I am going to try and post something that could, at least, possibly be taken for humour every Sunday. Most likely it will be an image from the Dollar Vigilante, like this week, or something from the Reality Zone. They do a good job of providing some humor with their reality.
Thanks Jeff Berwick for sending this little gem to your subscribers.
The Original post can be found here: http://www.dollarvigilante.com/blog/2012/2/17/governments-and-statists-are-an-anachronism.html
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Another great find from Gary North at the http://teapartyeconomist.com
At what point will these bureaucrats not just follow orders? Is it when the man dies in 3 feet of water in front of them, or when they are ordered (in this case, asking) to machine gun journalists? Or how about killing innocent people at a funeral? What about dropping atomic bombs on thousands of innocent women and children?
I am eagerly awaiting the day when answering to a higher law regains its position above the man-made laws of the state. I doubt we will ever see that day in our lifetime. After all, we live in a time where it is acceptable for Christians to commit murder.
On second thought, Christians have been killing since the beginning. I don’t think that day ever existed. I guess that is kind of the point. Don’t look for salvation on Earth. And don’t be surprised when shit like this happens. I don’t know why I still am.
Calling yourself a Christian (or a Muslim or whatever) is kind of like joining a political party. You are expected to answer for all the dumb fucks who misrepresent your values but scream them the loudest. Rick Santorum is to Christianity what bombing citizens of other countries is to loving your neighbor as yourself. Include other warmongering evangelicals in that as well. Jesus warned about false prophets. My what a hold they have on our nation. When will these people turn off their propaganda machines and re-open their Bibles?
The Original article can be found from the Daily Mail here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104358/Simon-Burgess-drowned-firemen-refused-wade-3ft-deep-lake-health-safety-rules.html
The article below with Mr. North’s insights can be found here: http://teapartyeconomist.com/2012/02/23/man-drowns-in-3-feet-of-water-in-front-of-rescuers/
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That we live in a world gone batty with government regulations comes as no shock. The voters know this. The bureaucrats don’t.
North’s law of bureaucracy: “There is nothing so bizarre that some bureaucrat will not do it by following the rules.”
Example:
A charity worker drowned in a 3ft deep lake when a policeman and a paramedic were ordered not to try to rescue him.
Simon Burgess, 41, was left to float face down as emergency crews watched.
Health and safety rules stopped them going more than ankle deep into the lake, an inquest was told yesterday.
According to a doctor, Mr Burgess’s life could have been saved had he been removed from the water quickly.
The constable and the ambulance worker who volunteered to jump into the lake were given strict orders not to do so by fire station watch manager Tony Nicholls.
Is this bizarre, or what?
It gets more bizarre.
‘The control room was informed I was going in and they sent a message that under no circumstances could I go in the water.’
Wading out: Following the delay, a pair of firefighters make their way into the centre of the waist-deep lake to attempt to rescue Mr Burgess.
A similar story comes from the United States. You can read about it here.
It will not get better as we march into the world of bureaucracy. It will get worse
Continue Reading on www.dailymail.co.uk
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Reblogged from Jenn Morrill’s great work at www.examiner.com
I highly recommend paying a visit to the original article and subscribing to her future articles. You can find the original here: http://www.examiner.com/independent-in-salt-lake-city/bomb-iran-billboard-salt-lake-sparks-controversy
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A new billboard went up Thursday off I-215 in West Valley City, Utah that has evoked a strong reaction among viewers, which, the designer of the billboard says, was exactly the point.
In large red letters, “Bomb Iran!” is scrawled across the sign. At first glance, many are certain to wonder why someone would pay to put that message on a billboard in the very conservative, heavily Mormon dominated population of Utah. On the second or third glance, the answer might become more obvious.
Whenever the government drags us into war, the politicians, media, and opinion makers collectively try to claim that we must ‘support the troops’ in their mission (whatever that mission may happen to be) in order to be patriotic Americans. We believe differently, for if a war is illegitimate and immoral, it should be opposed. Ultimately, we want people to go to the website to find some helpful links, book suggestions, and videos to learn more as to why we shouldn’t fight Iran.
The creators wanted an “in your face” way to get the message across and felt the billboard would be a good option. They also felt using sarcasm would be a more effective way of reaching people who do support going to war with Iran. Boyack said, “We wanted people to be at least slightly confused to make them stop and think for a second.”
Though Boyack is a vocal Ron Paul supporter, he said the sign is not a Ron Paul project. It was a grassroots effort, funded by fifty people across the country, but not all of them Paul supporters. He said,
This is an issue much bigger than one man or his campaign to win the presidency. This is a project to educate others; those who want to learn more about the issue by reading the recommended books listed on our website, or by watching the videos, will come to see that Ron Paul’s position on the subject of Iran is the correct one.
Boyack said,
But certainly, this isn’t a Mormon thing at all. Utah’s conservative majority claims it supports the Constitution and wants limited government, and yet so many of them support wars such as these — the last batch of which has kept us in the Middle East for a decade with $4 TRILLION spent, thousands of lives lost, tens of thousands more injured, and millions displaced or dead in the region we’ve occupied, invaded, and carpet bombed. Those offensive wars (as would be the case with a war in Iran) are neither constitutional nor reconcilable with limited government, let alone a Christian approach to foreign policy.
Many on social networking sites have been critical of the controversial approach to this subject and don’t believe most people will recognize the sarcasm while driving by at 70 mph. Boyack readily admits the design is not perfect and that the people who were involved with its creation aren’t marketing and design experts. Boyack noted,
It was pretty complicated to pack in a meaningful message that got a point across (that the military-industrial complex encourages and benefits from war), did it concisely, and in a way that got people to think for a minute rather than viewing the billboard and framing it with their preconceived bias and stopping there.
Boyack is unsure of how long the billboard will remain on I-215, saying that it will depend on how much money they are able to raise. Right now, it will probably be about a month. If they do raise additional funds, Boyack says the money might be used to put up a second billboard in another location.
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Ron Paul pleads again and again. Is anybody listening?
Note: Ron Paul calls Europe a country. Is that an accident?
Note II: Are any democrats still claiming to be anti-war and pro-peace? If so I want to hear about it. Please comment below.
| The administration recently released its 2013 budget proposal, and conservatives are correctly alarmed that it calls for unprecedented spending and continued annual deficits exceeding $1 trillion. But the same conservatives complain that the budget does not devote enough funds to overseas adventurism.
I continue to be dismayed that in spite of our economic problems, most of those who call themselves fiscal conservatives refuse to consider any reductions in military spending. Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute very aptly addresses this in his recent article for the American Conservative entitled “Attack of the Pork Hawks”. He points out that conservatives are using a tired liberal argument to defend the bloated military budget: namely, that more spending equals better results. The federal education morass is merely one example that clearly disproves this. The facts are that the President’s budget calls for an 18% increase versus the previously planned 20% increase. This is not a cut, yet Pentagon hawks continue to issue dire warnings that this “draconian” decrease in proposed future spending will seriously threaten our national security. In truth, the majority of DOD spending goes to protect other nations, including prosperous allies like Europe and Japan and South Korea – nations that could and should take more responsibility for their own defense. Is there any amount of money that would satisfy the hawks and the neoconservatives? Even adjusted for inflation, military spending is 17% higher now than when Obama took office. Even the worst case scenarios of Obama’s “cuts”, adjusted for inflation, still put outlays at 2007 levels, which are 40% higher than a decade ago. Our total spending on overseas adventurism and nation building equals more than the next 13 highest spending countries in the world combined. Even if we were to slash our military budget in half, we would still be the world’s dominant military power, by far. In reality, the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about has become every bit the voracious monolith he feared. It wastes as much as any other arm of government, if not more, because it knows it can depend on unlimited blank checks from a terrified Congress. Mr. Bandow concludes that America is more secure today than at any point since before WWII, and that military outlays should be reduced accordingly. We should, Mr. Bandow argues, “stop garrisoning the globe, subsidizing rich friends, and reconstructing poor enemies. Instead, it’s about time Washington focused on defending American and its people.” I couldn’t agree more. Wasting money on overseas adventurism and nation building threatens our national security by massively contributing to our debt. Both welfare and warfare spending are tipping our economy into a serious currency and debt crisis. We can afford no sacred cows in our budget. One only has to look to the violence and civil unrest in Greece and ask – is that the sort of security we envision for our nation’s future?” |
“One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they’re still free. N.A. Scott American author, intellectual, anti-totalitarian figure.”
One wonders if all of the network correspondents also think the same things (read the same scripts) on matters of foreign policy.
Killing people who live in other regions of the world.
For those of you who support yet another war in Iran, or anywhere else, this is what you are supporting.
From Lewrockwell.com
by Bill Walker
Previously by Bill Walker: The End of the Phony Express, or: The USPS Goes Postal On Our Economy
| The US is about to launch yet another undeclared war on yet another eastern front, this time against Iran. Supposedly our permanent state of war is necessary to “stop the next Hitler”…. in other words, the way to prevent a Nazi regime from arising is to launch surprise attacks on small countries, round up Semitic scapegoats and put them in secret camps, spy on our own people with 17 Gestapo-style intelligence agencies, build a series of invincible robot wonder weapons… wait just a darn minute here. I think our foreign-policy cooks are using the wrong recipe book. |
In order to prevent another Hitler, it is necessary to know how Hitlers are made. The National Socialist recipe is in the public domain, available in any historical cookbook. Let’s go into the kitchen with master chef Woodrow Wilson and watch the Nazi soufflé rise.
Hitler: Created by US Intervention, Kept in Power by England and France
Germany and France had fought a war in 1870. Some expendable soldiers died, a few civilians were collateral damage, and a couple border areas changed hands. Overall, the war changed nothing, and after the war Europe returned to peace and business as usual.
In 1917 World War One was on track to burn itself out in similar fashion. Both sides were war-weary; common people had been reminded that being gassed and ripped apart by artillery isn’t really as fun as it sounds. Another peace of exhaustion was in the cards, helped along by military technologies which favored the defender. Trench warfare and railbound supply lines made successful aggression difficult. Millions of troops died without changing the front lines very much.
Woodrow Wilson saved the War To End Wars with a major media campaign and 2.8 million drafted Americans. Funded by the recently created Federal Reserve, the US poured fresh troops and money in to support the British and French empires. This allowed Clemenceau and Lloyd George to launch a total war against the German civilian population.
The Germans signed an Armistice on November 11, 1918. However, the Allies didn’t stop fighting. They used their fleets to blockade (nowadays we would say “to impose sanctions”) Germany until July 1919. At least a quarter of a million Germans were killed by starvation and disease during the blockade.
Backed by their invincible US mercenaries, the French and British looted Germany. The Versailles Treaty prevented economic recovery and any return to normal trade for Germans. The Weimar government tried to pay its impossible foreign debts by inflating the mark, destroying the middle class and discrediting capitalist values like honesty and saving. Socialism of different stripes became the only ideology in Germany.
Without the Versailles Treaty, Hitler would have become a house-painting contractor or maybe a minor artist. Under the Treaty, he became a Messiah. People are evolved to live in tribes, and their default setting is xenophobic tribalism. Germans simply reset to the default setting, as other peoples from Japan to Rwanda have done under economic stress.
After Hitler came to power, the other powers jumped in to… help him. Britain and France pressured the Czechs to cede a strip of land (which coincidentally contained the Czech defense fortifications). After the Czechs were rendered defenseless, Poland and Hungary annexed parts of Czechoslovakia, helping Germany finish it off.
The interventionist policies of the other world powers also helped Hitler make Europe Judenfrei. Britain and France refused to allow most Jews to escape. Even in 1938, at the Evian Conference, the nations of the world continued to restrict Jewish immigration. The US used its navy and coast guard to turn back ships full of escaping Jews. Without these active government interventions, most of the Jews of Germany could have escaped the Holocaust.
So Hitler was created by interventionist foreign policy and war, then enabled by more interventions. After he finally attacked his benefactors in open warfare… they still worked hard to keep him around. The Springfield-toting sniper in Saving Private Ryan asks a simple question: why not send him to shoot Hitler, instead of shooting one German draftee at a time? It’s a very good question.
Did the heroic Allies actually try to remove Hitler and save the Jews, as our current mythology implies? Or did they treat him as just another member of the club, a good ol’ boy engaged in the gentlemanly arts of demagoguery, war, and tax collection? Roger Moorhouse has collected all the attempts on Hitler’s life into one volume. The book is fairly short for lack of material; in general, governments made no serious attempts to kill Hitler. We know they could have, because one construction worker almost succeeded with no assistance.
Saving Corporal Hitler
In 1938, an ordinary German carpenter named Georg Elser was convinced that Hitler was going to plunge Germany back into war. Elser decided to kill Hitler and save the world.
First, he traveled to Munich for the observance of the November 8th anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an important Nazi holiday. Hitler was obliged to give a speech at the Burgerbraukeller for these festivities. Elser simply went in afterward and bought a beer. He observed the position of the speaker’s lectern and the structure of the hall. Then he went home and got a job in a quarry that used explosives.
In August 1939, Elser moved to Munich. Every evening he bought dinner in the Burgerbraukeller. After each dinner he hid in a storeroom until the employees left. Then he emerged and worked all night, constructing a hidden cavity in a pillar behind the speaker’s dais. On the 2nd of November 1939, he installed a large homemade bomb. On November 5, he set the timers for the evening of November 8 (remember this is a punctual German bomb, it had a backup timer).
On the evening of November 8, Hitler entered the Burgerbraukeller and gave his speech. Unfortunately he was an hour early. Due to bad weather, he had decided to use the train instead of displaying his high-tech flair by flying. So he left the hall at 9:07. Elser’s bomb went off exactly at 9:20, not only blasting the lectern but bringing the whole gallery down onto the dais. Instead of killing Hitler and other high-level Nazis, he got only a few low-ranking supporters.
Elser missed… but not by much. He demonstrated that any individual who put a few months of their time into killing Hitler would have a pretty good chance of success. Unfortunately, as the rest of Moorhouse’s book shows, the major governments of the world never spared as much as one full-time carpenter to kill Hitler. Stalin put elaborate assassination nets in place, but then carefully avoided any harm to Adolf, probably fearing that a less crazy leader would make Germany more powerful.
The democratic Allies did no better. The British demonstrated that they could assassinate even the highest-ranking Nazis deep inside Eastern Europe, by killing Reinhard Heydrich. They produced James Bond weapons like the Welrod pistol and distributed them to resistance movements, and assassinated Nazi small fry all over Europe. But though they did a feasibility study (“Operation Foxley”) on shooting Hitler at his retreat in the Alps, they too left him strictly alone. On April 25, 1945, the British finally made some PR shock and awe by sending 375 bombers to blast Berchtesgaden. The results were the same as the attacks on Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the Iraq War; the dictator was nowhere nearby.
The American war leadership followed the British lead. They preferred to spend billions on bombing ordinary German civilians rather than sending in one sniper to Berlin. (Killing Hitler makes it plain that Hitler drove openly around Berlin until quite late in the war; he would have been no harder to hit than Heydrich). Hitler was left to pursue his campaign against the Jews to the very end.
Governments, whether “democratic” or openly totalitarian, are all driven by the same evolutionary laws. They gain power by maximizing the length and cost of wars.
“War is the health of the State” is a truism because it is true. Governments create and maintain Hitlers; if they remove one it is usually only to install another. (Ask the Poles and the Czechs how much they “benefited” from World War II… unlike switching to Geico, switching to Stalin didn’t save them hundreds of thousands of lives).
Hitler only died as an accidental byproduct of the financial and political machine that was World War. If he had actually used the WMDs that he had built to win on D-Day and/or at Kursk, he might have come to a Cold War accommodation of his own and lived on to die of old age. As it was he simply failed to be a strong enough bogeyman, and was replaced by Stalin and Mao… each of whom killed far more people in peacetime genocides than Hitler.
After World War Two: Let a Thousand Hitlers Bloom
Mao alone killed around 77 million Chinese according to historian R.J. Rummel. Maybe Mao should take Hitler’s place as the generic epithet for politician… but he won’t, since he didn’t lose. In fact, he went on to enjoy hispalaces and harems and die at a ripe old age, much to his own surprise.
Since 1945, the US has given foreign aid to most of the world’s genocidal dictatorships. Pol Pot was on the US dole, even after achieving the all-time record for “proportion of population killed”. Castro was given massive aid after the Bay of Pigs…. and the biggest job security boon to a Latin American dictator ever, in the form of US trade restrictions that kept Castro economically dominant and most Cuban homes free of VCRs.
Ho Chi Minh got a chunk of change from the US after the Vietnam War, although most of his support before that came from Warsaw Pact countries that borrowed the money from US banks. Idi Amin, Julius Nyerere, Robert Mugabe, Mobutu, Charles Taylor… you can just call the roll of dictators and not risk hitting one that wasn’t on the take from official US foreign aid.
Official foreign aid, like the current official US national debt, is just the tip of the iceberg. Unofficial aid can’t even be easily tracked. All a dictator has to do is borrow money from a US bank; with a wink and a nudge from the Federal Reserve, he’s on foreign aid that won’t be on the books for twenty years, and even then not without a real audit of the Fed. This is how “socialist” regimes can exist with no visible means of support; they don’t need a domestic market economy as long as they have their foreign-aid credit card.
So let’s drop the pretense that US intervention is about “stopping the next Hitler”. Our taxes and borrowings and printings and flat-out imaginary wild promises support a worldwide network of little Hitlers, from the ex-Soviet Afghan warlords to the nuclear-armed god-kings of North Korea.
If we want to “prevent the next Hitler”, we first have to stop US foreign aid to all the little Hitlers of the world. Then we have to stop our home-grown Goebbels and Goerings from bankrupting our country with wars on every front. The “next Hitler” is us.
February 17, 2012
Bill Walker [send him mail] lives and works in New Hampshire, where he is active in the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance. Visit hisFacebook page.
I previously commented on a piece of shit article from the NYT. It is only fair to show a great article, even if it is only 1 out of every 69 articles that are actually worth a shit. Every now and then the NYT comes out with a truly superb article that brings to light something that is both very important and was hidden at the same time. Then they never follow up on it, and everything surrounding it is complete shit. I haven’t got my finger on the pulse of the NYT, but this article is one of those great ones.
Junkyard Gives Up Secret Accounts of Massacre in Iraq
Now, this article completely documents what Americans with a brain have known for a long time: we have killed millions of civilians and our war machines that rain death upon a country are not perceived to be “goodwill ambassadors” by those abroad. The question is, and of course dear reader you already know the answer, “Why doesn’t the MSM allow this to become a truthful meme? Why is it unpopular, and even ridiculed, when someone in the punditry (or a presidential candidate) suggests these very facts: We killed many innocent civilians, our government officials (elected and unelected) and our military leaders are continuously lying to us (while using our money to implement these policies of terror), our polices of aggression are not winning hearts and minds, the families and friends of those we kill resent us and resort to violence in order to defend themselves or to retaliate, and that we are creating more terrorists than existed before?
No? Put your ear to the ground…you hear it now don’t you? That faint rhythmic sound, like an army marching in the distance. Yep, that is the sound of another march to war (That endless thing our elected dictators like to do every other day). Looks like today’s drumbeat is for the Iranians. How lucky for them. Is it just me or is Obama’s administration getting increasingly fear mongerish? It seems like the Propaganda Machine gets a turn more dialed up daily. Might we see a resurgence of the color coded terror alert scale?
Federal authorities foiled a plot by men linked to the Iranian government to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and to bomb the embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, Attorney GeneralEric H. Holder Jr. said in a news conference on Tuesday.
The men accused of plotting the attacks were Manssor Arbab Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, according to court documents filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York. The Justice Department said men are originally from Iran.
There is “no basis to believe that any other co-conspirators are present in the U.S.,” Mr. Holder said.
He said the men were connected to the secretive Quds Force, a division of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that has carried out operations in other countries. He said that money in support of the plot had been transferred through a bank in New York, but that the men had not yet obtained any explosives.
The Justice Department said in a statement that Mr. Shakuri, a member of the Quds force, remained at large. Mr. Arbabsiar, a naturalized American citizen, was arrested on Sept. 29.
Mr. Holder said the Mexican government had been instrumental in the investigation.
Iran reacted immediately to the news, calling the accusations a fabrication.
Details offered by the Justice Department painted a picture of a dizzying international plot involving Mexican drug cartels, murder for hire and huge sums of money being transferred from unknown locations.
The department said in its criminal complaint that from the spring of this year, Mr. Arbabsiar conspired with Mr. Shakuri to plot the assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel A. Al-Jubeir. According to the complaint, conspirators based in Iran were aware of and approved the plan, which involved hiring men connected to a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the killing.
The complaint alleges that those hired by the two men were in fact confidential sources of the Drug Enforcement Agency. They were later asked if they were knowledgeable in bomb-making, the complaint said, Mr. Arbabsiar “was interested in, among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.”
The criminal complaint filed on Tuesday accuses the men of conspiracy to murder a foreign official; conspiracy to engage in foreign travel and use interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction. specifically explosives; and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism.
ABC News, citing an unnamed official, reported that the plot also included plans to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington, as well as those belonging to Saudi Arabia and Israelin Buenos Aires, Argentina.
A spokesman for the National Security Council said that the plot had first been brought toPresident Obama’s attention earlier this year.
“The President was first briefed on this issue in June and directed his Administration to provide all necessary support to this investigation,” he said in a statement. “The disruption of this plot is a significant achievement by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and the president is enormously grateful for their exceptional work in this instance and countless others.”
Abdullah Alshamri, a Saudi official in Riyadh, predicted the disclosure would send Iranian-Saudi relations to “their lowest point yet.” Though no government steps had been taken, he suggested that a diplomatic row was inevitable.
“We’re expecting from our government a serious and tough reaction to give a message to the Iranians that enough is enough,” he said by telephone. “If we keep our diplomatic ties with the Iranians, they will think we are weak and they will keep trying to attack us.”
He said this was only the latest Iranian attempt to attack Saudi diplomats.
“This is their hobby,” he said. “Iran has no respect for international law.”
Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut and Mark Landler from Washington.
RevolutioNation 