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 message – and 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 2^nd 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.

31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs

Dr. Robinson (Dixie's Homeschooler) Myth Of Global Warming

More information concerning qualifications, peer-reviewed research and more.

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)