Friday, December 30, 2011

Forbidden Fruit or St. Martin’s Day

Even in this progressive age, religious uncertainties still abound as we approach Holy Season, which begins with St. Martin’s Day on January 16 and extends throughout Black History Month. This was made dramatically clear last week at a college near where I live, a place that has demoted the ancient Christian holiday that falls on December 25 and the weeks leading up to it as “holiday season.”

Meanwhile the institution is making every effort to commemorate MLK’s trials and martyrdom. Considering his stature, the customary one-day celebration was deemed inadequate, so they are preparing for a weeklong celebration of their twentieth-century savior. The sacred week will be devoted to recounting America’s racist past, what remains to be done to overcome that past, and most importantly, the question of whether King’s pronouncements can help advance gay and transvestite agendas.

The cheek of the man is unbelievable.

View From The Porch
Verbatim Post

The classic exemplar of "chutzpah" has always been the young man who murders his parents and then begs the judge for mercy on the grounds that he's an orphan.

No more, however. The new benchmark for chutzpah is Eric Holder, who has solemnly announced that more police officers were killed by 'illegal guns' in 2011 than in the previous year. 2011's total was 173, at least according to Mr. Holder. (It would have been 174, but Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December of last year.)
Holder said “too many guns have fallen into the hands of those who are not legally permitted to possess them,” in explaining the increase.
"Fallen into"? "Fallen into"? Is that what we're calling it now? Look, Eric, if I walk up and hand you something, it has not "fallen into" your hands, okay?

Either Holder is dumb as a stump or he is setting himself up to be the most courageous Washington fall guy since G. Gordon Liddy, and since I can't imagine Eric Holder holding his hand over a fire just to show people how tough he is, I know which way I'm betting.

"There Will Be Violence, Mark My Words"

Via Survival

By Michael Thomas, Newsweek

28 December 11

magine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers' club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the '11 is ready to drink and who'll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants' joy.

Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.

Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement - I hesitate to call it "a career" - in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude's home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York's most esteemed writers and editors.

"So," he asked, "how do you like what you're doing now?"

"I like it quite a lot," I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful: "There's one thing that bothers me, though. It's this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943."

I then added, "But here's the thing. At the same time as Funston's out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he'll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always." I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, "I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle."

And that was back when Wall Street was basically honest, brought into line thanks in part to Ferdinand Pecora's 1933 humiliation of the great bankers of the Jazz Age and even more so because of the communitarian exigencies forced on the nation by war. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, greed was definitely not good, and that proscriptive spirit lingered on right up to 1970, when everything started to change, and the traders began their long march through our great houses of finance, with the inevitable consequence that the Street's moral bookkeeping grew more and more contorted, its corruptions more elaborate, its self-interest less and less governable. What someone has called the "Greed Wars" began.

But now, I think, the game is at long last over.

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government's fault. This time, however, I don't think the argument that "Washington ate my homework" is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street's head - and about time, too.

It's funny; the Big Lie has a long pedigree. A year or so ago, I was leafing through Ron Chernow's indispensable history of the Morgan financial interests, and found this interesting exchange between FDR and Russell Leffingwell, a Morgan partner and Washington fixer, a sort of Robert Strauss of his day. It dates from the summer of 1932, with FDR not yet in office:

"You and I know," wrote Leffingwell, "that we cannot cure the present deflation and depression by punishing the villains, real or imaginary, of the first post war decade, and that when it comes down to the day of reckoning nobody gets very far with all this prohibition and regulation stuff." To which FDR replied: "I wish we could get from the bankers themselves an admission that in the 1927 to 1929 period there were grave abuses and that the bankers themselves now support wholeheartedly methods to prevent recurrence thereof. Can't bankers see their own advantage in such a course?" And then Leffingwell again: "The bankers were not in fact responsible for 1927–29 and the politicians were. Why then should the bankers make a false confession?"

This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS - I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral - but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.

Over the next year, I expect the "what" will give way to the "how" in the broad electorate's comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of "Tobin tax" on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won't just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street's tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell's head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren't met, and I say let 'em go!

At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won't really be about Wall Street's derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society's final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.

There should be more to America, Gore Vidal has written, than who pays tax to whom. It has been in Wall Street's interest to shrivel our sensibilities as a nation, to shove aside the verities of which General MacArthur spoke at West Point - duty, honor, country - in favor of grubby schemes and scams and "carried interest" calculations. Time, I think, to take the country back.

The spectre of 1932: How a loss of faith in politicians and democracy could make 2012 the most frightening year in living memory

Via Green Mountains Homesteading

The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.

Here in Britain, many economists believe that by the end of 2012 we could well have slipped into a second devastating recession. The Coalition remains delicately poised; it would take only one or two resignations to provoke a wider schism and a general election.

But the real dangers lie overseas. In the Middle East, the excitement of the Arab Spring has long since curdled into sectarian tension and fears of Islamic fundamentalism. And with so many of the world’s oil supplies concentrated in the Persian Gulf, British families will be keeping an anxious eye on events in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.

As commentators often remark, the world picture has not been grimmer since the dark days of the mid-Seventies, when the OPEC oil shock, the rise of stagflation and the surge of nationalist terrorism cast a heavy shadow over the Western world.

For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.

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Lee Chapel

Via Cousin John

Since the days of Robert E. Lee, Lee Chapel has been at the heart of life on the campus of Washington and Lee University. Imbued with tradition, it continues to be a gathering place for the University's most important events.

Construction began on the Chapel in 1867 at the request of Gen. Robert E. Lee, who served as president from 1865 to 1870 of what was then Washington College. The simple Victorian design may have been proposed by his son, George Washington Custis Lee, and the plans and specifications were drawn up by Col. Thomas Williamson; both were professors in the engineering department of neighboring Virginia Military Institute. Built of brick and native limestone, the Chapel was completed in time for graduation exercises in 1868. Lee attended daily worship services here with the students and the lower level housed his office, the treasurer's office and the YMCA headquarters (student center).

Lee died on October 12, 1870, and was buried beneath the Chapel. In 1883 an addition was made to the building which houses the memorial sculpture of the recumbent Lee by Edward Valentine and includes a family crypt in the lower level where the general's remains were moved. His wife, mother, father ("Light-Horse Harry" Lee), all of his children and other relatives are now buried in the crypt as well. The remains of his beloved horse, Traveller, are interred in a plot outside the museum entrance.

Lee's office is preserved much as he left it for the last time on September 28, 1870. The rest of the lower level became a museum in 1928, exhibiting items once owned by the Lee and Washington families.

Lee Chapel was named a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and from 1962 to 1963 the Chapel was restored with the support of the Ford Motor Company Fund. A major renovation of the Lee Chapel Museum was completed in 1998, commemorating the University's 250th anniversary in 1999. In 2007 to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Lee * the exhibition was re-installed and now focuses on the history of Washington and Lee University.

The chapel remains an integral part of Washington and Lee's campus even today. Concerts, lectures and other University events take place regularly in the 500-seat auditorium on the main level and its balcony.

A state-of-the-art museum is housed in the lower level and includes Lee's office, an exhibition tracing the history and heritage of Washington and Lee University, a small changing exhibtion space and a museum shop.

* Changed to reflect PC and not mention his WBTS service. Criminals all.

Lee Chapel

LIBERTY LEGAL FOUNDATION: Busy December, Busy Year Coming

This year has been increasingly busy and next year looks to continue the trend. Here's the latest:

Certification News

This week the Georgia Court of Administrative Hearings granted our motion for a separate hearing and set a hearing date of January 26th in our bid to prevent Obama from appearing on the Georgia ballot. The Court’s order and our motion can be viewed on our web site HERE. Other cases will be presented after ours, but we will be going first. This is important because our arguments are very short, simple, and different from the arguments being made by others.

The hearing will be held at 9 AM in Room G-40 of the Fulton County Justice Center Building, 161 Prior Street, Atlanta, Georgia. We don’t yet know whether the public can attend. We will find out soon and let you all know. We would like to pack the courtroom to let the judge know that the public supports our efforts.

Also in January the National Democratic Party and DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz have a deadline to respond to Liberty Legal Foundation’s Certification Class Action federal lawsuit and preliminary injunction. They will almost certainly file a motion to dismiss and attempt to avoid the substantive Constitutional issue raised by our lawsuit. We’ll update you as soon as any response is filed by the Defendants.

We will be setting a hearing date in mid-February for our preliminary injunction motion filed in the Tennessee state CCA lawsuit. That hearing will be held in Memphis, Tennessee. We will let you all know as soon as a time and date is set.

Obamacare News

We are currently working on our Supreme Court amicus brief in support of the State of Florida against Obamacare. As you know we will be the only group arguing for the complete overturn of Wickard v. Filburn.

Illegal Immigration News

As soon as our Obamacare amicus brief is filed we will be preparing another Supreme Court amicus brief in support of the State of Arizona in U.S. v. Arizona. Again, we will be the only group making the argument we’re presenting. In that case we’re the only group pointing to existing Federal Law that is being violated by the Department of Justice and the Obama administration.

State's Rights News

Earlier this month I met with the Board of Directors for the Tennessee Sheriff’s Association to gain their support for a Liberty Legal Foundation re-drafted Tennessee bill that will set the groundwork for nullification with teeth in Tennessee. This bill allows for arrest of any federal agents that attempt to enforce any unconstitutional law within the state of Tennessee. (TN SB1108/HB959 Campfield/Dunn). This bill gives teeth to its companion bill, which was also supported by Liberty Legal Foundation and introduced in the Tennessee legislature last year. (TN SB620/HB 1212 Campfield/Ragan). The companion bill establishes a committee within the Tennessee legislature to review all existing federal laws for Constitutionality, and to submit a list of all unconstitutional laws to the Tennessee legislature for nullification. After it was introduced earlier this year national radio talk show host Neal Bortz discussed this bill and said that he thought it was a great idea. Since then a Utah organization has begun forwarding an identical bill to conservative state legislators across the country. Liberty Legal representatives will be meeting with at least a dozen Tennessee legislators over the next several weeks to shepherd the passage of these bills.

As you can see, December has been a busy month, and next year is already looking to be even busier.

We’re honored to have members from all 50 states supporting our efforts. Please continue to spread the word about Liberty Legal Foundation. If you believe in the work we're doing, please donate what you can. With your help we will restore our Constitutional Republic.

In Liberty,

Co-Founder, Lead Counsel

LIBERTY LEGAL FOUNDATIO

NC teenager defends himself and his sister by shooting/killing intruder

Via Cousin John

"This just tickles me to Death. Three cheers go out to the teenager for killing the intruder. Maybe other scumbags will think twice before breaking into private property."

Good man!

The Vance County Sheriff's Office has arrested a second suspect in a Thursday home invasion where a teenager defended himself and his sister by shooting an intruder.

Sheriff Peter White said Anthony Henderson Jr., 19, had crossed the threshold at 586 S. Lynnbank Road, where two teens were home alone. The boy shot him, and he stumbled outside to the lawn, where deputies found him.

Henderson was taken to Maria Parham Medical Center, where he died.

Later Thursday, deputies apprehended Andrew Terry, 23, of 113 N. Woods Drive, and charged him with felony breaking and entering, conspiracy to commit breaking and entering and injury to real property.

Terry was also wanted in a break-in Nov. 14 at a different Vance County home.

Foreigners Dumping US Treasurys in Record Numbers

Foreign investors are selling Treasury positions in record numbers, even at a time when such assets are performing well.

In the week ended Dec. 28, foreign investors sold the second-highest amount of U.S. bonds in history at $23 billion, Zero Hedge reports, citing Federal Reserve data.

In the last month alone, foreigners sold a record $69 billion in U.S. paper. The numbers really defy logic.

"The euro plunges and the market refuses to follow, with risk assets rising on speculation the ECB (and/or Fed) are about to restart printing yet gold collapsing ... and finally with Treasurys soaring to near all time highs," Zero Hedge reports.

Ron Paul Has Already Won

What happens if Ron Paul wins Iowa? ... Paul seems to have a natural ceiling among GOP voters: A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that nearly half of Republican voters feel Paul's foreign policy views are a major reason not to vote for him. Indeed, the primary reason Paul has an opening to win in Iowa is that no consensus candidate has emerged among social conservatives, which dominate the GOP electorate here a situation that allows Paul to potentially win with less than 30 percent of the vote. Still, a Paul win in Iowa would have significant ramifications. It would go a long way toward pushing his Libertarian views, long dismissed as outside of Republican mainstream, to the center of the conversation. The resultant media coverage would allow Paul to further spread his messageand potentially win a host of new supporters. And if Paul can do well in New Hampshire on January 10, where he is currently tied for second place with Gingrich, Paul could even move to shared front-runner status with Romney, who is now ahead by more than 20 points in New Hampshire. – CBSNews

Dominant Social Theme: Paul is a crank and will never light up the sky.

Free-Market Analysis: The Internet Reformation is a process not an episode. US GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul shows us the accuracy of this statement. Ron Paul and his libertarian allies are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans by the millions. In fact, they have already won. More on this below.

HERE




What will our Mercs do when our wars wind down? Who will hire them?

Via Looking in the Mirror

Summary: Again we turn harsh lights on the future of America. The US government has created a pool highly skilled mercs (on a base of people the government itself trained). What will these people do when our wars wind down? To create serious trouble only a few need sell their knowledge and experience to unfriendly regimes and criminal gangs. Executive Outcomes has its roots in the Apartheid-era South African Special Forces. A more disturbing warning comes from Mexcio. Their gang wars went into hyperdrive with the formation of the Los Zetas Cartel from Mexico’s Special Forces, followed by the arrival of the Kaibiles (ex-Guatemala Special Forces). This post summarizes previous posts about mercs.

For good reason mercenaries have been called ”the dogs of war”. Since the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 the major western nations have worked to eliminate the scourge of mercenaries. But changing circumstances have brought them back, as they have the ability to adapt more quickly than conventional military forces.

Roberts made the interesting observation that the great military revolutions throughout history generally coincided with the predominance of mercenaries. They possessed the necessary discipline and professional skill to create a revolution …
— from the entry on “Military Revolution” in the Oxford Companion to Military History. Refers to Michael Roberts (1908-1996), historian and author of The Military Revolution 1560-1660 which described the ”revolution in military affairs”.

Under the stress of the Long War, the Bush Jr Administration thoughtlessly accelerated the resurgence of mercs (aka Private Military Corporations). The dangers of this are obvious to anyone watching events in Mexico.

Our finest troops now have an alternative market in which to sell their skills, one paying far more than America. We have created a conflict between our soldiers’ patriotism and their families’ needs, a challenge whose dimensions cannot yet be seen – only imagined. At the very least, we now bid against ourselves for their services. This will likely move beyond our control, as markets usually do.

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Preamble to the “Bill of Rights”

Via What Would The Founders Think?

Today, it’s generally forgotten that when the “Bill of Rights” was ratified in A.D. 1781, that it included a “preamble” from Congress that explained fundamental purposes for those first ten Amendments.

Understanding these fundamental purposes is important since those purposes constitute evidence of the intent of the Amendments/law. The law is the legislators’ intent. In the case of the Constitution and Amendments, the “legislators” are We the People. The preamble to the “Bill of Rights” explains the People’s/sovereign’s intent behind the Bill of Rights and thus explains the fundamental “law” of those Amendments.

For example, once you understand this “preamble,” you’ll see that the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms was intended to protect the people of the several States of the Union—but not against invasion by foreign enemies—but rather, from despotism imposed by our own federal government.

If you google “Bill of Rights preamble” you’ll find several sources for this document.

Here’s the Preamble’s text:

The First 10 Amendments to the
Constitution as Ratified by the States

December 15, 1791

Preamble

Congress OF THE United States
begun and held at the City of New York, on Wednesday
the Fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.:

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

The previous “preamble” is then followed by the first ten Amendments (“Bill of Rights”).

The fundamental “purposes” for the Bill of Rights is seen in the first paragraph/sentence of the Preamble:

“THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution.”

Fifty-nine words. One sentence. Let’s take it apart, piece by piece:

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Church of England: Memorialize Occupy Who Vandalized St. Paul’s Cathedral

::)

Attitudes towards protesters show depth of our moral vacuity

WHEN Time magazine proclaimed that 2011 was the year of the protester, it lent its prestige to the recently constructed prejudice that believes a loss of moral and cultural purpose can be recovered through the actions of people on the streets.

Communities have always honoured those who made sacrifices to help others. Throughout history, acts of outstanding heroism and duty served as moral exemplars for others. In very rare instances, such deeds have been represented as saintly and memorialised by generations to come.

Today, little is required of potential moral role models. All that is asked is that they complain, voice their emotion and make a public statement.

The occupiers of St Paul's Cathedral were still eating their Christmas pudding when Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, the third most senior cleric in the Church of England, told them their deed should be memorialised and turned into a spiritual legacy for the future.

"We are looking for ways of honouring what has been said when the camp moves on," he said. One suggestion is to erect a tent in the church itself so that worshippers could come together and discuss how to make the world a better place.

Usually, rendering an experience sacred does not occur while it is unfolding. Such haste in pronouncing an act worthy of memorialisation betrays a loss of historical time. There is also something tawdry about a senior cleric promising a group of would-be saints that their acts would soon be honoured by Britain's national church.

It is worth recalling that St Paul's has traditionally served as the site of state funerals of British military leaders, including the Duke of Wellington, Horatio Nelson and the wartime prime minster, Winston Churchill. This is a church where those who have made an outstanding contribution to the life of the nation are celebrated and laid to rest. St Paul's contains the tombs of such distinguished figures as the architect Christopher Wren, the scientist Alexander Fleming and the sculptor Henry Moore.

One does not need to be a worshipper of great individuals to find repulsive the suggestion that the current occupation should be sanctified as a national legacy for future generations. So what has driven senior church leaders and politicians to represent this year's acts of protest as possessing such elevated moral authority? And why is it that political figures across the ideological divide find it difficult to question or criticise the groups of demonstrators that occupy urban spaces in many parts of the Western world?

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Singing The Party Line

Jaded Haven
Verbatim Post

LANGUAGE!

Spendthrift Bush, Blackface Bush and waiting in the wings, Tinman Bush.

All bush, all the time. Why bother having elections when the electable candidates of both parties all follow the same policies once in office? Why not just crown Bush king and let him rule until his compassionate corpse turns the country to fucking dust.

It’s not like we need to correct any major problems in America. The economy’s going gangbusters, the budget’s balanced with a nice surplus sitting in the coffers, our three major entitlement programs are well-managed and solvent, especially Medicare Part D and goodness knows we can handle another trillion dollars in new war costs and futile nation building in the backwaters of a few more Muslim theocracies.

Our public schools, thanks to No Child Left Behind, are the envy of the world, busy churning out first class, creative STEM minds. The massive scourge of illegal immigration has been solved, unemployment is almost nonexistent and the emerging third world is snapping up our excellent, US manufactured trade goods at a fast pace on the open market.

We enjoy getting patted down at airports and don’t mind at all giving the FBI, NSA or CIA the power to poke into our phone, banking and online activities or wiretap us without justifiable cause or a warrant.

The Bill of Rights should naturally take a backseat to our fundamental liberties in the name of safety from terrorism. It’s no bother for Homeland Security to give us a grilling before boarding a Greyhound bus or let their dogs sniff our pants on the subway platform. Cameras on every street light, recording our faces and identities, the data filed into national security banks is no big deal. Being detained indefinitely without charges or access to legal council is the right way to go in these frightening times. Nobody really believes our government would just willy-nilly arrest or assassinate anyone who didn’t actually deserve it.

Seriously, what do you have to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong?

Our political class is corruption free, the taint of moneyed special interests influencing, writing and subverting legislation is a relic of the past. Wall Street abides by an honorable code of fiduciary ethics, the federal reserve doesn’t print money out of thin air and congress would never countenance the reek of fascist taint by bailing out and going into business with failed private entities. High morality and constitutional rigidity permeates all levels of our financial and political classes.

The war on drugs has been highly successful, next to no one uses or sells illegal substances anymore. The billion dollar, tax funded police state to eradicate illegal mind-altering substances was well worth the money spent. Prison costs are minimal and plenty of space is available to incarcerate truly violent reprobates. Our local constabulary are still Mayberry friendly, a community of neighborly people we trust to maintain the peace and openly welcome in times of trouble.

So unlike those third world, jack-booted storm troopers armed with extensive military hardware who shoot first and expect complete oversight when they murder innocent people and sweet family pets. We still trust our police.

Criminal Federal offenses now number in the mere hundreds, citizens and business know exactly where they stand within the limited number of government agencies tasked with enforcing compliance, including the IRS. Navigating government regulations has never been easier or more citizen friendly.

Starting a business has become a breeze, entrepreneurship is exploding across the nation, new start-ups are sending GDP through the roof and offering more avenues for employment. Low corporate tax rates are feeding this trend, filling the nations treasury with enough revenue to fund expensive old age entitlements into the next millennium.

Our most important one percent, the military personnel who volunteer to do the nation’s most terrible bidding, are treated like gold. We would never dream of subjecting them to multiple deployments for irrational nation building projects in muslim cesspools, give military foreign aid to countries who are actively fighting our soldiers or leave them helpless to IUDS, bullshit Nato directives or State department insanity. Of course, we pay them extremely well for their hard service and provide excellent financial comfort in their retirement. We treat our true blue one percent like Goldman Sachs executives, drape them in golden parachutes and all that other soft, public monetary jazz.

We seem to have very few problems in our land of prosperous plenty that can’t be handled by a continuing course of big spending, government growth, liberty hating, neo-conservative ideological platforms.

So why bother replacing a center-left, big state president if the electable center-right, big state republican candidate is another diced version of the same song which lead to us to this sorry result in the first place?

Because that’s what Conservatives do, kick out one filthy asshole in order to elect his dirty brother.

Of course, everything in America is going just fine. No need to consider any real change in management.

That would be insane.

5% Think Congress Doing a Good Job: New Low

Those 5 must be in an insane asylum.:)

Just when you think the numbers couldn’t get any worse for Congress, the end of session debacle over the payroll tax extension comes along and drives perceptions of Congress even lower.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just five percent (5%) of Likely Voters rate the job Congress is doing as good or excellent. Sixty-eight percent (68%) view Congress’ job performance as poor. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Comment on Those Evil Crusades

Link

"The Crusades themselves are ancient history as irrelevant to today as the treasure junks of Imperial China. Fascinating, of course. But with little to teach us about how modern commerce and international relations should be approached."

I disagree profoundly. Islam has been presented in the West as "The Religion of Peace" (only 5 years ago some Muslim conference in London had a massive banner declaring that falsehood to be true.)

1) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that the greatest genocide in history was that of the Nazis against the Jews, and that many western countries were complicit in this genocide by not taking Jewish refugees before the war, and not doing enough after the war. But the greatest genocide in history was that of the Muslim invasion of Asia - something no westerner is taught in school, something no western media outlet discusses.

2) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that throughout the history of Islam, Muslims have lived peaceably side-by-side with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Crusades were a response to hundreds of years of Muslim aggression. Instead, westerners are indoctrinated to believe that it was the Crusaders in their savagery and lust for violence who attempted to colonize "Muslim lands" such as Palestine.

3) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that the slave trade was something invented by christian europeans. Instead, the slave trade was an abominable but relatively short aberration on the part of europeans. It is the muslims who continuously took slaves from the time of Mohammed until now (the UN expert report on slavery in 1951 said that 1 in 20 of the population of Arabia and Yemen were slaves in 1950). The west should be proud (and Britain in particular) that it spent 200 years wiping out the muslim trade in slaves. I'd like to see museums running exhibits of that, alongside their displays of how many Africans were previously crammed into Briitsh slaving vessels.

These things are not irrelevant. They are directly relevant. The inverse of the truth is propounded by schools, museums, communists, the media and Muslims, all in order to portray Muslims as peaceful victims, and to shame the Europeans into accepting the invaders and the destruction of western culture.

I can say this, because until 3 years ago I was one of those Dhimmi lefties who believed (and propounded) precisely the false histories I'm outlining above.

Until Muslims and westerners are educated about the shameful past of Islam, Muslims are not going to leave their ghetto mentality and their supremacism. If such an exodus from Islam does not happen in the west in the next 2 generations, then we are going to see civil war.

I see the spread of these truths as profoundly important to preventing a devastating future. The Museum of London has a huge permanent exhibition on slavery. Despite being visited mostly by Muslim school children, the exhibition contains not one word of the history of Islamic slaving.

Joe Bloggs

How we celebrated things - Balkan Wars

It is the end of the year and people are celebrating so I write a bit about how we celebrated.

Actually we did not celebrate anything particular, like birthdays or Christmas or anything similar. Maybe we celebrated fact that we are alive. If we manage to have something like safe house to fix something as a party we just bring whatever we had and party there.

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Thomas Becket, Wounded Knee, Pocahontas & the Khmer Rouge (Dau)

The Money Changer
Verbatim Post

On 29 December 1170 Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by four knights acting on Henry II's orders. The murder set off a blizzard of books, plays, poems, and stories that has not stopped since.

On 29 December 1890 the US 7th Cavalry massacred over 400 Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. This was the last major conflict between Indians and US troops, mainly because the US troops had already killed almost all of 'em.

On 29 December 1607 Indian chief Powhatan spared John Smith's life in answer to the pleas of Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas. Sound sentiment, but maybe bad judgment, considering the long term.

On 29 December 1998 *Khmer Rouge leaders apologized for the 1970s Cambodian genocide in which they killed over a million people. None of the murdered millions was around to accept the apology, but it sure made the Khmer Rouge feel better about themselves. (I don't get the whole apology thing, unless the point is shameless, cynical, cheap propaganda. If I didn't do the harm, I ain't apologizing. If I did, what good is an apology without restoration & repentance?)


*Kerry And His Mystical Khmer Dau (Rouge)