it. I haven't used a telephone in ten years, and I would go out of my way any day to miss an incandescent light."

Doing One Thing 18 Hours Is the Secret

"You lay down rather severe rules for one who wishes to succeed in life," I ventured," working 18 hours a day."

"Not at all," he said. "You do something all day long, don't you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o'clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most men, that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed.

"Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object — one thing to which they stick, letting all else go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application."

They harder they push, the harder we push back

2011-01-29T04:09:00.000-12:00

"The surveillance state is now entrenched," writes Michael Edwards. "Free speech is set to be eradicated; and the Internet kill switch has been placed in the White House, while it has been calmly announced that world is indeed run by 'Globocrats,' but not a conspiracy. And yet we are aware of it en masse. The alternative media, talk radio, lone activists, card-carrying organization members, and Facebook virtual activists are all something new for the managers of society to deal with. This certainly has not been present in past closed totalitarian systems.

"The dialogue is becoming heated to a point where the elite controllers seem to be worried about what they might have overlooked in their desire to predict and control mass populations. So much so that they have engaged us, seemingly looking for a truce . . . or perhaps a bait and switch. They have been pushed to the limit of revealing their structure and many of their actions because of free humanity's mass awakening. They now want to have a role within our human world; a place where they feel that they very well could be excluded. The new world being born through climatic and technological change is one that very well could be total chaos. In such a world, the all-encompassing State has no role; the individual regains control over their own actions and solutions to the problems which lie ahead. The worldwide protests taking place are a clear sign that individuals are feeling powerful even in the face of increasing threats. Each form of resistance is communicated on a global scale, and serves as an example to others, building into a powerful force of solidarity. The more oppressive the response by governments, the nearer to victory we are." (emphasis added)

Lew Rockwell on state aggression

2011-01-11T17:36:00.000-12:00

Lew's post is so good I repost it here completely. The only point I question is the apparent understatement of the murders committed by governments in the 20th century. In his review of Death by Government by R. J. Rummel (1994), Richard Ebeling writes:

How many people, in fact, have been killed by government violence in the 20th century? Not deaths in wars and civil wars among military combatants, but mass murder of civilians and innocent victims with either the approval or planning of governments — the intentional killings of their own subjects and citizens or people under their political control? The answer is: 169,198,000. If the deaths of military combatants are added to this figure, governments have killed 203,000,000 in the 20th century.

Even these figures are probably low. The point is the state is the bloodiest institution in human history.

Questioning the Legitimacy of the State
Posted by Lew Rockwell on January 11, 2011 12:34 PM

Jacob Weisberg of Slate knows who’s really to blame for the attempted murder of a congresswoman:

At the core of the far right’s culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government—a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Then it was focused on “government bureaucrats” and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama’s birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism.

So, if you do not accept the asserted right of a socially parastic group of officials, tax collectors, money-printers, redistributors, spies, regulators, planners, soldiers, jailers, capital punishers, and police–the US government–to rule and spy on every aspect of your life, to seize whatever amount of your property it deems proper, to send you and your children to kill in foreign lands, to read your emails and listen to your phone calls, to run your family, your business, your community: you foment murder. Does this mean, by the way, that those who promoted the recent aggressive wars of the US government, which have built a mountain of Muslim skulls under the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, are accessories to murder? Of course not. Anyone killed by the US government deserves it. Anyone seized in secret, renditioned to a federal torture facility, abused and and held in secret or even killed in secret, deserves it. To doubt the validity of such actions by the US government makes you no better than a government-trained bomber who bombed a government building.

In other words, we are to believe that what Murray Rothbard correctly called “a gang of thieves writ large,” the State, owns us. We refuse to be owned. And all over America and the world, more and more people, young people, especially, are coming to understand the anatomy of the State, and its filthiest activity, mass murder. It is the job of anarcho-capitalists and our allies precisely to delegitmatize that locus of aggressive violence, the State. Even our Austrian economics seeks peace and social cooperation above all else. We understand that government harms both, and prosperity, too.

Everyone knows that private criminality is wrong. The far-vaster public criminality, which gave the world more than 100 million murders in just the last century, remains enshrined in too many minds. Of course, the delegitmization process is, of necessity, non-violent, and not only for religious and other ethical reasons. It is the US government that has the atom bombs, the chemical and biological weapons, the armies, the spies, the secret police, the black ops, the CIA assassins, the mercenaries–a million and one instruments of horror. Even if we wanted to, and we do not, we could not possibly compete on those grounds. However, we have the truth, and when that truth is known and understood, the edifice of aggression can topple over, without violence. Freedom and peace: that is our hope, that is our prayer, that is our goal.

Good news for the FBI

2011-01-09T09:03:00.000-12:00

It what can only be regarded as a yawner in terms of its newsworthiness, Fox News claims the suspect in the Tucson shooting, Jared L. Loughner, passed an FBI background check before purchasing his firearm legally from the Tucson Sportsman's Warehouse.

Good news, though, because the FBI will almost certainly find its budget fattened for letting a nut gain access to a firearm. They'll need a massive boost in funding to conduct extensive psychiatric exams on all gun applicants to ensure something like this never happens again.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy

2011-01-09T05:29:00.001-12:00

How Bradley Manning Spends His Days

2010-12-27T09:55:00.002-12:00

In a statement issued by Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs:

PFC Manning is currently being held in maximum custody. Since arriving at the Quantico Confinement Facility in July of 2010, he has been held under Prevention of Injury (POI) watch.

His cell is approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length.

The cell has a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet.

The guards at the confinement facility are professional. At no time have they tried to bully, harass, or embarrass PFC Manning. Given the nature of their job, however, they do not engage in conversation with PFC Manning.

At 5:00 a.m. he is woken up (on weekends, he is allowed to sleep until 7:00 a.m.). Under the rules for the confinement facility, he is not allowed to sleep at anytime between 5:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. If he attempts to sleep during those hours, he will be made to sit up or stand by the guards.

He is allowed to watch television during the day. The television stations are limited to the basic local stations. His access to the television ranges from 1 to 3 hours on weekdays to 3 to 6 hours on weekends.

He cannot see other inmates from his cell. He can occasionally hear other inmates talk. Due to being a pretrial confinement facility, inmates rarely stay at the facility for any length of time. Currently, there are no other inmates near his cell.

From 7:00 p.m. to 9:20 p.m., he is given correspondence time. He is given access to a pen and paper. He is allowed to write letters to family, friends, and his attorneys.

Each night, during his correspondence time, he is allowed to take a 15 to 20 minute shower.

On weekends and holidays, he is allowed to have approved visitors see him from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m.

Read the rest.

Read David House's interview with Manning on December 18-19, 2010:

Manning related to me on December 19 2010 that his blankets are similar in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet. He stated explicitly that the blankets are not soft in the least and expressed concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet burns. The problem of carpet burns was exacerbated, he related, by the stipulation that he must sleep only in his boxer shorts as part of the longstanding POI order. Manning also stated on December 19 2010 that hallway-mounted lights shine through his window at night. This constant illumination is consistent with reports from attorney David Coombs’ blog that marines must visually inspect Manning as he sleeps. . . .

Based on Bradley Manning’s description of his detention to myself and to his attorney, there are clear, unavoidable contradictions with the Pentagon’s public statements about Manning. Because of the longstanding POI order, Manning is subjected to restrictions far beyond the minimum right of other “maximum custody” prisoners held in the same brig.

Since his arrest Bradley Manning has been neither a threat to himself nor others. Over the course of my visits to see Bradley in Quantico, it’s become increasingly clear that the severe, inhumane conditions of his detention are wearing on Manning. The extraordinary restrictions of Manning’s basic rights to sleep, exercise, and communicate under the Prevention of Injury order are unnecessary and should be lifted immediately.

Michael Moore Supports Julian Assange

2010-12-16T04:58:00.000-12:00

On Tuesday, December 14, 2010, Michael Moore said he was posting $20,000 of his own money as bail for Julian Assange. His reasons for doing so are consistent with libertarianism.

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London , the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again. . . .

Openness, transparency -- these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 -- after the Pentagon had made up the lie that our ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin -- there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.

Instead, secrets killed them.

For those of you who think it's wrong to support Julian Assange because of the sexual assault allegations he's being held for, all I ask is that you not be naive about how the government works when it decides to go after its prey. Please -- never, ever believe the "official story." And regardless of Assange's guilt or innocence (see the strange nature of the allegations here ), this man has the right to have bail posted and to defend himself. I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money -- and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

iPad & iPhone Christmas Concert

2010-12-15T04:22:00.000-12:00

North Point's iBand

Mercola: FNB's Vitamin D recommendations far too low

2010-12-13T03:51:00.000-12:00

Joseph Mercola:

On November 30, 2010, the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) released their updated recommendations for vitamin D (and calcium), which has sent shockwaves of disappointment through natural health community.

According to the FNB, the new recommended daily allowance (RDA) for pregnant women and adults up to 70 years of age is the same as that for infants and children – a measly 600 IU's. This despite the overwhelming evidence showing that vitamin D is extremely important for a wide variety of health conditions besides bone health, and that most people need about ten times this amount or more.

Rothbard: Libertarians Hate the State

2010-12-13T03:28:00.000-12:00

Murray Rothbard (Originally published in The Libertarian Forum, Vol. 10, No. 7, July, 1977):

I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don’t really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us.

Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between non-libertarian private police agencies. But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire which in turn is better than the current system. Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too. In short, there is no sign that David Friedman in any sense hates the existing American State or the State per se, hates it deep in his belly as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability. For there is no sense in Friedman that the State – any State – is a predatory gang of criminals.

Ron Paul: Wikileaks controversy a diversion

2010-12-13T03:18:00.000-12:00

Ron Paul:

We should view the WikiLeaks controversy in the larger context of American foreign policy. Rather than worry about the disclosure of embarrassing secrets, we should focus on our delusional foreign policy. We are kidding ourselves when we believe spying, intrigue, and outright military intervention can maintain our international status as a superpower while our domestic economy crumbles in an orgy of debt and monetary debasement.

WikiLeaks MIrrors

2010-12-10T03:17:00.000-12:00

As of December 10, 2010, WikiLeaks is mirrored on 1,559 sites.

Ron Paul on WikiLeaks

2010-12-10T03:05:00.000-12:00

Assange and Wikileaks - Dec. 8, 2010

2010-12-08T03:20:00.001-12:00

STD Fears Sparked Assange Case blog post by Michael S. Rozeff

WikiLeaks No Threat to Free Society by Steve Greenhut

The Wikileaks sex files

Still Not Convinced on Amazon Boycott by Bob Murphy

Don't Shoot Messenger for Revealing Uncomfortable Truths by Julian Assange

Australia blames U.S. for leaks, Assange in U.K. Jail - Reuters - "Suspected attacks by hackers sympathetic to Assange and against censorship brought down the websites of the prosecution Swedish authority and of Borgstrom's law office."

MasterCard site partially frozen by hackers in WikiLeaks 'revenge' - The Guardian - Operation: Payback' hacks into MasterCard site over payment network's decision to cease taking donations to WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange is denied bail - USA Today - "Visa said it would 'suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules.' MasterCard said it would suspend payments 'until the situation is resolved.' PayPal, a popular online payment service, has already cut its links to the website, and Swiss authorities closed Assange's new Swiss bank account on Monday, freezing tens of thousands of euros, according to his lawyers.

"WikiLeaks is still soliciting donations through bank transfers to affiliates in Iceland and Germany, as well as by mail to an address in Australia, Assange's birthplace."

Why WikiLeaks Is Winning Its Info War By MASSIMO CALABRESI, Time - "First, the U.S. government pushed WikiLeaks off the servers of Amazon, its U.S. host — thanks in part to an effort by the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee. After the rogue site was pushed off a smaller, backup host in the U.S., it moved first to a Swiss domain, then to a simple numeric one. WikiLeaks has complained, and some news outlets have reported, about apparent hacker attacks against the website. The effect of all that pressure, however, was very much like cutting the head off the mythical Hydra. By Tuesday evening, WikiLeaks listed 507 Web addresses that it said were hosting the site worldwide."

TIME's Julian Assange Interview - Richard Stengel - "JA: This organization [Wikileaks] in its four years of publishing history — we don't need to speculate, it has a history — has never caused an individual, as far as we can determine or as far anyone else can determine, to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned and so on. That is a record compared to the organizations that we are trying to expose who have literally been involved in the deaths of hundreds or thousands or, potentially over the course of many years, millions."

Truth in Chain s by Chris Floyd - "It has been, by any standard, an extraordinary campaign of vilification and persecution, wholly comparable to the kind of treatment doled out to dissidents in China or Burma. Lest we forget, WikiLeaks is a journalistic outlet – just like The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, all of whom are even now publishing the very same material – leaked classified documents -- available on WikiLeaks."

Mises on the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution

2010-12-02T03:12:00.000-12:00

Remarks About the Popular Interpretation of the "Industrial Revolution"

Ludwig von Mises

Human Action, Scholar’s Edition, pp. 613-619

It is generally asserted that the history of modern industrialism and especially the history of the British "Industrial Revolution" provide an empirical verification of the "realistic" or "institutional" doctrine and utterly explode the "abstract" dogmatism of the economists.(13)

The economists flatly deny that labor unions and government prolabor legislation can and did lastingly benefit the whole class of wage earners and raise their standard of living. But the facts, say the anti-economists, have refuted these fallacies. The statesman and legislators who enacted the factory acts displayed a better insight into reality than the economists. While laissez-faire philosophy, without pity and compassion, taught that the sufferings of the toiling masses are unavoidable, the commonsense of laymen succeeded in quelling the worst excesses of profit-seeking business. The improvement in the conditions of the workers is entirely an achievement of governments and labor unions.

Such are the ideas permeating most of the historical studies dealing with the evolution of modern industrialism. The authors begin by sketching an idyllic image of conditions as they prevailed on the eve of the "Industrial Revolution." At that time, they tell us, things were, by and large, satis- factory. The peasants were happy. So also were the industrial workers under the domestic system. They worked in their own cottages and en- joyed a certain economic independence since they owned a garden plot and their tools. But then "the Industrial Revolution fell like a war or a plague" on these people.(14) The factory system reduced the free worker to virtual slavery; it lowered his standard of living to the level of bare subsistence; in cramming women and children into the mills it destroyed family life and sapped the very foundations of society, morality, and public health. A small minority of ruthless exploiters had cleverly succeeded in imposing their yoke upon the immense majority.

The truth is that economic conditions were highly unsatisfactory on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The traditional social system was not elastic enough to provide for the needs of a rapidly increasing population. Neither farming nor the guilds had any use for the additional hands. Business was imbued with the inherited spirit of privilege and exclusive monopoly; its institutional foundations were licenses and the grant of a patent of monopoly; its philosophy was restriction and the prohibition of competition both domestic and foreign. The number of people for whom there was no room left in the rigid system of paternalism and government tutelage of business grew rapidly. They were virtually outcasts. The apathetic majority of these wretched people lived from the crumbs that fell from the tables of the established castes. In the harvest season they earned a trifle by occasional help on farms; for the rest they depended upon private charity and communal poor relief. Thousands of the most vigorous youths of these strata were pressed into the service of the Royal Army and Navy; many of them were killed or maimed in action; many more perished ingloriously from the hardships of the barbarous discipline, from tropical diseases, or from syphilis. (15) Other thousands, the boldest and most ruthless of their class, infested the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes. The authorities did not know of any means to cope with these individuals other than the poorhouse and the workhouse. The support the government gave to the popular resentment against the introduction of new inventions and labor-saving devices made things quite hopeless.

The factory system developed in a continuous struggle against innumerable obstacles. It had to fight popular prejudice, old established customs, legally binding rules and regulations, the animosity of the authorities, the vested interests of privileged groups, the envy of the guilds. The capital equipment of the individual firms was insufficient, the provision of credit extremely difficult and costly. Technological and commercial experience was lacking. Most factory owners failed; comparatively few succeeded. Profits were sometimes considerable, but so were losses. It took many decades until the common practice of reinvesting the greater part of profits earned accumulated adequate capital for the conduct of affairs on a broader scale.

That the factories could thrive in spite of all these hindrances was due to two reasons. First there were the teachings of the new social philosophy expounded by the economists. They demolished the prestige of Mercantilism, paternalism, and restrictionism. They exploded the superstitious belief that labor-saving devices and processes cause unemployment and reduce all people to poverty and decay. The laissez-faire economists were the pioneers of the unprecedented technological achievements of the last two hundred years.

Then there was another factor that weakened the opposition to innovations. The factories freed the authorities and the ruling landed aristocracy from an embarrassing problem that had grown too large for them. They provided sustenance for the masses of paupers. They emptied the poor houses, the workhouses, and the prisons. They converted starving beggars into self-supporting breadwinners.

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.

It is deplorable that such conditions existed. But if one wants to blame those responsible, one must not blame the factory owners who - driven by selfishness, of course, and not by "altruismn” - did all they could to eradicate the evils. What had caused these evils was the economic order of the pre-capitalistic era, the order of the "good old days."

In the first decades of the Industrial Revolution the standard of living of the factory workers was shockingly bad when compared with the contemporary conditions of the upper classes and with the present conditions of the industrial masses. Hours of work were long, the sanitary conditions in the workshops deplorable. The individual's capacity to work was used up rapidly. But the fact remains that for the surplus population which the enclosure movement had reduced to dire wretchedness and for which there was literally no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production, work in the factories was salvation. These people thronged into the plants for no reason other than the urge to improve their standard of living.

The laissez-faire ideology and its offshoot, the "Industrial Revolution," blasted the ideological and institutional barriers to progress and welfare. They demolished the social order in which a constantly increasing number of people were doomed to abject need and destitution. The processing trades of earlier ages had almost exclusively catered to the wants of the well-to-do. Their expansion was limited by the amount of luxuries the wealthier strata of the population could afford. Those not engaged in the production of primary commodities could earn a living only as far as the upper classes were disposed to utilize their skill and services.

But now a different principle came into operation. The factory system inaugurated a new mode of marketing as well as of production. Its characteristic feature was that the manufactures were not designed for the consumption of a few well-to-do only, but for the consumption of those who had hitherto played but a negligible role as consumers. Cheap things for the many, was the objective of the factory system. The classical factory of the early days of the Industrial Revolution was the cotton mill. Now, the cotton goods it turned out were not something the rich were asking for. These wealthy people clung to silk, linen, and cambric. Whenever the factory with its methods of mass production by means of power-driven machines invaded a new branch of production, it started with the production of cheap goods for the broad masses. The factories turned to the production of more refined and therefore more expensive goods only at a later stage, when the unprecedented improvement in the masses' standard of living which they caused made it profitable to apply the methods of mass production also to these better articles. Thus, for instance, the factory-made shoe was for many years bought only by the "proletarians" while the wealthier consumers continued to patronize the custom shoemakers. The much talked about sweatshops did not produce clothes for the rich, but for people in modest circumstances. The fashionable ladies and gentlemen preferred and still do prefer custom-made frocks and suits.

The outstanding fact about the Industrial Revolution is that it opened an age of mass production for the needs of the masses. The wage earners are no longer people toiling merely for other people's well-being. They themselves are the main consumers of the products the factories turn out. Big business depends upon mass consumption. There is, in present-day America, not a single branch of big business that would not cater to the needs of the masses. The very principle of capitalist entrepreneurship is to provide for the common man. In his capacity as consumer the common man is the sovereign whose buying or abstention from buying decides the fate of entrepreneurial activities. There is in the market economy no other means of acquiring and preserving wealth than by supplying the masses in the best and cheapest way with all the goods they ask for.

Blinded by their prejudices, many historians and writers have entirely failed to recognize this fundamental fact. As they see it, wage earners toil for the benefit of other people. They never raise the question who these "other" people are.

Mr. and Mrs. Hammond tell us that the workers were happier in 1760 than they were in 1830. (16) This is an arbitrary value judgment. There is no means of comparing and measuring the happiness of different people and of the same people at different times. We may agree for the sake of argument that an individual who was born in 1740 was happier in 1760 than in 1830. But let us not forget that in 1770 (according to the estimate of Arthur Young) England had 8.5 million inhabitants, while in 1831 (according to the census) the figure was 16 million. (17) This conspicuous increase was mainly conditioned by the Industrial Revolution. With regard to these additional Englishmen the assertion of the eminent historians can only be approved by those who endorse the melancholy verses of Sophocles: "Not to be born is, beyond all question, the best; but when a man has once seen the light of day, this is next best, that speedily he should return to that place whence he came."

The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business. But as the entrepreneurs grew richer, the sons of successful businessmen began to intrude into the circles of the ruling class. The highborn gentlemen envied the wealth of the parvenus and resented their sympathies with the reform movement. They hit back by investigating the material and moral conditions of the factory hands and enacting factory legislation.

The history of capitalism in Great Britain as well as in all other capitalist countries is a record of an unceasing tendency toward the improvement in the wage earners' standard of living. This evolution coincided with the development of pro-labor legislation and the spread of labor unionism on the one hand and with the increase in the marginal productivity of labor on the other hand. The economists assert that the improvement in the workers' material conditions is due to the increase in the per capita quota of capital invested and the technological achievements which the employment of this additional capital brought about. As far as labor legislation and union pressure did not exceed the limits of what the workers would have got without them as a necessary consequence of the acceleration of capital accumulation as compared with population, they were superfluous. As far as they exceeded these limits, they were harmful to the interests of the masses. They delayed the accumulation of capital thus slowing down the tendency toward a rise in the marginal productivity of labor and in wage rates. They conferred privileges on some groups of wage earners at the expense of other groups. They created mass unemployment and decreased the amount of products available for the workers in their capacity as consumers.

The apologists of government interference with business and of labor unionism ascribe all the improvements in the conditions of the workers to the actions of governments and unions. Except for them, they contend, the workers' standard of living would be no higher today than it was in the early years of the factory system.

It is obvious that this controversy cannot be settled by appeal to historical experience. With regard to the establishment of the facts there is no disagreement between the two groups. Their antagonism concerns the interpretation of events, and this interpretation must be guided by the theory chosen. The epistemological and logical considerations which determine the correctness or incorrectness of a theory are logically and temporally antecedent to the elucidation of the historical problem involved. The historical facts as such neither prove nor disprove any theory. They need to be interpreted in the light of theoretical insight.

Most of the authors who wrote the history of the conditions of labor under capitalism were ignorant of economics and boasted of this ignorance. However, this contempt for sound economic reasoning did not mean that they approached the topic of their studies without prepossession and without bias in favor of any theory. They were guided by the popular fallacies concerning governnental omnipotence and the alleged blessings of labor unionism. It is beyond question that the Webbs as well as Lujo Brentano and a host of minor authors were at the very start of their studies imbued with a fanatical dislike of the market economy and an enthusiastic endorsement of the doctrines of socialism and interventionism. They were certainly honest and sincere in their convictions and tried to do their best. Their candor and probity exonerates them as individuals; it does not exonerate them as historians. However pure the intentions of a historian may be, there is no excuse for his recourse to fallacious doctrines. The first duty of a historian is to examine with the utmost care all the doctrines to which he resorts in dealing with the subject matter of his work. If he neglects to do this and naively espouses the garbled and confused ideas of popular opinion, he is not a historian but an apologist and propagandist.

The antagonism between the two opposite points of view is not merely a historical problem. It refers no less to the most burning problems of the present day. It is the matter of controversy in what is called in present-day America the problem of industrial relations.

Let us stress one aspect of the matter only. Vast areas -- Eastern Asia, the East Indies, Southern and Southeastern Europe, Latin America -- are only superficially affected by modern capitalism. Conditions in these countries [in mid-twentieth century] by and large do not differ from those of England on the eve of the "Industrial Revolution." There are millions and millions of people for whom there is no secure place left in the traditional economic setting. The fate of these wretched masses can be improved only by industrialization. What they need most is entrepreneurs and capitalists. As their own foolish policies have deprived these nations of the further enjoyment of the assistance imported foreign capital hitherto gave them, they must embark upon domestic capital accumulation. They must go through all the stages through which the evolution of Western industrialism had to pass. They must start with comparatively low wage rates and long hours of work. But, deluded by the doctrines prevailing in present-day Western Europe and North America, their statesmen think that they can proceed in a different way. They encourage labor-union pressure and alleged pro-labor legislation. Their interventionist radicalism nips in the bud all attempts to create domestic industries. These men do not comprehend that industrialization cannot begin with the adoption of the precepts of the International Labor Office and the principles of the American Congress of Industrial Organizations. Their stubborn dogmatism spells the doom of the Indian and Chinese coolies, the Mexican peons, and millions of other peoples, desperately struggling on the verge of starvation.

Notes:

(13)The attribution of the phrase "the Industrial Revolution" to the reigns of the two last Hanoverian Georges was the outcome of deliberate attempts to melodramatize economic history in order to fit it into the Procrustean Marxian schemes. The transition from medieval methods of production to those of the free enterprise system was a long process that started centuries before 1760 and, even in England, was not finished in 1830. Yet, it is true that England's industrial development was considerably accelerated in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is therefore permissible to use the term "Industrial Revolution" in the examination of the emotional connotations with which Fabianism, Marxism, the Historical School, and Institutionalism have loaded it.

(14) J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer 1760-1832 (2nd ed. London, 1920) p. 4.

(15) In the Seven Years War 1,512 British seamen were killed in battle while 133,708 died of disease or were missing. Cf. W.L.Dorn, Competition for Empire 1740-1763 (New York, 1940), p. 114

(16) J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, loc. cit.

(17) F. C . Dietz, An Economic History of England (New York, 1942), pp. 279 and 392.

Wikileaks takes Obama at his word

2010-11-30T05:20:00.001-12:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the "release of hundreds of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks" "tears at the fabric" of government.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder "condemned the disclosures as having put at risk the safety of diplomats and other American government personnel."

"Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called the release very damaging to U.S. interests."

But "New York Times Editor Bill Keller defended the release of the information, telling All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel 'it's history in real time.'"

And President Obama? On January 21, 2009 he made this announcement to his senior staff and cabinet secretaries:

For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.

Emphasis added. No doubt Hillary would say I'm taking his remark out of context.

To no one's surprise, Wikileaks web site came under a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Sunday, "just as it was publishing the first of what it says are 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables. Such attacks normally are done by flooding a website with requests for data."

New CPR Technique

2010-11-28T01:38:00.000-12:00

Developed at the University of Arizona, the continuous chest compression technique is more effective and easier to administer. Watch the six-minute video for details.

Senator Jay Rockeller Praises TSA Chief

2010-11-23T04:26:00.000-12:00

Being a creature of government the TSA is not subject to the market forces of competition and profit and loss. It is instead sustained by the government methods of coercion and propaganda. If it were a market entity its stock would've plummeted and it would likely be filing for protection under Chapter 11. But due to popular demand the market's voice has been silenced because it is allegedly flawed and opposed to the interests of the general public.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing air travel, praised TSA chief John Pistole during a Senate hearing recently: "I Think You're Doing A Terrific Job."

This is reminiscent of Bush's comment about Mike Brown, the former FEMA head, following that agency's predictable ineptitude in handling the Katrina disaster: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Three days after Bush's comment, the embattled Brown turned in his resignation. But FEMA is still with us, with more muscle and more money.

Someday a U.S. military exercise will go seriously awry and a major city will get wiped out. Will the president use his bully pulpit to reassure us of the fine job the military is doing to secure our precious freedoms?

Longest Home Run Ever

2010-11-10T11:03:00.000-12:00

ESPN’s John Brenkus did some calculations that would seemingly making hitting a home run in major league baseball a virtual impossibility. I would say something is missing from his calculations. He might agree.

A pitcher throwing a fastball at 99 mph will get the ball to home plate in 395 milliseconds. It takes 400 milliseconds to blink.

A lot has to happen in those 395 milliseconds. It takes the first 100 just for the batter to see the ball in free flight and get an image of it to his brain. If a decision is made to swing, the batter generally has a grand total of 150 milliseconds to get the bat around and through the strike zone.

There's more:

And even if his timing is perfect, he still has to put the “sweet spot” of the bat within an eighth of an inch of the correct spot on the ball. To give you an idea of the margin of error, the width of an average pencil is twice as big as the margin of error on a major league bat.

Most pitchers don't throw at 99 mph, but you get the idea. And it makes Mickey Mantle's feat of hitting a 565-foot homer on April 17, 1953 all the more mind-boggling.

Police States Implode

2010-10-31T05:31:00.000-12:00

Gary North writes:

The police State is doomed. It cannot possibly keep up with the constant innovation of society. It cannot gain access to enough resources to maintain control. It wastes the resources it commandeers.

The free market is winning. The attempts of the Federal Reserve and Congress to delay the readjustment of capital pricing goes on, but these attempts are not bringing the promised recovery.

The voters are growing restless. They have been promised miracles by the politicians. These promises are visibly disintegrating. We are seeing a loss of faith.

The key to government control is voluntary compliance. Without self-government, the civil government cannot exercise control. Self-government relies on widespread trust far more than widespread fear.

Widespread trust is fading. Widespread fear will fade with it.

All about sugar

2010-10-08T02:22:00.001-12:00

I read an article in Reader's Digest many years ago titled Killer Sugar. It's probably outdated in many respects but not in its conclusion, as expressed in the article's title. But sugar takes many forms and not all are equally bad, and its effects on our health can be moderated by other foods we eat. Raw honey, for example, has a glycemic index (GI) of about 30, which is considered low and relatively safe, whereas baked potatoes, watermelon, corn flakes, and white bread are in the high GI range of 70 and above. From Wikipedia:

The glycemic index, glycaemic index, or GI is a measure of the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels. Carbohydrates that break down quickly during digestion and release glucose rapidly into the bloodstream have a high GI; carbohydrates that break down more slowly, releasing glucose more gradually into the bloodstream, have a low GI.

A low-GI food will release glucose more slowly and steadily. A high-GI food causes a more rapid rise in blood glucose levels and is suitable for energy recovery after endurance exercise or for a person experiencing hypoglycemia.

The glycemic effect of foods depends on a number of factors such as the type of starch (amylose versus amylopectin), physical entrapment of the starch molecules within the food, fat and protein content of the food and organic acids or their salts in the meal — adding vinegar, for example, will lower the GI. The presence of fat or soluble dietary fiber can slow the gastric emptying rate, thus lowering the GI. In general, unrefined breads with higher amounts of fiber have a lower GI value than white breads. Many brown breads, however, are treated with enzymes to soften the crust, which makes the starch more accessible (high GI).

While adding butter or oil will lower the GI of a meal, the GI ranking does not change. That is, with or without additions, there is still a higher blood glucose curve after white bread than after a low-GI bread such as pumpernickel.

Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple has published what he calls The Definitive Guide to Sugar. Here is his list of warnings about sugar:

Sugar stimulates a physiological stressor-reaction cascade that provokes adrenaline and cortisol release and thickens the blood.
Sugar effectively disables your immune system by impairing white blood cells’ functioning.
Sugar decreases your body’s production of leptin, a hormone critical for appetite regulation.
Sugar induces significant oxidative stress in the body.
Sugar appears to fuel cancer cells. **[See below] (Check out Free the Animal for much more on the cancer connection.) [In particular, see this article.]
Sugar promotes fat storage and weight gain.
Sugar disrupts the effective transfer of amino acids to muscle tissue.
Sugar intake over time spurs insulin resistance, subsequent Type II diabetes and the entire host of related health issues like nerve damage and cardiovascular disease.

And sugar is also addictive. Sisson writes:

A common theory says that we evolved to crave sweet tastes in order to seek out healthy fruits to diversify our diets. The problem comes in the current age when our inclination is bombarded with the likes of Coco Puffs, Snickers and pudding packs. . . .

Sugar raises serotonin levels, and that boost can easily figure into [your sugar] cravings. But guess what? Exercise raises serotonin as well. If you can, plan your workouts around the time of day when cravings tend to hit.

Read his post.

** "The quest is not to eliminate sugars or carbohydrates from the diet but rather to control blood glucose within a narrow range to help starve the cancer and bolster immune function. The glycemic index is a measure of how a given food affects blood-glucose levels, with each food assigned a numbered rating. The lower the rating, the slower the digestion and absorption process, which provides a healthier, more gradual infusion of sugars into the bloodstream."

Teaching your kids about the state

2010-10-06T01:57:00.001-12:00

Lew Rockwell published an outstanding satire from the late Joseph Sobran today. How do you educate your kids on the true nature of the modern state? Sobran tells how he did it:

When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is "fair." Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being "selfish" and "greedy." Later in life he will thank you.

Make as many rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands you haven't yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic government.

The Tea Party won't save us

2010-10-04T09:25:00.000-12:00

To many, the Tea Party looks like the ideal weapon to extinguish the ruinous policies of the establishment. But as Lew Rockwell explains, this won't happen. First, many Tea Party members hold inconsistent views on liberty.

Its activists tend to be good on specific economic issues like taxes, spending, stimulus, and healthcare. They worry about government intervention in these areas and can talk a good game.

But just as with old-time conservatives, there are many issues on which the Tea Party tends toward inconsistency. The military and the issue of war is a major one. Many have bought into the line that the greatest threat this country faces domestically is the influx of adherents of Islam; in international politics, they tend to favor belligerence toward any regime that is not a captive of US political control.

On immigration, the Tea Party ethos favors national IDs and draconian impositions on businesses rather than market solutions like cutting welfare. On social and cultural issues, they can be as confused as the Christian Right, believing that it is the job of government to right all wrongs and punish sin.

Then there is the problem of what happens to defenders of liberty when they win an election:

They are leaned on by their new colleagues, the party elites, related financial interests, the press, and the entire system of which they are now part. Are they going to make themselves enemies of that system, or are they going to work within the system in order to achieve reform, and not just for one term but more terms down the line? Doing a good job means being part of the structure; doing a bad job means being an enemy of the very system that they now serve.

Which choice do they make? The same choice that everyone else in office makes (Ron Paul being the lone exception in all of human history). It is for this reason that newly seated "revolutionary" politicians will betray those who put them in power. It happens like clockwork, same as day turns to night.

Rockwell concludes: "We can state with confidence, all else being equal, that even the best electoral outcome will not lead to actual cuts in the power of government over our lives."

Has US Become a True Police State?

2010-09-25T05:37:00.000-12:00

In an essay called "It Is Official: The US Is a Police State," one of my favorite writers, Paul Craig Roberts, argues that:

An American Police State was inevitable once Americans let “their” government get away with 9/11. Americans are too gullible, too uneducated, and too jingoistic to remain a free people. As another Nazi leader Herman Goering said, “ The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace-makers for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger.”

This is precisely what the Bush and Obama regimes have done. America, as people of my generation knew it, no longer exists.

In a true police state, a libertarian like Ron Paul would be eliminated from public view. He would not be appearing frequently on TV. He wouldn't appear at all. He would be silenced. The government always has various options, and it might decide to murder him, as it likely did JFK. The important point is, it would not only have the power to silence him, it would exercise that power. So far it hasn't. He's getting the rabble roused, but other than that he's harmless. Big government marches on. Let him talk. The fact that he has little effect will prove that people want government to grow indefintiely. Slavery will seem like the people's choice.

In a true police state, the internet would be controlled to the point that no serious criticism of the government would be tolerated; an article like PCR's would be censored and its author arrested for providing "material support" to terrorism. Lew Rockwell would find his website shut down. This blog wouldn't exist. A growing government crushes what remains of our liberty, it will never stop, and it has every reason to be pleased with its progress, but there's still work to do.

As we move closer to a one-world superstate and a global central banking system printing money at will, the prospects for complete state control of our lives in an Orwellian sense becomes more realistic. Almost no one believes "1984" is a plausible scenario, which is one reason it becomes increasingly plausible. Did the German people of 1927 foresee the Germany of 1939? The Russian people foresee the horror of Stalin?

We're in deep trouble, but we still have a fighting chance. Government is doing everything wrong to get the economy moving again. As painful as this will be, the coming implosion may be our best hope for diluting the power of the state.

The Establishment has good reason to worry

2010-09-18T08:10:00.002-12:00

In an email today from John Tate, president of Campaign for Liberty, he notes some of the recent defeats the pro-government forces have suffered:

Dear Friend of Liberty,

This isn’t a good year to be part of the establishment.

Millions of Americans have had enough of runaway spending, shadowy Federal Reserve agreements, and lack of any respect for constitutional limits.

Legislators are used to hearing from angry constituents.

They’re not accustomed to watching one another be sent into early retirement.

Pro-TARP Senator Bob Bennett didn’t even make it out of the Utah Republican convention in early May to be eligible for another term. Audit the Fed supporter and Tea Party-backed Mike Lee was eventually chosen by Republican voters to be their nominee.

Pro-ObamaCare Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln just barely survived her primary and now trails her Republican challenger.

Florida’s Charlie Crist bolted from the Republican Party for an Independent run to keep his Senate hopes alive. His poll numbers and political future are now in a free fall as he scrambles to repudiate virtually every issue he once claimed to support.

Senate candidate Rand Paul handily defeated Kentucky’s Secretary of State Trey Grayson (who had been crowned the nominee by Washington GOP insiders months before the vote) in the Republican primary and leads Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway in general election polling.

After he switched parties just to save his political career, Arlen Specter lost to Joe Sestak in the Pennsylvania Democrat Senate primary in May.

Ken Buck defeated GOP establishment-supported Jane Norton in the Colorado Republican Senate primary.

Sharron Angle is facing off against pro-Big Government and anti-Audit the Fed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after defeating early favorite Sue Lowden in the Nevada primary.

In Alaska, Republican candidate and another pro-Audit the Fed Republican, Joe Miller, came out of relative obscurity to defeat pro-TARP incumbent Lisa Murkowski in the Senate primary.

And just this past week, despite fierce attacks from Republican Party insiders, Christine O’Donnell shocked the establishment by defeating pro-Patriot Act, pro-Brady Bill, and pro-Cap and Tax Representative Mike Castle for the right to run for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat.

Karl Rove, who we know is a genius (or so we’ve been repeatedly told), exemplified the insiders’ reaction to what has been happening by trying to sabotage O’Donnell after she won. A day later, and facing a backlash from angry tea partiers (as well as a long-deserved loss of credibility), Rove switched gears to support O’Donnell.

Today, hundreds of grassroots activists are gathering in Richmond, Virginia to join Judge Andrew Napolitano in taking a stand for states’ rights and against an out of control federal government. They’re not only hearing some powerful speeches but are participating in training sessions to learn proven techniques to reclaim the Republic beginning in their own backyards.

Much to Congress’ chagrin, we’re not stopping at contacting legislators over the phone and via email.

C4L is getting the word out about where office holders and candidates stand on the issues that are important to us through our survey program. Our members are taking part in public forums, running for local and national office, knocking on doors to sign up more concerned citizens to take action, and spreading the message that we will no longer allow our lives to be centrally planned from Washington, D.C.

Simply stated... we’re taking the fight directly to the statists.

They’re worried about what’s coming in November and beyond. And rightly so.

We’re just getting warmed up.

In Liberty,

John Tate

President

Eric Margolis on 9-11-01

2010-09-11T14:33:00.002-12:00

"If the official story about 9/11 is true, the attacks caught the Bush administration asleep on guard duty." - Eric Margolis, 9-11-10.

He adds:

On 28 February, 1933, fire, set by a Dutch Jew, ravaged the Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag. While the Reichstag’s ruins were still smoking, Adolf Hitler’s government declared a war against "terrorism." A "Decree for the Protection of People and State" was promulgated suspending all legal protections of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberties. The Reichstag fire allowed the government to round up "terrorism" suspects without due process of law and made police powers near absolute.

Sound familiar? . . . .

So what, in the end, can we conclude?
1. We still do not know the real story about 9/11.
2. The official version is not credible.
3. 9/11 was used to justify invading strategic Afghanistan and oil-rich Iraq.
4. The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry.
5. 9/11 boosted pro-Israel neoconservatives, formerly a fringe group, into power, and with them America’s totalitarian far right.
6. Bush’s unprovoked war against Iraq destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies.
7. 9/11 put America in what may turn out to be a permanent state of war with the Muslim world – a key goal of the neoconservatives .

But I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up. Just, perhaps, the Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to blame.

Rising Sea Levels? A Big Lie

2010-08-30T04:22:00.003-12:00

As man-made emissions warm the globe, the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt and bring on the Apocalypse, unless governments impose draconian spending and regulatory measures to slow the process. According to a UN commission the sea level will rise some 17 inches by year 2100. According to Al Gore, the the level will increase by 20 feet. Tiny island nations will vanish. Certain cities like San Francisco and Shanghai will be half under water.

Dissent from this view is not tolerated in Establishment circles, but yet we have dissenters. One who thinks differently on sea level changes is Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner. Mörner is the former chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. He has been studying sea level changes across the planet for 35 years and says the talk about catastrophic sea changes is one big scare story.

Read about it here.

Wikileaks exposes the racket of war

2010-07-31T05:21:00.000-12:00

These three articles (among others) explain how the heroics of Wikileaks may SAVE American lives:

1. Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers by Robert Sheer
What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our president’s agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively homegrown.

2. WikiLeaks: Who's Hiding What and Why by Fred Reed
Two ways exist of looking at WikiLeaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to the enemy and endanger the lives of Our Boys.

Implicit in the Foxian view is a vague idea that the leaks give away important – well, stuff. You know, maybe frequencies of something or other, or locations of ambushes or, well, things. Important things. The Taliban will use this information to kill American soldiers. The notion is vague, as are those who hold it, but emotionally potent.

The other view, held usually by people who have some experience of Washington, is that the Pentagon is worried not about the divulging of tactical secrets, but about public relations. WikiLeaks doesn’t endanger soldiers, insists this way of looking at things, but the war itself, and all the juiceful contracts and promotions and so on entailed by wars.

3. US Treasury Is Running on Fumes by Paul Craig Roberts
The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”

What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.

Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.

And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.

Publish Your Book on iPad and other eReaders

2010-07-16T01:48:00.002-12:00

Smashwords will do it for no charge, taking only a small percentage from net sales once your books are published. From the Smashwords website:

Publishing on Smashwords is as easy as 1-2-3:

Step 1: Carefully format your manuscript as a Microsoft Word .doc file per the guidelines in the Smashwords Style Guide and, if you desire mainstream distribution via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony and other retailers, study the guidelines for inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog. Apple and Sony require ISBNs, which you can acquire from our ISBN Manager.

Step 2: Click Publish on the home page and follow the simple steps to publish your book instantly

Step 3: Read the free Smashwords Book Marketing Guide for valuable book marketing tips!

Is it real? iPhone 4 Attenuation Problem

2010-07-15T02:11:00.002-12:00

For some iPhone 4 users, the answer is yes, it is real and annoying. And no, they don't want to stick tape on it, hold it a certain way, or enclose it in a bumper case to fix the problem. Nor should they have to.

After having used one for 16 days now, I can happily report that I have no problems with attenuation at all, and I've used it in talking to people located near and far, and in various places on my end. I've paid no attention at all to how I hold the phone, and I trust I hold it as anyone would in making a call. My computer-savvy 5-year-old grandson has used it as a phone without any problems. At this point I can say the iPhone 4 is the greatest gadget I've ever owned or used, and I've worked with computers all my adult life.

From what I've read most people have no complaints about attenuation. The problem is significant for some users, though, and Apple should offer to fix it in some reasonable manner. The company has scheduled an iPhone 4 press conference tomorrow, Friday, July 17, 2010, and they will likely tell us how it plans to remedy the defective units.

Did Lee fight for the North?

2010-07-10T00:47:00.003-12:00

John Avery Emison's Lincoln Uber Alles argues that the war of 1861-1865 was not the War Between the States, but the Federal Government's war on the states -- all states, north and south. Lincoln had no reservations about sending troops to any part of the country to shut down opposition to his policies and decrees. When Lee surrendered he gave up the political sovereignty of the individual states to the supremacy of the national government. The voluntary union had been replaced by a coercive union. In this sense, Robert E. Lee was fighting for the rights of states on both sides of the Mason - Dixon line. Consequently, we lost the Founder's republic and witnessed the laying of the foundation of today's leviathan state that, for propaganda purposes, still insists on celebrating Independence Day.

iMovie on iPhone 4

2010-07-03T03:47:00.003-12:00

In spite of the anti-market mania of the last - well, forever - people still manage to make some amazing things and offer them to the world. One of those products is the Apple iPhone 4. Last night I put together a short movie on the device using iMovie for iPhone 4.

Twenty years ago, or less, it would've been near fantasy to imagine creating a movie on a phone then posting it for the whole world to see. It is the freedom to innovate and profit that made it possible.

Who's the enemy?

2010-07-02T15:36:00.002-12:00

Ron Paul on YouTube: Why are we wasting lives and money fighting meaningless wars?

Simple-minded appreciation

2010-06-30T11:17:00.005-12:00

I ordered an iPhone 4 last Thursday, June 24, and it arrived Tuesday morning, June 29. So far, it's wonderful. I especially like the high-resolution display and the new camera. Reading a document or web page on this device makes you want to read everything on it.

What really amazes me about the iPhone 4 is the manner in which my order was filled. It came directly from the factory in China, by way of FedEx. Here is a summary of its journey:

When the FedEx driver delivered it to my door, I was greeted thusly:

To the best of my knowledge, everyone who participated in getting the device from the factory in China to my home in Georgia did so voluntarily and profited from it. No central czar dictated that it should be done this way, in this time frame, at this price. From what we know of history and economic theory, it was the absence of such a czar that made the whole operation possible.

It's amazing that in this age of government corruption and meddling that something like the iPhone could be made and delivered voluntarily, and in such a global manner. No one was killed, intimated, or robbed in the process - other than the taxes paid to the governments involved. Through the international division of labor, people produced and traded the product of their efforts for a certain payment, all to serve me, who to them is a faceless consumer, at a price I could afford. And I ended up with a device I could not have built on my own if I had ten lifetimes to live.

We made one another a little richer in the process. It's for "miracles" like this that we should all fight for liberty.

The iPhone 4 Thunderbolt

2010-06-25T01:33:00.003-12:00

Of all the criticisms leveled at the users of Apple products, the one that emerges most often is the charge that they're lemmings blindly following a cult leader. What an odd accusation it is, given that Apple made history with its anti-"1984" Superbowl commercial in 1984. Has the the company become the IBM of the mobile technology field, a market force so big that competitors clone Apple products and stick their labels on them, hoping that lower prices (made possible by minimal or nonexistent R&D overhead) will keep them solvent? Not at all. Apple is only the number two smartphone maker. Research in Motion's Blackberry has the biggest market share in the U.S. Its other competitors, Google and Microsoft, have the resources that could relegate Apple to a small player in a big field.

That still doesn't mean Apple users aren't lemmings, though. Certainly there are people who buy Apple products with little or no reason for doing so, other than to associate themselves with a certain lifestyle or to see Steve Jobs make keynote speeches in San Francisco. Could such technophobes be considered lemmings? Sure. But this is true of any product. What gives Apple critics a certain leverage is the claim that Apple's fans are buying a technically inferior product. The charge is they don't research the market and buy the best product - they fall under the Apple spell and obey their suggestions uncritically.

Apple might seem to have more than its share of lemmings, but that could be more a reflection of repeated end-user satisfaction and trust than uninformed obedience. Apple creates innovative products with features people want - and in some cases, dream about. And the features usually work as advertised. It makes sense to stay with a company that satisfies customers so well. Loyal customers are being mistaken for lemmings. As for uncritical acceptance of Apple's offerings, check out an Apple forum sometime and read some of the rants the "lemmings" make about their master's products.

Now we have the iPhone 4. At least one reputable source gives it a big thumbs up, and they followed this with suggestions on what to do with it. (No, it's not what you're thinking.) Other interesting iPhone 4 links:

6 iPhone 4 tips
Apple Responds to iPhone 4 'Death Grip' Reports
Smartphone Camera Battle: iPhone 4 vs. the Android Army
Apple iOS 4 vs. Android Multitasking: Which Approach Is Better for Users?
77% of iPhone 4 sales were upgrades
First day sales: 1.5 million iPhone 4s?
What the iPhone means to Apple
What's driving iPhone 4 sales?

War is a Racket

2010-05-31T04:27:00.002-12:00

The book by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, Major General Smedley D. Butler, and a five-minute video by Congressman Ron Paul. Both presented here.

Mark Twain's War Prayer

2010-05-31T04:16:00.001-12:00

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great exulting and excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest depths of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast doubt upon its righteousness straight way got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came – next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams – visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! – then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

"God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory – An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there, waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside – which the startled minister did – and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import – that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of – except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two – one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this – keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer – the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it – that part which the pastor – and also you in your hearts – fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

[After a pause.] "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Have you read 'WAR IS A RACKET'?

Anti-war films

2010-05-31T03:45:00.002-12:00

Butler Shaffer presents his annual list of recommended anti-war films, rating each from 1 - 3 stars, with three stars signifying his favorites. The list is long. Among those he grants only honorable mention to is Born on the Fourth of July starring Tom Cruise. It's possible he has not seen it, but I would give it two stars at least. He also awards two stars to All Quiet on the Western Front. I would rate it three stars. One he omitted that I would include is In the Valley of Elah. Starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, it is a story of how war dehumanizes soldiers.

Bourne's classic

2010-05-31T03:41:00.002-12:00

Randolph Bourne began an essay called "The State," but died in 1918 before finishing it. "War is the Health of the State" is the first part of that essay.

Paine on War and Taxes

2010-05-31T03:05:00.002-12:00

In July, 2003 I had an article published on Strike-the-Root called "Thomas Paine on War and Taxes." I would refer readers to that link today if it were still in a readable format. Since it is not, I present the article here instead.

Thomas Paine on War and Taxes

by

George F. Smith

On January 10, 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which ignited a clamor for independence throughout the colonies. Only six months later the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress proposed that these colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states -- an idea that had only a few quiet advocates before Paine’s pamphlet.

Common Sense earned Paine a worldwide reputation. By 1790 he was in Europe, entangling himself in the politics of the French Revolution and defending it against intellectual attacks.

Edmund Burke, a member of the British Whig party, was alarmed at what he saw happening in France. Burke had always been suspicious of government power and years earlier had often urged Parliament to avoid going to war with the American colonies, saying that “a great many redcoats will never rule America.”

But on November 1, 1790, Burke published a 350-page book called Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he attempted to alert those English gentlemen who had no desire to see “their mansions pulled down and pillaged, their persons abused, insulted, and destroyed.” [1]

Reflections earned Burke praise from his enemies and rebukes from his fellow Whigs. His old foe George III loved it and encouraged others to read it. Charles James Fox, once Burke’s “pupil,” criticized the tome as being in “very bad taste.” [2] The two men argued in Parliament over it, and Burke ended the quarrel by terminating their friendship.

Paine had been Burke’s friend, too, but his mission now was to defend the French Revolution. He studied Reflections and found himself agreeing with a great many points, such as Burke’s claim that “a jealous, ever-waking vigilance” was needed to “guard the treasure of liberty.” But Burke launched into ad hominen attacks on various individuals, including Paine, deriding his line from Common Sense that “government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.” He also ripped the artisan class from which Paine originated, saying that such occupations cannot be a matter of honor to those employed in them. Burke made it clear that he preferred existing states of inequality in society and attacked the ideals of republican self-government.

Reflections was immensely popular and was finding sympathy in public replies. Paine knew that his answer to Burke had to be strong and expressed in a style commensurate with his views. Burke wrote in the familiar heavy style of the privileged status quo. Paine would need to write in a manner more fitting for a republican. As with Common Sense, his goal was to avoid “every literary ornament” and make his rebuttal “as plain as the alphabet.” [3]

Paine’s reply was Rights of Man, which eventually earned him an absentia conviction of seditious libel in England. Though parts of it delve into welfare and social security proposals, there is much in it that libertarians can treasure. I have extracted some of Paine’s insights on war and taxation, and present them here.

From Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine:

To reason with governments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected.

. . .

Had governments agreed to quarrel on purpose to fleece their countries by taxes, they could not have succeeded better than they have done.

. . .

[G]overnment seems to be placarding its need of a foe; for unless it finds one somewhere, no pretext exists for the enormous revenue and taxation now deemed necessary.

. . .

War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretense must be made for expenditure. In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.

. . .

[T]he portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism, and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is, therefore on the ground of interest, opposed to both.

. . .

[T]he caterpillar principle of all Courts and Courtiers are alike. They form a common policy throughout Europe, detached and separate from the interest of Nations: and while they appear to quarrel, they agree to plunder.

. . .

Every war terminates with an addition of taxes, and consequently with an addition of revenue; and in any event of war, in the manner they are now commenced and concluded, the power and interest of Governments are increased. War, therefore, from its productiveness, as it easily furnishes the pretense of necessity for taxes and appointments to places and offices, becomes a principal part of the system of old Governments; and to establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.

. . .

It is time to dismiss that inattention which has so long been the encouraging cause of stretching taxation to excess.

. . .

To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.

. . .

If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey, and permits none to escape without a tribute.

. . .

Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it? What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man's estate, or raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and taxes the never-failing consequence?

. . .

Government, on the old system, is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity of taxes it requires.

. . .

It can only be by blinding the understanding of man, and making him believe that government is some wonderful mysterious thing, that excessive revenues are obtained. Monarchy is well calculated to ensure this end. It is the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes.

. . .

The government of a free country, properly speaking, is not in the persons, but in the laws. The enacting of those requires no great expense; and when they are administered, the whole of civil government is performed- the rest is all court contrivance.

. . .

Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?

. . .

If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America. Made up as it is of people from different nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a court rioting at its expense. Their taxes are few, because their government is just: and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there is nothing to engender riots and tumults.

1. Keane, John Tom Paine: A Political Life, Grove Press, NY, 1995, p. 289.

2. Ibid, p. 290

3. Ibid., p. 295

The U.S. is in "Psychiatric Denial"

2010-05-06T09:00:00.002-12:00

Dana Visalli traveled to Afghanistan in March, 2010 to meet with local humanitarian groups. He writes:

The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. . . .

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the "30-year war" there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. . . .

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.

Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….").

The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable rights.

There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors, Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.

The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis Johnson, stated, "The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

I can't verify the figures and quotes in this article from my own research, but if it is even close to accurate we've become a match for any enemy we've ever fought.

Why grieve over dead politicians?

2010-04-23T16:43:00.002-12:00

Is there any reason to grieve more over the loss of a politician or group of politicians than the loss of a stranger or group of strangers? No, writes Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski; in fact, "there seems to be a reason to be particularly restrained in one’s grief, since the victims belonged to a profession that the libertarian worldview univocally condemns as parasitical and destructive."

[N]o matter how personally nice, warm and charming the deceased could have been (and on such occasions the state apparatus of propaganda will do everything it can to bombard everyone with endless testimonies to that effect), all their professional activities were ultimately based on a barbarous method of violent coercion.

Eat your spinach

2010-04-17T00:43:00.002-12:00

That is the message, in essence, that Ron Paul is saying to the U.S. government and the American people, according to Justin Raimondo, and in a recent poll it has put him in a dead heat with a sitting president.

As I said in a recent issue of The American Conservative, however, I don’t think the prospects for a left-right alliance on the issue of war and peace are all that bright, to begin with because what used to be the left has essentially been absorbed into the Obama cult, and co-opted by power. In the end, all liberals really care about is getting their "fair share" of the spoils, for themselves and their supposed constituencies. So what if the price they have to pay is going along with mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan? We all have to die sometime.

I harp on Ron Paul for all sorts of reasons, but the one of most interest to my readers is the fact that he is by far the most successful antiwar politician in recent American history. Derided as being one of those dreaded "isolationists," and attacked even by some alleged "libertarians" precisely for that – and because he appeals to the common man – he not only insists on raising this issue, for him it is central to his analysis of what he calls the "Welfare-Warfare State," a phrase coined by the late Murray Rothbard. Dr. Paul’s diagnosis of a nation fast exhausting itself in an orgy of spending and militaristic adventurism has the stark ring of truth about it – an alarm bell ringing in the night.

High court declares income tax unconstititional

2010-04-15T03:20:00.007-12:00

This is true. It did - in 1895. Today, the Supreme Court wouldn't even listen to arguments opposing the income tax, and not because it's part of the Constitution. Government growth, to which both major parties are fully committed, requires government to squeeze every penny it can get from wherever it can get it. The Court understands that, and sees to it nothing interferes with government's revenue stream. As Thomas Paine wrote in Rights of Man, government "watches prosperity as its prey, and permits none to escape without tribute."

It wasn't always this way. For the first 70 years of our history, the country somehow got by without an income tax. Then Lincoln decided he would have a bloody war, and government's expenses grew astronomically. It turned to counterfeiting by issuing greenbacks, and it stretched its taxing powers. Congress approved an income tax in 1861, and the first deadline for filing returns was June 30, 1862. There was no collection agency then. The government's haul that year amounted to $0.00. Obviously, it would need credible threats to carry out the theft, since the unpopularity of Lincoln's war and the low level of egalitarian influence meant that no one voluntarily surrendered the money they had earned

On February 25, 1913 the "soak the rich" amendment - the Sixteenth -- became part of the U.S. Constitution. The income tax went from a "class tax to a mass tax" during World War II, with the passage of withholding - a temporary measure needed to fund Roosevelt's war. It's no coincidence that the bloodiest war in mankind's history - 50 to 70 million deaths, most of them civilians -- occurred when governments had their hands deep in their citizens' pockets, by means of the income tax and their central banks.

Withholding and monetary inflation are the twin pillars of government revenue, craftily designed to "fry" as much revenue as possible from U.S. citizens and dollar holders without igniting a rebellion.

Today, few people care about any of this one way or another. Of those who do care, most believe taxes should be more equitable, with loopholes closed, etc. Those opposing big government, or government at all, are marginalized as kooks or racist right-wingers. And that is government's greatest victory of all.

2010 Census and the Post Office

2010-04-14T02:39:00.004-12:00

I recently had a thank-you card returned by way of the U.S. Postal Service. The stamp I had affixed to the envelope featured the Liberty Bell, while in returning it to me the USPS canceled it with the message "2010 Census / Mail It Back."

My card came back because it was "not deliverable as addressed." What blunder did I commit? I had mailed the note to a one-building retirement home and specified the correct name, street address, city, state, and zip. But for the sub-address, I wrote "Apt. 321" instead of the correct "Apt. 231." The mail carrier could have delivered it with the information I specified. If I had left the apartment number off entirely, it likely would've been delivered.

I recalled that the 2010 census form contains more "blunders" than my little note card. It is clearly intrusive on privacy and goes well beyond the restrictions imposed by the Constitution, which, though highly elastic in today's world, still purports to be the highest law of the land.

With the Liberty Bell marred with the wavy lines of the cancellation message urging us to mail the 2010 census back, one is strongly tempted to comply, returning it the way it was received, unopened, as the USPS did to my little card. Their message also serves as a reminder that liberty itself had been canceled and our lives would forever be at the mercy of omnicompetent bureaucracies.

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

2010-04-12T10:28:00.001-12:00

Source: Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Published: October 1961 Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

HARRISON BERGERON

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance—it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good—no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday—just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well—maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.”
“You been so tired lately—kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean—you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it—and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen—”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
“That’s all right—” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen—” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me—” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not—I repeat, do not—try to reason with him.”
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have—for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God—” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here—” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened—I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now—” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first—cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while—listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said.
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
“Gee—I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee—” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

Once again, who killed JFK?

2010-04-10T05:31:00.002-12:00

We may never know for sure, but there's a new study published that presents evidence that the home movies taken of the assassination - the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore films - were heavily edited to conceal Secret Service complicity in the crime. Read about it here.

Is war a grand adventure?

2010-04-10T01:34:00.002-12:00

For awhile, it can be. For the lucky, it will be. For some, it will be worse than death. Fred Reed writes about it:

He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the war came in a far country. It doesn’t matter which. It was just a country.

His father, an angry man emitting the foul stench of patriotism, said his duty was to become a soldier and kill whoever it was in the far country, wherever it was. His father didn’t know or much care. It didn’t matter. Somebody would know. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It would be a grand adventure, an uncle said.

Read the rest.

How to Defend Atheism

2010-04-09T09:20:00.003-12:00

In 1976, author George H. Smith (no relation) delivered a speech in which he stated:

The American child who grows up to be a Baptist simply because his parents were Baptist and he never thought critically about those beliefs is not necessarily any more irrational than the Soviet child who grows up to be an atheist simply because his parents were atheist and because the state tells him to be an atheist. The fact that the Soviet child in this particular case may have the correct position is irrelevant. So it's not so much what one believes, or the content, as it is why one believes as one does. So it's no so much what one believes, or the content, as it is why one believes as one does. So the issue of reasonableness pertains to the concern for truth, concern for the correct methodology of reasoning. And just because a person espouses atheism is no guarantee -- believe me -- that person is necessarily reasonable.

This is why I never crusade for atheism per se outside of a wider framework. Atheism is significant, to be sure. But it's significance derives entirely from the fact that it represents the application of reason to a particular field, specifically the area of religious belief. Atheism, unless it is ingrained within this greater philosophical defense of reason, is practically useless. When, however, it is the consequence of the habit of reasonableness, then atheism stands in opposition to the wave of supernaturalism and mysticism we are currently experiencing. In other words, irrationalism in any form it may occur.

Now what this means is that atheism will not get very far simply by attacking religious belief. Rather, we have to defend reason, first and foremost, and then criticize religion within that framework. If you understand that most people adopt religion for psychological rather than intellectual reasons, you will understand why I think direct, frontal assaults on religion rarely, rarely persuade anyone to atheism. If, as atheists have been pointing out for many years, religion is an emotional and psychological crutch, then you don't get a person to stand on his own two feet simply by kicking out the crutch, if for no other reason that the person will hold onto it for dear life. Rather, you must first convince the person that the crutch is unnecessary and even harmful. And then, you can convince him that he's able to get along much better off without the crutch. So you don't have to kick it out; at this point, he will simply throw it away himself.

Read the complete transcript of this excellent speech here.

Obama issues death threats

2010-04-09T00:53:00.001-12:00

In an essay that brings to mind the argumentative power of Frederic Bastiat, Robert Wenzel describes the multiple death threats he has received since passage of Obama's health care bill.

WikiLeaks Video Shows Indiscriminate Slaying

2010-04-06T07:32:00.002-12:00

SunShine Press (WikiLeaks) has released a video taken from an Apache helicopter gun-site showing "the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. For further information please visit the special project website www.collateralmurder.com."

Woody Allen's Tribute to Manhattan

2010-04-03T04:10:00.003-12:00

Here is the opening sequence from Woody's 1979 movie, Manhattan. For the best experience, download and watch it on a big screen with good speakers.

How to be successful

2010-03-31T04:37:00.001-12:00

In a nutshell, "Persistently, single-mindedly and doggedly working at something until mastery is achieved."

Census Economics

2010-03-31T01:46:00.003-12:00

Writes Vedran Vuk, an analyst with Casey Research:

Digging a bit deeper, we find that this year, 723,000 door-to-door Census takers will be needed in comparison to 2000’s 604,000, a 16.6 percent increase despite the lack of an equivalent rise in the population.

The hiring numbers are pushed upward by the low total working hours per employee. On average, each temporary Census employee will work 19 hours a week for six weeks. But "work" may not be the most appropriate word. The Census estimates that only 47.8 million houses will require a Census worker to visit. Divide this by 723,000 census takers to get 66 houses per worker. Since each temp will be employed for six weeks, this translates into less than two houses visited per workday.

The spending side of the Census equation doesn’t make much sense either. According to a Census Bureau press release, mailing back the form costs the government only 42 cents, while visiting a house costs 56 dollars.

Why does it cost 56 dollars to visit just one house! Even with repeat visits, this seems a lot. Imagine that pizza delivery were this expensive.

This wasted money will go toward boosting the GDP by 0.1% and 0.2% during Q1 and Q2, followed by equivalent declines in Q3 and Q4. Some parts of the country will get more than others, according to various pay rates. The Washington D.C. Census office offers $20 per hour, San Francisco $22, and Anchorage, Alaska, pays the most at $25 per hour. On the lower end, Tupelo, MS, pays $10.50; Beckley, WV, $10.75; El Paso, TX, $12.75 per hour.

But what about the vast increase in free lunches a community could receive as a result of the Census data?

And what about money allocated through Census data? The Census marketing campaign has claimed that filling out the Census will help your community. Certainly, in 2007, nearly $436 billion were redistributed through the aid of Census data. But helping the community might be stretching it – unless one considers welfare payments as "helping the community." Examining the long list of programs reveals that little will help net taxpayers, other than road-building projects.

Government cannot improve one individual’s situation without taking away from another. Just as it does for any government program, this applies to money allocated by the Census. This helps the community about as much as mugging somebody on the street. Hey, someone in the community got the money, right?

Only Racists Oppose ObamaCare? Pat Sajak Speaks Out

2010-03-31T00:34:00.004-12:00

According to New York Times columnist Frank Rich, there are obvious reasons for the strong opposition to ObamaCare:

The conjunction of a black President and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

But Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak disagrees with the Times' former theater critic:

Welcome to post-racial America, where those who oppose a piece of legislation must defend themselves against the scurrilous charges of a man who seems much better suited to reviewing “Cats”. (He liked it, by the way.) This was a particularly shameful column, and the millions of Americans who oppose this legislation are owed an apology. Are they right? Are they wrong? Let’s discuss it. Let’s debate it. Let’s yell and scream if we want to. But would it be too much to ask that we approach the matter based on its merits and leave the psychobabble to Dr. Phil?

If we approach the matter based on the law, we would see that a constitutional amendment was required before we could discuss the merits. But that too could be construed as racist.

Paul Craig Roberts says good-bye

2010-03-29T09:16:00.003-12:00

Roberts has severe criticism for what he calls "free-market shills" who write in support of the off-shoring of "high-productivity, high value-added American jobs" that they consider too dirty for Americans to do. Nowhere does he mention how government policies over the last century might have driven these companies overseas. But his biggest disappointment is the strength of the government-media connection. He writes:

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job. . . .

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

Given this state of affairs, he has announced he will no longer write columns. But it's more like a man saying he can't take it anymore.

I liked his hard-hitting style even though I didn't always agree with his position. If he really is departing from the commentary scene, I will miss him.

Harvard's Instant Book-Making Machine

2010-03-29T05:47:00.001-12:00

If you have any interest in books, you should see this.

Terrorism now, terrorism forever

2010-03-26T01:29:00.005-12:00

In an increasingly common interview-style commentary, Doug Casey cites two definitions of terrorism. From Webster's, we get "the use of force or threats to intimidate, especially as a political policy." Obviously this won't do as a generally accepted definition because it would put all governments everywhere in the category of terrorists. The politically-correct definition of terrorism thus becomes "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property, meant to intimidate or coerce a government or the civilian population as a means for achieving political or social goals." As long as an act is lawful, it cannot be considered an act of terrorism.

So, what we see in the world today are law-abiding terrorists fighting unlawful terrorists.

Asked if he thinks the U.S. can win the War on Terror, Casey said:

No. Not only is that impossible, the very idea is meaningless. Terrorism is not an enemy – it's a tactic. You can't have a war on terrorism any more than you can have a war on artillery barrages, cavalry charges – or a war on war, for that matter. The first step in winning a conflict is to identify the actual enemy. And the fools in DC can't even do that.

But before we look at the future, it's worth noting that terrorism has long been a favored tool of those in power, going all the way back to ancient times. . . .

[Y]ou could say that "the state" is actually terrorism on a grand scale. It's bizarre how most people view the state as necessary, or even benign. It may offend some of our readers, who have been programmed into believing the military can do no wrong, and that the U.S. always has God on its side, but logically, the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo are prime examples of state-sponsored terrorism. World War II, in effect, legitimized the concept of mass murder of civilians. As late as World War I, the concept of incinerating whole cities would have been totally beyond the pale; WWII turned the moral clock back to the middle ages, when the wholesale slaughter of civilians was considered acceptable. I suspect the "Long 19th Century," from about 1776 to 1914, will be looked back on as a golden age, a peak of civilization, when the individual was ascendant, the state was under control, free market capitalism was lauded, and progress seemed natural and inevitable. Technology has improved since then, but it's a mistake to conflate technological progress with moral progress. . . .

[O]nly an idiot fails to recognize that in an advanced technological economy an individual can have an immense, disproportionate, effect if he wants to do damage. It's not like in pre-industrial days, when a single person was limited to perhaps setting a fire, or maybe stabbing someone. Today, an individual terrorist can alter the direction of society. And there are hundreds of millions of candidates for that role.

In my view, the trend towards terrorism as the next evolution of warfare is about as certain as they come. It's not just the U.S.; all the big nation-states are on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. Their huge bureaucracies, oppressive tax systems, complicated regulatory regimes, subsidies, bailouts, fiat currencies, and welfare programs are – every one of them – near collapse. They were confidence schemes. It's not just standing armies, but the nation-state itself is a dead man walking at this point.

L: Because the lumbering dinosaur can't compete with the fleet little mammal?

Doug: That's a good analogy. These giant dinosaur-states are thrashing around in their death-throes, and they are extremely dangerous – at least while they can still pay the salaries of their minions in the police and the military. And that very fact is stirring up a lot of little creatures that are going to want to see them die sooner.

L: I can see that; the more villages and such they bomb, the more enemies they make, and those new enemies provoke even more thrashing about, which creates even more enemies, provoking leviathan to even more violent and oppressive responses. It's a vicious cycle that sure seems to be taking the current world order down the spiral towards oblivion.

Doug: Yes, I'm completely convinced that all of the world's major nation-states are going to become much more oppressive as they try to keep things together. But it won't work. They are perpetually behind the curve, always fighting the last war. [All emphasis added]

Read the full interview here.

Detroit and health care reform

2010-03-24T00:29:00.002-12:00

Detroit is dying, but the media won't discuss it, says Gary North. The cause of its demise is government. Health care is headed the same way for the same reason. It's not politically correct to hurl blame at government, even if the old standby, private sector greed, can no longer carry the burden of guilt alone. For example, writes North,

In 1994, the median sales price of a house in Detroit was about $41,000. The housing bubble pushed it up to about $98,000 in 2003. In March 2009, the price was $13,600. Today, the price is $7,000. Check the price chart.

Furthermore,

There is no surge of buyers to take advantage of fabulously low prices in Detroit. Can you imagine buying a home for cash for $13,600 in 2009 – a house that had sold for $98,000 six years earlier – and losing half your money? It's incredible.

Regarding health care reform, here's what he thinks will happen:

1. Cost overruns
2. Fraud
3. Additional coverage extended to groups
4. Rising deficits in the program
5. Lower payments to physicians
6. Lower payments to hospitals
7. Delays in payments
8. Rising taxes on the rich
9. Rationing by doctors, hospitals, government
10. Delays in treatment
11. More HMO care: assembly line medicine
12. A search for scapegoats

His conclusion:

You had better start getting into shape. You can no longer afford to be vulnerable to the diseases and afflictions of a flabby lifestyle. ObamaCare has changed the risk-reward ratio. Risk has just gone up. It will continue to go up.

There will be no roll-back of this law. It is going to be enforced for as long as the U.S. government has money.

That may not be as long as Obama thinks.

Rent-a-Rambos by Eric Margolis

2010-03-23T13:56:00.003-12:00

Margolis writes:

According to a “New York Times” investigation and other Washington sources, the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have fielded covert mercenary networks in Afghanistan, Pakistan (aka “Afpak”), and Iraq whose mission is to murder tribal militants and nationalists opposing Western occupation.

Unfortunately, Margolis characterizes this action is "another heartwarming example of free enterprise at work." Since when does an operation sponsored by a government agency qualify as "free enterprise"?

Lee Killough on Health Care

2010-03-23T08:21:00.002-12:00

I know Lee only through email commentaries, and I happen to agree with much he has to say. Here is what he provides on government interference in health care, copied verbatim from an email he sent out recently. One of the commentaries is provided by Ron Paul.

---

I spent a few hours going through websites and blogs this morning about
the passage of the health care bill. I collected what I think are the best
commentaries (though some will certainly disagree). I list the URLs below,
and then expand the articles at the end.

One of the criteria I used for selecting articles is that they were
pro-liberty, and not simply anti-Obama or anti-Democrat. So many media
mouthpieces change their tune depending on who's in office or what party
they belong to, and instead of sticking to principles, they worship
parties or personalities.

Links on health care bill:

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/48553

http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/News/Opinion_Editorial/HEALTH_CARE_REFORM_PASSES_AMERICA_IN_CRITICAL_CONDITION/28648

http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2010/03/the-revolution-is-not-coming-today/

http://www.house.gov/htbin/blog_inc?BLOG,tx14_paul,blog,999,All,Item%20not%20found,ID=100322_3678,TEMPLATE=postingdetail.shtml

http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/03/22/the-cost-of-a-free-lunch/

My own feelings on the issue:

The main problem with health care in this country is that the people
receiving the care, i.e. the patients, are not the ones who have the
final say, or who pass the bucks around.

The only reason I go to a doctor sometimes, is to get a prescription.
Because the laws say that a pharmacy cannot freely sell to me unless a
state-licensed doctor has given me permission. They also say that a
doctor cannot write a prescription for more than 12 months -- that they
must see me at least once a year. In a sense, we're all treated like
children.

Some say that people are not competent to make their own decisions in
medicine. But I think people should be presumed competent, just like
the presumption of innocence. People are afraid of mistakes in
medicine which they don't understand, and so the perceived costs of
actual mistakes on people, and the costs spent to avoid mistakes
(like malpractice insurance), are artificially high. Guess who pays?

If we were responsible for our own care, and if the true costs were
reflected directly at the doctor's office or hospital instead of being
hidden behind an arbitrary price system created by insurance companies
and governments, then people could make rational decisions on their
health care.

If we had ownership of our own health care, and if instead of doctors
and insurance companies making the decisions for us, we made the
decisions, then we could be free, and health care costs would go way
down. But no, we are not free, and are instead controlled by a
pharmacracy of insurance and drug companies in bed with the government.

Single payer is not the way to go -- that only concentrates power even
further into the hands of a few, who will surely be listening to
lobbyists and political donors and drug companies, more than they will
be listening to you and me. Single payer puts too much power in the
hands of one agency, who, no matter how much funding it receives,
cannot omnisciently predict all of the needs out there and allocate
resources accordingly. This is known as the economic calculation
problem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem ).

We need to separate medicine and state. Make medical decisions
individual rights.

We lost medical freedom with the passage of prescription drug laws
around the same time the Federal Reserve was created -- coincidence?
Prior to that, you could buy any drugs at the pharmacy without
prescription. People had the freedom and responsibility to make
medical decisions wisely. Going to the doctor wasn't as expensive as
it is now, so an accident or illness wasn't financially life-
threatening.

Now, with third parties paying directly for our medical care, be it
insurance companies or government, we are not allowed to make the
decisions, nor can we feel the true costs of medicine (they are
artificially inflated or subsidized), nor do service providers compete
for our patronage, because insurance companies or governments pay for
it directly either way, and because the buck doesn't stop with the
patients but goes to third parties.

We're like helpless children, and the government likes it that way, as
do some elites and some people who would rather not be responsible for
their own health care.

The main fallacy is to assume that the costs that exist now, are that
way by necessity, and that any reform must take on these costs head-on.
No, they are that way because the feedback loops which regulate prices in
a free market, are missing. People obviously want health care, but since
they are not the ones paying for it, and since there's not free
competition in medicine where the customer is king, there's nothing to
tell doctors and hospitals what should be the best allocation of their
resources. They just guess, and when they are wrong, pass the costs onto
everyone.

If a single-payer system were adopted, and government regulated costs by
force, then we would have shortages and angry people on waiting lists
willing to pay more, but unable to receive care, because there would still
be demand, and the state forcing the costs down would prevent communication
of that demand to providers and de-incentivize new providers. If a doctor's
prices are regulated from going up during periods of increased demand
relative to supply, there will be less incentive for doctors to enter
practice and there will be shortages. This is an economic law with the
same force as the law of gravity, yet many people deny it or think that
it can be escaped through man-made laws.

Also the state's experts, not matter how smart they are and no matter how
much they try to predict, can never reach optimal allocation of resources
for health care because there is always something they will miss and will
assign too few resources to, or something they will over-allocate for. No
system will be perfect, but one in which the decisions are made locally
and freely is more desirable than one where decisions are made far away
by disinterested or conflicted parties. These things are best communicated
through a price system, which can smooth things out, and where private
actors closest to the action feel the costs and take the risks. The
problem is that right now the price system cannot work because people
receiving care are not the ones paying, and people are not allowed to buy
medical goods or services without extensive state regulation, which
imposes rules on the relationship and imposes high startup costs which
are passed on.

Also, the rules imposed by governments and insurance companies are very
black-and-white. Instead of a price being able to communicate a relative
value taking local information into account, prices are fixed by fiat. Or
instead of allowing a price to reflect a relative risk which can be offset
depending on a patient's preferences, a rule is imposed arbitrarily to
control that risk without the patient's consent. When these things happen,
the inevitable economic consequence is that the price is going to be
reflected elsewhere, either in a hidden cost paid somewhere else, or in a
shortage of medical services to society, or in patients who avoid medical
care until it becomes critically necessary.

Prices often convey information which is unarticulated by the parties,
such as relative preferences among alternatives. If prices are not allowed
to work freely, and are replaced with another system like prices set by
insurance companies and governments, then lots of hidden information which
gets communicated through pricing but which isn't articulated or even
known by the respective parties, gets lost.

Separate medicine and state. Abolish prescription drug laws, and all other
drug laws. Teach medical awareness and self-responsibility early in life.
Allow those who are competent, to make their own medical decisions
with or without a doctor. Remove third-party payment providers.
Separate health care from employment -- put ownership of health insurance
back into the hands of the beneficiaries.

Here is my "Imagine" piece from last year:

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/print.php?news.2660

See also this comparison chart for details on the bill:

http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm

And see this recent piece on our country's condition, which I am convinced
is going downhill and must be fixed at the local (not federal) level:

http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/03/18/it-was-a-wonderful-life/

Lee

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/48553

The Individual Mandate: An Unconstitutional Exercise of Congressional Power
Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2009-12-20 02:21.
* Healthcare

By Sheldon H. Laskin

It is generally agreed, by both proponents and opponents of the
Administration's health reform bill, that the lynchpin of the
legislation is the individual mandate requiring uninsured Americans to
obtain health insurance, or pay a tax penalty for failing to do so.
Without the mandate, even the Administration's wildly exaggerated cost
savings estimates simply cannot work. The whole plan is predicated on
enlarging the risk pool by bringing in younger, healthier people who
currently lack the means or the incentive - or both - to purchase health
insurance.

Given the centrality of the mandate, it is somewhat surprising that
little attention has been paid to the critical legal question of whether
Congress has the constitutional authority to require Americans to
purchase a commodity from a private, for-profit corporation. Other than
some limited commentary on the Right -- George Will and Orrin Hatch both
had columns on this topic in the Washington Post and the Heritage
Foundation recently published a detailed legal analysis of the question
- there has been almost no critical discussion of the issue. The silence
on this issue is even more amazing in view of the fact that the
Congressional Budget Office raised a red flag on the question during the
Clinton Administration's abortive effort at health care reform:

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would
be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never
required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful
residence in the United States.

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE, THE BUDGETARY TREATMENT OF AN INDIVIDUAL
MANDATE TO BUY HEALTH INSURANCE, (1994) available at
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4816/doc38.pdf.

Unlike the states, Congress cannot enact any law even if doing so would
foster public safety and health. Under our federal system of government,
Congress can only enact laws that are of a type authorized by a
provision of Article I of the Constitution, which sets forth the powers
of Congress. Proponents of the individual mandate typically cite the
Commerce Clause of the Constitution as granting Congress the authority
to require individual Americans to purchase health insurance.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the power "[t]o
regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,
and with the Indian tribes." Therefore, in order for Congress to have
the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance, the
purchase of health insurance must constitute "commerce" within the
meaning of the Commerce Clause. It does not.

In 1982, the Supreme Court declared that, in order for a commodity to be
considered an article in commerce, it must be capable of being sold.
Sporhase v. Nebraska, 458 U.S. 941 at 949 -- 950 (1982). While there is
no doubt that the sale of health insurance by an insurer constitutes
commerce, it does not follow that the purchase - or more precisely, the
failure to purchase - health insurance by a consumer also constitutes
commerce. Health insurance, once purchased by a consumer, is not capable
of being further sold in commerce because there is no market for it; who
would purchase a health insurance policy naming someone else as the
insured?

In order to understand the point better, it might be helpful to contrast
health insurance with life insurance. Because paid-up life insurance has
a cash value, an industry has developed in purchasing life insurance
benefits from terminally ill patients. Known as viatical settlement
companies, they will pay a percentage of the value of an insurance
policy to a terminally ill patient if the corporation is named as the
beneficiary of the policy. The patient gets the cash up front, to pay
medical bills or to support his family, and the corporation makes a
profit on its investment when the insured dies. Because there is a
market for life insurance benefits, the purchase of those benefits may
be regulated under the Commerce Clause to make sure that the patient is
not coerced by the Tony Soprano Benevolent Society to name it as
beneficiary. But there is no market for health insurance benefits once
the policy is issued. No one would buy my health insurance, because no
one other than I can derive any benefit from it. Since there is no
market, health insurance is not an article of commerce once issued. If
it is not an article of commerce, Congress lacks authority under the
Commerce Clause to require me to purchase it.

There are two Supreme Court cases that proponents of the individual
mandate often cite in support of their position that Congress may
require individuals to purchase health insurance. The first case
involved government regulation of the amount of acreage used by farmers
to grow wheat. A farmer who was fined for exceeding his acreage
allotment challenged the fine, asserting that since he was using the
excess acreage for personal consumption (he used it either to feed his
chickens or to make bread for his family), Congress lacked authority
under the Commerce Clause to regulate that excess acreage. The Court
rejected this argument, pointing out that even wheat grown for personal
consumption is marketable and that therefore the farmer's excess acreage
affected the supply and demand for wheat in interstate commerce. Wickard
v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 at 137 (1942). Using similar reasoning, the
Supreme Court recently affirmed congressional authority under the
Commerce Clause to regulate the production and use of marijuana as
applied to individuals who personally use marijuana for medicinal
purposes under state laws that legalize such use. Gonzales v. Raich, 545
U.S. 1 (2005). Again, Congress had commerce clause authority to regulate
personal consumption in this context because marijuana for home
consumption is "a fungible commodity for which there is an established,
albeit illegal, interstate market." 545 U.S. at 18.

Unlike wheat or marijuana, health insurance is not a fungible commodity
and is therefore not marketable. Again, no one would purchase my health
insurance - it is personal to me and cannot be sold for any price.

Finally, proponents of the mandate often cite the fact that states
require drivers to purchase auto insurance as justifying a federal
individual mandate for health insurance. This is a facile comparison
that ignores the constitutional differences between federal and state
authority to regulate. As noted above, Congress can only legislate when
there is a specific provision of Article I of the Constitution that
authorizes it to enact that type of law. Conversely, the states have
virtually unlimited legislative authority to pass laws that foster the
public welfare, health and safety. Driving is a privilege, and the
states are free to impose any reasonable condition on the exercise of
that privilege that they choose. In any event, the states have limited
the auto insurance requirement to the purchase of liability insurance to
cover injuries sustained by third parties. No state requires drivers to
purchase insurance to cover their own injuries.

For single-payer advocates, a very powerful argument is that, while the
individual mandate to purchase private health insurance is
unconstitutional, Congress can lawfully tax to support a government
financed health insurance program. Article I empowers Congress to use
its taxing powers in support of government programs that foster the
public welfare; this is the constitutional authority for Social Security
and Medicare. But to extend that authority to requiring Americans to
purchase a private commodity raises profound civil liberties issues. If
Congress can compel the purchase of insurance from a for profit
insurance company, it can compel the purchase of any commodity if there
is an arguable public policy to support it. The auto industry is
collapsing? Forget Cash for Clunkers, just order Americans to buy cars
or tax them if they don't. Obesity crisis? Order Americans to join
health clubs, or tax them if they don't. If Congress gets away with
this, there is no stopping point and Big Business will have succeeded in
making Americans into involuntary consumers whenever it so chooses.

*Sheldon H. Laskin is an attorney who has appeared in the United
States Supreme Court. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Tax
Program at the University of Baltimore Law School. Mr. Laskin
specializes in state tax cases under the Commerce Clause of the US
Constitution.

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http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/News/Opinion_Editorial/HEALTH_CARE_REFORM_PASSES_AMERICA_IN_CRITICAL_CONDITION/28648

HEALTH CARE REFORM PASSES; AMERICA IN CRITICAL CONDITION
John G. Winder , The Cypress Times
Published 03/21/2010 - 9:47 p.m. CST
America on life support
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The shift from personal liberty to federal tyranny is a done deal.

Now that the Health Care Reform bill has passed the House of
Representatives, all that stands in the way of final passage is the
Senate. This bill will pass the Senate. It will then be signed into
law by President Obama and "we the people" will be left to suffer the
consequences for the remainder of days that there exists a place
called the United States of America.

I would love to see universal health care become a reality in this,
and every nation. What Christian wouldn't? I would love to see
universal housing, and universal clothing, and universal assurances
that no one will ever again go hungry.

The problem is that no one in the federal government cares even just a
little bit about providing any of those things to you even if it could
be done.

It's not about you. It's not about me. It's not about health care.
It's not about the sick and dying.

* During the course of this debate, President Obama's approval
rating has dropped to 45%
* The approval rating of the Congress now sits at 18%.
* 46% of our nation's doctors say they'll leave the profession if
this legislation passes.
* 56% of the American people are opposed to this legislation, yet
it powers on toward law.

Politicians, a particularly unique breed of craven coward not known
for bucking the will of the people, are now standing up and voting
against the will of the people which will almost certainly assure them
of losing re-election in just seven months time.

Why?

The spin on this transformation is that this smarmy animal (the
Politican) has become a suddenly bold, suddenly brave new breed who
rather than doing as they have always done (living their lives in
double-speak and under the cover of the shadows of relativism) have
now grown spines....because they really really care about you.

In fact, they care so much about you that they're willing to put their
seats, literally and politically, on the line in order to help you.
That's another lie from a bunch of lying liars.

The truth is that this legislation is not about providing health care
for you or me, or for your children or mine. Aside from the taxes you
pay, no one in the federal government cares if you live or die.

This legislation is about power.

The Health Care Reform bill contains such a heady aphrodisiac for
these lying liars that they are even willing to risk their
phony-baloney jobs to dare to reach for power of this magnitude. This
is a kind of power heretofore unimaginable in our once free republic.

To paraphrase a line from Bill Clinton's first presidential race, "It
is about the power, stupid."

It's about the federal government having power over each state.

It's about the federal government having power over the individual.

This legislation is all about power. Your health. Your future. Your
opinion doesn't come into play. This is not a bill about giving to
you - it's a bill about taking from you.

This law is all about tearing your few remaining freedoms from your
tightly clinched fists and putting the federal government in charge of
every aspect of your life. Some of you know this. Others of you are
foolishly handing over your freedom in the blind hope that you can
trust your government. You're placing your hope and faith in the most
leaky of vessels; a politician. Others of you still are selling your
freedom for a misguided belief that you're getting something "Free".

The power transfer is going to happen. The shift from personal
liberty to federal tyranny is a done deal.

So, what now?

Now, those of us who disagree with this legislation can, and will,
look for new candidates to support in order to replace those deaf
Democrats who made this bill the law of the land.

We'll have a litmus test for all candidates, "Will you work to repeal
health care reform?" Those we support will answer, "Yes." In fact,
those wannabe leaders will shout from the roof tops for all to hear,
"I will repeal the health care bill."

We might be successful. Let's assume for a moment that we are successful.

Let's assume that come November, the GOP sweeps back to power in the
Congress. Let's assume that every single Democrat who voted for
Health Care Reform gets booted out. Let's assume that every
Democratic Senator who voted for this bill, and stands for re-election
in 2010, gets booted out.

What then?

Once they're elected and sitting in that federal office behind that
federal desk feeling the surge of federal power race through their
beings, they will NEVER repeal health care reform.

You'll elect each of them based on their promise to repeal the bill.
But when they get into office, they'll immediately realize that they
now control all of the power. That power is the most enticing,
addictive drug of all to those lying liars who want to ?lead? our
country.

Do you remember how the Democrats railed against "The Patriot Act" and
the irresponsible powers that it provided the President of the United
States? What happened to "The Patriot Act" when the Dems took
office? Did they repeal it? Did they still feel that this act gave
the Prez too much power? No, no, it was no longer an issue.

Why?

Those who covet power only get upset when the other guy has the power.
Dems don't like power grabs when it's the Republicans doing the
grabbing. Republicans don't like power grabs when it's the Dems doing
the grabbing. The real problem is all of that power is coming from
you and me. It belongs to us, not them.

We call that power our freedoms, or rights, and they are quickly
becoming endangered species.

With both the Republicans and the Democrats grabbing as much power as
they can, while never relinquishing any of their ill-gotten gains, it
is "we the people" who suffer.

We will suffer the consequences of the passage of Health Care Reform
for the remainder of days that there exists a United States of
America. As of now our once great nation lies in critical condition,
on life support. Our nation's lifeblood is that unique belief that
man has certain unalienable rights, granted by God, and that all power
in the United States government resides in the people.

That lifeblood is now draining away before our eyes.

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http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2010/03/the-revolution-is-not-coming-today/

The Revolution is Not Coming -- Today

Even if Congress passes its "health-care reform" bill today -- and
President Obama signs it into law -- this is not going to lead to a
Tea-Party-led general revolt.

In my very first article for this column on October 31, 2009,
"ObamaCare Doesn't Bring Socialized Medicine to U.S.," I wrote:

To listen to Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits, President
Obama's proposals for health care reform are the first step in turning
America into Cuba or Venezuela.

But the truth is that the health-care system favored by
conservatives is only marginally less government-run than the public
option and must-buy health insurance favored by progressives.

All medical practitioners -- physicians, surgeons, dentists,
nurses, etc. -- must be licensed by state and local governments, and
approved by the federal government if they are to receive
reimbursement for their services from Medicare.

All hospitals and clinics must also be government licensed, with
additional licenses for teaching hospitals.

All degrees awarded by medical schools are only valid if they're
issued by medical schools approved by state-sanctioned medical boards.

Doctors may only prescribe pharmaceuticals or medical devices
approved by the FDA -- that is if they're not on lists of substances
prohibited by law from being prescribed at all, and providing them
gets one a visit from the DEA.

Flu epidemics exist or not by a decision made by the Federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also approves or
disapproves of the vaccines to treat them.

An entire department of the Federal government is devoted to
regulating "Health and Human Services."

Finally, fifteen percent of the U.S. population -- those 65 or
older or declared disabled -- are already enrolled in fully-socialized
"public option" government health insurance through Medicare and
Medicaid -- and as high as a third of the U.S. population have at times
been eligible for 100% U.S.-government-run health care provided
through the Veterans Administration.

So Fox News and right-wing radio pundits ranting that President
Obama and the Democratic Party want to bring socialized medicine to
America is not only hypocritical and ignorant of history. It's just
obliviously silly.

I'm 56 years old, and I have never drawn a breath when my health
care wasn't fully regulated by -- often paid for by, and sometimes
directly operated by -- the government, at one level or another.

It's undeniable that expanding government health insurance to
those under 65 who aren't veterans or disabled -- and forcing healthy
people to buy healthcare policies to lower premiums for those with
preexisting illnesses -- is indeed moving in the direction of universal
single-payer health care.

But to argue that President Obama and the Democrats want to bring
us socialized medicine ignores the obvious.

We've had socialized medicine for generations.

The incremental usurpation of the people's rights and powers has been
going on, now, at least for close to a century. It goes back at least
to 1913, when both the Federal Reserve System and the federal income
tax went into effect.

But the first federal income tax -- and the first military draft --
date back to the Civil War.

The usurpation will continue even if the Democratic Party is forced
back into being the minority in the next two election cycles, and is
replaced in the White House and Congressional majorities by the
Republican Party.

One can name a number of flash points in American history when one
could have expected popular revolts.

I've already suggested why 1913 would have been one.

The beginning of alcohol prohibition in 1920 would have been another.

The prohibition of private ownership of gold in 1933 would have been a
possible flash point.

People don't stage revolutions over entitlements. Entitlements are
shell games designed to hide where the money's coming from.

The closest the United States has come to a modern tax revolt is over
property taxes (which are localized) and the federal income tax.

But the politicians got cagier and used deficit financing monetized by
the Fed instead of raising visible taxation which would have caused
popular opposition.

Ron Paul's efforts aside, the bulk of the American people do not
understand how the Fed loots them, so they can't revolt against what
they do not see.

More limited groups rebel in more focused ways -- like truck drivers
buying radar detectors and CB's when 55 was the national speed limit.

Most special interest groups simply hire lobbyists.

The closest the federal government came to real trouble with a large
popular segment of the American people was in the mid-1990's when the
Clintons and the Democrats started passing major new federal
gun-control laws. Unlike the Gun Control Act of 1968, there had been
time to organize opposition.

It cost the Democrats their majorities in both the United States
Senate and the House of Representatives, and they learned a lesson.

But there's not going to be any real revolt on the basis of
health-care legislation that, in effect, takes a casino approach to
distributing the spoils of new compulsory health-insurance purchases
by people too healthy to need it much. There are too many people who
will see it as a benefit they "have coming to them," just like they
went along with Social Security and Medicare.

So what's going to happen is that American government will continue to
aggrandize power until its liabilities are more than can be passed
along by devaluing the money supply.

Only then will there be a general systemic collapse.

What happens after that collapse depends entirely on the preparations
of the people who understand this -- the people who have secured things
to trade, and rebuild, and defend themselves.

You don't have to go off to Ayn Rand's hidden gulch to do it. That's
why Atlas Shrugged wasn't enough and why I had to write Alongside
Night -- a dramatized show-and-tell portraying how this might work.

Which will resume here with Chapter VI, tomorrow.

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http://www.house.gov/htbin/blog_inc?BLOG,tx14_paul,blog,999,All,Item%20not%20found,ID=100322_3678,TEMPLATE=postingdetail.shtml

Texas Straight Talk

A weekly column
Healthcare Reform Passes

Following months of heated public debate and aggressive closed-door
negotiations, Congress finally cast a historic vote on healthcare late
Sunday evening. It was truly a sad weekend on the House floor as we
witnessed further dismantling of the Constitution, disregard of the
will of the people, explosive expansion of the reach of government,
unprecedented corporate favoritism, and the impending end of quality
healthcare as we know it.

Those in favor of this bill touted their good intentions of ensuring
quality healthcare for all Americans, as if those of us against the
bill are against good medical care. They cite fanciful statistics of
deficit reduction, while simultaneously planning to expand the already
struggling medical welfare programs we currently have. They somehow
think that healthcare in this country will be improved by swelling our
welfare rolls and cutting reimbursement payments to doctors who are
already losing money. It is estimated that thousands of doctors will
be economically forced out of the profession should this government
fuzzy math actually try to become healthcare reality. No one has
thought to ask what good mandatory health insurance will be if people
can't find a doctor.

Legislative hopes and dreams don't always stand up well against
economic realities.

Frustratingly, this legislation does not deal at all with the real
reasons access to healthcare is a struggle for so many -- the
astronomical costs. If tort reform was seriously discussed, if the
massive regulatory burden on healthcare was reduced and reformed, if
the free market was allowed to function and apply downward pressure on
healthcare costs as it does with everything else, perhaps people
wouldn't be so beholden to insurance companies in the first place. If
costs were lowered, more people could simply pay for what they need
out of pocket, as they were able to do before government got so
involved. Instead, in the name of going after greedy insurance
companies, the federal government is going to make people even more
beholden to them by mandating that everyone buy their product! Hefty
fines are due from anyone found to have committed the heinous crime of
not being a customer of a health insurance company. We will need to
hire some 16,500 new IRS agents to police compliance with all these
new mandates and administer various fines. So in government terms,
this is also a jobs bill. Never mind that this program is also likely
to cost the private sector some 5 million jobs.

Of course, the most troubling aspect of this bill is that it is so
blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the ideals of liberty.
Nowhere in the constitution is there anything approaching authority
for the Federal government to do any of this. The founders would have
been horrified at the idea of government forcing citizens to become
consumers of a particular product from certain government approved
companies. 38 states are said to already be preparing legal and
constitutional challenges to this legislation, and if the courts stand
by their oaths, they will win. Protecting the right to life, liberty
and pursuit of happiness, should be the court's responsibility.
Citizens have a responsibility over their own life, but they also have
the liberty to choose how they will live and protect their lives.
Healthcare choices are a part of liberty, another part that is being
stripped away. Government interference in healthcare has already
infringed on choices available to people, but rather than getting out
of the way, it is entrenching itself, and its corporatist cronies,
even more deeply.

Posted by Ron Paul (03-22-2010, 10:27 AM) filed under Healthcare

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http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/03/22/the-cost-of-a-free-lunch/

THE COST OF A FREE LUNCH
Posted on 22nd March 2010 by Administrator in Economy

The healthcare bill will cover 32 million more people and reduce
future deficits. With 2,700 pages of rules, regulations, payoffs,
corporate handouts, and outright bribes, the law of unintended
consequences will work its wonders in the coming decades. Would you
encourage your bright student son or daughter to become a doctor? How
many older doctors will throw in the towel and retire? Why try to make
more than $250,000 when it will all be taken by the Federal
government? Why would a small business with 49 employees expand beyond
that many employees if the Federal government will come down on them
like a ton of bricks?

Do you really think this bill will cut costs and future deficits?
Really? The Democrats crow about the historic passage as being on par
with the great programs of Medicare & Medicaid. Please read the FACTS
below regarding what Congress said they would cost versus what they
actually did cost.

If you are stupid enough to think there is a free lunch, then believe
this bill will reduce costs. Just like the $787 billion job stimulus
bill would create 3.5 million jobs. Remember that one?

Medicare (hospital insurance). In 1965, as Congress considered
legislation to establish a national Medicare program, the House Ways
and Means Committee estimated that the hospital insurance portion of
the program, Part A, would cost about $9 billion annually by 1990.v
Actual Part A spending in 1990 was $67 billion. The actuary who
provided the original cost estimates acknowledged in 1994 that, even
after conservatively discounting for the unexpectedly high inflation
rates of the early '70s and other factors, "the actual [Part A]
experience was 165% higher than the estimate."

Medicare (entire program). In 1967, the House Ways and Means
Committee predicted that the new Medicare program, launched the
previous year, would cost about $12 billion in 1990. Actual Medicare
spending in 1990 was $110 billion -- off by nearly a factor of 10.

Medicaid DSH program. In 1987, Congress estimated that Medicaid's
disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments -- which states use to
provide relief to hospitals that serve especially large numbers of
Medicaid and uninsured patients -- would cost less than $1 billion in
1992. The actual cost that year was a staggering $17 billion. Among
other things, federal lawmakers had failed to detect loopholes in the
legislation that enabled states to draw significantly more money from
the federal treasury than they would otherwise have been entitled to
claim under the program's traditional 50-50 funding scheme.

Medicare home care benefit. When Congress debated changes to
Medicare's home care benefit in 1988, the projected 1993 cost of the
benefit was $4 billion. The actual 1993 cost was more than twice that
amount, $10 billion.

Medicare catastrophic coverage benefit. In 1988, Congress added a
catastrophic coverage benefit to Medicare, to take effect in 1990. In
July 1989, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doubled its cost
estimate for the program, for the four-year period 1990-1993, from
$5.7 billion to $11.8 billion. CBO explained that it had received
newer data showing it had significantly under-estimated prescription
drug cost growth, and it warned Congress that even this revised
estimate might be too low. This was a principal reason Congress
repealed the program before it could take effect.

SCHIP. In 1997, Congress established the State Children's Health
Insurance Program as a capped grant program to states, and
appropriated $40 billion to be doled out to states over 10 years at a
rate of roughly $5 billion per year, once implemented. In each year,
some states exceeded their allotments, requiring shifts of funds from
other states that had not done so. By 2006, unspent reserves from
prior years were nearly exhausted. To avert mass disenrollments,
Congress decided to appropriate an additional $283 million in FY 2006
and an additional $650 million in FY 2007.

It's NOT a Health Bill, NOT a Medicare Tax and It Can't Possibly Cost
Only $940 Billion
Posted by Alan Reynolds

* The "reconciliation bill" is not a "health bill" but an
anti-health bill. It relies heavily on price controls, taxes and
fines to punish doctors, hospitals and formerly innovative companies
the produce prescription drugs and medical devices. If we treated
farmers, food companies and grocery stores the way Congress threatens
to treat the health industries would anybody expect food to become
better or cheaper?
* The 3.8% tax on both labor and investment income is not a
"Medicare tax." It's surtax on income that goes into the slush fund,
not the Medicare trust.
* The bill could not possibly cost "only" $940 billion unless it
contained a sunset provision -- repealing the law after 2019.

In fact, new spending is negligible for four years. At that point the
government would start luring sixteen million more people into
Medicaid's leaky gravy train, and start handing out subsidies to
families earning up to $88,000. Spending then jumps from $54 billion
in 2014 to $216 billion in 2019. That's just the beginning.

To be unduly optimistic (more so than the CBO), assume that the new
entitlement schemes only increased by 7% a year. At that rate
spending would double every ten years -- to $432 billion a year in
2029, $864 billion a year in 2039, and more than $1.72 trillion by
2049. That $1.72 trillion is a conservative projection of extra
spending in one year, not ten. How could that possibly not add to
future deficits?

Could anyone really imagine that the bill's new taxes and fines could
possibly grow by 7% a year? On the contrary, most of the claimed
revenues are either a timing fraud (such as treating $70 billion for
long-term care premiums as newly found treasure) or self-defeating.

The hypothetical tax on Cadillac plans (suspiciously postponed until
2018), for example, is designed to discourage such plans from being
offered by employers or wanted by employees -- that is, it's designed
to yield less and less over time.

Moreover, the accumulating penalties on reporting joint incomes above
$250,000 -- a 39.6% tax, a 3.8 % income surtax, a 0.9% Medicare surtax,
rapid phasing-out of deductions and exemptions -- would greatly
discourage any activity that would push income above $250,000. Most
obviously, no sensible family whose income is normally below that pain
threshold would be so foolish as to sell enough assets to let capital
gains to push them over the line.

(If even half of the punitive tax plans are enacted, I plan to launch
a "249 Club" whose members pledge to never again report more than
$249,000).

ObamaCare's Actual Price Tag
Posted by Michael F. Cannon

My oped at FoxNews.com explains just how well Democrats have hidden
the full cost of the Obama health plan:

To hear Democrats tell it, the CBO projects the legislation would
cost a mere $940 billion over the next 10 years.... the actual cost of
the bill is nearly $3 trillion....

Yet this legislation would set in motion political forces that
would make additional spending inevitable. It would create new
constituencies for government spending, hook existing constituencies
on even more government spending, and promise implausible cuts in
existing subsidies to constituencies that are highly organized and
vocal...

When Congress inevitably fails to implement the Obama plan's
spending cuts, and expands its subsidies to more and more people, the
cost of this legislation will grow beyond $3 trillion.

The CBO did an admirable job of projecting the cost of this
legislation as written. But the text of the legislation does not
reflect the reality it would create.

Giving the Obama health plan the effect of law will not make those
costs disappear.

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Who did/did not vote for ObamaCare

2010-03-22T06:40:00.002-12:00

Here is the tally of votes taken late Sunday night, March 21, 2010. It was entirely expected. It was also one of the most shameful moments in American history.

The ayes won, 219-212. No Republican voted for it, and 34 Democrats voted against it.

Campaign for Liberty is urging members to keep hammering at those who voted for it. Wouldn't it be great if Pelosi got unseated because of it?

Or Obama became a one-term president for pushing it on is?

Obama's Great Leap Forward

2010-03-22T02:15:00.003-12:00

Congratulations to Obama and his supporters for getting a health care bill passed. If somehow the current plan turns out to have problems, I have no doubt Congress will patch it up with the necessary amendments -- assuming, of course, the economy has not completely collapsed by then.

Readers of Atlas Shrugged might welcome ObamaCare for the same reasons the strikers of Rand's novel welcomed every new state intrusion: It hastens the arrival of reckoning day. Libertarians who have their own "Galt's Gulch" have the best insurance of all. They can witness the implosion from a safe and hidden locale instead of having it collapse on their heads.

Canada is a country with progressive government health care. What's it like getting medical treatment in Canada? I have only anecdotal information to pass on. My sister and her husband live in Calgary. They are not poor. Their son is a doctor. A little over a year ago, my sister was told she needed an MRI, and so she was put on a waiting list -- not a waiting list to get the MRI, but a waiting list to have one scheduled. A year after being put on the list, she was finally due to schedule an MRI. Unfortunately for her, the date on which she was to work out the arrangements with the bureaucrats came while she was out of the country spending time with our mother, who was in hospice and recently died. When she gets back to Canada she will have to start over. Having a son who's a doctor doesn't shorten her wait time. Meanwhile, what's happening to her health?

Such a question misses the point, of course. The system was designed to meet the requirements of "social justice," not the needs of individual health care consumers. From the standpoint of its advocates, the system is morally flawless because it's explicitly based on altruism instead of selfishness. So what if it fails to meet consumer demands? That's a destructive, selfish way of looking at it. People need to remain quiet and wait their turn like good little subjects. If they die waiting, that's a small price to pay for existing under the moral grandeur of collectivism. No system is perfect, and the medical bureaucrats are doing their best. It's egalitarian, and only insensitive monsters would oppose it.

For a brief sketch of a system of ethics contrary to altruism, see this Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand.

For a discussion of the general principles underlying government intrusion into health care, see this Murray Rothbard essay on HillaryCare.

Facsism is freedom for many Americans

2010-03-19T01:14:00.004-12:00

Is there anything of any consequence that is today outside the reach of the American state? No, says Robert Higgs.

What about religion? Aren't those who wish to practice a religion allowed to do so freely?

Only with state approval. During the Vietnam War, as Higgs points out, certain religions were regarded as legitimate and therefore its practitioners could be granted conscientious objector status. Other belief systems failed to make the grade as religions, in the state's view.

But even those practicing approved systems of mysticism subordinate their religious beliefs to the higher authority of the state. If the state orders them to murder, rob, or lie, most of them will obey.

Estimates of the number of people killed in the "Good War" (WW II) range from 50-70 million, depending on whose numbers you accept. As Nicholson Baker points out in Human Smoke, on December 31, 1941, most of those people were still alive. Within four years they were dead, and most were not soldiers. States ordered their killing.

But it's not only war that invigorates the state. As Higgs tells us,

When the state produces unworkable or unsatisfactory conditions in any area of life, and therefore elicits complaints and protests, as it has for example in every area related to health care, it responds to these complaints and protests by making “reforms” that heap new laws, regulations, and government bureaus atop the existing mountain of counterproductive interventions. Thus, each new “reform” makes the government more monstrous and destructive than it was before.

He concludes:

We verge ever closer upon the condition in which everything that is not prohibited is required. Yet, the average American will declare loudly that he is a free man and that his country is the freest in the world. Thus, in a country where more and more is for the state, where virtually nothing is outside the State, and where, aside from pointless complaints, nothing against the State is permitted, Americans have become ideal fascist citizens.

Jon Pilger on Hollywood Propaganda

2010-03-08T00:41:00.002-12:00

Writes Jon Pilger:

This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

Thanks to Doug Herman.

Many Thanks

2010-03-07T03:12:00.003-12:00

On March 3, 2010 my grandson Preston turned 5, the same day my mother died quietly in her home at age 94. I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to those who have offered their condolences on her passing.

Duke Lacrosse accuser charged with attempted murder

2010-02-18T10:04:00.002-12:00

What economist William L. Anderson has called the "Duke Non-Rape, Non-Kidnapping, and Non-Sexual Assault Case" has surfaced in the news once again.

North Carolina police responding to a domestic violence call have arrested the woman who falsely accused three Duke University lacrosse players of rape.

WRAL-TV reported 33-year-old Crystal Gale Mangum was arrested late Wednesday on charges she assaulted her boyfriend.

Durham County jail records indicate Mangum is charged with attempted murder, arson, assault and battery, identity theft, communicating threats, damage to property, resisting an officer and child endangerment.

Anderson's articles on the Duke case can be found in his archives.

Stack's Suicide Crash Not Terrorism, DHS Claims

2010-02-18T09:31:00.002-12:00

Earlier today 53-year-old Joseph Andrew Stack flew his single-engine plane into an Austin, TX office building housing about 190 IRS employees. Stack has been confirmed dead.

In a neighborhood about six miles from the crash site, a home listed as belonging to Stack was on fire earlier Thursday. Two law enforcement officials said Stack had apparently set fire to his home before the suicidal plane flight.

MyFoxAustin.com said firefighters reported that the entire house was engulfed in flames, including the fence, when they arrived on the scene.

Neighbors said they heard a loud explosion in the house Thursday morning right before the house became engulfed in flames.

MyFoxAustin.com reported that a 12-year-old girl and a woman were rescued by a neighbor from the $236,000 burning house which belonged to Stack. The station reported that the girl is believed to be Stack's stepdaughter. Other media reports indicated that these individuals may have alerted authorities to Stack’s actions.

Back in Austin,

The Austin American-Statesman newspaper reported several "walking wounded" at the scene of the crash. Paramedics set up a triage center at the scene.

Heavy smoke could be seen coming from the building at 9420 Research Boulevard. Several local witnesses on Twitter reported seeing flames coming out of the building and lots of broken glass.

Dozens of fire trucks were on scene and the building was evacuated.

Early reports that the building housed the FBI field office in Austin later turned out not to be true. An FBI spokesman told Fox News that the FBI office in Austin is near where the plane crashed, but not in the same building. There are some federal offices in the building, though authorities couldn't identify which ones.

The NTSB is sending staff out of Dallas and DC to the scene.

As a precaution, the Colorado-based North American Aerospace Defense Command launched two F-16 aircraft from Houston's Ellington Field, and is conducting an air patrol over the crash area.

Witnesses are asked to contact the Austin Police Department at 210-650-6196 with any information that might be useful in the investigation.

Why did Stack do it? He started a blog entry two days ago at EmbeddedArt.com. But go there now and here is what you will see:

This website has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI. To see an archived version of the original letter, please go here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html. Please visit our forum if you wish to discuss anything related to this incident: Texas crash pilot left suicide note on Web site - embeddedart.com.

Regards,
T35 Hosting - www.T35.com

Here's what The Smoking Gun has to say:

FEBRUARY 18--The man suspected of intentionally crashing an airplane into a Texas office building today appears to have posted a lengthy online diatribe attacking the Internal Revenue Service and declaring that, "I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand." The six-page manifesto, which you'll find below, is dated "2/18/10" and is signed "Joe Stack (1956-2010)." Andrew Joseph Stack, 53, has been identified as the man who flew a small plane into an Austin building housing IRS offices. The statement was uploaded to the front page of a web site that was registered in 2003 by a Joe Stack, who listed an address in San Marcos, Texas, which is about 35 miles south of Austin. The online posting is titled "Well Mr. Big Brother IRS man... take my pound of flesh and sleep well." Cached versions of Stack's web site, which described his software development consulting business, noted that he founded the firm in southern California in 1983, and eventually relocated to the Austin area to "lend a hand to the growing high technology industry in South-Central Texas." Alex Melen, whose firm hosts Stack's site, told TSG that Stack last changed his web site this morning at 10:12 AM (Eastern). His Piper Cherokee crashed into the Austin building at around 11:30 AM (Eastern). Until Stack uploaded his suicide note, his site consisted of a handful of pages describing his business, Embedded Art, and its history. A screen grab of the previous front page of Stack's site, which he backed up Tuesday afternoon, can be seen here. Melen said that Stack paid his annual hosting fee with a credit card, and last year changed his billing address from San Marcos to an address on North Mopack Expressway in Austin. Prior to speaking with TSG, Melen said he had been contacted by FBI agents in Austin and New Jersey, where his hosting business is located. At 2:40 PM today, Melen deleted Stack's web site at embeddedart.com. He replaced it with a statement noting that, "This web site has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI." (7 pages)

Here is Stack's suicide note, last revised this morning:

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL - Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. - This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

Â· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.

Â· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.

Â· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.

Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

02/18/2010

Snowmaggedon

2010-02-13T07:26:00.002-12:00

Writes Doug Bandow at the Cato Institute about the recent snowstorm that shut down the government three days straight:

In theory the government closure is costing all of us. Some 230,000 D.C. area employees stayed home, costing an estimated $300 million "in lost productivity per day," according to federal officials. But is the shutdown really hurting the public?

Using the term "productivity" in the same sentence as "federal government" is a dubious exercise. No doubt, in the sense of performing a task efficiently, the Feds can be productive. Just watch how quickly and completely the IRS attempts to clean out the average taxpayer.

Audi vs. Apple

2010-02-13T06:59:00.002-12:00

From Edward Hudgins at the Atlas Society, commenting on the gross dissimilarity between Audi's recent Super Bowl ad and the fabulous Apple Computer Super Bowl ad in 1984:

The Audi commercial perhaps was having some fun with what might seem to be just a few steps in the future if the logic of eco-cult is played out in our society. And perhaps in the future, when folks complain as new environmental restrictions tighten around their necks, they’ll say, “It’s like in that Audi commercial.”

Still, the car in the Audi ad doesn’t smash a repressive system as the Apple computer jogger did. Rather, it escapes repression by complying with the system. This is certainly a bad subliminal cultural message, and it’s shocking to think that a company would think such a message could enhance the image of its brand in a free and individualist society.

You can view Audi's ad here, Apple's here.

Frisbee inventor dies at 90

2010-02-12T06:10:00.002-12:00

From CNN:

[Fred] Morrison died this week at his home in Utah, said Jen Derevensky, a spokeswoman for Wham-O, the company that has sold the official version of the flying disc since signing a contract with Morrison in 1957.
The company has sold more than 200 million Frisbees to date, Derevensky said Friday.

Morrison started experimenting with flying disc designs in 1937 after his girlfriend's uncle invited him outside to toss the lid from a popcorn tin, according to Wham-O.

Later, Morrison borrowed a cake pan from his mother's kitchen to throw with the girlfriend, who later became his wife. He was soon hawking "Flyin' Cake Pans" for 25 cents on beaches and parks around Los Angeles, California.

A fighter pilot during World War II, Morrison was shot down and held as a prisoner of war for 48 days, according to Wham-O.

After the war, he became a carpenter, drawing up plans for aerodynamic discs in his free time. His plastic Whirl-Away was a commercial flop, but the better-designed Pluto Platter sold well enough to attract the attention of the Southern California-based Wham-O, which would soon begin selling the Hula Hoop.

Wham-O took the name Frisbee from a group of New England college students who'd been throwing empty tins from the local Frisbie Pie Co. The company quickly trademarked the term.

I've always loved tossing Frisbees, and it's sad to see the inventor pass on.

The Green Audi Ad

2010-02-11T13:13:00.002-12:00

Greens love the ad because it shows enforcement police arresting everyday Americans for using their private property without regard to the Green agenda. Libertarians like it because it mocks the Green agenda. I think most people will see more truth than humor in the ad. People who are not green forfeit their rights.

Don't Sign Up

2010-02-10T12:56:00.002-12:00

As Justin Raimondo puts it, anyone "who joins the American armed forces at this point necessarily becomes an accessory to murder on a mass scale." If we were a non-aggressor nation, a military career would be no different than a career in some other line of work, "neither calumniated nor valorized in an unseemly way." But the U.S. military today is engaged in "unabashedly naked aggression."

The moral grounds for such aggression has a new element since the Coming of Obama: defending the rights of women and gays.

The mobilization of liberals behind a crusade to make the world safe for the American empire is a key goal of the War Party, and one way to accomplish it is to market the conflict as a war to rid the world of political incorrectness. That fits in rather nicely with this “gays in the military” campaign, which is being brought up at a pivotal point in the life of the Empire: the transition from the conservative Bush regime to an administration much more conducive to the left-liberal imagination.

How the War Party Works

2010-02-10T12:44:00.003-12:00

Justin Raimondo writes:

In framing the Iranians for supposedly harboring "weapons of mass destruction," the War Party’s job is to keep up a relentless assault in the hope something will stick. Get ready for a barrage of "leaks" by pro-war factions inside the administration, and yet more "intelligence" reports planted by one or another foreign country with an interest in fomenting war, all of it backed up and "verified" by reliably biased experts. What makes the War Party’s job easier, in this case, is that it’s not hard to confuse the public with a lot of "scientific" terminology and wrangling over technical details: people eventually throw up their hands, and reason that where there’s so much smoke there’s bound to be fire.

The debunking of war myths has to be done carefully, and systematically: the process can take years. There are still those who believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a number roughly equivalent to the audience for Fox News. War propagandists erect their war mythos in layers, first laying the foundations by positing the absolute evil and inherent aggressiveness of their chosen enemy, and then building the case for war brick by brick, a construction consisting of whatever "evidence" can be found or manufactured at the time. This results in a somewhat unsteady, makeshift structure, but remember that longevity is not something the War Party is aiming for. The idea is to seize on the passions and politics of the moment to push us into war. What happens afterward is someone else’s problem.

Nanobubbles

2010-02-10T12:32:00.002-12:00

This sounds more like a video game than a radical new technology. It's very encouraging.

Using lasers and nanoparticles, scientists at Rice University have discovered a new technique for singling out individual diseased cells and destroying them with tiny explosions. The scientists used lasers to make "nanobubbles" by zapping gold nanoparticles inside cells. In tests on cancer cells, they found they could tune the lasers to create either small, bright bubbles that were visible but harmless or large bubbles that burst the cells.

Read the rest.

The global warming guerrillas

2010-02-09T04:36:00.002-12:00

Writes Matt Ridley in the Spectator:

Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

Eric Margolis on U.S. Wars

2010-02-02T00:23:00.002-12:00

Margolis writes:

One thing is clear: the US and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan in spite of their fearsome arsenal of high-tech weapons and war chests of billions of dollars.

Lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen are living up to their legendary reputation of making Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. . . .

Meanwhile, Pakistan, without whose cooperation the US cannot wage war in Afghanistan, is in turmoil. The US is infiltrating Xe (formerly Blackwater) and DynCorp mercenaries into Pakistan to protect US military supply routes north from Karachi to Afghanistan, and to operate or defend US air bases in Pakistan.

US mercenaries are also reportedly being used to assassinate militants and enemies of Pakistan’s US-installed government, and to target Pakistan’s nuclear installations for future US action. This, and increasing attacks by US killer drones, have sparked outrage across Pakistan and brought warnings of creeping US occupation. . . .

The US and its allies need a face-saving way out of Afghanistan. Real peace talks are the answer. Not the ruse long proposed by US Gen. Stanley McChrystal to try to bribe away low-ranking Taliban and so split the Afghan resistance.

This stratagem worked to a degree with Sunni tribesmen in Iraq, but is unlikely to succeed with the proud Pashtun tribes who value honor more than money. Theirs is an antique concept most westerners cannot understand.

The original Patriot Act

2010-01-30T08:18:00.002-12:00

Author Tom Mullen has a post detailing the original sin of American government - adopting the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t get me wrong. If our government were limited to the powers granted it in that document, the United States of America would be far freer, far more prosperous, and likely not facing any of the monumental problems that it is facing now. However, that does not change the facts about why the Constitutional Convention was called or why the Constitution itself was created. . . .

Compared to the overtaxed, overregulated society that is America today, the America of the 19th century was one of astounding liberty and prosperity. However, even America after 1787 had much more government than America in its first decade. We are taught that this was a grave problem and that the Constitution was necessary to avoid imminent destruction from any number of horrors . . .

By 1787, there were two dominant parties in America. Unlike the two dominant parties today, the Federalists and what would later become the Democratic-Republicans of that time really were diametrically opposed on fundamental issues. Led by Alexander Hamilton, the Federalists sought a much more powerful central government with a central bank, a standing army, and an alliance with big business that would control the economy. . . .

When viewed objectively, the very words of the Constitution reveal its true purpose. Constitutionalists often cite Article I Section 8 as proof of the limits on the powers granted to the federal government, but let’s not forget what that section actually says. It begins,

“The Congress shall have the power to…”

What follows is a long list of powers that the central government did not previously have. . . .

Of course, supporters of the Constitution would point out that the first ten amendments to the Constitution are actually a list of specific limits on government. Indeed they are. However, most people miss the point of those precious amendments. They represent the compromise, the attempt to limit the damage that was already done by the original document. . . .

Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense.

Happy birthday, Thomas Paine

2010-01-29T03:46:00.002-12:00

The Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason author was born 273 years ago in Thetford, England. See my new book, Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, available now on Kindle and soon in print.

Surgery without government oversight

2010-01-26T09:13:00.002-12:00

Incredibly, scientists have discovered that nearly 7,000 years ago early Neolithic surgeons successfully amputated the forearm of an elderly man.

And, more remarkable yet, they ensured the patient was anaesthetised and the limb cut off cleanly while the wound was treated afterwards in sterile conditions.

And to think this was done without government oversight, without medical training at a licensed university, without health insurance, and without the blessing of the AMA. We've traveled far since those dark days.

1932: US Military defeats Bonus Army

2010-01-25T14:38:00.002-12:00

Did the U.S. military engage in combat operations between the two World Wars? Did MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton get involved? Why, yes, it did and they did, right on the military's front lawn. The enemy was WW I vets and their families. In 1932 the vets were in D.C. to get their silver certificates redeemed for silver. They had received the certificates as a bonus for fighting in the inferno of WW I. The House approved the redemption, but the Senate balked. The vets and their families marched, and the military intervened. Their temporary shelters were burned, their families shot at and gassed. Some were killed, including children. Freedom was once again preserved.

Congress "rescues" exploited American Samoan workers

2010-01-25T04:57:00.002-12:00

Effective last year, the U.S. Congress raised the minimum wage across all U.S. states and territories, including American Samoa, where half of the private sector workers were employed in one of the two tuna canning factories. Raising the minimum wage made tuna canning an unprofitable venture for the companies, one of which -- Chicken of the Sea -- closed its cannery. Starkist, the other company, is considering pulling out as well.

Peter Schiff writes:

In the case of American Samoa, tuna canners simply could not deliver $7.25 cents per hour of productivity, so their jobs were eliminated. Rather than being employed at $3.26 per hour (the level prior to the minimum wage hike), they are now unemployed at $7.25 per hour. Which do you think is better?

Among the unintended consequences of congressional "benevolence" are rapidly rising consumer prices, due to the higher shipping costs now necessary to bring consumer goods to the islands. Before the minimum wage hikes destroyed most of the canning jobs, lots of canned tuna were shipped from American Samoa to the U.S. (over 50% of the canned tuna in American markets came from American Samoa). One benefit of all the shipping traffic was a low cost of imports, as ships were coming to the islands anyway to pick up the tuna. However, with fewer ships coming to Samoa to pick up tuna, goods are now much more expensive to import.

Eyes of Fire for Kindle

2010-01-24T05:59:00.004-12:00

Sample the beginning of Eyes for free. Download it to Kindle, PC, iPod Touch, or iPhone for $3.95. The print version should be available in two weeks or less.

Home-schooler sets sail alone

2010-01-24T05:37:00.003-12:00

Sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland left Marina Del Rey, CA Saturday morning hoping to be the youngest person ever to sail around the globe alone. Her father Laurence built the 40-foot craft, called Wild Eyes. Her brother Zac had held the record until last August, when it was broken by 17-year-old British Mike Perham.

Responding to naysayers, the British-born Laurence said: “You know, the bottom line is, every kid will learn to drive. Do we stop them from driving because they might have an accident? We’re trying to protect the young so much that we stifle their development. ... This is years in preparation and years of work, and I’m very excited for Abigail.” . . . .

The home-schooled Sunderland is taking along textbooks, as well as an iPod, cameras and a journal (she plans to write a book later), and necessities like six months’ supply of dehydrated food, a water purification machine and 60 gallons of fuel for the sailboat’s small motor.

One hard thing about sailing solo is that you often can sleep for only 10 or 15 minutes at a time, Sunderland said.

Eyes of Fire, the book

2010-01-18T06:44:00.003-12:00

I've spent most of the last ten days preparing my manuscript on Thomas Paine for publishing. It's an updated version of a screenplay I wrote in 2003 that I found quite interesting when I re-read it last year. The original version got lost in detail and failed as a dramatic piece, though it still made the quarterfinals of the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition that year. A friend who read it said it would be suitable for the History Channel, and I had to agree. The version I'm publishing in book form has, I hope, the right amount of history to make Paine's enormous contributions to American independence intelligible. The book should be available on Amazon later this month or in early February. I call it:

EYES OF FIRE - THOMAS PAINE AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION