Disabled South Vietnamese (VNCH) veterans need help

Via Michael and WRSA

I have been back many times since 1992 and this is indeed true.  For instance, children of the VNCH weren't allowed to attend school, but finally in 1981 this was changed and my wife finally entered grade school at nine years of age. I have met many veterans and it brings tears to your eyes to think of their betrayal.

 

Brief History of VHF

In late 2005 some American veterans of the war met with some Vietnamese survivors of the war who had relocated to the Raleigh-Durham area.  The Vietnamese related their concerns over the disabled South Vietnamese veterans still living there, whose lives are doubly difficult due to their disabilities and the restrictions they have faced ever since the end of the war.

The American veterans immediately identified with the sufferings of their former comrades, and so everyone wanted to work to bring some level of aid and comfort to those disabled veterans who are worst off.  From the discussions eventually came the idea of a charity specifically to help these most needy victims of the war.  And thus the Vietnam Healing Foundation was set up and officially registered as a 501 (c)3 organization.

In early 2006 the first expedition to Viet Nam was conducted, to begin locating needy veterans there.  A bilingual translator from Canada worked with one American vet in visiting and interviewing a number of disabled veterans in the Saigon area, with guidance from helpful Vietnamese living there.

Over a period of several days, careful visits were made to a couple dozen disabled veterans, to validate their claims of service and examine their situations.  Most of them were extremely poor, leading lives of deprivation and hardships, trying to make a living in ways such as selling lottery tickets, doing street repairs on motorbikes, or just being supported by family members, so the whole family shared the hardships.  Many were also in poor health, due in part to their wounds, but more from all the years of next to no health care.

All of them received cash gifts of several hundred thousand dong, for which all were grateful.  But as one of them said, it was as important to them to be remembered and visited by someone from the US, after all their years of being forgotten and abused.

Since that time VHF members have made several more trips to Viet Nam, and located needy veterans all the way from Saigon to Hue.  The stories all have much in common, lives of quiet desperation, trying to just make enough money to pay some rent and at least one bowl of rice per day.

Because the authorities are suspicious of anything that concerns old Southern veterans, VHF has to operate as much in the shadows as possible.  Twice every year we arrange for our clients to receive packages of money, amounting to at least 1.5 million dong and for some sponsored vets, as much as eight million.  These amounts don’t make any veteran rich, but they do help make life much better, paying for food, medical treatment, and sometimes for house improvements or school tuitions for children.

While we have a list of over 80 confirmed clients to receive regular aid, we have also made special one-time gifts to at least another 80, plus paid for houses to be built, special bicycles for those missing limbs, and other particular needs to be met.  We also contribute to orphanages and have arranged for shoes, clothing, and even a day at an amusement park for the Bui Doi street children.

All of this is done with no part of our budget going anywhere except to those in need, and about a 3% overhead for costs of distributing the funds.  All VHF members contribute their time and effort for no compensation other than the knowledge that the work we do really helps people who need and very much deserve help.

We are always looking for more members and more contributors, since there is a huge number of needy old veterans in Viet Nam, and we hope to keep expanding our client base.  This is truly worthwhile work, and very rewarding to all of us who have been involved in it.

More @ VHF

China's Eminent Domain laws are stronger than Americas?

Ninety Miles

VERBATIM

 

(from Reuters (member of corrupt media))

A car stops beside a house in the middle of a newly built road in Wenling, Zhejiang province, China, November 22, 2012. An elderly couple refused to sign an agreement to allow their house to be demolished. They say that compensation offered is not enough to cover rebuilding costs, according to local media. Their house is the only building left standing on a road which is paved through their village. REUTERS/China Daily

(from Ninety Miles (not a member of corrupt media))

So it seems China has stronger Eminent Domain laws than the U.S.?  Currently if a company wants to build condominiums on your property, a city can deem this an economic benefit and use Eminent Domain, yes for a private company and China can't use Eminent Domain to build a road?  We need to start firing Government in the U.S.

Oldest examples of hunting weapon uncovered in South Africa

Via Mike Miles

 

 Scientists working in South Africa have unearthed the oldest-known spear tips, apparently made by a common ancestor of people and Neandertals around 500,000 years ago.

More than 200 stone points found at a site called Kathu Pan 1 display modifications and damage consistent with having been attached to spear handles and hurled at animal prey such as springbok, say Jayne Wilkins, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, and her colleagues.

“These were close-range weapons, either thrusting spears or spears thrown from fairly short distances,” Wilkins says.

 

A description of the South African spear points appears in the Nov. 16 Science.

 

More @ Ninety Miles

Help Wanted: Economists Who Understand the Economy

 

 The Independent Institute

VERBATIM

 By Mary Theroux

 

Ronald Coase, the 101-year old, Nobel Prize-winning economist from whose essay, “The Lighthouse in Economics” the Independent Institute takes its logo, is at it again: tweaking his fellow economists for being out of touch with reality in a new piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Saving Economics from the Economists.”

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate.

Coase is well known for—gasp—venturing out of the ivory tower to go see how people and firms actually operate in the real world. Terribly unorthodox and anti-academic, but he is English, after all, and everyone knows they’re somewhat eccentric.
Just as Coase blew the lid off the myth of the pure “public good” (lighthouses), he also revolutionized understanding of why firms exist, as well as showing that understanding economics negates much of the perceived need for government regulation.
Unfortunately, as he points out in his current HBR piece, his brand of economics rooted in the real world is increasingly rare, with the result:

Government is increasingly seen as the ultimate solution to tough economic problems, from innovation to employment.
Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates.

Yet the current era, with an explosion of increasingly complex and diverse economic relationships, is precisely when the field of real-world economics could provide the information desperately needed for markets to work well.
We’re glad Dr. Coase is still going strong, and greatly appreciated his serving as Honorary Co-Chair of our 25th Anniversary Gala last year, honoring Robert Higgs, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Lech Wałęsa. It would be wonderful to celebrate his upcoming 102nd birthday on December 29th by seeing a strong response to his plea to his profession:

It is time to reengage the severely impoverished field of economics with the economy. Market economies springing up in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere herald a new era of entrepreneurship, and with it unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the market economy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional, and organizational diversities. But knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.

A Tale of Two Abolitionists

 The Independent Institute

VERBATIM

  By Mary Theroux

An excellent movie released six years ago, “Amazing Grace,” depicted the life of William Wilberforce and his ultimately successful efforts to abolish, first, the British Slave Trade in 1806, and then slavery throughout the English empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. He did so entirely peacefully, through the British parliamentary system. It was a long and arduous struggle, and he is rightly depicted as a man of deep religious conviction who dedicated his entire life to this noble cause.

Last weekend Steven Spielberg’s biopic, “Lincoln”, was released, concentrating on the several weeks of Lincoln’s similarly successful machinations to have the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery passed by Congress.

While the carnage and horrors of the Civil War make brief appearances, the movie focuses on the political back-room deal-making, horse-trading, and scheming surrounding Lincoln’s championing of the amendment.

In this, then, the two movies similarly deal with slavery as public policy, and how laws abolishing the practice were passed.

Which then begs the question—why, then, the American Civil War?

If, ultimately, what did away with slavery was a change in the law of the land, which passage of the 13th Amendment accomplished in America in 1865 what the Slavery Abolition Act accomplished throughout the British empire in 1833, why did 620,000 Americans out of a population of 30 million die horrific deaths in a war supposed to have been to “end slavery” in the U.S., with no war required to abolish it anywhere else?

Or, as Thomas DiLorenzo expounded in our event, “The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate”,

In the book, Time on the Cross, by Fogel and Engerman, they do a survey of emancipation in this time period, and they find that dozens of countries, including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French and Danish colonies—dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully through some sort of compensated emancipation.
...The one big quandary is, why didn’t we do what every other country in the world did during the previous 50 years that ended slavery, and end it peacefully through compensated emancipation?

Numerous scholars have done superb work studying the issues around the Civil War and Lincoln’s despotic rule during it, and Spielberg’s movie includes the president’s musing aloud upon the legality of his actions. In addition to unleashing total war against the South, instituting a draft, and violently suppressing draft riots in New York, he famously suspended habeas corpus, censored all telegraph communication, nationalized railroads, and ordered federal troops to interfere in Northern elections.

Lincoln deported Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham for disagreeing with him. He confiscated firearms. Ministers in the South were imprisoned for not praying for Abraham Lincoln. Secretary of State William Seward set up a secret police force, and he famously boasted to Lord Lyons, the British Ambassador, that he could ring a bell and have any man in America arrested.

Steven Spielberg is, of course, a master filmmaker, and “Lincoln” is no exception, with a superb cast. But for a tale of the principled fight to abolish slavery, see “Amazing Grace.” It is a far more satisfying tale of how one pursues noble ends—not through a wanton disregard for human life, liberty, and the rule of law under the guise of “the ends justifying the means.”

Meanwhile, the reader interested in further enlightenment on the question of why the United States, uniquely in all the history of the world, required a war to “end slavery”, should read the transcript or listen to the audio of the above-referenced debate; or check out any of the following wonderful resources on our site—and there are many more elsewhere:

• “The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War between the States,” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
•  “The Bloody Hinge of American History,” by Robert Higgs
•  Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, reviewed by Stanley L. Engerman
•  “The Civil War: Liberty and American Leviathan,” featuring Henry Mayer and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
•  “Civil War and the American Political Economy,” by Joseph R. Stromberg

And, of course, Robert Higgs’s prescient classic, Crisis and Leviathan, now in a new 25th Anniversary Edition, tracing the growth of today’s leviathan state from its roots in the American Civil War and Lincoln’s precedent-setting power-grab.

Chuck Woolery on Assault Weapons

Via SF Medic

Silent Conquest - The End of Freedom of Expression in the West

Via The Feral Irishman

'Red Dawn' Doles Out Tea Party Patriotism

Via WRSA

 

According to Merriam-webster.com, one of the definitions of the term "tea party" is as follows: an exciting disturbance or proceeding. Basically, a protest. Well, while everyone was out catching the Black Friday Deals (I caught a few myself), I decided to have my own little tea party and share the story with some fellow patriots.

My girlfriend's mother is hosting two foreign exchange students this year. One is from China and the other is from Thailand. For the sake of anonymity, we will refer to them as E and F. As I was searching for a film to kick off Thanksgiving weekend, I kept running into the mainstream reviews of the "Red Dawn" remake. To mention them specifically would be a disservice to my intelligence and yours. Anyway, I decided in protest of this lame and lazy smearing of the new "patriotic" film that I would go see it. But, I took E and F on the offhanded chance the film would capture the same American patriotism that the original practically defined for a generation of Americans.

I wasn't expecting much as the three of us took our seats in the packed theater. And they were simply following my lead expecting just another movie. I'm a big fan of John Milius's original film, and what I was expecting was a politically correct remake without an iota of intelligence in its head. But when the lights went down the three of us were subjected to a two-hour film filled with great action, unabashed patriotism and love for freedom.

We got "Red Dawn."

More @  Breitbart

The Classified Report DHS Doesn’t Want You To See: “The Electric Power Delivery System… Could Be Severely Damaged By A Small Number of Well-Informed Attackers”

Via WRSA

In 2007 the National Academy of Sciences completed an extensive review of the national power grid infrastructure in a 164 page report titled Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. In it the NAS detailed a wide array of physical, personnel and cyber vulnerabilities that could pose a significant risk to the national security of the United States.

Even though the report was originally written for public release, notes Madison Ruppert of End the Lie, the entire document was almost immediately classified by the Department of Homeland Security and hasn’t seen the light of day until this week. That release came after five years of committee reviews, reversals, deliberations and pressure from the Academy itself.

 The contents of the report make it clear why DHS wanted to keep it out of public view, as it illustrates severe deficiencies within the whole of the national power grid infrastructure.

So serious are the problems, that a coordinated attack by just a few people in just a few critical components could wreak such havoc that the effects would be measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives:

The electric power delivery system that carries electricity from large central generators to customers could be severely damaged by a small number of well-informed attackers.

More @ SHTF Plan

Here’s How it Will be Done….....

Via The Feral Irishman

 

Incrementalism has proved depressingly effective as a tool for getting most people to quietly surrender their rights piecemeal. For gradually habituating them to an ever-diminishing circle of liberty. When the circle finally closes and their rights no longer exist at all, they hardly notice – because by that time, most of their rights have already been taken.

The final surrender is met with a shrug rather than a scream of outrage.

Think how Americans have been habituated to arbitrary search and seizure. Something like the TSA would simply not have been tolerated if it came out of the blue sky circa 1980. And no, the terrr attacks of nineleven did not “change everything.” Getting people to accept “sobriety checkpoints” beginning around 1980 changed everything. Accept that – and something like Gate Rape is inevitable.

The same process works just as well when it comes to dismantling due process – and removing limits on what the government may not do to us. We didn’t get to legal strip searches for jaywalking or littering in one fell swoop. Nor rendition, torture as policy – and presidential kill lists. It is a matter of getting them – getting us – to  tolerate “A” so that “B” will be accepted in turn.

This is how the citizens of the United States will be disarmed.

More @ Eric Peters