Take the Red Pill

Psychopaths Have (Mis)Shaped History and Rule the World

2010-01-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

When I wrote the blog post on Psychopaths, Corporations, and Government, and Rise of the IMPs, I had inferred that psychopaths rise to power in government in the same way they are attracted to the corporate structure as described in the book "Snakes in Suits". At the time I did not know that there was an entire book written about psychopaths in government.

Here is the book:

Political Ponerology

"Ponerology" is the study of evil, from the greek word for evil, Poneros. Evil can be studied outside of theology, in the same way ethics can. Author Michael Shermer discusses this in his book "The Science of Good and Evil". The basic premise is that the desire to help others is hard-wired into the species, in order to help preserve it. However, Shermer misses the fact that 0.8% of the population, the psychopaths, do not have this desire.

Political Ponerology studies how psychopaths take over political systems, which is then called a Pathocracy. (The term psychopath has a more specific meaning than sociopath, which is a more colloquial term.) The Polish author, Andrew Lobaczewski, was part of a group of psychologists in Poland who were secretly studying pathocracies while under Soviet rule. They were doing this research in fear of discovery and harsh punishment. Psychopaths don't like being studied and are afraid of being discovered. He escaped to the U.S.A. and showed a manuscript to an influential fellow Pole, who praised the work, but somehow got the book suppressed for many years. This Pole is Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama's Foreign Policy Secretary, whom I've written about before. He authored a book about the U.S. strategy for controlling the oil in Eurasia.

In the book "Without Remorse: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among us", psychologist Robert Hare explains that born psychopaths comprise about 0.8% of the population and are not "insane" - they understand what society considers "right" and "wrong", understand the consequences of their actions, but have no conscience, remorse, guilt, nor empathy. They are completely callous and self serving, but they have free will and make conscious choices.

They consider themselves superior to the rest of us, who are "weak" because we are subservient to our emotions, and thus "deserve" to be taken advantage of. They consider people around them as objects, including spouses and children, if they have them. At the same time they feel oppressed, because they desire some things which "normal" people find reprehensible and would punish them for. As an example, an Austrian man was arrested for imprisoning his daughter for over 20 years in the basement. In his mind, all he wanted was to keep his daughter in the basement, nothing wrong with that, but normal people came and took her away and jailed him. A psychopathic convict in jail for nearly killing someone in a bar fight, said, "It's not fair, he only spent 2 months in the hospital, while I'm in jail for 2 years!".

Many psychopaths become con artists, or go to jail, but many stay just below the radar, moving through society, taking advantage of everyone around them. Only about 1 in 25,000 become serial killers. Not all of them particularly enjoy killing people. Some of them become priests, lawyers, doctors, managers, or politicians. These are the "successful psychopaths". They become master manipulators, using their skill at feigning emotions. They are fascinated by psychology, which many study in order to improve their manipulation skills. Many prison psychiatrists have been fooled by their psychopathic subjects. They are glib and are expert, smooth liars. They are obsessed with manipulation and power over others. They move like predators among us.

At a young age, they realize they are very different, and practice making the proper emotional expressions in the mirror. They become actors on the stage of life. (They sometimes invoke the wrong, puzzlingly inappropriate emotional expression due to the lack of real emotions other than "proto emotions" such as rage and pleasure.) This is what psychologist Hervey Cleckley called "The Mask of Sanity", in his downloadable book of the same name. This Mask of Sanity can be turned into the Mask of Ideology - psychopathic politicians can say and do the "right" things in the public light to attract voters, things which they do not care about in the slightest. Think of the caricature "god-fearing" politician who in his private life, hires homosexual prostitutes, snorts cocaine, and accepts bribes. Think of the caricature "progressive" politician who preaches saving the environment and helping the poor, while jetting in a private plane and screwing people over by voting for the Mother of All Bailouts.

Communist and "cult of personality" totalitarian regimes, the Nazis, and historic baddies such as Pol Pot, Genghis Khan and Mao Tse Tung, are some very obvious psychopaths and pathocracies. However, remember that not all psychopaths would be as extreme as those, and there are probably many more "moderate" ones. Remember they are obsessed about power and manipulation, and not necessarily about killing (however they may find the death of one, or of thousands,"necessary" for their personal aims, and will have no qualms about it).

Here are a few things some politicians have done which suggest psychopathy

Bush's wars of aggression, which have killed 10s or 100's of thousands.
Clinton lying smoothly under oath (no I don't care that he got a blowjob from an intern), and his and Hillary's Whitewater scam
Madeleine Albright saying that the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children was "worth it"
Margaret Thatcher saying that her dream was to lead the nation into war and win (we are like pawns to psychopaths)

And then here are 2 articles about Obama's narcissism (many narcissists are psychopaths and other narcissists can be considered as mild psychopaths):

Is Obama a Narcissist? The article is written by Sam Vaknin, the world's only known "successful psychopath" who has come forward, and is the subject of the documentary I, Psychopath.
This one discusses his callous, inappropriate reaction to the Fort Hood Massacre.

In Political Ponerology, Lobaczewski describes the structure in a Pathocracy. It is like a pyramid, like most hierarchical stuctures. Psychopaths are capable of functioning in hierarchies as long as they think it lets them achieve their goals. At the top are the true psychopaths. Below them are the "new bourgeoisie" - those that benefit from the Pathocracy - many are probably the borderline psychopaths. Then below them are whom Lobaczewski calls the "Right wing Authoritarians" (an unfortunate choice of words). I prefer calling them the "Authoritarian Ideologues", because authoritarians can be either right wing or left wing (as per today's nomenclature). Ideologues are those who strongly believe in ideology, such as those Lenin referred to as "useful idiots", those that spread ideology to help you gain power.

Lobaczewski says that these "authoritarians" comprise 15% of the population, who have the personality type which have a need to follow and to exert authority. They are the types who believe very strongly in ideology, such as the caricature "liberals" and the caricature "conservatives", and want to tell everybody how to live their lives; they are the busybody judgmental types, the little-Nazi HOA types, and the TSA types - the bossy types who order you around and are obsequious in the face of authority above them.

The rest of the population, or about 80%, are along for the ride, living their lives, oblivious to the wholesale manipulation they are subject to.

I have seen discussions of Lobaczewski's book on "liberal" or "progressive" forums - they make the predictable mistake of calling Bush a psychopath then being blind to the psychopaths who spew "progressive" ideology. They do not understand the philosophy of the Fabian Socialists (who are members of the elite of society), who latched onto the idea of spreading Welfarism as a means of gaining more power, because the elite control government, Welfarism requires more government power, and "helping the less fortunate" tugs at your heartstrings and is thus difficult to argue against because the desire to help others is hardwired into the species. e.g. "You don't like welfare, you must be heartless!"

The Progressives do not realize that all Progressivism requires Authoritarianism and Centralization of Power, which attracts psychopaths. They do not realize that the Progressives of the 1930s were admirers of the National Socialist party of Germany (Nazi party) for their desire to shape society in the collectivist mold (but distanced themselves when the Nazis started killing Jews). They do not realize that Progressivism was fueled by PR campaigns of Big Business, in order to enable "regulation" which was actually Corporatism and Cartelization. (See page 82 of this PDF: The Case Against the FED) They do not see that while Bush is an obvious war-monger, the Democrats supported the war with votes and that Obama is the same, and is a Fabian Socialist. (This is not to say that the Neoconservatives don't promote Socialism - their voting supports it).

The "liberals" do not understand that the mass media controls the debates and feeds a false left-right paradigm which is meant to control thought and distract from the real issues of erosion of liberties. They do not understand that any attempt to shape society from the top-down is a form of Elitism and Utopianism. Those that believe in it do so because they feel superior and better than the rest (elitism), and that everyone else should be forced to act the same way (authoritarianism), in order to make society better by force (Utopianism), led by the most moral members of society. And there is the conundrum - the psychopaths will rise to power, not the virtuous. If two people run for the same office, and one is a good person and the other is evil and doesn't play by the rules, who would win? How can you expect that the ruling elite will be comprised of individuals that are more morally upright than the masses they rule?

Picture the bible-thumping "right wingers" who want government to force everyone to their way of thinking, and their nemesis, the "liberals" or "left wingers", who want government to force everyone to *their* way of thinking. They think their enemy is each other, but they are played against each other. (And most of the 80% along for the ride think the truth is between the two sides, not realizing that the answer is neither). The "wingers" are all from the 15% portion who are Authoritarians. They are an important tool for the psychopaths to exert their control over society.

The science of psychopathy as researched by Lobaczewski and Hare shows that positions of power attract the psychopaths, and thus any top-down method of shaping society, regardless of good intentions, by means of centralization and use of power, is doomed. The correct solution is self-rule and de-centralization or dismantling of power - and the only significant power is that which is backed by violence or threat of violence. Remember that in any government system, only government has the legal monopoly on violence. (e.g. you break its laws, and men with guns and badges arrest you.)

This pervasive thinking is the Myth of the Benevolent Dictator - the belief that "if only the right person gets into power, everything will be better". The "liberals" believe that "if only those true to the progressive ideology" get into power, everything will be better. Even if you could get a "good"person into office there wielding power righteously for a while, the next one will likely be a psychopath and will use that exact same power for evil.

This reviewer of Lobaczewski's book had this to say:

In this book I have learned that most, if not all of the governments of the world, have been taken over by a pathological infection from just a small group of psychopaths who understand the psychology of normal people to a very high degree and they have corrupted these governmental structures to the very core. These psychopaths have silently, but with mind boggling persistence and stealth moved in and taken over and hollowed out the very soul of humanity using lies and deception as their weapons of choice. These psychopaths, this inhuman race of pathological deviants, who do not have the capacity to feel conscience and feel the pain of another, now literally rule the world.

One psychopath can terrorize an entire town, even an entire city. The majority of normal people are now ruled by a minority of psychopaths and they have basically made our governments criminal networks. Criminal governments. Those working for these governments are now working for what basically is a criminal enterprise and they don't see it because they are in it and profit by it, yet it is these people who are determining our future and the future of our children.

Mankind is becoming a willing slave to the pathocratic structures created by the inhuman obsessive greed of this small percentage of humanity that cannot feel conscience. This book is a MUST READ. Only by knowing what we are dealing with can we do anything about it without going in circles. We are dealing with an intelligent predator that feeds on the soul of humanity. It seems to me that there are only a very few who are now speaking of psychopathy and (macrosocial) Evil in the way Lobaczewski speaks of it, since it has been suppressed for so long, but knowledge of the behavior of these deviants, these snakes in suits, is essential so we can recognize this "predator within our midst" and then do something about it with any real and lasting results

History has been disproportionately shaped by psychopaths - it makes sense that wars happen because of psychopaths. However, not only overt war-mongers had to have been psychopaths, but every stinking empire-hungry conqueror and power-hungry leader in history had to have been one - including the first caveman who convinced his fellow cavemen to take over the next cave by force. The sorry state of today's world with the seemingly intractable poverty and hunger despite our technological prowess is most easily explained by the fact that governments are pathocracies.

One may argue that psychopaths are produced by a recessive gene which the human species needs in order to progress, that the large-scale organization required by the rise of the early great civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt would not have happened without psychopaths. This may be so, but given today's technology and telecommunications, such large-scale organizations are possible without the power backed by violence that governments (and their psychopaths) have. Just look at Sony, Apple, or Toyota. They are large scale organizations capable of organizing tens or hundreds of thousands of people through mutually agreed voluntary contracts, in order to achieve a common goal - create products which customers voluntarily purchase. This, by the way, is the essence of the free market, which is based on freedom to trade and to enter into voluntary contracts. In the absence of violence or coercion, all agreements are reached voluntarily, through persuasion and reason.

Freedom and Free Markets produce the best possible outcomes for the majority. Freedom and Free Markets are not perfect and do not produce a Utopia - it is not about shaping society - and it cannot produce the ideal result for everyone at any given time. But given the science of psychopathy there is nothing better.

The Media's Memory Hole

2008-08-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

In George Orwell's 1984, the Memory Hole was the tube into which workers placed documents to be sucked and destroyed. This way, if no documents of an event existed, the event never occurred.

The Corporate Media commit the lies of omission instead of the lies of commission. In a lie of omission, the liar withholds certain pieces of information in order to mislead the audience, instead of saying an outright lie (which is the lie of commission).

Some of the media's lies of omission are outright censorship.

Here are a few examples.

In the Boston Globe online, the original story about a man who was arrested for placing a sticker in an airplane lavatory that said "9/11 was an Inside Job - prisonplanet.com", included a mention of Alex Jones and his website, www.prisonplanet.com, and a link to it. A few days later, the prisonplanet.com phrase in the sticker's quote was removed, and the link and mention of Alex Jones were deleted.
http://www.infowars.com/?p=3704

Recently Obama delivered a speech in Berlin, where he said that the U.S. needs a "civilian national security force" that would be "as powerful, strong and well-funded as the military". (Taken alone and out of context, this line sounds decidedly like he was wanted a Gestapo - the meaning in the speech is a bit different, but still it is very strange to be using a line like this). In the online transcripts such as on the Wall Street Journal and the Denver post, the line is missing:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=69784
You can watch the speech here. The line was at the 16 minute mark:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df2p6867_pw

Several months ago, in a presidential debate, Ron Paul was given a bullshit question meant to embarrass him. He answered it extremely well, and in the subsequent Fox replays of the debate, the question and his answer were edited out.

Very recently, the media has reported that Russia invaded Georgia without provocation. In reality, the Georgian president, emboldened by thinking he had NATO and U.S. support, had invaded South Ossetia and attacked Russian peacekeepers. Russia launched a massive counterattack. In declaring that it was all Russia's fault, the Mainstream Media dropped the Ossetians into the Memory Hole.

Here is a video of Fox News abruptly cutting off a 12 year old girl from California when she started thanking Russian troops for saving her. She was visiting relatives in Ossetia when the Georgian army attacked:
http://www.youtube.com/v/ySWm76IZ0No

One of the biggest events of the 20th century in the Memory Hole, was the attempted military coup against the civilian government of the USA, in the 1930's, when FDR was president. I'll bet most of you haven't heard of it. If such a military coup attempt happened, surely it would be big in the history books!

Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine Major General at the time. A group of people in government and big business plotted an overthrow of the civilian government. He was recruited to lead the military, chosen because of his popularity among his men. He played along until the last minute, then exposed the plot.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=883
What followed was a whitewash. The media ignored it, and the one person who could corroborate his story died mysteriously.

Smedley Butler was a true patriot. Today, few people have even heard of him. Why are he and the "Business Plot" not well known?

From Wikipedia:

These reasons were proposed to explain why the Business Plot did not become a cause célèbre:

The story embarrassed politically influential business people, who felt it best to deflect attention from themselves.

In 1934, newspapers were controlled by an élite — according to then-Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, 82 per cent of daily newspapers monopolized their communities; the media down-played Gen. Butler's testimony to protect the interests of advertisers and their owners.

Some of President Roosevelt's advisers were plotters, and downplayed the matter, avoiding exposure.

If in 1934, newspapers were controlled by the elite, what more today that they've had more time to consolidate their power? Today, 5 Corporations own the mass media.

There is one more reason I believe that Smedley Butler is ignored in mainstream history. It's because he wrote the book War is a Racket. In this book, he said that the U.S. Military is the attack dog of Wall St.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Today, the US Military is still the attack dog of Wall Street. In addition, funding the military with taxpayer money means immense profits for the military suppliers. Never-ending wars such as the Vietnam war, and the Iraq War, are not meant to be won, but to be waged...

On the subject of the Iraq War, when the WMD weren't found, the media had simply forgotten that that was the supposed reason for going into the war in the first place.

When Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats were campaigning to be elected into Congress, they vowed to end the Iraq War. That was 2 years ago...

We must not allow the media make us forget just because they don't remind us.

The Free Market is like the Internet

2008-05-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

The internet is a web that isn't controlled by a single person or a single group. If there is a defect, data gets routed around it.

If I were a baker and my flour supplier screws up, I can find another flour supplier.

The Free Market is self optimizing. If I had 2 flour suppliers I'd go with the one that offered the best combination of price, quality, and service. If the less favored supplier figured out a way to cut cost, he would become the favored supplier. Let's say he figured out that he could cut cost by switching his delivery vans to vegetable oil / diesel. The other guy would then have to figure out a way to cut his costs too.

The beauty of this is that everyone figures out a way to be most productive, because he gets rewarded. I don't need to tell the flour supplier that he should switch his delivery vans to diesel. No bureaucrat needs to decide who gets how many rolls of toilet paper that week.

The free market in a way is also like distributed processing. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry would get to decide how to best run their business. A million individual brains is better than one single bureaucrat.

The opposite of this is centralized economic planning a la the Soviet Union. Their shortages of basic necessities were legendary. In contrast, when were you ever worried that your favorite coffee shop would have no coffee one morning?

The idea of the free market as self-optimizing is espoused in the classic essay, "I, Pencil":
http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Essays/rdPncl1.html

The most curious thing of all though is, despite the fact that many people realize that central economic planning is ridiculous, they allow the very core of the economy, the monetary system, controlled by a central planner, the central bank, aka the Federal Reserve (in the United States).

How does the monetary system work? Here is a fantastic 45 minute cartoon video making it easy to understand:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

The Gatekeepers

2008-05-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Most of the population fall for the Left vs. Right argument, believing that the Democrat vs. Republican debate is valid. They are simply playing out the role of Good Cop / Bad Cop.

If the left/right axis were simply socialism vs. capitalism, then I am a right winger. (Note that today we have CORPORATISM and NOT true capitalism).

However, many issues are mixed into the "left/right" axis, seemingly at random. The human tendency to identify with a group makes them want to identify with either the left or the right, at first due to their pet issue, and are brainwashed later into accepting all the other stands of that side on all the other issues.

Who decided that the right would be pro gun rights?
Who decided that the right would be "pro life"?
Who decided that the left would be pro civil liberties?
Who decided that the left would be anti war?
Who decided that the left would be pro gay marriage?

(Missing from this is the most important issue, the fact that the monetary system is fundamentally flawed, and inherently corrupt. )

In reality ...

The Democrats in Congress have voted overwhelmingly to support the Iraq war. (They aren't anti war)
The Democrats have voted overwhelmingly to support the Patriot Act. (They aren't pro civil liberties)
The Republicans have increased spending as much, if not more than, the Democrats. (They aren't pro small government)
The Republicans (more accurately, the NeoConservatives) have continually increased government power (They aren't pro small government)
The Republicans (the NeoConservatives), have been pushing for more war (How is that pro-life?)
Republican Ronald Reagan bought into Keynesian Economics (tax less but spend more, which of course increases deficits, and benefits the bankers).

As you can see, the "Left" and the "Right" each have some valid points, but on the valid points, they say one thing and do another - such as the Democrats voting to support the war and the Republicans increasing government spending.

An example of how people are manipulated by the Left/Right illusion is that all the pro gun rights people, who have forgotten that the 2nd Amendment is there so that an armed populace is a deterrent and the last stand against a tyrannical government, did NOT make a stand against the Patriot Act, an act by a tyrannical government! All because they were led to believe that the Republicans were on "their side".

And of course when someone gets it right, like Ron Paul, the "Left" and the "Right" attack him by simply screaming about his points that don't agree with the Establishment Right/Left. e.g. the "Right" screamed he's antiwar and therefore doesn't care about "national security", and the "Left" screamed that he's anti-human because he's anti-welfare. And then on Abolishing the Federal Reserve, they'll both just call it "loony".

Part of this left/right issues hodgepodge is the belief that we are screwed today by corporations and their lobbyists (true), but that the solution is more government regulation (false) and more socialism (false), because corporate abuses are a result of capitalism (false).

One other issue of the "extreme left" is that the US Government is abusive overseas (true), but that it's simply a result of simple politics (false).

Which brings me to the GATEKEEPERS, who are a potent method of making people believe in the left vs. right hoax.

Noam Chomsky for example is a LEFT GATEKEEPER.

http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=NoamAsset :

Noam Chomsky is often hailed as America's premier dissident intellectual, a fearless purveyor of truth fighting against media propaganda, murderous U.S. foreign policy, and the crimes of profit-hungry transnational corporations.
His formula over the years has stayed consistent: blame "America" and "corporations" while failing to examine the hidden Globalist overclass which pulls the strings, using the U.S. as an engine of creation and destruction. Then after pinning all the worlds ills on American imperialism, Chomsky offers the solution of world government under the United Nations.
Chomsky steadfastly denies the role of the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission in the creation and management of the wars and poverty he claims to condemn. When speaking on such "conspiracies," he said the following:
"It's the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things the people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about -- they're "nothing" organizations. Of course they're there, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together-that's not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually function." (Understanding Power, p. 348)

The CFR has been the dominant roundtable group pushing for a Panamerican Union by 2010 which would dissolve national borders and unite Mexico, Canada, and America under a single currency, with biometric ID cards and GPS-tracked vehicles on camera-strewn superhighways. How can Chomsky seriously claim the CFR is a "nothing organization" when their role in crafting policy is so clear? Whom is he trying to protect in denying the treasonous goals of the CFR?

Chomsky's stonewalling on the Bilderberg Group raises even more suspicions. Since 1954 the Bilderberg has served as the central brain of the New World Order, the major secret gathering for Globalist agents from across the globe. Bilderberg chairmen like Prince Bernhard and David Rockefeller have pushed for total global government, eugenics population control, engineering wars, and controlling the worldwide economy. Top politicians from America and Europe also undergo a grooming process at the Bilderberg [meetings]. Bill Clinton went in 1991 as Rockefeller's personal guest, and Tony Blair attended in 1993 before becoming Prime Minister. John Kerry attended in 2000, and John Edwards did two weeks before becoming the VP nominee in 2004.

Gatekeepers have two functions:

Limit discussion so that fans think that's all there is to the issues
Make "extreme" bullshit statements so that the opposite side (the right in this example), will summarily dismiss his valid arguments, such as Chomsky's arguments against Corporatism, by way of the Ad Hominem logical fallacy, (which FSK groups under what he calls the "Strawman Fallacy")

Another example of a left gatekeeper is Lyndon Larouche.

Larouche has dug up and published obscure stuff like CIA involvement in the overthrow of certain foreign governments. With respect to (2) above, he says things like:

“The Beatles had no genuine musical talent, but were a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications.”

And so by means of the Ad Hominem logical fallacy, the pro-right people will dismiss the notion that the CIA has overthrown legitimate foreign governments.

Larouche by the way endorses the "Alexander Hamilton" banking model -a central bank, like the Federal Reserve, which makes him a New World Order asset.

The Right Gatekeepers, most common of which are the obnoxious radio talk show hosts,
will say stupid things like "we need to invade Iraq", and then the pro-left will dismiss valid points like "we need to get rid of welfare".

Lou Dobbs is another kind of Gatekeeper. He rails against Corporatism and the North American Union, and claims that none of the presidential candidates ever talks about it, despite the fact that Ron Paul has talked against both many times! This is to prevent any real progress on these issues.

The way to identify gatekeepers is to see if they push any of the NWO (New World Order) agenda:

central banking
claim that the free market is the cause of recessions and/or poverty
more government power or more centralization of power
more government regulation
more government spending
more war / conflict
less individual freedom

Or if they rail against some of the agenda but limiting discussion to prevent real progress (e.g. Lou Dobbs not talking about Ron Paul).

Rise of the IMPs

2008-04-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

First I'd like to say that I've been in a sort of funk so I haven't been posting much recently. I don't know if I can go back to my former pace. Some bloggers say you should post several times per week, but my blogs take so long to research and write, and takes so much energy out of me, that that was never possible. Maybe if I made my blogs shorter, I can blog more often. That aside...

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If you have been reading my other posts, you know that I believe that there is a power elite in the world that operates hidden from the public eye, with selfish interests.

John Perkins calls it the Corporatocracy.
Carroll Quigley calls it an Anglophile elite.

Quigley was a well-respected Georgetown University historian and professor. He was an elitist who agreed with the elite's secretive agenda of oppression. Bill Clinton was his protege. Clinton is quoted as saying:

"I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley"

If one can easily believe that in a small town the sheriff, the mayor, and the judge are all corrupt and in cahoots, why would it be hard to believe the same to be true in the national level, namely the executive, judicial, and the legislative branches of government? And that people in power from different countries collude?

Government today resembles Fascism aka Corporatism:

Government regulation favors big business over small
Government regulation bails out businesses that are "too big to fail" despite risky business practices; and yet said businesses keep their earnings to themselves when times are good
Government regulation in the form of the Federal Reserve (and all central banks around the world), confer a massive subsidy on the entire financial industry
There's a revolving door between the highest positions of power in government and in the large corporations (e.g. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.)

The history of mankind has always been of hegemony. A group always rises to the top. This group always tends to step on others to get to, and to stay at, the top.

In the past this group tended to be royalty.

In about the 1700's the world saw the rise of liberal democracies, with the French Revolution and the American Revolution, and that was supposed to be the end of royalties. (The term here is loosely defined, as the USA is supposed to be a republic, not a democracy).

Great idea - that government officials are elected by the people, and that laws are written by their representatives. However, the democratic processes are simply being manipulated behind the scenes by a hidden power elite. The corporatocracy has replaced royalty.

This same corporatocracy controls the mass media, creating the illusion that people control their government and their destiny through the democratic process.

This same corporatocracy controls the economy via the money supply creation process. People never question the banking system. They just accept it like space and time and the weather. In reality it is a great scam known as the Compound Interest Paradox.

This same Corporatocracy controls the educational system. This is the reason the Compound Interest Paradox is never discussed in economics class or in college.

This same Corporatocracy exerts huge control on the direction of public and private money expenditure in scientific research. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations get to pick and choose what research projects get funded, just like they got to pick and choose which historians and professors got grants, in order that history books frunctions as propaganda.

I have posted that 1% of the population have varying degrees of psychopathy, and that the corporate structure attracts them, because ruthless behavior that non-psychopaths would have trouble doing, is rewarded. The corporatocracy, is basically comprised of the people who own and control the world's largest corporations, and the people in government are basically subservient to them, via the lobbyists. The lines between the highest echelons of the wealthiest corporations and government are blurred. Therefore, psychopaths run the government.

What if 1% of the 1% of the population that are psychopaths, are also very intelligent? What if 1% of those were also megalomanic? 1% of 1% of 1% equals 1 in a million. Of the 1 billion or so people on the planet who didn't grow up in poverty, there are 1,000 of them.

They are the Intelligent, Megalomanic Psychopaths.

IMPs.

They are our rulers.

Spitzer Schmitzer

2008-03-16T22:28:00.000-07:00

The corporate media is all over NY Governor Eliot Spitzer. The thing that riles me the most over this whole thing is not that prostitution is illegal; it's the fact that he was caught because of "suspicious wire transfers":
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4424507&page=1

If one transfers $5,000 or more from his bank account more than once, the banks automatically forward the information to the FBI and the DEA. These laws that allow government to spy on its citizens' money transfers isn't really about drug laundering, it's about taxation. The IRS wants its pound of flesh, and taxes practically everything.

Ironically, Spitzer was the victim of the very police state tactics that he himself had used when he was Attorney General. His entrapment consisted of the wiretapping and recording of 6,000 private phone calls, and the interception of 5,000 emails:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/007915.asp

Much as I dislike the WSJ, this article is worth quoting:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB120536943121332151-lMyQjAxMDI4MDE1MzMxNjM5Wj.html

"Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin's KGB, once quipped to his boss, "show me the man and I will find the crime." The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad."

His prosecution looks like a vendetta.

It's very interesting that one of his last attempted victims with his police state tactics was Maurice "Hank" Greenberg:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson208.html

Greenberg is a director of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R._Greenberg#Other_public_positions

Finally, regarding the illegality of prostitution...

I heard the argument that prostitution should stay illegal because of the "abuse" of women by their pimps. However, the reason that prostitutes can't go to the police when they get abused is precisely because prostitution is illegal! If it weren't illegal they could go to the police when they get abused.

The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America

2008-03-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

This post has the same title as a book by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Department of Education, who blew the whistle in the 80's on government activities withheld from the public:
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/book.htm

This terrific book is available for downloading:
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/MomsPDFs/DDDoA.sml.pdf

The public school system is one of the most important ways that the people in power (via the government) have, in brainwashing the populace in preparation for the future. I have written about this before.

The Preface of Iserbyt's book alone, pages xiii to xx, talks about a lot of the things I have touched on in the past:

children are not taught how to think
that the educational system is designed to turn out good little workers
turning the USA into a socialist/fascist nation subservient to the UN and not the Constitution
children are brainwashed to reject individualism and embrace collectivism
the principle of gradualism - slowly changing the "accepted" norms over time by the use of propaganda, like the frog slowly being boiled to death

The Foreword (page xi) talks about preparing the USA to join a One World Government.

Page 5 discusses that the Rockefellers and Morgans had a hand in the early days of public shooling.

Page 12 discusses Bernays, propaganda, and the real roots of "public opinion", and the CFR.

Before I end this post, I want to apply Kung Fu monkey's EEBC - "Extrapolated Everyday Bullshit Comparison" - turn bullshit words into what they really are. Manuel Lora blogged it:
Government this, government that:

"Public Schools" should be called "Government Schools".

linking to my posts

2008-02-24T18:36:00.000-08:00

I received some feedback:

"I think you ought to consider putting each post on its own page, that way I could post the link for others to read without them feeling overwhelmed by a whole page of text."

This is a function of blogger's templates. I couldn't find one that shows the titles of the posts. The best I could do was change the archive on the left to show all the various month's archives. If anyone knows a blogger template that lists all the post titles, let me know.

If say you want to send someone a link to my post about the Pyramids, without showing the other 7 posts from January, here are 3 ways:

1) If you know what month the post is in:
- Click January on the left
- Scroll down to the title of the post on the pyramids.
- Right click on the title, and click "copy link". That link is the direct link to the post.
- Paste the link into your email.

2) Another way, if you don't know what month the old post is in, is to do a direct google search:
- "site:rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com pyramids"

3) A 3rd way is to use the search box in the upper left of the blog template:
- Type in "pyramids"
-click "search blog", and all the posts with the word "pyramids" will show.

The Truth About Obama

2008-02-04T08:09:00.000-08:00

Many people think Obama is an outsider, an anti-war candidate, and whose rise to stardom is something for Americans to be proud of:

"Sen. Barack Obama’s amazing climb from relative obscurity to the pinnacle of American politics is something that all Americans can feel good about. It is one thing to say that any American can grow up to be president, and another to see a black man have a more than reasonable shot at doing just that."

These are all lies.

First, Obama is far from squeaky clean. He made the judicialwatch.org top ten list, along with Hillary:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-announces-list-washington-s-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-2007
And he's been linked to a Federal corruption trial:
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/obama-linked-federal-corruption-trial

Second, when the mass media promotes someone from zero to hero, be very suspicious. The mass media is controlled by the CFR. Any presidential candidate promoted by the corporate media - basically anyone in the media-anointed "top tier", is an insider. Obama is indeed a member of the CFR , and his wife is on the board of directors of Chicago's CCFR.

(This 1 hour video about the CFR and the corporate media is very telling:)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6632255652046262625

Third, Obama is not antiwar.

Fourth, Obama tapped Zbigniew Brzezinski as his top foreign policy adviser. Brzezinski was Henry Kissinger's protege. Kissinger was responsible for the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile for the dictator Pinochet, the extending of the Vietnam war, the bombing of Cambodia, and many, many other crimes:
http://www.counterpunch.org/carlkiss.html

In the late 90's, Brzezinski wrote a book "The Grand Chessboard". In this book Brzezinski talks about the geopolitical importance of Eurasia, and that America must dominate Eurasia to ensure its hegemony.

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.” (p.30)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” (pp 24-5)

"The Grand Chessboard" is eerily similar to the PNAC's 2000 document "Rebuilding America's Defenses". PNAC promotes "American hegemony" and "Full-spectrum dominance" in its own publications featured on its website.

Section V of Rebuilding America's Defenses, entitled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force", includes the sentence: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor"

In this article, Michael Rupert connects Brzezinski's book, 9-11, and the invasion of Afghanistan to make the way for an oil pipeline from the region's untapped oil deposits. 9-11 has been called "The New Pearl Harbor".

Brzezinski's other famous deed is founding the Trilateral Commission, which is the worldwide official organization for a One World Government:
http://www.augustreview.com/issues/globalization/the_trilateral_commission:_usurping_sovereignty_2007080373/

In closing, I will leave a quote from this article which summarizes Obama well:
http://moderate.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/obama-brzezinski-and-the-neolib-neocon-family-feud/

Let’s call Barack Obama what he is—a sock puppet for the ruling elite. Obama made this plainly obvious recently when he tabbed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his top foreign policy adviser. In addition to his affiliations with the Council on Foreign Relations (as director), the Trilateral Commission, and the National Endowment for Democracy, Brzezinski was the architect of Carter’s Afghanistan policy, that it to say he is responsible for killing thousands of innocents and organizing the Afghan Arabs, later to become “al-Qaeda.” It is said David Rockefeller asked Brzezinski to create the Trilateral Commission and details were hammered out at Rockefeller’s Pocantico Hills estate outside New York City. Rockefeller later introduced the idea to the Bilderberg group in Knokke, Belgium in the spring of 1972.

The Roots of "Public Opinion"

2008-01-31T22:37:00.000-08:00

Almost everything that is "accepted" as "public opinion" is, in reality, carefully crafted propaganda.

Take Bacon and Eggs for breakfast. One would think that this is a cultural thing since antiquity. Edward Bernays, the "father of Public Relations", came up with a campaign showing survey results of doctors recommending hearty breakfasts, and came up with publicity touting bacon and eggs. This was to promote the sales of bacon.

Bernays wrote the book "Propaganda", wherein he wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

From the customer reviews in the Amazon link:

During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon.
Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.

Sound familiar?

The book Trust Us We're Experts outlines the way by which media-touted "experts" push the agenda of the corporations that hire them:

Fearless investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow U.S.A.) are back with a gripping exposé of the public relations industry and the scientists who back their business-funded, anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of "experts" in question--the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions. Lively writing on controversial topics such as dioxin, bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified food makes this a real page-turner, shocking in its portrayal of the real and potential dangers in each of these technological innovations and of the "media pseudo-environment" created to obfuscate the risks. By financing and publicizing views that support the goals of corporate sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of the century, managed to suppress the dangers of lead poisoning for decades, silence the scientist who discovered that rats fed on genetically modified corn had significant organ abnormalities, squelch television and newspaper stories about the risks of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilization for action. Rampton and Stauber introduce the movers and shakers of the PR industry, from the "risk communicators" (whose job is to downplay all risks) and "outrage managers" (with their four strategies--deflect, defer, dismiss, or defeat) to those who specialize in "public policy intelligence" (spying on opponents). Evidently, these elaborate PR campaigns are created for our own good. According to public relations philosophers, the public reacts emotionally to topics related to health and safety and is incapable of holding rational discourse. Needless to say, Rampton and Stauber find these views rather antidemocratic and intend to pull back the curtain to reveal the real wizard in Oz. This is one wake-up call that's hard to resist.

From Publishers Weekly
Recent surveys show that "national experts" are the third most trusted type of public figure (after Supreme Court justices and schoolteachers). Hard-hitting investigative journalists Rampton and Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!) ask whether that trust is misplaced. They assert that, with highly technical issues like environmental pollution and bioengineered foodstuffs, "people are encouraged to suspend their own judgment and abandon responsibility to the experts." The authors examine the opinions of many so-called experts to show how their opinions are often marred by conflicts of interest. Peering behind the curtain of decision making, they catch more than a few with blood money on their hands. From spin doctors with dubious credentials to think tanks that do everything but think and scientists who work backwards to engineer desired experimental results, Rampton and Stauber present an astonishing compendium of alleged abuses of the public's willingness to believe. Particularly sobering is their summary of the historical use of "experts" by the tobacco and mining industries, which, they reveal, have suppressed and manipulated information in order to slow industrial reform. Their allegation that industry flaks may be purposely clouding the current debates swirling around "junk science" and global warming issues should provoke readers to reexamine these matters. Rampton and Stauber's impassioned call for skepticism goes beyond rhetoricAthey also offer practical guidelines for separating propaganda from useful information. Agent, Tom Grady.

A review on books.google.com:
http://books.google.com/books?id=KWHNJwAACAAJ&dq=trust+us+we%27re+experts

Over the past decade, corporations and public-relations firms have seized upon a remarkable new way of influencing opinion called the "third-party technique." The method is simple-just put your words into the mouth of someone who appears impartial, such as a doctor, professor, watchdog group, or an "expert" of some kind. Written with biting humor and penetrating insight, Trust Us, We're Experts! exposes the current and very effective methods of opinion manipulation practiced by the corporate powers that be.

This webpage has an interesting set of videos:
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=8339

The Century of the Self: The Untold History of Controlling the Masses Through the Manipulation of Unconscious Desires

The first of four videos, "One: Happiness Machines":

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

Video #4 of this series is called "Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering". It is about how politicians have used propaganda to appeal to the masses.

I believe all this is the root of today's consumerism which I've written about before. I also wrote that the real purpose of public education is to produce good little consumers.

More on the Compound Interest Paradox, and why Corporations are Obsessed About Growth

2008-01-25T22:48:00.001-08:00

I found a great article:

"Is This the Beginning of a Worldwide Depression?"
by Paul Rye,

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=5751

The coming economic crisis is "due to the nature of our monetary and banking system and Government’s relation with it", and is completely foreseeable.

I wrote that because of the Compound Interest Paradox, the money supply is gradually being replaced by debt - IOW the money in circulation is owed to the banks. He says that only 3% is NOT owed. 97% of the money in circulation is OWED TO BANKS. Think about it. How many middle class people do you know have more assets than debt?

"The crux of the problem is that mathematically, credit-based money is lent into existence at interest by a fractional reserve banking system that does not create the money needed to pay the interest. All debts cannot be repaid, because not enough money is lent into existence to repay both the principal and interest. Therefore, the interest must come from the existing pool of money. No matter what the quality of the participants, there must be losers."

He touches on something I'd wanted to blog about - how the Paradox drives corporations to be obsessed about growth.

"The pressure on the losers to pay their debts makes the economy unnaturally competitive and growth-oriented, leading to excessive exploitation of natural and human resources. And, the only way to avoid an excessive number of losers is to keep increasing the total amount of debt, continually pumping more money (credit) into the system. Therefore, monetary inflation is necessary and endless.

If you do not want to be a debt slave for the rest of your life, if you do not want to see generations of people in the U.S. and the third world be debt slaves for the rest of their lives, if you do not want to see the human and natural resources of this planet squandered simply to pay interest on loans that are not even necessary to create a workable monetary system, then you need to learn about how the existing system works, who perpetuates it, and how the whole system could be re-thought and re-designed.

The article is excellent and well worth reading.

I think the word is spreading on the lies of the monetary system.

Public Schools and Propaganda

2008-01-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

I have blogged about this before. The public school system does not teach critical thinking, and produces dumbed down masses that are "good little consumers".

John Lott in his book Freedomnomics, has a subchapter titled "Government Control of Information: From Public Schools to Television".

Public Education was actually designed to spread government-approved values. In totalitarian countries, in order to instill the proper adherence to the ruling ideology, totalitarian leaders must attach the most common locus for spreading oppositional values - the family. To weaken parental influence, the soviet union during the 1920's and again in the 1950's experimented with raising children in communal children's houses that would decrease the importance of the individual household.

This is not limited to totalitarian countries.

Take the creation of Sweden's extensive nursery school system. Declaring that "school is the spearhead of socialism", Ingvar Carlsson, Sweden's education minister from 1969 to 1973 (and later prime minister), insisted that removing children from the home through "pre-school training is essential to eliminate the social heritage of undesirable, reactionary parental views. Swedish education theorists even advocated tax and government employment policies that would "get both parents out of the home, so that children are forced out as well".

By abolishing the very concept of the family, totalitarian governments hope to create a government monopoly on the transmission of social values. The main avenue [being] the educational system. By instilling in young students the idea that the regime is legitimate and acts fairly, totalitarian governments seek to reduce potential opposition to their rule. They invest enormous resources in these endeavors for a very rational reason - evidence shows that government provided schooling reduces political opposition and predisposes students to support the government when they get older.
..
While the degree of indoctrination in American schools never reached totalitarian levels, an brief history of the evolution of American public schooling reveals that public schools, in fact, did develop specifically as a method to inculcate values supported by the government.
..
So what are these government values spread in the educational system? Teaching the young to believe that government policies can effectively solve problems. Teachers have a natural incentive to teach this axiom. Public high school teachers face the same incentives. They have a personal interest in perpetuating the growth of government, which is the source of their own livelihood.

Government spending on education is widely views as a positive endeavor. But public schools have been aimed at instilling government values. Thus it should not be too surprising to learn that totalitarian nations on average spend twice as much on education per student as do free countries with the same total income.

This isn't because totalitarian countries care more about their children. Totalitarian states have spent less on health care than freer countries.

It's interesting to note that countries with socialized medical care usually allow much more competition between government hospitals or doctors than they allow between schools. If patients can pay to travel a long distance to see a certain doctor, they're typically allowed to do so. Students, however, can't so easily choose which public school to attend. While competition between hospitals or doctors produces better health care, competition between government schools reduces the effectiveness of government indoctrination efforts.

Ingvar Carlsson, the Swedish education minister who said "school is the spearhead of socialism", is a member of the Trilateral Commission, which is a sister group to the CFR, and a major player in the UN. The CFR and TC are pushing socialism and one world government. The UN was the world power elite's 2nd attempt at a supra-national body (the first being the League of Nations)

Aaron Russo, the Hollywood director of "Trading Places" fame, made the movie "Freedom to Fascism".

In an interview, Aaron Russo recounted his conversations with Nick Rockefeller:
"After his popular video Mad As Hell was released and he began his campaign to become Governor of Nevada, Russo was noticed by Rockefeller and introduced to him by a female attorney. Seeing Russo's passion and ability to affect change, Rockefeller set about on a subtle mission to recruit Russo into the elite.

During one conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo if he was interested in joining the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) but Russo rejected the invitation, saying he had no interest in "enslaving the people" to which Rockefeller coldly questioned why he cared about the "serfs."

In a later conversation, Rockefeller asked Russo what he thought women's liberation was about. Russo's response that he thought it was about the right to work and receive equal pay as men, just as they had won the right to vote, caused Rockefeller to laughingly retort, "You're an idiot! Let me tell you what that was about, we the Rockefeller's funded that, we funded women's lib, we're the one's who got all of the newspapers and television - the Rockefeller Foundation."

Rockefeller told Russo of two primary reasons why the elite bankrolled women's lib, one because before women's lib the bankers couldn't tax half the population and two because it allowed them to get children in school at an earlier age, enabling them to be indoctrinated into accepting the state as the primary family, breaking up the traditional family model.

This revelation dovetails previous admissions on behalf of feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem (pictured) that the CIA bankrolled Ms. Magazine as part of the same agenda of breaking up traditional family models."

The book Educating for the New World Order discusses a woman's fight with the educational system:

Copying from one of the book's Amazon reviews:

"This is the story of how Anita Hoge investigated and uncovered how the state of Pennsylvania was implementing a psychological test to measure the students' beliefs, yet calling it "educational testing" to unsuspecting students and parents. Those with the "wrong" opinion receive extra "treatment" and the field of education turned away from teaching the basics (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic). Anita stood up to the education establishment and forced it to obey the law."

and:

I read this book in 1992. When I told my friends and relatives what was coming in education (teaching homosexuality and bestiality, global citizenship, etc.), they thought I was a kook. They're not laughing now! All American schools are now obliged to teach kids how to be a multi-cultural, non-judgmental, citizen of the world. I also recommend her book, "Cloning of the American Mind." Her books are long on details, and not real entertaining, so you're going to have to work at them -- but it's worth it. -- RustyMason.com

The educational system is responsible for the spread of "liberalism" aka socialism, and "political correctness". More on this in another blog.

The Pyramids, Food Production, and Economic Inefficiency

2008-01-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

5,000 years ago the civilization of ancient Egypt had signs of wealth... in their pyramids, the temples, the medicine they practiced.

Civilizations arose in areas of the world where agriculture allowed farmers to feed a large number of people, freeing others to specialize in other areas such as development of technology and philosophy. Egypt for example occupied the fertile banks of the Nile river.

Jared Diamond is an evolutionary biologist with a theory of how civilizations came about and how it is that modern civilization sprung up in Eurasia. Eurasia had a combination of plant and animal life that was very conducive to agriculture.

The following is a summary of his book Guns, Germs and Steel. It is fascinating and well worth reading:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html

One question that comes to mind is, how much more efficiently can we produce food, as compared to ancient civilizations such as Egypt? It stands to reason that if we can produce food 5x as efficiently as the Ancient Egyptians, we would need to work 1/5th as much for the essentials, if cost of the other essentials such as housing were reduced the same amount.

This webpage says 129 people, today, working 8 hours a day. (In 1960, it was 25.)

That would suggest that if one's economic output were roughly equivalent to a farmer, one would need to spend less than 1% of their time (if working 8 hours a day), working in order to pay for food. That number probably does not include the cost of a farmer's machines and land; let's just pretend for a very rough calculation that the cost of a farmer's labor in food production is 30%; that would still suggest that 3% of a person's economic output would be needed to pay for food.

Let's look at the other essentials - shelter and clothing.

It took one guy 9 weeks to build a 1200 sq ft log home:
http://www.loghomebuilders.org/faq/56#56n43
Out of 40 weeks per year and 40 years, that's not even 1% of a person's economic output. Let's just assume that that cost is doubled by the cost of tool rental. That's still less than 2%.

Clothing is probably less expensive than food and shelter.

So if food is 3%, housing is 2%, and clothing is say 1%, that brings the total to 6%. Let's just say medical care will cost the same as food, and energy, the same as housing. The total is 11%. This pie in the sky calculation says that the basic necessities of life can be purchased by working less than an hour a day. Let's pretend there is a taxation rate of 50% in a socialistic society. That's still only 2 hours a day. Or, put another way, with today's technology, we should be able to get the basic necessities just working 60 days a year. Anything over that should just be fluff.

Let's say the Ancient Egyptians worked 8 hours a day 300 days a year. Today the average worker works 8 hours a day, something like 220 - 240 days a year. Has 5,000 years of technology only allowed us to work 25% less??? Or, why have we not benefited from technology in the form of reduced workloads?

The answer I believe is incredible economic inefficiency today. There is much waste. Think of all the people in industries that really are parasites on society. Everyone's favorite example is lawyers. Think of nuisance lawsuits. Think of how much economic output is wasted not only by lawyer's fees, but also by the time spent by jurors. Another example are the tax accountants. They are being paid to do a job simply because the tax code is onerous and byzantine.

In many ways, wealth is destroyed simply by wasting people's time that could have been spent being productive - basically when people have to take time off from work in order to do things such as going to court for a traffic ticket.

The largest wastage of economic productivity is government. In the example above I used a tax rate of 50%. However, taxes are probably much higher. The average Federal income tax rate is 25%, but Social Security and Medicare is another 15%, and in some states, the state income tax is 5%. Then there is regulatory compliance cost of 16% of GDP. That brings the total to 66%. Some may say "but those costs are for some necessary services". Government is incredibly inefficient at spending money to provide services. They simply have no motivation to spend money wisely, unlike the free market. FSK has said that the resulting total tax is even greater than 66%.

There is another parasite that is living off of the middle class. These are the beneficiaries of the corrupt monetary system. The tax they foist on the middle class is in the form of interest payments on debt, and inflation because of the central banking system. Note also that the income tax pays for interest on the loans made by central banks to government, using money created out of nothing.

Even if my calculations are off, the reasoning stands. A heck of a lot of wealth is confiscated or destroyed by government and by debt.

Psychopaths, Corporations, and Government

2008-01-14T22:18:00.000-08:00

In the book "Snakes in Suits", the authors claim that the corporate world attracts psychopaths because the corporate structure rewards ruthless behavior. 1% of the general population are psychopaths. It is mostly genetic, like dyslexia.

Contrary to popular belief, most psychopaths don't become serial killers, as they don't necessarily enjoy killing.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

[Psychopaths are not] burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.
..
This is where you're likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as "moderately psychopathic"
..
There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You'll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one's position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something."
..
Indeed the 2003 documentary The Corporation, corporations are "sociopathic" (a synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us.

If corporations attract psychopaths, then by extension government attracts psychopaths.

When one rises above a certain level in a large corporation, one rubs elbows with government and enter the "revolving door" between the corporate world and government.

One of the ways people "debunk" a conspiracy theory is, "why would these people want more money and power than they already have?" Well, there's the answer, they are psychopaths.

"What About the Children?!!"

2008-01-06T18:20:00.000-08:00

One of the easiest ways to influence people is to appeal to emotion. I mentioned fear in my previous post "The Ministry of Fear":
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/mass-media-ministy-of-fear.html
and I mentioned this book:
The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

But the most effective emotional appeal is "What about the children?!" It combines fear and concern for children; to be afraid for the little ones.

American parents show slavish devotion to children:
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2006/08/swaddling_cloth.html

"..many people don't understand how kiddie-centric America has become. To me, this is one of the central givens of contempo American life. It seems so blazingly evident to me that I tend to assert it as established fact, and am amazed to encounter people who dispute it.

What's my proof? .. impressions, really. .. what has jumped out at me most during my times abroad is the way that other cultures don't organize themselves around children to the same extent that the U.S. does.

I spent a school year in Rennes, Brittany in the early 1970s. Here are a few examples of how their attitudes towards kids differed from ours.
They never took vacations for the kids -- .. the idea of devoting a few weeks of one's treasured time-off to a kiddie destination would have been found laughable. Vacations were to be spent where the parents could enjoy their well-earned leisure.
Days and weeks weren't organized around the kiddies' obligations and plans: playdates, music lessons, soccer games, SAT-coaching appointments, etc. Life was organized around the parents' rhythms.
Grownups didn't choose neighborhoods to live in strictly for the sake of the kids. They might (or might not) move someplace because they knew the schools there to be better. But that was rare. And, in any case, parents certainly wouldn't sacrifice anything in the way of their own dignity and pleasure for the sake of, say, a big backyard."

Given how crazy parents are about their children, appealing to that emotion is very effective.

It's a standard media propaganda trick. If the day ever comes that the Internet will be censored, it will have started because of child porn or to "protect" children from porn. That will be the nose of the camel in the tent. Indeed, mandatory child porn filters are now required in Australia:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/31/2129471.htm

When smearing Ron Paul, the media often used the fact that he wants to get rid of the Department of Education. It of course elicits the reaction "What about the children?!" In the sound bite, of course the media doesn't explain Ron Paul's stand, that the parents in a community should decide how a school is run, not some bureaucrat in Washington. After all, local property taxes pay for schools, not the Federal income tax.

Many stupid laws, regulations, and even behavior, are about "What about the children?!" Sometimes in the morning I drive by a school. Traffic always backs up at the crosswalk, and it's the crossing guards' fault. Instead of making the vehicles and the children take turns, the crossing guards immediately stop the cars when even a single child approaches, so that the child doesn't even break stride, nor even look to see if cars have stopped. . The guards do this even if there is a large group of children 10 seconds behind the lone one, where he could have stopped the one child in order to continue to let cars pass until the large group arrived. The ridiculousness of this situation is so obvious to me, that I yell my displeasure at the crossing guard, who then of course yells back at the impatient ogre who just wants to mow down little children.

Not only does this system force everyone else to waste time and be slaves to the little children's whims, but it does not teach them the individual responsibility of watching out for their own safety to check the street for oncoming cars. People are so busy child-proofing the world, that they forget the more important task of world-proofing the child!

A friend was a juror in a child abuse case. The defendant was accused of abusing his girlfriend's child. The child had fallen and hit his head while the mother was away, so the worried defendant took the child to a doctor. The doctor said the kid was fine, but noted minor bruising on the kid's arms. The doctor was required by law to report this to Child Protective Services. And so the circus began.

All the witnesses said they never thought the defendant would hurt the child. The cops who had seen the child did not think so either. The only person accusing the defendant was an employee of Child Protective Services who filed suit based on pictures that the cops took. She had never even seen the child. After several days of testimony, the big day finally came where the incriminating photos would be shown to the jury. Squinting at the blurry, badly exposed polaroids, the jurors all shook their heads and could barely see any bruising.

The defendant had explained that the kid liked to rough-house, which explains the slight bruising on his arms. The jurors thought there was no way this guy was guilty. Then suddenly, surprise! The defendant accepted a plea bargain! In exchange for pleading guilty and paying for expensive "child rearing seminars", the charges would be dropped. My friend was so shocked he approached the defendant's lawyer and told him "why did you not wait for a verdict, we were gonna find him not guilty". The lawyer shushed him and explained "we're never sure which way the jury goes".

So much for justice. All in the name of "What about the children". Part of the deal too was that the guy move at least 300 miles away. All this could have been prevented if the law did not require a doctor to report all cases of bruising to Child Protective Services, but instead relied on a doctor's or cop's common sense to make the decision whether to report it or not.

Read this story about how young children can have false memories implanted by a child psychologist, leading to convictions of child molestation. It starts with a fascinating experiment where a false story of a mousetrap accident is implanted in a child, about 40% of the way down the page: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1625239/posts

On this page about 1/3rd of the way down is a chapter entitled "Child Sexual Abuse"
http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume6/j6_2_4.htm

..rape and sexual harassment pattern — expanding definitions, rapidly increasing accusations, intensely politicized publicity campaigns, and significantly high percentages of false allegations — has also appeared in still another arena, the agencies which deal with the sexual molestation of children.

We are now learning that children can be manipulated into supplying dramatic testimony of sexual abuse and that in most cases the accusation originates not with the child but with the mother.

Allegations of child abuse, both divorce related and in general, are flying out so frequently that those who believe themselves victimized by false charges have organized a nationwide support group, VOCAL (Victims Of Child Abuse Laws), ... In 1989, its summary of relevant statistics cited 23 studies ... the lowest assessment of false allegation was 35%, the highest 82%, averaging at 66%.

Recovered Memories
Those joining VOCAL are finding that an even more dramatic form of child abuse allegation is now sweeping the country. It originates with a "recovered memory" of sexual atrocity, often involving incest or satanic ritual abuse, usually made by an adult daughter against her father, and almost always discovered in therapy. This form of allegation made the headlines when celebrities such as Roseanne Arnold, La Toya Jackson, and Suzanne Sommers declared they had suddenly remembered a long repressed victimization.

Other sources suggest that the kind of child abuse caused by satanic ritual cults is almost totally a myth. There may be a satan and he may have followers but, contrary to widely held belief in the mid-eighties, they did not surface all over middle America. Where accusations actually led to trials, as in Jordan, Minnesota and in Los Angeles in the McMartin Preschool Case, prosecutors suffered embarrassing defeats.

A strong phalanx of professional opinion has raised significant doubts about the veracity of long repressed memories even within a carefully disciplined therapeutic context.

The media's overhyping of child molestation has created a fear of being accused of child molestation. The reaction is that people who work with children don't touch children anymore. This may have a tragic side effect:

http://www.newfrontier.com/asheville/American-boys.htm

In a cross-cultural study of affection and aggression done at McDonald's playgrounds, pre-schoolers in France playfully touched each other twice as much US children did, but while the French children acted aggressively only 1 percent of the time, the US youth did so 29 percent of the time. Anthropologists have long known that cultures that shower physical affection on young children have little adult violence, dating back to Margaret Mead's studies in New Guinea."There's got to be some relationship between a lack of touching and violence," said Tiffany Field, MD of the University of Miami Medical School, who conducted the study at the McDonald's playgrounds especially since international statistics have consistently shown that France has the lowest homicide rate of developed nations, while the United States has the highest. Dr. Field said she fears there will be even less physical affection toward children in our society as a result of teachers and day care providers worrying about accusations of sexual abuse.

All of this I believe, is part of creeping statism, and the death of common sense.

The Attack on the Free Market

2008-01-04T18:13:00.000-08:00

There has been a constant attack on the Free Market since the turn of the last century, just as there has been a constant attack on Individual Freedom. The crash of the stock market in '29 and the ensuing Great Depression have been blamed on "excessive capitalism". These are myths.

Every incidence of so-called "excessive capitalism" is actually Corporatism. Corporatism is when big business and government collude so the latter will pass laws that benefit the former. (Think lobbyists.) Most government regulation is a result of this. A free market system is not the only system susceptible to government corruption. A socialist system is just as susceptible. The bigger the government, the worse it would be; because a socialist system requires a big government, it would be worse with respect to corruption.

I've written about the history of government regulation. The meat packing and steel industries at around 1900 got government to write regulation whose real purpose was to erect artificial barriers to startup competition. Free market competition is the best "trust buster". Whenever a cartel starts to form, outsiders will find it attractive to start a competing business because of unusually high profits, and they will bring prices down, to the benefit of the consumers.

The problem with letting the government write regulations in the free market, is that government is corruptible. The bigger government is, the more a corrupt government will impinge on our daily lives and distort the free market, to the detriment of the consumer. The bigger and more centralized the government, the easier it is for the lobbyists to go to a central place to push their agenda. The smaller the government, the less likely government will corrupt the free market. Agorists of course, would say that zero government means zero free market distortion.

The crash of '29 was caused by the biggest banks of the time, calling in all their margin accounts at once. The margin account was invented during the roaring 20's. A margin brokerage account is where you can borrow money from the brokerage in order to buy stocks with. If the brokerage suddenly calls the loan in, you will have to sell stocks to repay them. So the big banks calling in their loans all at once had the intended effect of causing a huge stock selloff, at a time when the stock market bubble was inflated by nearly a decade of low interest rates. Voila, stock market crash. The racketeers then of course made immense profits after buying up stock at rock bottom prices.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, ostensibly to prevent boom and bust cycles. However, the greatest bust happened right after their creation... the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Fed itself was the result of government regulation. President Woodrow Wilson and several senators were bribed to create a banking cartel. The Federal Reserve Act itself was drafted by a group of bankers, both local and international, at Jekyll Island in Georgia.

The income tax was implemented the same year as the Fed, as a means to pay the interest on the money loaned by the Fed to the government, which they create out of nothing. Colonel Edward House, a known Marxist, and Woodrow Wilson's best buddy and top adviser, pushed the idea to him, and got the idea of a graduated income tax from Karl Marx. The top tax bracket in the beginning was 3%; today the average bracket is something like 25% (edit: FSK pointed out I did not include 15% for Social Security and Medicare, bringing the total to 40%). This of course effectively enslaves the middle class, effectively re-directing 25% of their economic output directly to the financial industry. People are slowly being boiled like the proverbial frog in a pot. Colonel House would go on to found the Council on Foreign Relations. House had 4 pet projects: the UN, a graduated income tax, a central bank, and the CIA. He was also a member of the Cecil Rhodes Round Table Group, which is extensively discussed by Carroll Quigley.

The Great Depression itself should not have happened after the '29 stock market crash. There should have just been a short, shallow recession. The Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve shrinking the money supply by raising interest rates. Even Greenspan has said "misguided policies" extended the Depression. The money supply is readily shrunk when the Fed lowers interest rates - it's part of the Compound Interest Paradox. The net effect is a massive subsidy on the entire financial industry, in the form of the income tax and inflation.

Milton Friedman the Nobel prize winning economist, has shown that every recession has been accompanied by a shrinkage of the money supply, and vice versa. The 2 go hand in hand; you don't get one without the other.

The Great Depression was deepened and lengthened by the anti-free-market policies of Hoover and FDR: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3097:

If you want to study more about the lie that the Fed is, here are 2 books:

The Creature from Jekyll Island: http://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Island-Federal-Reserve/dp/0912986395
The Case Against the Fed: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Fed-Murray-Rothbard/dp/094546617X

Today government meddling in the free market is so endemic that:

Laws are constantly passed that benefit corporations, large over small, or over mom and pop type small businesses. This has created an atmosphere that...
It's hard to start a small business. The system is rigged against the small business owner.

Finally, philosophically, the Establishment does not like Capitalism, because Capitalism gives power to the individual. This is the antithesis of the Collectivism that they want. It gives people the power, literally, to vote with their wallets:

"Why People Hate Capitalism"
http://www.stonemarmot.com/rantrave/rantscap.html

"Capitalism is the most democratic economic system there is, for every time you spend a dollar, or refrain from spending a dollar, you are casting a vote. That is why so many people hate capitalism, because, with capitalism, the world people live in is the sum total result of each of their individual actions. In other words, capitalism makes people responsible for their own actions, whether they like it or not.
..
But most people are too lazy and/or selfish to properly exercise this incredible power. Most people feel that they can and should be able to do whatever they want and that it is up to others to make sure that all is possible and no harm is done. This attitude is continually reinforced by our media, educational systems, and our legal system, particularly the US tort judgments.

Before I end this post I will leave you these thoughts, also from the above link:

"If you don't like Microsoft or think Mr. Gates is too rich, then quit using Microsoft products. .. If you think professional athletes (or movie stars, or rock stars, or whoever you're presently jealous of) make too much money, then quit supporting them by attending their events, watching their shows on television, and buying their products and those they endorse.

Whatever there is in this world that you think needs to be changed, first honestly examine your own life to see if and how you are contributing to the very problem you are condemning. Once you clean up your life to minimize your contribution to the problem, then you can ask others to make a similar change in their lives."

The Assault on the Individual

2008-01-03T12:46:00.000-08:00

Woman spills coffee on herself, wins millions from McDonald's.

Child gets sick right after vaccination; tests show strain of disease is different from vaccine; court orders vaccine maker to pay millions anyway.

Man dives off a cliff despite a sign "No diving", gets paralyzed, and sues the town; he wins because the sign didn't underscore the danger by saying "Danger: no diving".

Drunk woman backs into a lake and couldn't unlatch her seatbelt and drowned; her companion got out. Court orders Honda to pay dead woman's family for designing a seatbelt that couldn't be operated underwater by a drunk woman.

Sound familiar?

In all of the above cases, people pass on the costs of their stupidity or misfortune onto others, for their profit. In the vaccine case, the court took pity on the child and decided "someone must pay for the poor child's misfortune, and it may as well be the company with its deep pockets".

What they are forgetting is that now, the company that makes the vaccine, needs to cover the cost of the lawsuit and future lawsuits, by increasing the price of its vaccine. Ironically the increased price of the vaccine means that now there will be a number of children who will not receive the vaccine because of the increased price, increasing the number of children who will catch the disease that made them take pity on the child in the first place.

They are symptoms of the erosion of personal responsibility.

Raising the drinking age to 21 is another example of erosion of personal responsibility. "We don't serve teenagers" say signs at bars. Society doesn't seem to want teenagers to learn to drink responsibly. (Aside: 18 year old males are called "men" in the military recruitment posters.)

Why is there such an erosion of individual responsibility? Probably for the same reason there is an erosion of individual liberty.

Individual responsibility and individual liberty are two sides of the same coin.

You can't have one without the other.

The above frivolous lawsuits are a means of wealth redistribution - wealth moves from the public who pay for the products and the town's taxes, to the few who were stupid or unfortunate; and to the lawyers involved in the case. The cost is passed on to the collective. The collective is responsible for the individual. It is part of the march towards collectivism. Collectivism is the opposite of individual liberty.

Individual liberty has been attacked for a long time now. A progressive income tax is an attack on individual liberty. The direct tax of 45% of your wages means that 45% of your economic output is taken from you and used in ways you may not agree with. It means that from January to May you are enslaved by the government. This 45% figure is conservative; it doesn't include the fact that part of your income is stolen by inflation, and interest payments on any debt.

The Patriot Act tramples on the 4th amendment.

Likewise the 5th amendment was recently trampled on.

There is a pattern to all this:

Bigger, more powerful government, less individual liberty.

The societal trend towards reduced individual responsibility is part of the big picture of attacking individual liberty, and creeping statism.

Even the entertainment industry fills our heads with "group identity". Cliched images of urban hip hoppers, rap artists, drug dealers, nerdy teenagers, skateboarders, executives, and white suburban housewives come to mind. The obsession with group identity is inherently collectivist.

Who benefits from bigger government and reduced individual liberty? The corporatocracy which virtually runs the government. Who are these people who form the corporatocracy? The people who run the biggest corporations, which include Big Oil, Mass Media, Big Defense, Big Finance, the Federal Reserve banks, and the Entertainment Industry. Some of these people also go in and out corporations and government.

By owning the Mass Media and the Entertainment Industry, they could have huge control over "public opinion" and popular culture.

Indeed, writers like Ken Adachi, John Coleman, Byron Weeks, and Thomas Dye have said that "public opinion" is carefully molded propaganda.

What would happen if Ron Paul were "removed"?

2007-12-27T20:26:00.000-08:00

A sleeping giant would awaken, the likes of which the world has never seen before:

http://www.newswithviews.com/Stang/alan21.htm

Human See, Human Do

2007-12-27T10:35:00.001-08:00

I got a great link in a reply to my previous post "Monkey See Monkey Do".

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/aschs-conformit.html

Below is an excerpt:

Asch's Conformity Experiment

Solomon Asch, with experiments originally carried out in the 1950s and well-replicated since, highlighted a phenomenon now known as "conformity". In the classic experiment, a subject sees a puzzle like the one in the nearby diagram: Which of the lines A, B, and C is the same size as the line X? Take a moment to determine your own answer...

The gotcha is that the subject is seated alongside a number of other people looking at the diagram - seemingly other subjects, actually confederates of the experimenter. The other "subjects" in the experiment, one after the other, say that line C seems to be the same size as X. The real subject is seated next-to-last. How many people, placed in this situation, would say "C" - giving an obviously incorrect answer that agrees with the unanimous answer of the other subjects? What do you think the percentage would be?

Three-quarters of the subjects in Asch's experiment gave a "conforming" answer at least once. A third of the subjects conformed more than half the time.

Interviews after the experiment showed that while most subjects claimed to have not really believed their conforming answers, some said they'd really thought that the conforming option was the correct one.

Asch was disturbed by these results:

"That we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong... is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."

......

Conformity increases strongly up to 3 confederates, but doesn't increase further up to 10-15 confederates. If people are conforming rationally, then the opinion of 15 other subjects should be substantially stronger evidence than the opinion of 3 other subjects.

Adding a single dissenter - just one other person who gives the correct answer, or even an incorrect answer that's different from the group's incorrect answer - reduces conformity very sharply, down to 5-10%. ....

When the single dissenter suddenly switched to conforming to the group, subjects' conformity rates went back up to just as high as in the no-dissenter condition. Being the first dissenter is a valuable (and costly!) social service, but you've got to keep it up.

This reminds me of a quote from Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

This is why a dissenting voice, or someone playing Devil's Advocate, is so important.

Knee Jerk Reactions: Monkey See Monkey Do

2007-12-25T23:42:00.000-08:00

I've written about knee jerk reactions before, and how people seem to be conditioned to react in certain ways to anything that's "outside the mainstream".

Here's an interesting psychological experiment. I'm not sure if it's real or if it's an urban legend, but it makes sense.

-----------------------------

Start with a cage containing five monkeys.

Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a stepladder under
it. Before long, one of the monkeys will spot the banana and start to
climb the ladder. As soon as he does, spray the other four monkeys with
ice-cold water.

Replace the banana.

After a while another of the monkeys will go for the banana. Again,
spray the other four monkeys with cold water. Monkeys are fairly smart,
so pretty soon whenever one of the monkeys tries to climb the ladder
all the other monkeys will try and prevent him doing it. When this
happens, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and
replace it with a new one. Then put another banana at the top of the
ladder.

The new monkey will spot the banana and make for the ladder. To his
surprise all of the other monkeys will attack him! After a couple more
attempts result in beatings, the new monkey will not make any further
attempt to go for the banana.

Remove another of the original monkeys and replace it with another new
one. Then replace the banana. As before, the newest monkey will make a
grab for it. Like his predecessor he will be amazed to find that all
the other monkeys attack him. (The previous newcomer is likely to take
part in this punishment with great enthusiasm.)

One at a time, gradually replace all of the original monkeys with new
ones. Each of the newcomers will go for the banana. Each one will be
attacked by the other four, although none of the newer monkeys will
have any idea why they are not allowed to climb the ladder, or why they
are participating in the assault on the newest monkey.

When all of the original monkeys have been replaced, none of the
remaining monkeys will ever have been sprayed with cold water.
Nevertheless no monkey ever approaches the ladder.

Why not?

Because that's the way we've always done it around here.

"Remove" Ron Paul?

2007-12-17T10:01:00.001-08:00

If the report below is true, it suggests that Ron Paul is truly the only serious anti-establishment presidential candidate:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2007/121407_assassinating_paul.htm

"Best-selling author and Bilderberg sleuth Daniel Estulin says he has received information from sources inside the U.S. intelligence community which suggests that people from the highest levels of the U.S. government are considering an assassination attempt against Congressman Ron Paul because they are threatened by his burgeoning popularity."

Here is the MP3 of the Estunil interview. They discuss more interesting topics, such as Bush being told to back down from Iraq.

The most common method for "removing" dissenters is with a small plane crash. This is what may have happened to Paul Wellstone, and to Jaime Roldos, and Omar Torrijos.

Daniel Estulin is the author of a very recently published book on the Bilderbergers:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977795349/ref=nosim/bookfindercom0e

Here is a bit about the Bilderberg group:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group

And a BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4290944.stm

The chairman in the above article is quoted as saying:

"I don't think (we are) a global ruling class because I don't think a global ruling class exists. I simply think it's people who have influence interested to speak to other people who have influence," Viscount Davignon says.

The members may or may not agree on all issues, but then on those that they agree on, then they would have huge influence, and thus act as a virtual global ruling class on said issues. The other possibility is of course, that they agree to disagree on most issues and agree to implement their concensus, in which case they ARE a virtual global ruling class and Davignon is downplaying it.

Consumerism, Corporatism, and 3rd World Oppression

2007-12-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

I recently spent several weeks vacationing in a 3rd world country with several friends. This 3rd world country was well known for their ancient civilization which was very advanced for its time. I had a wonderful time, and also had a life-changing realization.

While I was there I read John Perkins's book "Secret History of the American Empire", which is a follow up to his bestseller "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Reading his book while in a 3rd world country, seeing all the poverty, makes it very in-your-face. That was the reason for my realization.

Economic Hitmen are international consultants whose main job is to convince the corrupt elite of LDCs (less developed countries) around the world to accept multibillion-dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ends up at Halliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root, and other United States engineering and construction companies.

The loans, which come from the IMF/World Bank, are designed so that the poor nations will never be able to repay them, but will forever be enslaved by only being able to pay interest on the loan. (This is a lot like the US middle class, and the Federal government's debts - ultimately unpayable - because of the Federal Reserve and the fundamentally corrupt monetary system. The root is the Compound Interest Paradox, aka the "Debt Virus". Here's an excellent summary.) Indeed the IMF and WB are simply a part of, and controlled by, the central banks, most especially the Federal Reserve. Many, many poor nations spend more on paying interest on their foreign debt, than they do on education, basic medical care, micro-loans, and other grassroots programs for the poor.

John Perkins goes on to say that this system relies on corrupting the elite in these poor nations. These elites benefit directly by siphoning a small portion of these multibillion dollar loans, and by remaining in power. This is the carrot.

The system is driven by the corporatocracy - a term coined by Perkins to mean the collective of the transnational corporations. Wall Street benefits directly from the enslavement of the 3rd world, as they are able to tap the natural resources of these 3rd world nations at low cost. Carrol Quigley had written in his book, "Tragedy and Hope", that the world's elite keeps the 3rd world poor in order to keep the prices of natural resources low.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1119-24.htm:

“The system is set up such that the countries are so deep in debt that they can’t repay their debt,” Perkins said. “When the U.S. government wants favors from them, like votes in the United Nations or troops in Iraq, or in many, many cases, their resources – their oil, their canal, in the case of Panama, we go to them and say – look, you can’t pay off your debts, therefore sell your oil at a very low price to our oil companies. Today, tremendous pressure is being put on Ecuador, for example, to sell off its Amazonian rainforest -– very precious, very fragile places, inhabited by indigenous people whose cultures are being destroyed by the oil companies.”

John Perkins goes on to say that if the elite of a 3rd world country begins to resist or go nationalistic, the stick comes out - the CIA jackals are sent in. This is the fate that befell Jaime Roldos in Ecuador, Omar Torrijos in Panama ,and Allende in Chile. They were assassinated. Note that the CIA and Wall Street are intertwined. The jackals then install a new puppet government.

If the jackals fail, the US Military is sent in to finish the job. Young men and women are sent in to die "for their country", to kill people who "hate us for our freedoms", and to "spread democracy". This is what happened to Saddam Hussein, who, ironically, was trained by the CIA to assassinate his predecessor Qasim who was anti-corporatist, and to be a counter balance against Iran. And don't forget that in 1953, Iran's popular democratically elected Mossadegh was ousted, and the Shah put in power, by the CIA, at the behest of British Petroleum, because Mossadegh wanted his people to get a larger share of BP's oil income.

The US Military as Wall Street's attack dog has been written about back in the 1930's. Smedley Butler, perhaps the most decorated major general in the Marine Corps, wrote a book, "War is a Racket".

Such activities are those of an empire. Of all the characteristics of an empire, only one doesn't describe the USA - the presence of an emperor. However, Perkins points out that the corporatocracy acts as a virtual emperor. The root is that corporations have been conferred the rights of an individual, and none of the responsibilities. As an entity, they always look out for the bottom line. If the bottom line is helped by oppressing people in other nations, and transparency is not required, they will do it. The result is that the American Empire is hated by many people in the world.

All of this empire building is completely unbeknownst to the vast majority of the American public. This is because the mass media is controlled by the same corporations that run the corporatocracy, by the same people that run the government. This is a crucial point to understand. America is not hated for her people, who are misled by the so called free press. America is hated because of her government's foreign policy and covert operations; her government that is run by the corporatocracy; a government that does not represent "we the people".

Reading Perkins's book while visiting a 3rd world county gave me a new perspective. It doubled the intensity of my feeling that needless human suffering is very, very offensive. As a technologist, I feel there is no good reason that anybody on this planet should not have access to food, clean water, shelter, and basic medical care. The poverty in this world is a man-made, artificial creation of the people in power. They believe in materialism - that in order to have a bigger piece of the pie for themselves, they have to steal someone else's. They believe that life and economics is a zero-sum game.

I believe that wealth comes from knowledge, as Plato said. If we need more wealth, we can make the pie bigger for everyone. Almost all the wealth we have today comes from technology - medicine, transportation, communications, mass production of goods, and so on. Keeping huge swaths of the world poor, results in tremendous swaths of untapped human potential. Human potential that could have been generating more wealth for everyone.

If parts of Asia and Africa were not desperately poor and had access to higher education for the past 40 years, then technology, which is accelerating, would probably be 20 years ahead today - we'd probably have had the Internet boom in the 80's, and have the technology of the 2020's here today. The world's power elite are killing the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. Keeping the 3rd world poor is counter-productive. Even though natural resources would be more expensive, technological advancements continually make use of smaller and smaller amounts of natural resources to make the same product, offsetting the increased prices of resources. Ironically, by now some bright young scientist in Asia or Africa may have discovered the cure for a fatal cancer that one of the elite in the first world may be dying of today.

During my trip, an incident struck me. We had just come from a 4 day boat cruise where our group had had a discussion about how much to leave as a tip for the crew. We had settled on $8 from each of us for 4 days. This was a very paltry sum given the wonderful service we got from the crew, and the local culture's very warm-hearted manner.

The next day, while our group was hailing a taxi, some rejected a taxi because the driver wanted to charge $0.50 more than what was considered to be a good price. Our destination was Hard Rock Cafe, because 2 women in our group had wanted to purchase a Hard Rock cafe shirt or blouse with the name of the city we were vacationing in. When we got there, I was shocked at the price of the blouse - $60, in a 3rd world country. It struck me that these same women had haggled our taxi fare for 4 of us down by $0.50, and had only wanted to give $8 total tip for 4 days on a boat cruise. This was money for people who were working to feed their families. And yet, they readily coughed up $60 for a blouse made by a wealthy corporation, for a product that probably cost them $1 to make.

It was offensive to watch. I asked them about wasting time haggling $0.50 for a cab ride - they said they "don't want to be ripped off". Yet they didn't feel ripped off paying $60 for a $1 blouse.

I understand that they are exercising their own freedom and that was their free choice. However it struck me just how pervasive consumerism is. The constant barrage of "buy buy buy", and the brainwashing and instilling in consumers the idea that acquisitiveness is a good thing, is disgusting. I have posted about this before, that the educational system and the media turn people into good little consumers.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to have high quality stuff to enjoy per se - but making what-you-have a substitute for who-I-am is creepy. "Me, me, me", "Look at me in my enormous 4,000-lb SUV, which I bought on credit, for carrying my 30-lb child", while soldiers die for the gas that runs it. "Look at my fancy $1,000 signature purse which I bought with my credit card, because I have been brainwashed into thinking that having some Italian fashion guru's name on my bag makes me feel good about myself", all the while a big chunk of the world lives on less than $1 a day. And all this consumerism is the result of brainwashing, to enrich the loan and credit card companies and the corporatocracy.

I'm not saying you should live the life of a pauper and be happy you don't have to walk 10 miles a day to fetch water. All I'm saying is you should see through the consumerism and think twice about useless "feel-good" purchases. Especially if you have to borrow money to "afford" it.

John Perkins' proposal to end the oppression by the corporatocracy, is to effect a legal change in corporations' charters, basically requiring them to have the same responsibilities as a person, to go with their rights. Another is to greatly increase corporate transparency, so that consumers are aware of their activities, and can vote appropriately with their wallets. I have a proposal to add, that managers and members of boards of directors have reduced liability protection for a corporation's actions which are a direct consequence of their decisions.

Despite all the horror stories, Perkins is positive. He says we can turn the empire into a good thing. When an empire collapses a new one takes its place - he says we can instead turn the corporations into good corporate citizens. Corporations have many strengths - such as efficiently turning scarce resources into products that consumers want.

Today, Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate that has called a spade, a spade. He said the USA cannot afford to continue empire building. All Empires end. The ancient civilization of the country I was visiting ended, and today they are a 3rd world country. Empires end because they go bankrupt, from printing too much fiat money, and forgetting the principles that made their pre-empire nation great to begin with. In the USA, these are the principles of Individual Freedom, limited government, and the free market. Ron Paul has always voted against meddling in the internal affairs of other nations. He voted against the Iraqi Freedom Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1998, which paved the way for the Iraq invasion. He has consistently voted against the Patriot Act, the spying powers act, and all the other acts that increase the power and spending of the government and all acts that reduce our freedoms; all of this while Hillary and Obama and most of the Democrats voted the opposite.

I believe that if Ron Paul gets elected, and if John Perkins's suggestions come to fruition, that America, followed by the rest of the world, will enter a new golden age. America can again become the shining beacon she once was, leading by example.

Before I end this post I need to say a caveat - Perkins seems to confuse capitalism and corporatism. There is a pervasive myth that capitalism always leads to corporatism. Corporatism happens when big business and government collude so that government writes laws and regulations that favor certain corporations, or favor large corporations, over small business. This leads to cartelization, which is the goal of any "regulation" that is pushed by corporations. This could either happen by government being misled, or bribed, by lobbyists. Government meddling in the free market is almost always corporatist. Many industries in the USA are heavily regulated, thus, the free market does not truly exist.

Here is a good book review that says exactly this:
http://www.mises.org/story/2416

Perkins's primary problem is in assuming that all global capitalism is sinister in the sense described in his book. Any creation of wealth that depends on coercion can hardly be considered market capitalism. It truly is sinister when a US firm, funded indirectly by taxpayer dollars, forces indigenous people offs their land in South America because geological tests suggest that oil deposits there surpass those of the Middle East. It is sinister because it violates the property rights of both the taxpayers who fund the politically well-connected firms and of the displaced peoples and cultures whose property rights are violated when they are removed from their land (often with much suffering).

But Perkins's anticapitalism really shows when he equates such activity with (say) the opening of a Nike plant a third world country. No one dies, and no cultures are killed off, when a factory opens and workers living near it can voluntarily sell their labor for wages that (economic theory tells us) exceed their next-best opportunity for work.

In developing countries, a new Nike plant is a godsend, not only because it increases capital flows to a region, but because it means that families can become autonomous, or that daughters do not have to resort to prostitution to put food on the table.

In this sense, it is perverse to assume that a Wal-Mart in China or a McDonald's in South Korea is analogous to a Bechtel in India or a Halliburton in Iraq.

Perkins's biases also show when he assumes that the West stays rich because poor countries are kept poor. This zero-sum thinking ignores those factors that cause wealth to become created in the first place. The America of the Founding Fathers — whose anti-imperial instincts Perkins rightly lauds throughout Confessions — didn't depend on international development loans or the expansion of social welfare programs to fuel the industrial revolution, but on the protection of property rights, which then rewarded saving and attracted capital. For that reason, it is no coincidence that poor countries that eschewed such loans and nurtured property rights institutions 20 years ago are those that are quickly joining the wealthy countries of today.

Reader comments on "Media Anointed"

2007-12-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Anonymous said in reaction to my post The Campaign Contributors of the Media Anointed:

It seems the media is guilty of ignoring any candidate that isn't in their owner's pocket, like say Ron Paul.

But they are ignoring others even more, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Alan Keyes, Mike Huckabee, etc...

However, you do the same thing! You have the candidates you want to bring down because they are in the pocket so to speak, but you mention only Ron Paul. He isn't the only other candidate. Perhaps you should be including the data for or at least mentioning the other candidates so we can see the whole picture instead of a "media" prepared "sound bite".

What are the contributions for the other candidates? To be truly concerned with our having the whole story, shouldn't you have included them? Your choice to only include Ron Paul, begs you bias toward him, which in itself is fine. I have a problem with you not including ALL the candidates.

I am also interested to so the armed forces as some of the biggest contributors to Paul as well as technology companies. Those both concern me.

Finally, I am curious how popular each candidate is compared to their spending and compared to their receipts especially the average and median size of their receipts.

It takes an incredible amount of time to write a blog when one strives for accuracy and strives to show sources. And, in that post, I had to do a screen capture of the contributors of each of the candidates I showed, and convert each to GIF, because the content may disappear in the future due to its contentious nature. (I've seen this happen). So, to save time, I decided to do a cross section of the "media anointed", rather than present a comprehensive list.

Yes I have a bias towards Ron Paul. My objective in this blog is to educate, and to make people take the red pill. Ron Paul is a ray of hope - he is the only candidate in decades who wants to phase out the Federal Reserve, eliminate the federal income tax on wages, eliminate inflation, restore true freedom, reduce government regulation, reduce the size of the government, and truly fix the health care system. I have written about each and every one of these topics before. And being a blog, I can write my opinion, instead of striving to be neutral as a news source should be. I do my best not to lie or mislead. The corporate-owned mass media on the other hand, is not only not neutral, but consistently shows an Establishment bias which serves to further enrich the wealthy to the detriment of the middle class and the poor.

As for Ron Paul's contributions from the military and technology companies, take note of the disclaimer from the opensecrets.org website that I included in my post. The contributions reflect the employers of the sum of individual contributors. A law requires contributors to identify their employers when contributing more than $200. People will contribute to a candidate that they feel will best improve their future well-being. The "media-anointed" are a favorite among the financial institutions, which as I've posted before, effectively run this country, and which receive a huge subsidy from the corrupt monetary system starting with the Federal Reserve. As for the military, Ron Paul is the #1 candidate among enlisted men and women. Perhaps they like Ron Paul because he will get them out of fighting needless wars of aggression that only the power elite want. Regarding technology companies, Google has a simple explanation. Google has invited several presidential candidates, including Ron Paul, to their campus to do lengthy interviews. Ron Paul is very popular among people who have heard his message. Google has several thousand well paid employees. So it stands to reason that a lot of Google employees gave a lot of money.

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Leah has left a new comment on your post "The Campaign Contributors of the Media Anointed":

What about Dennis Kucinich?

I like a lot of what Dennis Kucinich stands for. His donor profile on opensecrets.org is also anti-establishment. However, there is one basic thing about Kucinich I don't like - he is pro-socialism. I have posted about this before. I don't like the idea of "giving a man a fish", especially if forced by government. I like the idea of "teaching a man to fish". A fair economic system will do far more for the poor than socialism or welfare will. The free market system has generated wealth for mankind, more than any other system. Do not confuse corporatism (collusion between corporations and government, so that laws are written to benefit corporations), with capitalism (the free market system). The free market allows us to "make the pie bigger" for everyone. Technology and knowledge is wealth. The so called "evils" of capitalism is actually corporatism, and not an indictment of capitalism. I wrote about this before too. The free market does not necessarily devolve into corporatism aka fascism - bloated government breeds corruption. In a capitalist system, corruption leads to corporatism, in a socialist system, corruption leads to how life was in the former Soviet Union. Both are forms of tyranny, which the Founding Fathers warned us against.

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Michael Blomquist has left a new comment on your post "The Campaign Contributors of the Media Anointed":

This is really a sad testament to captalism and democracy. One could argue that it is treason, given the hundreds of billions if not trillions in damages these companies have inflicted upon our country during a time of war.

Create money out of thin air and then enslave the citizens in debt. If in the process you destroy the dream of homeownership and the currency...no problem!

The citizens should have known better. The government maintains a balanced budget and so should the people.

Wake up people!

Indict and convict white collar criminals; don't waste our time and resources on steroids or related perjury!!!

www.discountrealty.com
Michael Blomquist
408-399-0590

Again do not confuse capitalism and corporatism.

I agree that some white collar crimes (e.g. Enron) are heinous in the total amount of human suffering they cause. Thousands of employees losing their future. A much worse crime than say, beating up one person.

Look who's getting the most lobbyist money

2007-12-06T22:37:00.001-08:00

From http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/select.asp?cycle=2008
(Note that the exact numbers may change over time.)

And her supporters probably think that she won't kowtow to lobbyists, due to the mass media's propaganda. What a lie.

For a look at the corporate donations of the media anointed, click here.

The Campaign Contributors of the Media Anointed

2007-11-13T21:51:00.002-08:00

The USA is controlled by the Corporatocracy, by the lobbyists and big business interests. The people that own these corporations are the people that own and run this country. They are not interested in making life better for you or me. They are only interested in their own money and power.

By controlling the mass media, they choose who the next president is. At the beginning of election campaigning, they immediately declare and anoint who the "top tier" are. This is the short list of whom they approve for the presidency. The 2-party system ensures that this list gets pared down to "Puppet A" and "Marionette B".

Of these corporations, the most powerful are the banking and finance corporations.

Now let's look at the largest campaign contributors of the media anointed presidential candidates.

The following info is taken from http://opensecrets.org/pres08. The site has an explanation

HOW TO READ THIS CHART: This chart lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors - like EMILY's List and Club for Growth - make for particularly big bundlers.

Take note of how the "top tier" media anointed ALL have banking and finance corporations as their top contributors. To all the Hillary fans who think that she is different than the others in terms of not kowtowing to Big Business Interests, TAKE SPECIAL NOTE.

HILLARY CLINTON:

BARACK OBAMA:

RUDY GIULIANI:

MITT ROMNEY:

And now let's look at Ron Paul. He's consistently received the most donations from enlisted personnel. They probably understand first-hand what folly our foreign policy of empire-building is, and Ron Paul is espousing the Founding Fathers' admonition to stay out of internal affairs of other nations.

RON PAUL:

The Truth about the Howard Dean Scream and the Power of the Media

2007-11-11T09:44:00.001-08:00

From http://www.wanttoknow.info/howarddeansdemise

The Scream

by David Podvin

On December 1, 2003, Howard Dean was ahead by twenty points in the polls when he appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, "We're going to break up the giant media enterprises." This pronouncement went far beyond the governor's previous public musings about possibly re-regulating the communications industry. It amounted to a declaration of war on the corporations that administer the flow of information in the United States.

The media giants quickly responded by crushing his high-flying campaign with the greatest of ease. This time, they didn't even have to invent a scandal in order to achieve the desired result; merely by chanting the word "unelectable" at maximum volume, the mainstream media maneuvered democratic voters into switching their support to someone who poses no threat to the status quo.

John Kerry is a member of a group of politicians whose disagreements with the mercantile elite tend to be merely rhetorical. Any doubts about Kerry's level of commitment to his stated progressive beliefs were answered in 1994 when he proclaimed himself "delighted" with the Republican takeover of Congress (Boston Globe, New York Times). The media oligarchy knows that a general election race between Kerry and George W. Bush will insure a continuation of its monopoly, regardless of who wins.

The news cartel had always been hostile to Dean. Independent surveys revealed that he had received the most negative coverage of any candidate except Dennis Kucinich (the only other contender who strongly favors mandatory media divestment). But after his statement on Hardball, reporting about Dean abruptly came to an end and was replaced by supposition.

By mid-December, the news divisions of the four major television networks were reporting as fact that Dean was unelectable. The print media echoed the theme; on December 17, the Washington Post printed a front-page story that posited Dean could not win the presidency. The Post quickly followed up with an onslaught of articles and editorials reasserting that claim. Before the month was over, Dean's lack of electability had been highlighted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and every other major paper in the United States.

As 2004 began, Time and Newsweek simultaneously ran cover stories emphasizing that Dean was unelectable. In the weeks before the Iowa caucus, the ongoing topic of discussion on the political panel shows was that Dean was unelectable. National talk radio shows repeatedly stressed that Dean was unelectable. The corporate Internet declared that Dean was unelectable. And the mainstream media continued with the storyline that Dean was unelectable right up until Iowans attended their caucuses. Iowa Democrats could not watch a television or listen to a radio or read a newspaper or go online without learning that Howard Dean was unelectable.

On January 19, Democratic caucus goers in Iowa - who were the initial intended audience for this propaganda disguised as reportage - overwhelmingly repudiated Dean, telling pollsters they believed he was unelectable. Later that evening, Dean yelled encouragement to his supporters at a pep rally, an incident that provided the pretext for the coup de grâce.

During the week leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the media obsessed about Dean's "bizarre" rally incident, adding "un-presidential" and "emotionally unstable" to its descriptions of the governor. The unified message was that Dean had self-destructed. When he finished a distant second in New Hampshire, journalists and pundits hailed the defeat as confirmation of their premise that Dean had always been unelectable.

Yet there had been no tangible basis for that assertion. At the beginning of 2004, a poll conducted by Time magazine showed that Dean trailed Bush by only six points. That was a smaller deficit than Gore faced shortly before the general election in 2000, and he wound up getting the most popular votes. Undaunted by this evidence to the contrary, reporters adhered to the motif that Dean had absolutely no chance.

It is not what a politician does that creates a scandal. It is whether the television networks and major metropolitan newspapers respond to the incident with saturation coverage. When a presidential candidate who was committed to deregulating the corporate media got caught lying about breaking the law, the importance of the event was minimized. When a presidential candidate who was committed to breaking up the corporate media got caught shouting at a pep rally, the importance of the event was maximized.

Howard Dean's campaign now lies in ruins because he chose to confront the multinational conglomerates that run this country. If Dean is so resilient that he fights his way back into contention, the Fourth Estate will be ready to batter him again. In the United States of America, people who pose a threat to the reigning corporate establishment are destroyed. Or, as the Soviets used to put it, emotionally unstable individuals who deviate from the party line are guilty of engaging in "self-destruction".

Engineering Talent, Regulation, and Housing Cost

2007-11-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

I work in the Electronics industry. It is amazing to watch how rapid development progresses in Electronics - witness Moore's Law - how quickly memory, hard disk space, RAM, flash memory, and CPU speed are improving, and how quickly cost is going down.

The Electronics industry is incredibly competitive, despite the high degree of skill required to design and manufacture the products. I've worked in a few companies, and the competition is fierce. The strive to improve the products and reduce production costs is relentless; if a company slacks off one bit, significant market share will be lost almost immediately.

I believe part of the reason that the electronics industry pushes the state of the art so aggressively is that it seems to be very highly unregulated, resulting in very dynamic free market competition. This means that startup companies with some new technology or that spot a niche can very easily jump in and provide a new product.

I've written before about the history of government regulation, where a lot of so called pro-consumer regulation, is actually lobbied for by the big corporations, in order to legislate laws that actually protect them; in some cases, by setting up artificial barriers to startup competition. If you want to know the beneficiaries of such laws, follow the money. Who gets to laugh all the way to the bank? Here is a short list of examples:

The Bird Flu scare and $2B purchase of Tamiflu doses
The Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003
Sarbanes-Oxley Act
Bankruptcy Law of 2005

Even with respect to Safety regulations and standards, the electronics industry is quite self-regulating. One set of regulations that many electronics and electrical companies follow is that set by Underwriters Laboratories.

For the most part, the standards for a given product are written with the design engineers in the loop; as such the standards are very reasonable, don't cost much at all to implement, and UL doesn't charge very much for compliance testing. The system works well, such that a consumer who finds the UL logo on an appliance can be reasonably assured of product safety:

This is in contrast to say government regulatory bodies, such as the FDA, which is a government bureaucracy, whose kowtowing to Big Pharma is legendary. Here is one such article: http://www.smart-publications.com/nutrition/fda.php

And just try googling "FDA lies".

In the electronics industry, legions of talented engineers work hard to make the next generation of products better and cheaper. Often an engineer will spend weeks knocking $0.10 or 5% off the cost of a design.

This makes me wonder. It looks like the free market has created the demand for engineers to spend their talent doing such cost reduction exercises. However, if one were to look at the typical budget of a household, the single largest expenditure, after taxes, is probably the home mortgage. Of the cost of a home, perhaps 1/3rd or 1/2 is the construction of the house itself. Definitely much more than that spent on electronics.

So why isn't all this engineering talent expended on reducing the cost of a typical family's largest single expense? Why aren't legions of engineers developing better and lower cost housing materials, and homebuilding robots to reduce labor cost? Why haven't design-it-yourself lego-like building block homes catching on?

A possible answer is that the construction industry is heavily regulated and is unionized. Both of which are meddling in the free market. There is still some belief in the myth, that automation and labor saving devices, reduce employment and is bad for the economy.

Or maybe it's part of the mass media's perpetuation of consumerism - consumption of overpriced shoes, bags, watches, furniture, weddings, and homes. I've written before about the mass media pounding people incessantly to be good little consumers.

Media Bias In Action - NYT Propaganda

2007-11-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Presidential Candidate Ron Paul raised a stunning $4.2M in one day, in an event organized by one of his supporters on the internet.

You would think that the Mass Media would be all over it, talking about it on the front page, and digging in to what the man is about, and his stands, informing the public.

Nope.

If Hillary so much farts, it's front page news.

Ron Paul beats one-day fund-raising records, it gets a few paragraphs on page 11. Worse, they subtly manipulate the reader to have a negative opinion of him.

Here’s some practice reading through the mass media drivel. It's a carefully crafted piece of propaganda:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/us...8be&ei=5087%0A

Look how much space is used up about Guy Fawkes, and “V for Vendetta” – around 40%, instead of informing the reader what Paul's stands are.
Look at the Ron Paul picture they chose… an angry face.
One of the paragraphs starts with “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds the record..”, in order to make the reader feel “Oh, Hillary is still 'leading'”.
“..he argues that the fight against terrorism is threatening American democracy”, instead of "the War on Terror" is threatening American democracy” - the reader might pick up the illogic of a "War on Terror" Note also that they are pushing the lie that the USA is supposed to be a democracy.
“Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings." -- this may make the reader assume that his supporters do.
“He wants to demolish things like the Department of Education,” ---- they picked the one department abolishment that most people would instantly react negatively to, with no explanation. ("What about the children?!")
They repeated Hillary's lie that she raised $6.2M in one day

Some interesting comments from the www.ronpaulforums.com on this topic:

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“Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings. “ -- may make the reader assume that his supporters do.

This is such a basic trick, it always works though and it never is included in articles about the Mass Media Anointed candidates.

For example, they'd never ask Fred Thompson if his campaign supported cocaine trafficking since one of his aids quit yesterday because of his criminal drug dealing past.

It's such a joke, yet people fall for this kind of crap reporting all the time.

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Absolutely it's propaganda. Without a doubt. Any major media outlet employs psychologists who understand that how a person sub-consciously processes a story is much more important than it's outer facade.

Spot-on. This was a carefully crafted propaganda piece. Association, connotation, and implications abound in this article.

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I completely agree with this. Most major media news is propaganda, and once you start to understand how they craft it, you see it everywhere.

The father of PR is a man named Edward Bernays and he is the reason people think bacon and eggs is breakfast food and that the neurotoxin flouride is good for your teeth.

Click here to familiarize with Bernays. All of the media is carefully crafted propaganda. They have been creating reality for us for the better part of a century. The internet has finally set us free and empowered us to seek out the truth and take our freedom back.

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And look at the things the media DON'T tell us about their anointed candidates.
Click the youtube video in this link, about Hillary's campaign contribution fraud:
http://www.peterfpaul.com/

"Dumbed Down by the Educational System" by George Carlin

2007-10-27T11:23:00.001-07:00

I've posted about this before:
Dumbed Down by the Educational System
The Educational system produces mostly people incapable of critical thinking.

Here is George Carlin's take:

Statism Begins at Home aka "The Land of the Free" Rings Hollow

2007-10-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

A California legislator attempted to pass a bill outlawing spanking children below a certain age.
http://cbs5.com/local/local_story_018210510.html
The woman who submitted the bill doesn't even have any children of her own.

Thank goodness the public's overwhelming negative reaction stopped it.

Now a city in California wants to ban smoking in apartments:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/11/BAM2SNO3O.DTL&type=politics

In "Testing for the Fascist Factor", Karen de Coster tests a person's "Fascist Factor" by asking them if they agree with banning smoking on private property. If a person says "yes", she asks, well why not ban blondes in certain restaurants?

arbitrary decrees that invade the self-ownership and private property rights of others. Both decrees are based on the view that one group of persons has the means to control another group of persons and their choices via government fiat. Both decrees are fascist in that they subject the individual to the collective and private property to some notion of "public good."

Is America the "Land of the Free"?
How many of you really asked this question?

Wikipedia defines Statism is defined as follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statism

Statism (or Etatism) is a term that is used to describe:

Specific instances of state intervention in personal, social or economic matters.
A form of government or economic system that involves significant state intervention in personal, social or economic matters.

(Note the word "state" means "government", not "state" as in California, Maine, etc.)

The Nanny State and the Police State are two forms of Statism.

The Police State is very much alive in the USA. How many times have you been nervous while driving because there was a police car near your car, despite the fact that you're doing nothing wrong? It gets worse than that. The

The Police State Is Closer Than You Think

by Paul Craig Roberts

Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate.

The hysterical aftermath of September 11 has put into place the main components of a police state.

Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.

President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the US, the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give reign to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness.

If you think the Neoconservatives are the only ones who voted for this, well, look at this Senate voting record:

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00029
~70% of Democratic Senators voted to extend the Patriot Act, including Hillary and Obama.

Goes to show the Dems and the Republicans are both pushing the country towards an Authoritarian, Socialistic state.

Homeland Security is pushing for the militarization of local police departments.

His blog chronicles many excesses of police departments:
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

If you think Homeland Security was created as a reaction to 9/11, well, the first draft of the Homeland Security Act was written in 1998, during Bill Clinton's presidency:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/HSA_RoAPS.html

The Nanny State is more alive than ever.

It is most apparent every time you drive. The speed limits are set artificially low, in the guise of Safety. In reality, the insurance companies lobby to keep speed limits low, so that they can collect extra premiums whenever you get a "point" on your license. This is a classic example of collusion between corporations and government; government passing laws to either enable cartelization, or in order to increase profits of corporations. This is a form of Fascism. And of course, the courts, the PD's, and the cities just LOVE the revenue stream.

Speed limits have very little correlation with safety. In fact, speed limit signs have little effect on the average speeds that motorists drive. That is, motorists will tend to drive at a speed that they consider to be a reasonable compromise between time savings and safety. Drivers who drive faster than average, those that are faster than 85% of other drivers, have the lowest crash rates.

What is the greatest cause of crashes? In one word, inattention. Researchers in Virginia Tech installed cameras to record crashes and near misses in 100 cars over more than a year. Nowhere is speed mentioned:

Nearly 80 percent of all crashes and 65 percent of all near-crashes involved driver inattention, just prior (within 3 seconds) to the onset of the conflict.
93 percent of the rear-end-striking crashes involved driver inattention

And of course, when driving, the police state and the nanny state combine to punish you for behavior that isn't necessarily unsafe. Witness the Kangaroo courts that the traffic courts are.

Since 1969 in California, citizens have been denied jury trials for most alleged traffic offenses.

Beginning on January 1, 1969, the state legislature created a new category of criminal offense called the infraction. The state would preserve all its rights in prosecuting these infraction citations as criminal offenses, but would remove the citizen's most basic rights to justice in these cases. For the first time in California history, citizens would be legally denied their right to a jury trial in criminal cases. The community would no longer be the arbiter of justice in these contested criminal cases.

It's unconstitutional, of course, because it got around the right to a jury trial.

Even red light cameras are a scam. They don't reduce accident rates, and there are better alternatives.

A 3rd manifestation of Statism is over-regulation. Regulatory compliance cost to the economy is 14%: http://mwhodges.home.att.net/regulation.htm. It adds to our total effective tax rate: http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/10/whats-your-taxation-rate.html

This over-regulation completely takes over common sense:
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/09/there-oughtta-be-law.html

Most Americans don't realize that having a Statist society is the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended. And, while the so-called Republicans claim to advocate smaller government, in reality they are anything but. Bush has borrowed more than all previous 42 presidents combined.

And, the neocons that have hijacked the Republican party are statists at home, and imperialists abroad.

Health Care Questions Not Being Asked

2007-10-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

I. Where is all the money going?

Why not get a forensic accountant to figure out where all the money is going? How many % end up in laywers' pockets via lawsuits? How many % end up as malpractice insurance company profits due to litigation? How many % go to needless tests because doctors are afraid of possible lawsuits stating that they "didn't do everything"? How many % are profits for the HMOs? For Big Pharma? How can you even talk about socialized health care without reigning in cost? It will just be expensive for everyone, and some special interest groups stand to make even more money.

II. Health Care in the USA is the most expensive in the world, yet one of the lowest quality in the First World, today. What was it in the 60s?

If health care was better in the USA in the 60s vis a vis other first world countries, what changed?

III. Why can't I buy health insurance like car insurance? Would you like to buy car insurance that covers routine maintenance but which doesn't cover being totalled by a drunk driver? "Oh sorry, you're not covered because you didn't disclose the pre-existing condition that your neighbor is a habitual drunk driver". But that's exactly what a lot of HMOs do. They cover piddly little expenses, but if you need a very expensive operation, they may not cover it.

It makes WAY more financial sense to be covered for events that are UNLIKELY but FINANCIALLY CATASTROPHIC. That is exactly what insurance is supposed to be for.

I would like to buy some health care program that covers say, the first 6 family doctor visits a year (for prevention, which saves money) and then only covers anything over a yearly deductible of $5,000 per year. If I needed $5,000 of health care in one year, it would sting, but wouldn't bankrupt me. A $200k operation, on the other hand, would.

I have some partial answers. In 1973 Nixon passed the HMO Act. It gave tax subsidies to companies that provided health care in the model of the HMO, to the detriment of companies with other business models. The result was that HMOs grew and grew into the size they are today, with no competition from other business models (e.g. health savings accounts)

This is exactly the kind of government regulation, meddling in the free market, that creates
distortion and cartelization, that makes the middle class suffer.

Here are 2 articles talking about deregulating health care:
http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=279
http://libertariannation.org/a/f12l3.html

The HMO Act resulted in the illogical coupling of employment with "discounted" (via tax breaks) health care. If you quit working for a corporation, and try to purchase the same kind of health coverage, you will likely have to spend twice as much. (This is yet another example of laws benefitting corporations)

Re: the above, I can hear the argument, "When you buy insurance as part of a group, like if you work for a corporation, you are pooling risk with your co-workers, so insurance should be cheaper". This is FALSE. If an HMO had 100,000 existing customers, then, if you add yourself alone, from a statistical point of view, you ARE POOLING RISK WITH THEIR 100,000 OTHER CUSTOMERS. It makes no difference then if you join their 100,000 as part of a group of 100, or you join them by yourself.

I think that doctors are way too quick to prescribe expensive, dubious prescriptions drugs, instead of lifestyle changes.

For example, a friend was diagnosed with high cholesterol. His doctor prescribed an anti-statin drug. My friend, displaying more wisdom than the doctor, said "No thanks, I'll try losing weight first". He proceeded to lose 80 lbs in one year (and now looks fit). His cholesterol, HDL, triglycerides etc, are all well within the normal range.

Statins have had dubious drug trials and potentially serious side effects with long term use (which have not been tested).

The American Medical Association is a monopoly. They artificially restrict the supply of doctors, ensuring high salaries (and thus cost to you and me). They also espouse expensive "mainstream" procedures instead of better, lower cost remedies. My realization was when 2 people I know were told they needed surgery to remove their gallbladder due to gallstones. They performed a gallbladder flush, which involves apple juice, some fasting, grapefruit juice, olive oil, and epsom salt. Out the stones went, and an ultrasound confirmed, no more gallstones. I know it sounds incredible, and I've posted about this before, that people are trained to reject anything "outside the mainstream".

Another example is a friend who was found to have some plaque buildup in his heart's blood vessels. He reversed it with Chelation Therapy. Predictably, the doctor poo-poo'ed him, despite that fact that he was surprised at the reversal.

The dollar amount spent on prescription drugs has more than doubled since 2000. This came out in the newspapers recently, but in typical shallow mass media fashion, the question "why?" was never even asked.

The FDA famously protects the interests of Big Pharma, while attacking all manner of "natural remedies" (read: non-patentable drugs, nutrition, or preventives). A google search "FDA lies" will give over a million hits.

I learned of this first-hand when I started getting a lot of migraines. I traced it to my starting the use of Splenda. (BTW Aspartame also gives me migraines). I've since found a substitute, Stevia, which tastes much better, and has no reported side effects in Japan and South America, where it's popular. Aspartame and Sucralose, on the other hand, have had thousands of complaints filed with the FDA.

Why haven't you heard of it? Turns out that the FDA gave "generally recognized as safe" status to Aspartame and Sucralose, but "has not tested" Stevia, and so it is marketed not as a sweetener, but rather as a food supplement, over which the FDA has little jurisdiction over. The FDA went so far as to seize Stevia cookbooks from a small business.

More details here: http://www.vegsource.com/davis/sweeteners.htm
The Aspartame/FDA story involves Donald Rumsfeld: http://www.stevia.net/aspartame.htm
Incidentally, Rumsfeld made millions on the fake Bird Flu media scare and Tamiflu. Remember all the nonstop fear-mongering coverage of the Bird Flu by the media? Read this:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/10/20/bird_flu_scare_handsome_profit_for_rumsfeld.htm

In the 1960s health care was much better. This is a really good article:
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22171
Some people say "modern technology" has made medicine more expensive.
How is it that modern technology has caused the price of each Gigabyte of memory and Hard Disk Space to drop year after year?

Finally, Presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul got a standing ovation when he spoke to medical students at Dartmouth on Health Care. H'es the only candidate who's an M.D.:
http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/10/14/ron_paul_md_speaks_on_health_care.php

Paul began his remarks by telling students that, “the medical system is going well except for a few groups: the patients, the doctors, the hospitals, the labs, and the politicians. Everybody else is happy.

(In the 1960s)
The amazing thing was it was the city hospital and there was no government; there [was] very little insurance and nobody was turned away whether they were illegal or legal, and nobody, nobody was quizzed. If you didn’t have the money, you didn’t pay, and people came in, and it wasn’t that bad. People didn’t lay on the sidewalks. You’re more likely to hear stories today of people being neglected in emergency rooms…and dying on stretchers—because we have managed care.” Paul often came back to this point in referencing the health problems of today.

He is certain that the problems with today’s health care stem from too much government involvement, not too little. “This whole idea that we need centralized economic planning in anything is a fallacy, and it’s a temptation to say, ‘Yes, we can’t have central economic planning for electronics, televisions, and cell phones because we want efficiency of delivery service, but medicine is different.’

Paul was also highly critical of current insurance schemes, claiming that the only things that should be insured are surgeries and other high cost possibilities. Instead of insurance for things like a check-up, Paul favored a medical savings account. “We should allow every individual to take a $3,000 tax credit, and they can put that away and use it to go and pay for their doctor visits.

A major problem with today’s society, according to Paul, is the confusion of “needs” and “rights”: “We have rights to our lives and liberty and we have a right to pursue our happiness and we should have the right to keep the fruits of our labor. We have a moral obligation to help our fellow man.” "That doesn’t mean, however, that we have a right to affordable health care."

Perhaps surprisingly for a doctor, Paul encourages more competition in the field of medicine. Noting that many alternative methods of care have sprouted up in recent years, Paul said the competition would be in the best interest of the patients. The only thing he cautioned against was fraud..

“Under the Constitution, government shouldn’t be in medicine.”

Vicente Fox confirms the Amero

2007-10-16T21:04:00.001-07:00

Watch this interview on Larry King:

http://vanishingamerican.blogspot.com/2007/10/vicente-fox-confirms-that-amero-is-not.html

Transcript of portion of interview:

KING: E-mail from Mrs. Gonzalez in Elizabeth, New Jersey. "Mr. Fox, I would like to know how you feel about the possibility of having a Latin America united with one currency?"

FOX: Long term, very long term. What we propose together, President Bush and myself, it's ALCA, which is a trade union for all of the Americas. And everything was running fluently until Hugo Chavez came. He decided to isolate himself. He decided to combat the idea and destroy the idea...

KING: It's going to be like the euro dollar, you mean?

FOX: Well, that would be long, long term. I think the processes to go, first step into is trading agreement. And then further on, a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA.

The Media Moguls, the Bankers, and the CFR

2007-10-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

While browsing an online forum I came across a very interesting thread where the posters had done some research on the media.

What the posters have found is that in the board of directors of some of the 6 corporations that own most of the media, some names appear over and over again; some of them also appear in the board of directors of some very large banks and other financial institutions; some are on the boards of large oil companies, and have relationships with some of the highest people in government, and some are members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Below is a copy of the thread. At the bottom is someone's post about oligarchy and plutocracy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

While doing a little research, I happened to open a Pandora's Box so to speak. I was curious about some of the ownership and leadership of the Media Machine.

One of my first searches was for Time Warner.

Time Warner owns, CNN, AOL, HBO, New Line Cinima, WB, etc.

Heavy investors are Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch

When looking at the board of directors, this is what Wiki has to say...

Quote »

* James L. Barksdale - Barksdale Management
* Stephen F. Bollenbach - Hilton Hotels Corporation
* Frank J. Caufield - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
* Robert C. Clark - Harvard University
* Mathias Döpfner - CEO of Germany's Axel Springer AG
* Jessica P. Einhorn - Johns Hopkins University
* Reuben Mark - Colgate-Palmolive Company
* Michael A. Miles - Altria Group (Parent co. of Philip Morris)
* Ken Novack - former Time Warner - Affiliate Director
* Richard D. Parsons - Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer
* Francis T. Vincent, Jr. - Vincent Enterprises
* Deborah C. Wright - Carver Bancorp
* Edward J. Zander - Chairman and CEO of Motorola Inc.

The Senior Executives are:

Quote »

* Richard D. Parsons, Chairman/CEO of Time Warner Inc.
* Jeffrey L. Bewkes, President/COO of Time Warner Inc.

If you click on Richard D. Parsons you get some interesting info.

Quote »

Positions held

A liberal African-American Republican, Parsons served an internship at the New York State Legislature, at which time he was invited to work as a lawyer for the staff of the then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. When Rockefeller was appointed Vice President of the United States, in 1974, Parsons followed him to Washington D.C., where he worked directly with President Gerald Ford. He also met a deputy attorney general, Harold R. Tyler, and one his aides, a young Rudolph W. Giuliani, with whom he was to be closely associated - supporting him in his campaign for New York mayor and heading his transitional council.[1]

In 1977, Parsons returned to New York and became a partner after only two years at the Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler law firm; Working at the firm was Giuliani. During his eleven years at the firm he took on Happy Rockefeller, the widow of Nelson (who had died in 1979) as a high-profile client.[2] In 1988, he was recruited to serve as chief operating officer of the Dime Bank by Harry W. Albright Jr., who was a former Rockefeller aide. He later became chairman and CEO[1] and oversaw a merger with Anchor Savings Bank; gaining a substantial sum when the Dime Bank was demutualized.

Three years later, in 1991, on the recommendation of Nelson's brother Laurance Rockefeller to the then CEO Steven Ross, Parsons was invited to join Time Warner's board; he subsequently became president of the company in 1995, recruited by Gerald Levin.[1] He helped negotiate the company's merger with America Online in 2000, creating a $165-billion media conglomerate.

In December 2001, it was announced that chief executive Gerald Levin would retire and Parsons was selected as his successor. The announcement surprised many media watchers who expected chief operating officer Robert Pittman to take the helm. In 2003, Parsons made the announcement of the name change from AOL Time Warner to simply Time Warner.[2]

[edit] Prominent connections

From the early 1980s through much of the 1990s, Parsons owned a house at the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, (see Kykuit), where his grandfather was once a groundskeeper. For a brief time he had worked for Nelson at the family office, Room 5600, at Rockefeller Center (he currently has a Time Warner office in Rockefeller Plaza at the Center).[1]

Parsons is chairman emeritus of the Partnership for New York City,[3] established by David Rockefeller in 1979,[4] who has known him for many years. He is an advisory trustee of the family's principal philanthropy, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and he sits with David Rockefeller on the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation. Parsons is also on the board of the family created Museum of Modern Art.

In 2001, United States President George W. Bush selected Parsons to co-chair a commission on Social Security. Parsons also worked on the transition team for Michael Bloomberg, who was elected Mayor of New York City in 2001. In 2006, Parsons was selected to co-chair the transition team for the incoming Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.[5]

In August 2006, an article in New York Magazine reported that Parsons will likely run for Mayor of New York City in the 2009 New York mayoral election, claiming that "insiders say it's all but official".[6]

But wait, it gets better. Richard Parsons is ALSO on the board of directors for Citi Group.

Citi Group Board of Directors:

Quote »

* Michael Armstrong, Retired Chairman, Hughes, AT&T and Comcast
* Alain Belda, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Alcoa
* George David, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, United Technologies Corporation
* Kenneth T. Derr, Chairman, Retired, Chevron Corporation
* John M. Deutch, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Retired CIA director
* Roberto Hernández Ramírez, Chairman, Banco Nacional de México
* Ann Jordan, Consultant
* Andrew N. Liveris, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Dow Chemical Company
* Dudley Mecum, Managing Director, Capricorn Holdings LLC 1
* Anne Mulcahy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Xerox
* Richard D. Parsons, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Time Warner
* Charles Prince, Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup
* Judith Rodin, President, Rockefeller Foundation
* Robert E. Rubin, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Member of the Office of the Chairman, Citigroup
* Franklin A. Thomas, Consultant, TFF Study Group
* Sanford I. Weill, Retired Chairman, Citigroup

Sorry, didn't mean to post yet, still researching. This is just ONE example of the conflict of interest so to speak. But you guys should get the idea. There is such an influence between Major Money, Politics, and Media. So if your just listening to the Major News networks about the Economy or Elections, consider the source, literally.

More to come.....

Oh, Prescott Bush former member of Directors for CBS.

News Corporation (Believe Fox News) Board:

Quote »

* K. Rupert Murdoch
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
News Corporation
* José María Aznar
President
FAES - Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis
Former President of Spain
* Peter Barnes
Chairman
Ansell Limited
* Chase Carey
President and Chief Executive Officer
The DIRECTV Group, Inc.
* Peter Chernin
President and Chief Operating Officer
News Corporation
* Kenneth E. Cowley
Chairman
R.M. Williams Holdings Pty. Limited
* David F. DeVoe
Chief Financial Officer
News Corporation
* Viet Dinh
Professor of Law
Georgetown University

* Rod Eddington
Non-Executive Chairman for
Australia and New Zealand
JPMorgan
* Andrew S.B. Knight
Director
Rothschild Investment Trust C.P
* Lachlan Murdoch
Illyria Pty Ltd
* Rod Paige, Ed.D.
Chairman
Chartwell Education Group, LLC
* Thomas J. Perkins
Partner
Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers
* Arthur M. Siskind
Senior Advisor to the Chairman
News Corporation
* John L. Thornton
Professor of Global Leadership
Tsinghua University of Beijing

------------------------------

Haha, this is only the tip of the iceburg IMO.

Check out some of the other Citi Group board of directors.

Lets go down the list. Again, I'm using wiki so far for all my references.

Micheal Armstrong is also on the Council on Foreign Relations.

Quote »

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an influential and independent, nonpartisan foreign policy membership organization founded in 1921 and based at 58 East 68th Street (corner Park Avenue) in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C. Through its membership, meetings, and studies, it has been called the most powerful agent of United States foreign policy outside the State Department.

Alain Belda is also a member of The Conference Board, and has a little bit of history behind him.

George David

Quote »

George David is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of United Technologies Corporation. David was elected UTC’s President in 1992 and Chief Executive Officer in 1994. He joined UTC’s Otis Elevator subsidiary in 1975 and became its President in 1986.....

He has served on the boards of the Graduate Business School at the University of Virginia, the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council, the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Fine Arts.

In 1999 the Russian Federation awarded David with the Order of Friendship for his contributions to that nation’s economy, particularly to its aerospace industry. In 2001, he received the Air Force Association's John R. Alison Award for contributions to national defense by an industrial leader. In 2002, France named him to its Legion of Honor.

In 2000, he was named as one of America's Most Powerful People by Forbes magazine; and CEO of the Year by Industry Week' in 2003.

lol, this keeps getting better.

Kenneth Derr

Quote »

Kenneth T. Derr is a member of the board of directors of the Halliburton Company. He is a Retired Chairman of the Board, Chevron Corporation (international oil company). He served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Chevron Corporation, 1989-1999. Derr is also a Director of AT&T Corporation, Calpine Corporation, Citigroup Inc., and Potlatch Corporation. He is also on the Council on Foreign Relations.

John M. Deutch

Quote »

John Mark Deutch (born July 27, 1938) is an American chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from May 10, 1995 until December 14, 1996. He is presently an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the Board of Directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd.

Schlumberger =

Quote »

Schlumberger Limited is the world's largest oilfield services corporation operating in approximately 80 countries, with about 70,000 people of 140 nationalities. Schlumberger supplies a wide range of products and services from seismic acquisition and processing; formation evaluation; well testing and directional drilling to well cementing and stimulation; artificial lift and well completions; and consulting, software and information management. Schlumberger also provide similar products and services for the groundwater industry.....

Operating revenue in 2006 was US $19.23 billion with a market capitalization as of January 31, 2007, of US $74.5 billion.

Roberto Hernández Ramírez is also a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - 2002 to present.

Judith Rodin

Quote »

Rodin became president of the Rockefeller Foundation in March 2005.

She is currently on the the Board of Directors of Citigroup, AMR Corporation (the parent company of American Airlines), and Comcast Corporation where she served as the presiding director until 2006. [6] Rodin has also served on the Board of Directors for corporations such as Aetna, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and BlackRock. [7] She continues to serve as a trustee of the Brookings Institution.

Quote »

In 2004 Rodin was touted as one of Pennsylvania’s best Democratic candidates for the United States Senate. [11] During the lead up to the 2006 United States Senate election, one which would eventually result in the ousting of incumbent Sen. Rick Santorum, Judith Rodin was again listed among the Democrats' short list favorites. [12]

Robert E. Rubin... just a BIT on this guy.

Quote »

Robert Edward Rubin (born August 29, 1938) is an American banker who served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton Administrations.

Quote »

Rubin was briefly mentioned as a potential vice-presidential candidate for 2004 Democratic Party presidential nominee John Kerry. He did serve as an economic policy advisor to Kerry's campaign and was expected to be a front-runner for the position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve upon Alan Greenspan's retirement if Kerry had won. Rubin's heft as a Wall Street tycoon added a stamp of approval to Kerry's economic plans.

Quote »

During his time in the private sector, Rubin has served on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, the Ford Motor Company, the Harvard Corporation, the New York Futures Exchange, the New York City Partnership and the Center for National Policy. He has also served on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Mt. Sinai Hospital and Medical School, the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Market Oversight and Financial Services Advisory Committee, the Mayor of New York's Council of Economic Advisors and the Governor's Council on Fiscal and Economic Priorities for the State of New York. He is currently the co-chairman of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Franklin A. Thomas .....

Quote »

Other directorships: Citigroup Inc., Cummins, Inc., Lucent Technologies, Inc., Alcoa and PepsiCo, Inc.

Sanford I. Weill

Quote »

In April 1998 Travelers Group announced an agreement to undertake the $76 billion merger between Travelers and Citicorp, and the merger was completed on October 8, 1998. The possibility remained that the merger would run into problems connected with federal law. Ever since the Glass-Steagall Act banking and insurance businesses had been kept separate. Weill and Reed bet that Congress would soon pass legislation overturning those regulations, which Weill and Reed and many other businesspeople considered obsolete. To speed up the process, they recruited ex-President Gerald Ford (Republican) to the Board of Directors and Robert Rubin (Secretary of Treasury during Democratic Clinton Administration) whom Weill was close to. With both Democrats and Republican on their side, the law was taken down in less than 2 years. (Many European countries, for instance, had already torn down the firewall between banking and insurance.) During a two-to-five-year grace period allowed by law, Citigroup could conduct business in its merged form; should that period have elapsed without a change in the law, Citigroup would have had to spin off its insurance businesses.

In November 1998 Jamie Dimon was forced to resign from Citigroup.

In 2001, Sanford A. Weill became a Class A Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Class A Directors are Board Members who are elected by Member Banks (of the Federal Reserve System) to represent the interests of Member Banks. (See article on Federal Reserve Bank Board Membership).

In 2002 the company was hit by the wave of "scandals" that followed the stock market downturn of 2002. Chuck Prince replaced Mr. Weill as the CEO of Citigroup on October 1, 2003.

------------------------

Some others.

This guy is on the board for HSBC

*The Rt Hon the Lord Butler of Brockwell, KG, GCB, CVO

Quote »

Age 69. Master, University College, Oxford. A non-executive Director since 1998. Chairman of the Corporate Responsibility Committee and the HSBC Global Education Trust. A non-executive Director of Imperial Chemical Industries plc. A member of the International Advisory Board of Marsh McLennan Inc. Chaired the UK Government Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2004. Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service in the United Kingdom from 1988 to 1998.

Some from JPMorgan:

Stephen B. Burke

Quote »

Stephen B. Burke has served as our Chief Operating Officer since July 2004, and as our Executive Vice President and President of Comcast Cable and Comcast Cable Communications Holdings since November 2002. Prior to November 2002, Mr. Burke served as an Executive Vice President of Comcast Holdings and as President of Comcast Cable since January 2000. Mr. Burke is also a director of JPMorgan Chase & Company.

Lee R. Raymond

Quote »

Lee R. Raymond (born August 13, 1938) was the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of ExxonMobil from 1999 to 2005. He had previously been the CEO of Exxon since 1993. He joined the company in 1963 and has been president since 1987 and a director since 1984....

Raymond was appointed to Chair a committee to lead America's Alternative Energy Future by President Bush in fall 2006...

The report of 18 July 2007 by the National Petroleum Council, of which Lee is a member, argues, contrary to Lee’s former position on this matter, for an international framework to tackle emissions of carbon dioxide, suggesting that Lee has taken a greener stand on energy policy after his retirement from Exxon

Ellen V. Futter

Quote »

She formerly served as Chairman of the Board of New York Federal Reserve Bank and Chairman of the Commission on Women's Health of The Commonwealth Fund. She has received numerous honorary degrees, including from Yale, and awards.

She is currently:

Director of American International Group

Director of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co

Director of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

Director of Consolidated Edison, Inc

Director of Viacom

Member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Board of Overseers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

--------------------------------

the deeper I dig, the more apparent that is. MANY of the names above are on the board of other super companies. They are completely tied together, it's really amazing. What I have above is just a HINT of the total picture.

Banks, Media, Oil, Policy are all tied together at the TOP levels. They know exactly what they are doing, and seem to be in total control.

------------------

I don't usually quote Wikipedia entires...but here is a good one for our current state of affairs.

Quote, originally posted by wikipedia »

Oligarchy, aristocracy, and plutocracy

Historically, many oligarchies openly gave the political power to a minority group, sometimes arguing that this was an aristocracy ("organization by the 'best' and the 'brightest'"). Such states were often controlled by powerful families whose children were raised and mentored to be heirs of the power of the oligarchy. However, this power may also not be exercised openly, the oligarchs preferring to remain "the power behind the throne", exerting control through economic means. Although Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group.

Oligarchy vs. monarchy

Early societies may have become oligarchies as an outgrowth of an alliance between rival tribal chieftains or as the result of a caste system. Oligarchies can often become instruments of transformation, by insisting that monarchs or dictators share power, thereby opening the door to power-sharing by other elements of society (while oligarchy means "the rule of the few," monarchy means "the rule of the one"). One example of power-sharing from one person to a larger group of persons occurred when English nobles banded together in 1215 to force a reluctant King John of England to sign Magna Carta, a tacit recognition both of King John's waning political power and of the existence of an incipient oligarchy (the nobility). As English society continued to grow and develop, Magna Carta was repeatedly revised (1216, 1217, and 1225), guaranteeing greater rights to greater numbers of people, thus setting the stage for English constitutional monarchy.

Oligarchies may also evolve into more autocratic or monarchist forms of government, sometimes as the result of one family gaining ascendancy over the others. Many of the European monarchies established during the late Middle Ages began in this way.

Examples of oligarchies

Examples include Sparta (excluding the Helots, who were the majority of the population, from voting) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (only the nobility could vote). A modern example of oligarchy could be seen in South Africa during the 20th century. Here, the basic characteristics of oligarchy are particularly easy to observe, since the South African form of oligarchy was based on race. After the Second Boer War, a tacit agreement was reached between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites. Together, they made up about twenty percent of the population, but this small percentage ruled the vast native population. Whites had access to virtually all the educational and trade opportunities, and they proceeded to deny this to the black majority even further than before. Although this process had been going on since the mid-18th century, after 1948 it became official government policy and became known worldwide as apartheid. This lasted until the arrival of democracy in South Africa in 1994, punctuated by the transition to a democratically-elected government dominated by the black majority.

Russia has been labeled an oligarchy because of the power of certain individuals, the oligarchs, who gained great wealth after the fall of Communism. Critics have argued that this happened in illegitimate ways and was due to corruption.

The Iron law of oligarchy

Some authors such as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Thomas R. Dye, and Robert Michels, believe that any political system eventually evolves into an oligarchy. This theory is called the "Iron law of oligarchy". According to this school of thought, modern democracies should be considered as elected oligarchies. In these systems, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an 'acceptable' and 'respectable' political position, and politicians' careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites.

The historian Spencer R. Weart in his book Never at War argues that oligarchies rarely make war with one another.

Three Kinds of Establishment People

2007-10-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

I think there are 3 types of people who push the Establishment Agenda.

In the 1st group are the SHILLS, those to whom it's like a religion, a belief system. They are drinking the KoolAid so to speak, but do not know or see the big picture. This applies to the people who are polarized on the left/right axis and vehemently and obnoxiously defend their positions. This group would include the Dan Rather types and the Sean Hannity types. They buy into the left vs. right illusion. Most “pundits” are in this category. I base my opinion on this book:

"Bias: by Bernard Goldberg:

http://books.google.com/books?id=9L9qIIuj4WMC&pg=PP1&dq=bias+goldberg&sig=5_jQzkPnt7AqZgAHuoZVWooolBw

He's a former CBS correspondent who got kicked out when he wrote an article about the liberal bias so prevalent in the major networks and the NYT. Too bad that in his book he obviously buys into the left vs. right illusion, simply pointing out that there are two ends on the axis, instead of catching on to the real picture.

The 2nd group of Establishment people, whom I will call the DELUSIONALS, are those who know the big picture, but justify defending what they’re doing, by believing it benefits mankind. Human beings inherently can come up with justifications for what they do, even though most others would consider what they’re doing as evil (for example, suicide bombers, Nazi soldiers, etc). The Clintons and the Bushes fit here, and the media bosses who hand down edicts on what to say, to the Dan Rathers and the Sean Hannitys. This book explains how human beings come up with reasoning to justify evil deeds:

"The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ws_HtuMoWHsC&pg=PP1&dq=science+of+good+and+evil&sig=6A7YBB9gJV6nPYVPltokjDPAdGE

The 3rd group is the smallest. I will call them the SOCIOPATHS. They are the true megalomaniacs, who don’t care about the welfare of their fellow human beings, and only care about increasing their own power, despite their being extremely wealthy. Note that sociopaths mostly don’t become serial killers. The percentage of psychopaths in positions of power in the business world is higher than in the general population (the Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison types). These types of Establishment people are the wizards behind the curtain. These are the people we don’t see. This book discusses how psychopaths can climb in the business world. Parallels can be drawn in the world of the power elite:

http://books.google.com/books?id=J9mvHW1eA14C&pg=PP1&dq=snakes+in+suits&sig=oYnGROu2QjK730kTKlTtWSaJgTw

The history of mankind has always been of hegemony. A group will always tend to rise up and dominate the rest. I think the US Constitution was an attempt to prevent it. Alas, it failed.

Everything I Want to Do is Illegal

2007-10-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article by a farmer, showing how far we've come along, in terms of overbearing government regulations:
Everything I Want to Do is Illegal

I've written about this before, about the growth of bureaucracy and death of common sense:
There Oughtta be a Law

Are you a Liberal or a Conservative?

2007-10-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

When asked why the nation is going in a direction they don't like, Conservatives will blame "the Liberals". If a Liberal is asked the same question, he will blame "the Conservatives".

I have met seemingly intelligent people on both sides of this argument.

If you identify with one of these 2 groups, did you ever stop and consider that you are being played against each other?

It's a trick question, an illusion. The same way that an illusionist will distract your attention away from what's really happening:

The Republicans and the Democrats, are together, pushing an authoritarian, socialist agenda.

Why Terrorism is not the Nation's Most Pressing Problem

2007-10-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

I posted on what the Nation' s Most Pressing Problem is.
I will now say why I think terrorism is not the most pressing problem.

Colin Powell in his GQ interview:

GQ: Isn’t the new global threat we face even more dangerous?

CP: What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?

I found this post on an online forum, written by someone who writes better than me:

History and common sense teach that Powell speaks truth.

Since 9-11, 100,000 Americans have been murdered — as many as we lost in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq combined. Yet, not one of these murders was the work of an Islamic terrorist, and all of them, terrible as they are, did not imperil the survival of our republic. (ed: Bankruptcy would.)

Terrorists can blow up our buildings, assassinate our leaders, and bomb our malls and stadiums. They cannot destroy us. Assume the worst. Terrorists smuggle an atom bomb into New York harbor or into Washington, D.C., and detonate it.

Horrible and horrifying as that would be — perhaps 100,000 dead and wounded — it would not mean the end of the United States. It would more likely mean the end of Iran, or whatever nation at which the United States chose to direct its rage and retribution.

Consider. Between 1942 and 1945, Germany and Japan, nations not one-tenth the size of the United States, saw their cities firebombed, and their soldiers and civilians slaughtered in the millions. Japan lost an empire. Germany lost a third of its territory. Both were put under military occupation. Yet, 15 years later, Germany and Japan were the second and third most prosperous nations on Earth, the dynamos of their respective continents, Europe and Asia.

Powell's point is not that terrorism is not a threat. It is that the terror threat must be seen in perspective, that we ought not frighten ourselves to death with our own propaganda, that we cannot allow fear of terror to monopolize our every waking hour or cause us to give up our freedom.

For all the blather of a restored caliphate, the "Islamofascists," as the neocons call them, cannot create or run a modern state, or pose a mortal threat to America. The GNP of the entire Arab world is not even equal to Spain's. Oil aside, its exports are equal to Finland's.

Afghanistan and Sudan, under Islamist regimes, were basket cases. Despite the comparisons with Nazi Germany, Iran is unable to build modern fighters or warships and has an economy one-twentieth that of the United States, at best. While we lack the troops to invade Iran, three times the size of Iraq, the U.S. Air Force and Navy could, in weeks, smash Iran's capacity to make war, blockade it and reduce its population to destitution. Should Iran develop a nuclear weapon and use it on us or on Israel, it would invite annihilation.

As a threat, Iran is not remotely in the same league with the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, or Mao's China, or Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan, or even Mussolini's Italy.

And why would Tehran, which has not launched a war since the revolution in 1979, start a war with an America with 10,000 nuclear weapons? If the Iranians are so suicidal, why have they not committed suicide in 30 years by attacking us or Israel?

What makes war with Iran folly is that an all-out war could lead to a break-up of that country, with Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis going their separate ways, creating fertile enclaves for al-Qaida recruitment and training."

Now listen very carefully to this interview of Judge Andrew Napolitano

The powers (wiretapping, Patriot Act) that the Federal Government are taking on, are the same as that of the former East Germany, to crush the individual grapes, to make the juice that is the collective. We are being turned into SLAVES, in the name of safety.

The means is FEAR; the goal is POWER; the victim is LIBERTY.

The crashing US Dollar

2007-10-01T22:20:00.001-07:00

The US Dollar vs. Canadian $:

The price of crude oil in US$:

The Federal Debt:

The Consumer Price Index:

Now listen to what Ronald Reagan said about mounting debt and inflation:

What would happen if the US Dollar crashed and the nation went bankrupt? Perhaps, the adoption of the "Amero" will be proposed as "the solution". What's the Amero? It's to the North American Union, what the Euro is to the E.U. Here's a segment on CNBC discussing the Amero:

And here's a CNN segment discussing the North American Union. The NAU is to the U.S., Mexico, and Canada is, as the E.U. is to Europe. Pay attention to the mention of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the list of transnational corporations which are pushing for the legislation, dubbed the "SPP" (Security and Prosperity Partnership):

The Nation's Most Pressing Problem

2007-09-30T13:29:00.001-07:00

..isn't the war in Iraq
..isn't some guy with a turban
..isn't some 3rd world nation that might develop one nuclear weapon

It's the nation's road to bankruptcy.
Every single empire in history has ended by going bankrupt:
book: Empire of Debt

I posted earlier that the debt per man, woman and child was $160,000, and the Compound Interest Paradox:
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/debt-is-slavery.html

The US Government's Top Accountant, David Walker of the General Accountability Office, has been doing the lecture circuit to make more people aware of the issue. He has given up on trying to convince government on the magnitude of the problem, and has started talking to businesspeople and the academe.

The government fiscal burden per full-time worker, is $375,000! That is on top of one's personal debt (mortgage, car, etc). He explains that it is like having a $375,000 mortgage with no house.

Here is a segment from 60 Minutes about him and his message. It is 11 minutes long and pretty well done:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/01/60minutes/main2528226.shtml

Here is his video presentation in 2 parts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIgrxpp97OQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXr_Ga_n0pY

Why is the Federal government continually spending more and more, way beyond tax collections? Why is the Federal government borrowing more and more from the Federal Government, and from China, and getting deeper and deeper in debt? Why is the Federal government promising more and more in future entitlements that it can't afford? Why is the Federal government borrowing more and more, against our future earnings, and our children's future earnings? How can it possibly be sustainable?

How is it that few people even realize the magnitude of the problem?

The Left vs. Right Illusion

2007-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've written about this many times, most recently in my last blog post:
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/09/reps-and-dems-are-pushing-authoritarian.html

Here is an article I enjoyed very much:
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/freedomcontent.cfm?fuseaction=left_right&refpage=issues
A more detailed article on the same topic is here:
http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/futurecalling1.pdf
The above, a PDF file, is a very interesting read, highly recommended.
It's by G. Edward Griffin, an author I've mentioned earlier.

Excerpt from the first link:

"Would you rather be a Neoconservative or a Progressive? That is a trick question. The trick is in the fact that, although there may be differences between the rhetoric and short-term agendas of these groups, their long-term goals actually are the same."

The illusion of opposites has been a dominant part of the world's political landscape for over a century and it has been the primary reason for the advance of collectivism during that time.

In today's debate, the illusion of opposites has become a myth of gigantic proportions.

.. if there is any doubt of the similarity between the collectivism of Marx and the collectivism of Hitler, all one has to do is read Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf. The point is that, when the labels are peeled off and the underlying ideologies are examined, we come inexorably to the conclusion that every one of them is built upon the foundation of collectivism.

What are the elements of collectivism that are common to all of these seemingly opposite forces? Collectivists on the so-called Left and Right agree that:

1. Rights are derived from the state; (comment: i.e. not inherent in individuals and simply protected by the state)
2. The group is more important than the individual;
3. Coercion is the preferred method to bring about reform;
4. Laws should be applied differently to different classes;
5. Providing benefits (redistributing wealth) is the proper role of government.
It is sad that intelligent people with knowledge of this history still cling to the myth that they are opposites when it is so clear they are merely different manifestations of the same ideology.

Both “Left and Right” are ready to sacrifice freedom for the furtherance of their agendas. Both camps are willing to grant freedom to those who accept their political and social mores but do not hesitate to withhold it from those who oppose them.

The Reps and Dems are pushing an Authoritarian, Socialist agenda

2007-09-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

In a previous blog post, I pointed out that the USA has features of both a Fascist and Communist state:
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/09/usa-is-both-fascist-and-communist.html
The USA is turning into an Authoritarian, Socialist state. A socialist state where most people are below middle class, overworked, with limited freedoms, controlled by the super-rich with their corporations' lobbyists writing laws.

In another post, I wrote that the Republicans and the Democrats are playing the role of Good Cop, Bad Cop:
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/democrat-republican-good-cop-bad-cop.html
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/democrat-republican-good-cop-bad-cop-pt.html

I believe The Plan is that the public will be so angry at the Republicans (Neoconservatives, actually), that they'll elect a Democrat, and think "thank goodness we now have a Democrat". And then, said Democratic president will NOT undo the authoritarian EO's that Bush put in place, and then proceed to get away with, and screw the nation, with more socialist policies.

The Republicans are pushing the Authoritarian agenda.
The Democrats are pushing the Socialist agenda.

They are both pushing for more taxes, bigger government, more regulation, more war, more power for themselves, and less freedom for you and me.

Do you think Homeland Security was put in place as a reaction to 9-11? Think again, the first draft of the Homeland Security Act was written in 1998, during Bill Clinton's presidency.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/HSA_RoAPS.html

"The proposal for a Homeland Security Department originated in 1998 with the launching of the so-called Hart-Rudman Commission, .."

"Finally, the Homeland Security Act was structured on the recommendations of a special commission that was closely connected to, if not derived from, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which one author notes "has had its hand in every major twentieth century conflict. .. Of the "twelve" Hart-Rudman commissioners, Jasper writes, nine were members of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR or "the Council"), which Jasper calls "the semi-secret, private organization that serves as the most visible element of the Internationalist Power Elite."

In case you missed the short explanation about the CFR in my previous post...

Here's a good summary
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/shadow/cfrintro.htm

And here again is an excerpt from Carroll Quigley's book "Tragedy and Hope":

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. {p. 1247}"

"There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret record. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.. my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

"In addition to these pragmatic goals, the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.'' pp. 950 and 324

Carrol Quigley was the professor thanked by Bill Clinton in a public speech, for "guiding" him. Bill Clinton was a member of the CFR.

Many, many prominent people in government are members. At the bottom of this page is a list of members of the CFR:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807/SPEciaL.html

Reader comments #3, on Group Rights

2007-09-25T16:46:00.001-07:00

Comments on "I Have the Right to a Toilet"

Anonymous:: "The problem here is that (Ayn Rand) talks of 'rights' being given by governments. Where do these rights come from? Who says they are 'rights'? And if a similar group in a different context says no such rights exist does that make them true and authoritative?"

My reply:

Rights aren't "given" by governments. In the case of the US Constitution, government is supposed to _protect_ these rights which are "God given", or inherent in humans. If an individual doesn't agree with this, they're welcome to move to a country that is more aligned with their beliefs.
Anonymous:: "Also who says that all individuals ought to pursue happiness as a life goal? Some German philosophers for instance have argued that suffering and pain are necessary for people like Wagner and Goethe to emerge and unleash their greatness. Do all people want happiness?"

My reply:

If one were to argue that "suffering makes some people 'happy'", and to expand "pursuit of happiness" to also mean "to do what you want", then people who want to 'suffer', as a means to achieve enlightenment or whatever, are free to do what they want in the USA. For example, if one wants to sleep on a stiff board, or to practice masochism, in the privacy of their home, as long as they don't trample on others' rights, they are free to do so.

Reader comments #2: on Gov't Regulation and Big Business

2007-09-24T19:18:00.000-07:00

Comments on The History of Government Regulation and Big Business

Anonymous said: "I have read somewhere too that too much competition can lead to monopoly. Price undercutting and even selling some items at a loss, just to attract the customer to buy the higher valued products as well at the same time. This is because competitors will be driven to the wall, until one or a few firms dominate the market. I know you are saying that this is unlikely in a pure free market where there is no state, to intervene or create an elite. But the process described above is possible in such a situation is it not?"
My reply:: If a corporation drops prices, let's say until it sells an item at a loss, in order to block a newcomer from making a profit, the consumer benefits from the reduced prices. If said corporation does this in order to maintain a monopoly, then I think the corporation "deserves" that monopoly, because it is able to drop prices lower than all other competitors. Consumer wins. If this corporation starts becoming fat and happy, then competitors will be able to undercut the first corporation, by having lower costs.

As for the case of "selling some items at a loss" in order to "sell other higher valued items", and the consumer ends up paying more, then it's the consumer's fault for not going elsewhere for the higher valued item. If the consumer likes to have a one stop shop, then it's still a win-win.

Here is another link I found on Government Regulation:

Most of the harmful effects of deregulation are caused by incomplete deregulation — in particular, by deregulating X while neglecting to deprive X of special governmental privileges that consist of regulations or taxes on everybody else. Three examples leap to mind: First, there are cases in which governments, invoking "free market" values, have "deregulated" (i.e., permitted a broader range of pricing and other options to) industries that are either monopolies (e.g., power companies with a legal guarantee from competition) or near-monopolies (e.g., industries dominated by powerful corporations who are insulated from competition through regulations and tax codes that make it more difficult for newcomers to enter the market).

Second, there is the notorious S & L scandal, when the Reagan Administration gave Savings and Loans greater freedom to make decisions with depositors' money, while at the same time retaining federal deposit insurance and so ensuring that the taxpayers, rather than the lenders, would bear the costs of the lenders' mistakes.

Third — in an example that shows that big government is no friend to the environment — politicians have given loggers greater freedom to log on federal lands, at a fraction of the cost that a private landholder would demand. In all these examples, partial deregulation amounts in fact to a fascist grant of quasi-governmental privilege, without accountability, to private entities — a practice that can only lead to skewed incentives and abuse of power. (Governments are socialist to the extent that they seek to exercise direct control over the economy, and fascist to the extent that they delegate this task to the powerful "private" beneficiaries of state privileges and protection. Socialism means rule by bureaucrats; fascism means rule by plutocrats. The current American system seems to be a mixture of the two.) Those who complain of the harmful effects of deregulation are quite correct, if they are referring to what passes for "deregulation" under a statist régime. (The statists have similarly appropriated the term "privatization" to refer to the fascist process of "contracting out," i.e., of granting to private companies an exclusive monopoly to perform services usually monopolized by government directly — as opposed to the original libertarian meaning of "privatization," which was that such services were to be turned over to the competitive market free and clear.)

Reader comments #1

2007-09-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

On "I Have the Right to a Toilet.",

Anonymous said...: I like the racist = collectivist theme.But from a purely genetic point of view, is it not true that people from within particular racial, and or social or geographic groups display some form of collective trait (it could be greed, generosity, kindness or whatever)?

People who have lived in small geographically 'isolated' areas have similar attitudes.
My reply:: I have not read any research that talks about certain collective traits being genetic or racial. At this point I believe tendency toward traits are CULTURAL.

For example, people who grow up in very poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods, have the "Pie is not big enough" mentality and tend to become criminals themselves.

See my post regarding "the pie is not big enough": http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/09/pie-is-as-big-as-we-want-it-to-be.html

If one has had the experience of meeting several [insert group here] people who all were [insert trait here], then one cannot be faulted for assuming when meeting new people of the same group, that there is a good chance that the person is [trait]. That in my mind is not racism. Some may call it stereotyping.

However, if one then over extrapolates that and assumes that all members of the [group] are [trait], rather than giving the person that they meet for the first time the benefit of the doubt, that in my mind is racism. (And illogical) The worst kind obviously is when it becomes hatred. Hatred at certain minorities, again comes from the belief that "The Pie isn't Big Enough". e.g. "these immigrants are taking our jobs".

Remember, the smallest minority is the individual. We are all individuals.

Scoots wrote:

I have a story for you. My brother and I were at a movie several years ago (Falling Down) and during the long opening scene when there is no dialog we could hear someone narrating everything on the screen right behind us (we were in the front row) "It's a traffic jam. It's a hot day. Michael Douglas has a buzz cut and is sweating in his car. There is a schoolbus of kids making noise." and so on. My brother, always one to nip such behavior in the bud, stood up, turned around and said "DO YOU MIND NOT TALKING DURING THE MOVIE" to which he recieved the following stunning replay "HEY, JUST BECAUSE WE'RE BLIND DOESN'T MEAN WE DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO SEE A MOVIE!" To which my brother replied "YOU ARE BLIND. YOU CAN'T SEEEEEE A MOVIE" He got applause and the blind people left.

The difference between Fascism and Communism

2007-09-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

.. is not much!

http://www.fdrs.org/differences_between_communism_and_fascism.html

A few days ago, I posted that the USA is both Fascist and Communist.

Article talks about several of my points

2007-09-24T09:04:00.001-07:00

In this blog, I've posted about the mainstream media (MSM) and educational system dumbing us down, the Federal Reserve, bureacracies, the Corporatocracy, the fascist state, welfare, wars, "group rights" as weapons. This article talks about all of them at once; he even specifically mentions Britney and Lindsay:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/swinkels1.html

The USA is both Fascist and Communist

2007-09-22T12:02:00.001-07:00

Let's start with the statement "The USA is Fascist".

Bear in mind that Benito Mussolini,originator of fascist state, said

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate interests.”

I pointed this out in my post Laws Benefit Corporations.

I found 2 really good links.

14 points of Fascism: http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm

Fascist America in 10 easy steps by Naomi Wolf: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

In the first link, one of the steps is:
"Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause"

In the second link, the same step is called
"Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy"

I pointed this out in my post, "Mass Media: Ministry of Fear".

Check out this pic:

Of course, Giuliani is one of the "media anointed'. The mass media is making a short list of whom they approve for the presidency. At the very beginning of the campaign, they anoint who the "top tier candidates" are, instead of just letting them all be equal "candidates", and letting the public choose who the "top tier" are. The media is choosing our president for us.

Now let's look at the statement "The USA is Communist".

FSK wrote "The Communist Manifesto's Succesful Implementation in the USA"
http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/06/communist-manifestos-successful.html

He shows that the USA has implemented many of the 10 Planks of Communism. The most damning are:

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

The 2nd point, refers to the Federal Reserve.

The 3rd point, regarding combining education with industrial production, I touched on in another post, Dumbed down by the Educational System, part 2. In it I pasted a link that shows that the educational system turns people into good worker bees and good consumers.

The Pie Is As Big As We Want It To Be

2007-09-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

In a reader comment to my earlier post
"The History of Government Regulation and Big Business":
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/09/history-of-government-regulation-and.html

Anonymous said...

Good post. Lets say you live in a mythical place where people are encouraged to trade, produce and make their own things which they take to market. Lets say competition is encouraged but not beyond some prices (because too much competition results in monopoly, oligopoly), and also individuals themselves follow a religion which tells them to be generous in trade, to even aid competitors if they are in trouble (because there is plenty for everyone and everyone is guaranteed a pre-determined livelihood by God who is the Most Generous). would this be a good society in your opinion?

I can see some people may be lazy because "God provides", but they are taught that God provides for those who help themselves and who work.

For instance I have heard cases of shop traders in Egypt refusing to serve a customer and asking them to go to a neighboring 'competitor' shop to buy the item 'because he has not had allot of business today'.

He may have missed my point, in that history shows that true free-market competition PREVENTS cartelization. There is no such thing as "too much competition". Cartels happen when government imposes regulation; history says that regulation was pushed by the giant corporations themselves (through lobbyists and bribes to government officials), to help shut out competition from startups.

His 2nd point, about people (such as ancient Egyptians) or a religion that encourages people to help their competitors when they are in serious trouble, reminds me of 2 things.

First is that this is the philosophy, if I recall correctly, of Plato, that "The Pie is Big Enough", or better yet, "We Can Make the Pie as Big as we Want it to be", as opposed to "The Pie isn't Big Enough for Everyone", or "Life is a Zero Sum Game".

In the former, the essence is that knowledge is wealth, and more knowledge begets more wealth. Technology has the power to make everyone wealthy. Witness how technology has enriched our lives.

In the Middle Ages only Kings could travel 500 miles in relative comfort, and they would die a slow death if they contracted Amoebic Dysentery. Today I'd wager that flying 500 miles in coach on JetBlue or Southwest is more comfortable than said Middle Age King's journey, and even the lower middle class in a 3rd world country can afford the pills to cure Amoebiasis.

In the latter, (Zero Sum Game) the belief is "I need to steal somebody else's piece of the pie in order for me to have a bigger slice". This mindset is at work when some riffraff breaks into your car (thinking "I'm poor, this guy is rich, he can afford a new stereo"); when people do day trading on the stock market; or the big leveraged buyout firms make money; or when the WTO/NAFTA/IMF/WB force rules and monetary and tax law changes on 3rd world countries, which effectively force them to remain poor, for the benefit of transnational corporations. It is also true when nations go to war over oil. All of it is wealth re-distribution (and wealth destruction, in the case of wars and breaking in cars).

Socialism is the same. Socialists think "Look at these poor people, let's take money from the productive middle class, and give it to the poor". (Wealth re-distribution, zero sum game) .

A better way is to think "How can we stimulate the economy, or make the economy more sound and more fair, so that jobs can be created, so these poor people can make a decent living?" Make the pie bigger. The saying of teaching a man to fish, instead of giving him a fish, comes to mind. And no, I'm not talking about government mandated minimum wages. The minimum wage does NOT create more jobs...

The 2nd thing the comment reminds me of, is morality. An Egyptian shopkeeper sending customers to a competitor in trouble, is altruism. It's a separate topic than free-market competition. The two are not mutually exclusive. This is why during the 80s, the "Decade of Greed", that charitable contributions reached an all-time high. (From the book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History")

In the book "The Science of Good and Evil", the author Michael Shermer argues that altruism is hardwired into the brains of our species (as well as in primates). Altruism helps propagate the species. The book goes on to explain why people do evil things, despite that.

I will argue that everything that drives man, is for selfish purposes (as Ayn Rand says), including altruistic deeds. When someone does something altruistic, he or she feels good, which is what drives the deed in the first place.

My writing this blog is also a selfish deed. The direction that the nation and the world is going, makes me sad and angry. Writing this blog is my therapy. A second selfish reason for writing this blog, is the hope that it will make the world a better for most everyone, including myself.

It's just really neat that the mechanism of true free-market economics harnesses the power of selfishness to create wealth for everyone.

The USA is not a Democracy (and isn't even supposed to be one)

2007-09-15T21:07:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard "we're a democracy" and "we're spreading democracy"?

The U.S.A. is NOT EVEN SUPPOSED to be a democracy. It's supposed to be a Constitutional Republic. The word "democracy" is NOT mentioned ONCE in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers wanted a nation built on the principles of individual freedom and limited government.

Here is a good explanation of the difference between a democracy and a Constitutional Republic:

From http://www.dailypaul.com/node/1958

" pure Democracy is nothing more than "mob rule" with no provisions for the rights of the individual. The Founding Fathers saw this as one of the worst forms of government and in their wisdom provided a framework to secure the rights of the individual, ie., a Constitution and a Bill of Rights with separation of powers subject to Judicial Review which is the "Rule of Law" we live under.

True that we do elect our head of state and representatives by a Democratic system, ie., majority popular vote. (Although with the Electoral College and the Florida debacle that's even in question), but that aside, once our head of state and representatives are elected democratically they are bound by their oath of office to "uphold, obey and defend the Constitution, so help them God" thus a Constitutional Republic.

A constitutional republic is a state where the head of state and other officials are elected as representatives of the people and must govern according to existing constitutional law that limits the government's power over citizens. In a constitutional republic, executive, legislative, and judicial powers are separated into distinct branches and the will of the majority of the population is checked by protections for individual rights so that no individual or group has absolute power. The fact that a constitution exists that limits the government's power, makes the state constitutional. That the head(s) of state and other officials are chosen by election, rather than inheriting their positions, and that their decisions are subject to judicial review makes a state republican."

I believe the spreading of the lie that the USA is supposed to be a democracy makes it easier for the media to manipulate the public and sway opinion.

If the media declares "51% of survey respondents support a ban on pork rinds", then Joe Public will then think "oh well it's a democracy, and if the majority want it banned then so be it", instead of "Hey, I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of pork rinds, as long as my eating pork rinds doesn't violate someone else's rights", as the Founding Fathers would advocate.

Even if the USA were supposed to be a democracy, it is far from one. Instead, it's a Corporatocracy and a carefully concealed oligarchy:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_anthony__070903_the_ghosts_inside_th.htm

" the two-party system is the true cancer eating away at the heart of this republic. The notion that both sides have a grasp on absolute truth, politically and morally is one of the greatest lies perpetrated against the American people."

Restore the Republic!

"I Have the Right to a Toilet."

2007-09-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard someone say "I have the right to..."? Despite the fact that it impinges on someone else's rights?

Pedestrians who cross the street sometimes step in front of a moving vehicle, just because they have the right of way. As if they were thinking "I have the right of way, it gives me the right to step in front of your car, and make you wait 15 seconds while I take my sweet time ambling across the road". Never mind that they expect your car to defy the laws of physics and stop in time; never mind that the laws of physics trump human laws every time.

New York City tried to install coin-operated toilets on the sidewalks to address the odor you often smell around the city. However, a disabled-group activist sued the city to force them to use large, wheelchair accessible toilets. You see, the "physically challenged", have the "right" to be "treated like normal people". NYC ran a trial, using both types of toilets. They found that the regular toilets were heavily used, while the wheelchair friendly toilets were barely used; they were much more expensive, would be out of the City's budget, as they could not charge a fee to help it pay for itself. In court, the city tried to make their case. In the end, neither the court nor the wheelchair activist budged, and the city then decided not to install any toilets at all. I don't see the score as "disabled people 1, regular people 0", rather, it's "0-0" Would it really be a "point against the disabled", if he had let the city install regular toilets? toilets? Why does he think that life is a zero sum game? That if the "other side gets ahead" it means "I lost"?

The wheelchair activist felt he exercised his group's rights. I will turn it around and ask.. "What about the 'right' of normal people to have a city that doesn't smell of urine? What about the 'right' of normal people to have toilets around"?

This horror story, and many more, are chronicled in the book "The Death of Common Sense". Author Philip K. Howard discusses how Group Rights came about:

The last section of Howard's book explores the "rights revolution," where government has become "like your rich uncle under your personal control" and everyone now gets to be a part of a legally-mandated, discriminated-against minority. As rights weaken the lines of authority in our society, the walls of responsibility - such as how a teacher manages a classroom - have begun to crumble. We want government to solve social ills, but distrust it to do so. Congress has resolved this dilemma by using rights to transfer governmental powers to special interest groups. The result has not been bringing excluded groups into society, but rather has become the means of getting ahead in society. Howard makes the distinction that, "The rights that are the foundation of this country are rights against law. In James Madison's words, the Constitution provides for 'protection of individual rights against all government encroachments, particularly by the legislature.' Rights - freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association - were to be the antidote against any new law that impinged on those freedoms."

In this way, Howard finds that we have confused power with freedom. These new legislative rights aren't rights at all, no matter how righteous they sound. "They are blunt powers masquerading under the name of rights." He says we need to consider how these new rights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms. The flip side of the coinage of the new rights regime is called coercion.

In the paper recently, I read about a Black comedian who came up with a comedy routine along the lines of "What it means to be Black". This was a result of some other Black celebrity or writer accusing him of "not being a real Black", because the comedian had said in an interview that he didn't like rap music nor "large SUV's with chrome rims".

Like the comedian, I find the accusation laughable. It however, is a symptom of a society that likes to label or box people.

Am I [insert race here], or a [insert profession here], or [insert sexual orientation here], or [Liberal/Conservative], or [Republican/Democrat] ? I find the question "Are you a Republican or a Democrat" the most absurd of all.

I personally like to make friends, and identify with, people that share the same interests and hobbies as me, and have the same mindset and attitude.

Ayn Rand has said that the smallest minority is the individual. The Constitution guarantees the individual's rights to "Life, Liberty". Nothing about conferring additional, or new rights, to groups or subgroups.

Ron Paul has said, http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul381.html

"Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist."

and

"All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals."

The Constitution protects the individual's rights to "Life, liberty", and "the pursuit of happiness". The latter, as long as it doesn't impinge on others' rights to life and liberty. And arguably, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor (e.g. wages with no taxation). It does NOT give the individual the right to a job, a home, a car, health care, nor a toilet if one is "physically challenged".

"There Oughtta be a Law"

2007-09-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

In the papers, there are often public outcries about "more laws to prevent X crime from happening again". Never mind that numerous laws were broken in the occurrence of said crime, the enforcement of which would have prevented it. People somehow want more and more specialized laws to prevent every possible permutation of a crime.

If an uninsured octogenarian with poor eyesight had mowed down 5 schoolchildren at a school crossing while sipping a latte, there would be cries to create laws making it illegal for uninsured 80 year olds who fail the DMV eye test to drive near schools while holding coffee. Never mind that the eye test is supposed to ensure that drivers have adequate eyesight, and that it's already illegal to drive without insurance. You get my point.

OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), will fine businesses and require them to redo railing if they're an inch too short, or if there is flaking paint within 30 feet of food handlers. But the one thing they DON'T do is review a company's actual safety records and compare them against other companies in the same industry.

In the books "The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America", and "The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom, author Philip K. Howard writes a scathing indictment of excessive government bureaucracy.

From Amazon:

New York City laws forbidding Mother Theresa from opening a two-story homeless shelter unless she installs an elevator. A 33 page manual describing the qualifications and uses of a hammer. Contract bidding procedures that unintentionally but blatantly encourage corruption. To Howard, an attorney practicing in New York City, this is but one of many examples of the law's suffocating Americans by extensive decrees on what may and may not be done.

A review by Charles G. Hardin, chardin@govreform.org :

Philip Howard's insights help us understand why government appears arbitrary, almost never able to deal with real-life problems in a way which reflects an understanding of the situation. .. absurd regulatory inflexibility and the lack of the use of judgment, Howard's book reveals that we have concocted a system of regulation that "goes too far while it does too little."

Our old system of common law recognized the particular situation and invited the application of common sense. ... But in this century statutes have largely replaced common law, and in recent decades regulations have come to dominate the legal landscape. Howard observes that the Interstate Highway System (still the nation's largest public works program) was authorized in 1956 with a 28-page statute. Now, we attempt to cover every situation explicitly; (witness the 200 page contracts for home sales)
Howard traces the growth of this regulatory "rationalism" from Max Weber - the German sociologist at the turn of the century who said that "Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is `dehumanized'" - to Theodore Lowi - who in The End of Liberalism in 1979 saw greater regulatory specificity to be the antidote to special interest groups. But in truth, Howard shows us, the more precise we try to make the law, the more loopholes are created.
Centralized rules have caused us to cast away our common sense.

Furthermore, "Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its common attribute. .. The idea of a rule detailing everything has had the effect of reversing the rule of law. We now have a government of laws against men."
The second section of Howard's book explains how the ritualization of bureaucratic process has brought us to the point where people argue, not about right and wrong, but about whether something was done the right way.
In this maze of centralized, detailed regulation - a system designed to discourage individual responsibility - many have lost sight of what government is supposed to be doing. .. He tells us that responsibility, not process, is the key ingredient to action. If responsibility is shared widely, then like the extreme where property is shared widely, it is like there being no responsibility at all.

and

..by noting the damage predatory litigation has done to the communal fabric of the United States: "Social relations in America, far from steadied by law's sure hand, are a tangle of frayed legal nerves." He tells how seesaws have started to vanish from playgrounds, how teachers are banned from touching students, and how emergency-room staff are blocked from attending to patients off hospital grounds--even if they can see them bleeding to death just 30 feet away.

Some points from above:

centralized rules make us cast away our commone sense
bureaucracy is dehumanizing
it discourages personal responsibility
coercion by goverment the main fear of the Founding Fathers, is its main attribute

I think this is part of the dumbing down of the populace that I posted about earlier. And excessive government regulation, wrote Caroll Quigley, Bill Clinton's mentor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope", is one of the ways to "squeeze the middle class", which he loathed. I posted about this.

I like what my friend Scott M said, that every law on the books, that hasn't needed to be enforced in a long time, adds inefficiency to the system; its very presence is counter-productive.

Recently in the local newspaper, there was an article with "experts" on both sides of an argument, arguing whether or not it was legal to turn right without stopping, at certain types of intersections. The experts, a columnist specializing in roads and traffic, and a traffic cop, disagreed on the interpretation of the laws. The traffic cop said that he and his buddies had written hundreds of tickets for "violators" who did not stop.

It was surreal, because if something as insignificant as coming to a full stop or not, could get the "experts" to disagree, then it's obviously useless to have to come to a complete stop. Clearly one should err to the side of common sense - that the motorist in question would have the experience to decide whether he could see enough in all direction to warrant stopping or not. The purpose of traffic laws is to improve safety and keep traffic flowing. Neither "expert" brought it up. The discussion was all about what the law meant. The absurdity of coming to a stop was never questioned. Coming to a full stop when turning right, would be unnecessary if a motorist slows down and can adequately check that there are no pedestrians, and can see that he can merge in without disrupting flow. The cops were simply enforcing laws for the sake of enforcing them, as opposed to using common sense and actually improving safety and traffic flow. But then of course, there is also much incentive for traffic cops to write tickets, as they are told to do so, and the revenue stream is attractive for cities, PD's, and courts.

Ayn Rand once stated that the hallmark of authoritarian systems is the creation of innumerable, indecipherable laws.

The History of Government Regulation and Big Business

2007-09-15T14:01:00.000-07:00

The "Progressive Movement" aka the History of Big Business getting in Bed with Big Government

Murray Rothbard (an economic historian) et al, have shown that the "Progressive" movement of 1890-1920, the beginning of big government regulation of big business, was influenced by big business themselves. This is from his book "The Case Against The Fed".

He said that the so-called government regulation was lobbied for by the giant corporations of the time, in order to make entry more difficult for startup competition. The classic case is Meat- Packing regulation:

From http://www.cato.org/research/articles/cpr28n4-1.html --

Today's history books credit muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair with the reforms in meatpacking. Sinclair, however, deflected the praise. "The Federal inspection of meat was, historically, established at the packers' request," he wrote in a 1906 magazine article. "It is maintained and paid for by the people of the United States for the benefit of the packers."

Gabriel Kolko, historian of the era, concurs. "The reality of the matter, of course, is that the big packers were warm friends of regulation, especially when it primarily affected their innumerable small competitors." Sure enough, Thomas E. Wilson, speaking for the same big packers Sinclair had targeted, testified to a congressional committee that summer, "We are now and have always been in favor of the extension of the inspection, also of the adoption of the sanitary regulations that will insure the very best possible conditions." Small packers, it turned out, would feel the regulatory burden more than large packers would.

From http://www.cato.org/research/articles/cpr28n4-1.html

Consider the story of one of the most famous "trusts" in American folklore: U.S. Steel.

In the 1880s and 1890s, rapid steel mergers created the mammoth U.S. Steel out of what had been 138 steel companies. In the early years of the new century, however, U.S. Steel saw its profits falling. That insecurity brought about a momentous meeting.

On November 21, 1907, in New York's posh Waldorf-Astoria, 49 chiefs of the leading steel companies met for dinner. The host was U.S. Steel chairman Judge Elbert Gary. The gathering, the first of the "Gary Dinners," hoped to yield "gentlemen's agreements" against cutting steel prices. At the second meeting, a few weeks later, "every manufacturer present gave the opinion that no necessity or reason exists for the reduction of prices at the present time," Gary reported.

The big guys were meeting openly— with Teddy Roosevelt's Justice Department officials present, in fact—to set prices.

But it did not work. "By May, 1908," Kolko writes, "breaks again began appearing in the united steel front." Some manufacturers were undercutting the agreement by dropping prices. "After June, 1908, the Gary agreement was nominal rather than real. Smaller steel companies began cutting prices." U.S. Steel lost market share during this time, which Kolko blames on "its technological conservatism and its lack of flexible leadership." In fact, according to Kolko, "U.S. Steel never had any particular technological advantage, as was often true of the largest firm in other industries."

In this way, the free market acts as an equalizer. While economies of scale allow corporate giants more flexible financing and can drive down costs, massive size usually also creates inertia and inflexibility. U.S. Steel saw itself as a vulnerable giant threatened by the boisterous free market, and Gary's failed efforts at rationalizing the industry left only one line of defense. "Having failed in the realm of economics," Kolko writes, "the efforts of the United States Steel group were to be shifted to politics."

Sure enough, on February 15, 1909, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote a letter to the New York Times favoring "government control" of the steel industry. Two years later, Gary echoed this sentiment before a congressional committee: "I believe we must come to enforced publicity and governmental control . . . even as to prices."

When it came to railroad regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the railroads themselves were among the leading advocates. The editors of the Wall Street Journal wondered at this development and editorialized on December 28, 1904:

Nothing is more noteworthy than the fact that President Roosevelt's recommendation recommendation in favor of government regulation of railroad rates and[Corporation] Commissioner [James R.] Garfield's recommendation in favor of federal control of interstate companies have met with so much favor among managers of railroad and industrial companies.

Once again, big business favored government "curbs" on business...

In his book "The Case Against The Fed", Murray Rothbard showed that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (which created the Federal Reserve), resulted in cartelization of the banking industry, the same way the regulation of the steel and the meat industries produced cartels in their respective industries.

And of course, it gets much worse than that - the worst thing about it is the Compound Interest Paradox.

The Founding Fathers were hostile towards corporations - they could be dissolved by the state; in the late 1800s there was a landmark court "precedent" that declared corporations as having "the rights of a person" that got around this:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030919.html

Every time there is perceived "corporate malfeasance", the public cries out for more regulation.

One other thing the public doesn't realize, is that whenever there is some kind of "boom industry" due to artificially low interest rates, there is malinvestment, and a subsequent bust.

Again FSK has touched on this. A Good Explanation of the Housing Bubble:

When the newly printed money starts accumulating in one part of the economy, prices skyrocket. Newspapers and television tout it as being the new "hot investment area". Eventually, everyone is investing in this "hot area". At this point, the Federal Reserve is concerned about inflation and jacks up interest rates, causing a crash. The insiders start buying at the start of the bubble, and sell before the crash. You don't know how long the boom cycle or bust cycle will last, because you don't know what the Federal Reserve is going to do.

What he didn't mention in this post, is the subsequent government bailout, at taxpayers' expense, and the predictable reaction of "We need more government regulation to prevent this from happening again".

He did touch on the bailout phenomenon: Distributed Costs and Concentrated Benefits

Today's housing bubble and subprime mortgage meltdown was caused by 2 things: The Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially too low for too long, creating artificial demand for homes due to cheap loans, and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). I can't summarize it in 2 sentences so here's the link:

The Government-Created Subprime Meltdown:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo125.html

It seems whenever the government sticks its fingers in the free market, it's either to benefit Big Business, and/or it creates undesireable unintended consequences.

It's been suggested that Benito Mussolini said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Laws Benefit Corporations

2007-09-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I mentioned that Steven LaTullipe wrote that the nation is a "carefully concealed oligarchy".

Laws have continually been enacted, to benefit large corporations, and to "encourage" citizens to be good little taxpaying corporate employees.

FSK has written on a related phenomenon, "It's hard to start a Business":
http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/07/its-hard-to-start-business.html
One of the things he said is that many of the costs of running a business associated with government regulation, penalize the small business owner or a small corporation, more than a large corporation.

Below I will list a few examples of laws and acts that benefit large corporations.

The 401k
The 401k was not created to benefit employees. It originally benefited company executives, until the IRS ruled it could apply to ordinary employees in 1979. 401k's are more expensive to administer for smaller companies and small business.

From the PBS website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement/world/401k.html#1

And from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/401(k)

A primary reason for the explosion of 401(k) plans is that such plans are cheaper for employers to maintain than a pension a pension for every retired worker.

The HMOs (and the HMO Act of 1973)
Here's a good history of the HMOs and managed health care:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2819

A result of the HMO Act of 1973, was the illogical coupling of employment with "discounted" health care. Just try to get the same coverage as your employer can get you, and it will cost you twice as much. It's an incentive to work for a large corporation.

I've heard the argument to this as "if you join an HMO with 100 fellow employees, you are pooling your risk with the 100, and so the risk as seen by the HMO is smaller than if you join by yourself". This is completely illogical; and it's another argument for you to work for a corporation. This would be true if you were the first, or the first 100 customers of the HMO.

If an HMO had 1 million existing customers, and you then join them by yourself, you ARE POOLING RISK WITH THEIR 1 MILLION OTHER CUSTOMERS. If you joined at the same time as 100 fellow employees, the difference in the pool of risk is statistically insignificant, as you are still pooling risk with thier 1 million other customers.

Regarding Health Care...

Why should it make financial sense to me to buy health care that pays for every little doctor's visit, yet doesn't cover catastrophic events such as requiring an organ transplant?

Would you like to buy car insurance that covers routine maintenance but which doesn't cover being totalled by a drunk driver? "Oh sorry, you're not covered because you didn't disclose a pre-existing condition that your neighbor is a habitual drunk driver"

It makes WAY more financial sense to be covered for events UNLIKELY but FINANCIALLY CATASTROPHIC. That is exactly what insurance is supposed to be for.

I would like to buy some health care program that covers say, the first 6 family doctor visits (for prevention, which saves money) a year and then only covers anything over say, $5,000 per year. $5,000 of expense in a year would sting, but wouldn't bankrupt me. A $200k operation, on the other hand, would.

As far as I know, such a product doesn't exist; it ceased to exist after the HMO Act of 1973.

Lastly, there has not been much talk about addressing the spiralling cost of health care. You can't have ANY kind of sensible health coverage IF the costs are out of control. (This is another topic altogether)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a backlash against the Enron scandal. (It's a bunch
of new accounting rules). People think it's to reign in "corporate malfeasance".

But:

It wouldn't have prevented what happened at Enron, because the accounting firm and Enron colluded, and the new rules wouldn't have done anything about it
What happened at Enron already broke a lot of existing laws
Enforcement of existing laws would have prevented Enron
The new rules make preparing accounting statements for companies hugely more expensive, giving much, much more business to accounting firms (THERE's the beneficiary of the act)
The new rules were drafted by, guess what - accountants
The additional costs to companies, don't scale with size - they are much more punitive to small companies than large ones.

It's a classic case of government regulation again favoring the giant corporations (and a special interest group).

The Patent System
The Patent system was originally intended as a means of rewarding inventors. Today getting a patent is expensive for an inventor working by himself. Not just that; a patent is only worth it if you can afford to defend it. Defending a patent means filing a patent infringement lawsuit, which is hugely expensive, even for corporations.

The patent system has been perverted. One company (typically a larger one), sues another for infringement, and the punitive damages go way beyond what a fair or typical licensing agreement would have cost. It is often used as a weapon to kill competitors. And of course, larger companies can more easily afford lawsuits than smaller ones. Sometimes the lawsuit is for infringing a patent that a smaller company is unknowingly violating, that is unrelated to their core product. Despite this, damages are huge enough to bankrupt the victim.

Sometimes a patent holder will seem to wait for a company to start making some serious money, then pounce with a lawsuit, instead of seeking out a royalty agreement early on. By waiting, the victim will have more money to confiscate.

Withholding tax
The law that says you get taxed before you get your paycheck, of course, means that if you work for a corporation, you will be a good little taxpaying citizen. Not to mention, most people overpay their tax, and get a "refund", which makes some people happy. What a joke. You just loaned your money to the IRS interest free. And if you underpay and have to pay a balance by April 15, you will likely have to pay a fine, and interest.

Can you imagine what would happen today, if instead of being taxed automatically, people had to write a check every month to the IRS? They would probably suddenly realize just how much the government takes in taxes and there would be a taxpayer revolt.

I'm not saying corporations should be dissolved - they have their place. Witness the technology that's been developed by corporations - such as the Hard Disk Drive, the improvements in Digital Cameras, Microprocessors, and Solid State Memory.

But, this relentless march toward Corporatism must be stopped. Laws being passed that favor corporations at the expense of the consumers and the middle class, must be stopped.

Ghost in the Machine

2007-09-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

Here's an excellent blog post I found that agrees with my stand that the Republican and Democratic parties are TWO FACES OF THE SAME EVIL, and that the media dumbs down the populace with inane articles about Lindsay Lohan:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_anthony__070903_the_ghosts_inside_th.htm

" the two-party system is the true cancer eating away at the heart of this republic. The notion that both sides have a grasp on absolute truth, politically and morally is one of the greatest lies perpetrated against the American people."

The Mass Media: The Ministy of FEAR

2007-08-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

There's a huge propensity for the mass media to spread fear and to exaggerate dangers.

I read this book:
The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things Here's a quote from an Amazon review:

Americans are afraid of many things that shouldn't frighten them, writes Barry Glassner in this book devoted to exploding conventional wisdom. .. he certainly shows we have much less to fear than we think.

.. Glassner (Derailing Democracy) deconstructs .. beliefs about the threats of the modern world and aims to expose the media's role in keeping citizens fearful. Frightened citizens, he posits, make better consumers and more easily swayed voters. In a methodical fashion, he raises a series of public safety threats—the prevalence of road rage, middle-class heroin addiction and husband abuse, to name just a few—and then systematically tries to strike them down with statistics.

Among the things that Glassner skewers is the media's portrayal of teen moms & young black men as destroyers of American society, road rage, plane crashes,... The basic premises that Glassner covers are these:

1) Mass media creates panics & hysterias from a few isolated incidents. 2) Anecdotal evidence takes the place of hard scientific proof. 3) The experts that the media trots out to make comments really don't have the credentials to be considered an expert. 4) Entire categories of people are christened as "innately dangerous" (like the aforementioned teen moms and young black men)

There's that thing again about making citizens into "better consumers". It came out in a link in my blog part 2 of Dumbed Down by the Educational System ; from the Underground History of American Education website, and here's the quote:

The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

What's the purpose of fear, and how does it sway voters? It's the classic trick of the propagandists. Instill fear in the public, and you can convince them to do anything. Here's an illuminating 1 minute video:

What's the difference between the old Soviet news agencies and the American Mass Media? The Russians knew it was propaganda.

The Mass Media: DoublePlusUnTruth

2007-08-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone can disagree with this statement:

You can't have a functioning democracy without a free press.*

*The USA isn't supposed to be a democracy, but that's another topic, and let's assume it's supposed to be one for the purposes of this discussion.

My assertion is that the mass media is far, far from a free press. They do not inform the public. They do not provide unbiased news. They do not perform their due diligence and provide all sides of a story, nor all the facts.

Only Six Corporations Dominate Major Media Outlets

You may say, "that doesn't mean it's not free". Well, if we assume for the moment that the nation is not a free capitalistic society, but instead is a corporate collectivist society, then the corporations, who call the shots (i.e. influence government to pass laws for their benefit), shouldn't be running the mass media. Note the commonly used term, corporate media.

Let's look at the assertion that the country is corporate collectivist.
From http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe80.html:

..it’s important to accept one fact about contemporary America: This is not a democracy, and certainly not a constitutional republic. America is actually a carefully concealed oligarchy. A few thousand people, mostly in government, finance, and the military-industrial complex, run this country for their own purposes. By manipulating the two-party system, influencing the mainstream media, and controlling the flow of campaign finance money, this oligarchy works to secure the nomination of its preferred candidates (Democratic and Republican alike), thus giving voters a "choice" between Puppet A and Marionette B.

Everybody knows that lobbyists have undue influence on government; in the Pharmaceutical industry alone, lobbyists outnumber congressmen 2 to 1:
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/aug2007_awsi_01.htm

The term "corporatocracy" was used by John Perkins in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Wikipedia has an entry for Corporatocracy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy#The_U.S._as_a_corporatocracy

..when the major media outlets are controlled by large corporations, access to information tends to become limited to what serves corporate interests, and corporate interests in turn are able to define the national political agenda.

I have personally seen the Mass Media, or Mainstream Media ("MSM"), spew what I certainly know are egregious lies. Not just that; I have seen them discuss a news item at one time, then, at another time, discuss a related item, contradictory to the first item, as if the first item had never been broached.

It reminds me of George Orwell's 1984:
Wikipedia entry, 1984. In the novel, there was the government news, propaganda, and information ministry: The Ministry of Truth. Its purpose was to rewrite history and change the facts to fit party doctrine, for propaganda effect. The Ministry of Truth published a daily newspaper, wherein a story would be run that could totally contradict a story from the day before. The people would completely forget the previous day's story, not noticing the contradiction at all, like the previous day's story never happened.

I have seen this happen in real life. This is why I say the media are DoublePlusUnTruth. (Newspeak for "big lie")

Here are examples.

In the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there was much ado over the weapons of mass destruction. In the months after Saddam's famous statue fell, it was almost forgotten by the public that the whole reason for the invasion were those weapons that couldn't be found. It was a collective shrug and a "well we're in there already, so we just keep fighting". There was no indignation at all, that the whole reason for going in there was bogus to begin with. Like the WMD reasoning never happened.

In the conclusion of the Valerie Plame affair, the MSM discussed Scooter Libby's pardon: Example Mass Media article on the Libby Pardon

The whole focus of the media in this case has been on "who leaked information about Plame to the media". Completely forgotten was the reason why Libby lied to a grand jury in the first place, which was to protect a certain lie by the Bush administration from being uncovered.

That lie was in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, when he famously frightened a nation by declaring, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The so-called evidence, was an entire fabrication. Details on the cover up

No mainstream American media organization has pursued this story.. Most Americans, consequently, don't even know what a grand lie Bush and the White House perpetrated upon them and the Congress in order to win approval for an attack on Iraq.

And then there's the Democrats who were voted into Congress, with a lot of fanfare, to reign Bush in and end the Iraq war. A year later, the Dems even give Bush more spying powers than he asked for. Pelosi's promises were completely forgotten, both by the media, and some actual people I've talked to who are mainstream believers, Hillary supporters: http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070827&s=cockburn

I will show examples of outright lies by the mass media, that I have witnessed, in another blog post.

Dumbed Down by the Educational System, pt. 2

2007-08-23T21:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote about the Dumbing Down by the Education System earlier:
http://rabbit-hole-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/dumbed-down-by-educational-system.html I mentioned that I thought few people seem to be capable of critical thinking.

I found another link along the same lines:
Underground History of American Education,
a book by John Taylor Gatto

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. ... Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes... Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself ...

The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments with the power of the truth by the word of "experts". The new dumbness is particularly deadly to .. kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform.

According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce". The workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought... Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so.

if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

There are several ideas in the above excerpt that I agree with:

Lack of critical thinking in the masses
Commercially prepared disinformation (mass media is controlled)
.. dispensing propaganda
.. for tranquilizing the workforce (my earlier blog, Dumbed down by the media)
A vast bureaucracy, necessary to address the dumb

Regarding the last 2 points, I think the "workforce", meaning the masses in the middle class, are purposely made dumb, precisely to make them easier to control. This is accomplished by the first above bullet points.

Here is a short, illustrated "American Education History Tour". It will take you 5 minutes:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm

This all reminds me of another thought I have. The world resembles Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley:
Amazon link
Wikipedia entry

Paraphrased from the wikipedia entry: In the Brave New World, society is rigidly divided into five castes — Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. They are separated into categories based on "natural" abilities they have been bred to possess. The lowest castes were bred to do menial tasks and to have such a disposition as to be very happy with this type of work. All members of society are trained to be good consumers to keep the economy strong. The Deltas and Epsilons do menial work such as factory labor, and are happy, as long as they have their perfect drug, Soma. The drug makes it possible for everyone to be blissfully oblivious and perfectly content to do the assigned tasks of their caste.

Seem familiar? Consumers that are oblivious to what's going on around them, as long as they have their perfect drug. Joe Schmoe is happy as long as he has his job, his overpriced home, his new truck which he bought by taking equity out of his home, and can open a sixpack in front of the mind-numbing TV after work. Next day, get up, go to work, pay taxes, repeat, ad nauseum.

Democrat, Republican: Good Cop, Bad Cop pt. 2

2007-08-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I said that the Democrats and Republicans are playing out the role of good cop / bad cop, like in the movies. I'll give more examples of this.

The Democrats aren't reigning Bush in.
Pelosi and the Dems were elected into Congress, ostensibly to reign Bush in and de-fund the war in Iraq. It's been a year, and the war is still funded.

Here's an Executive Order that Bush did. Not a peep from Congress.
Government can freeze assets of anyone "blocking efforts" in Iraq:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/07/20070717-3.html

Try googling it: Bush "July 17" EO

No mention at all in the mass media. Suspicious? It's only discussed on non-corporate news websites.

And what about the recent expansion of Bush's spying powers?
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08042007.html

"The Democrats in this Congress are a bunch of spineless cowards and willing enablers, and they now bear the chief responsibility for establishing the elements of an American police state."

And here's the grand-daddy. Try googling it: NSPD-51. Here are sample links:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55824
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1837936/posts

Again not a peep from the corporate media, nor the Dems.

The 2 Parties are One and the Same
Indeed, Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope", said, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley#Quotes

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. {p. 1247}"

Who is Carroll Quigley and what is his book about? He was a historian and professor at Georgetown University, and his book was a history of western civilization and the influence of the globe's ultra wealthy families and their organizations. Quigley proudly proclaimed he was a member of one of their organizations, and his only criticism was that they need not remain secret. In this book, Quigley expressed contempt for the middle class, that they should be "squeezed" with more taxes, regulation, debt, and government that appears to be solving problems, but actually does not.
http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094500110X

Bill Clinton was a War Monger and an Elitist
Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar at Georgetown, was a protege of Carroll Quigley. Clinton thanked Quigley by name in an acceptance speech. Was he thanking a kindly old professor? No, he mentioned the name of an elitist pig. Maybe to announce to those in the know, that he was part of the "in" group.

Here's an article about the 2-party sham, Bill Clinton, and Quigley, from 1998:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=14629

"For those who still cling to the hope that there is a real difference between the two major U.S. political parties.." ".. the ordinary individual..may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups .. his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives" .. "he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits."

If you think Clinton was a great, peaceful president, unlike today's Republicans (neo-conservatives), well:

Between WW2 and Clinton's administration, the US Military was dispatched overseas 4 times. During Bill Clinton's 2 terms, 44 times: http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-23-99.html

Bill Clinton passed the "Iraqi Liberation Act" in 1998, saying, "we don't like Saddam and we should throw him out and replace him". This was the PRECURSOR of the Iraq invasion: http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/11/01/981101-in.htm

Why Clinton would sign such a thing? Why didn't they vote against the invasion? Why didn't they de-fund the war?

Democratic Presidential Candidates willing to "negotiate" with Iran?
Regarding Iran, some Democratic presidential candidates claim to be "moderate", saying "I am willing to negotiate with Iran". Negotiate? What's there to negotiate?

Why does there need to be any war, "last resort" or not? Iran are NO threat to us. Why does Iran hate the USA? Because in the 1953, the CIA and British Intelligence coordinated a coup against their popular, democratically elected president, Mohammed Mossadegh, and replaced with the Shah and his brutal secret police: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/
Why did the CIA and British overthrow Mossadegh? Because Mossadegh wanted British Petroleum, which owned the oil concessions in Iran, to give more of its profits to the Iranian people. The British convinced the powers that be in the US Government to let the CIA do most of the dirty work. The result was the 1979 overthrow of the Shah, and the Iranian US embassy hostage crisis, and their continuing hatred of the US.

So what if they're developing nuclear weapons? They don't have a delivery system. The enemy of the USA, the former Soviet Union, had 40,000 warheads, and thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And we're worried that Iran might have ONE?

The real reason for beating up on Iran?
Maybe the real issue is oil. Or the fact that Iran wants to sell oil for Euros and Yen instead of US Dollars. Before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam had announced the exact same thing. Coincidence?

Saddam to accept Euros and Yen
Or maybe it was the neocon's plan all along. The PNAC (Project for a New American Century) , in their document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" , declared that "Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has."

And listen to ex-general Wesley Clark's interview:
1 minute youtube video
He recounted the list of countries the neocons wanted to invade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, and Sudan.

The Two Faces of the Same Evil
How many times have you heard people say that they will "vote for the lesser of two evils"? Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island , has said, "They are two faces of the same evil!"

Good cop or bad cop? They're both bad!

Wake up, people!

Democrat, Republican: Good Cop, Bad Cop

2007-08-09T00:44:00.000-07:00

The people of this country are strongly polarized along the Democrat/Republican, Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right axis. It's puzzling, until you think that maybe it's a distraction from the real issues. Or that they are really one and the same, and only appear to be different on the surface. This is so the parties, and the public, will argue about things that don't really matter, such as whether or not to allow the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools. In the meantime, both parties voted to invade Iraq, with few asking, "should we invade Iraq at all?"

I say, the Democrats and the Republicans are playing out the role of good cop/bad cop. In case you don't know what that is... In the movies, when cops interrogate a suspect, "bad cop" barges in first and roughs up the suspect. "Good cop" rushes in and pulls "bad cop" off of the suspect, and yells at him to stop beating up the suspect. He then turns to the suspect and says, "I'm a nice guy. I'm here to help you. Just tell me what you know". The suspect, afraid of bad cop and thankful for good cop's intervention, begins to trust him and spills the beans.

Today the Republican party (better called the Neoconservative party), is doing overt things that alienate the American public. Bad cop. The people then think that the Democrats are here to save them. Good cop. The next Democrat president will proceed to do things he wouldn't otherwise get away with because our guard is down. The Democrat president wouldn't undo the authoritarian Executive Orders that Bush has executed which add frightening powers to the Presidency. Today, the Dems don't even talk about undoing those EO's anymore.

Pelosi had promised to fight Bush's authoritarian moves before getting elected - but nope. No noise from her these days. The Dems got elected on the promise to de-fund the Iraq war, which they didn't do.

People are sick and tired of the 2 party system. Voter turnout has been on a steady decline since the 50's. There was ONE blip - 1992, when Ross Perot ran, a 3rd candidate, an alternative to the 2 parties. This is from http://mwhodges.home.att.net/voting.htm :

Hmmm, pretty telling.
More on this in my next post.

Dumbed Down by the Educational System

2007-08-09T00:27:00.000-07:00

How many times have you heard someone complaining about the school system? Someone complaining about how teachers get away with crap that would get them fired for laziness had they been working for a private company?

The U.S. school system is a monopoly run by a rigid union! There is no accountability within the schools, and no competition betwen them. What did you expect? Excellence?

Here's an interesting webpage on the decline of education::
http://mwhodges.home.att.net/summary.htm#educate

For every $1 spent on "special needs" children, less than 1c is spent on advanced students. Advanced students aren't given enough stimulus to grow to their potential. Who do you think would help ensure the future of the nation?

Consider these facts:

More than half of PhD candidates in US universities are foreigners.
Half of engineers and scientists working in the US are foreign born.
South Korea with 1/6th the population of the US, graduates more engineers per year.

Why are people not taught financial calculations in school? Why are they not taught how much money you end up paying for that blouse you paid for with a credit card, if you make only the minimum payments? Or how much goes to interest, and how much goes to principal, for every month, for a 30-yr home mortgage at 6% interest? 7%? That in a typical 30 yr mortgage, in the first several years, most of the payment goes only into interest?

I found these same questions asked by a Wall Street insider, and what he thinks the answers are, here:

Wall St. insider on the education system and more

It's a bit long, but at least read the first couple of pages which is about the educational system. It's quite negative, and talks about a few other things that I want to cover in this blog at a later date.

And here is a book that you can download for free, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America". I haven't read it yet but it looks interesting:

click here to download the PDF file

the website

about the book

This quote is very telling:

"When I returned to the United States I realized that America's transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the "system" in all areas of government-federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the "system's" control would take place in the school-through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, .... "

More on that particular topic (from constitutional republic to socialist democracy) in another post ...

Dumbed Down by the Mass Media

2007-08-09T00:12:00.000-07:00

Why is the mass media so full of inane, mind-numbing, "news"? We get an incessant barrage of reports on Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Nicole Richie. It makes me sick. WTF do I care about a couple of ditzy girls with too much money and time and not enough brains?
Just try a news.google.com search of "Paris Hilton":
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=paris+hilton&btnG=Search+News
And compare the number of hits to "debt ceiling":
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=%22debt+ceiling%22&btnG=Search+News

What do you think will affect you more, Paris Hilton finding God in prison, or your share of the national debt being increased by $3,000?

A few years ago it was Laci Peters dominating the headlines for months. One pregnant lady gets murdered - it's front page news... everyday for the next several weeks. There was one time during all this, that there was a big earthquake IIRC in India, and lots of people died. Incredibly, it was on page 2, while the long dead and bloated Laci was on the front page. No disrespect for Laci...

If a plane crashes in Brazil, it's big news. I'm not saying it isn't news.

But, a jumbo jet's worth of people die everyday in the 3rd world due to hunger or lack of basic medical care. Something to think about.

Regarding dumbing down, I see it every day while driving. Not only do I see bad driving everyday (as anyone with a pulse can get a driver's license), but the traffic rules are severely dumbed down. No consideration for flow. Traffic laws are a particular peeve of mine.

For example, in no other country have a seen so many stop signs. And all behold the uniquely American abomination, the 4-way stop sign. For those of you who haven't driven anywhere else in the world... most stop signs can be replaced by yield signs. That means, cars on the other street have right-of-way. You approach with caution and continue if the other driver wouldn't have to slow for you, but stop if needed. Come on. We have stop signs at intersections that are lightly travelled, and from which you can see in all directions. There are 11 stop signs each way on my 3.5 mile daily commute. 11! That's one every ~0.3 miles! I reckon, every single one can be replaced by yield signs. The only reason for their presence I can think of is that a very, very, low common denominator is accounted for. A denominator IMO that should NOT be given a driver's license in the first place, one that is too stupid to understand the concept of yielding. And the effect on the rest of us is, we're treated like schoolchildren, or we turn into criminals by saving gas and time by doing the "California roll" through them.

Then there's the ridiculously low speed limits, which deserve an entire blog on its own....

Knee-jerk anger at "radical" ideas

2007-08-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

I noticed, and so did my friend Joey, that people immediately reject any opinion that is contrary to the "mainstream", instead of giving the new idea or opinion thoughtful consideration, or research, before making conclusions.

Joey for example, recently discovered a non-invasive cure for gallstones:
http://curezone.com/gallstones/

He sent me the link, and I found it pretty incredible, but he convinced me to try it anyway. He's found that people automatically reject what he's saying, in some cases getting angry.

I will quote myself, with a post I made on a forum:
--- [quote]---
The father of my wife visited with us for a few months a year ago when I decided to try the gallstone flush. I asked if he wanted to try it too and he said yes. He said afterwards that a dull ache he had in his back went away.

Fast forward a year, he got an ache again, and he went to the doctor, who gave him an ultrasound. Gallstones. Doctor said if the pain gets worse, he'd need an operation.

He went home and repeated the flush procedure a few more times. He went back for another ultrasound. Gallstones gone!!!

Amazing....... a week of apple cider vinegar and half a day of fasting.... vs. they cut you open and throw away an organ.
-- [ end quote]

This experience makes me question doctors' "mainstream thought".

Joey has told a lot of people about the gallbladder flush, and they usually immediately reject what he is saying, and in some cases they get angry. He asks "why are you reacting that way?", and they reply "I don't know".

I frequent an automotive forum, and technical discussions are common. Whenever I post something controversial, but based on my observations, I often get attacked, simply because it went against "accepted wisdom". I have seen this happen to other, very thoughtful people, who had posted something controversial, but correct; what they originally proposed later became the "accepted wisdom".

I think people are trained to instantly and vehemently to reject any opinion that is contrary to the "mainstream".

Let's see how these statements make you feel:

sunlight prevents cancer
if you have gallstones you can easily get rid of them and you don't need an operation
Expensive statin drugs (Lipitor, et al), don't prevent heart disease, proper nutrition does

the FDA has supressed nutrition as a preventive for disease, and promotes expensive drugs to cure disease that could have been prevented
the FDA has promoted Aspartame and Splenda, synthetic chemicals, which cause migraines (me included), and suppressed Stevia, a sweetener made from a shrub, popular in Japan, that tastes much better, and appears to be safe.
the AMA is a monopoly on healing; nurses should be allowed to diagnose and prescribe medicine for simple, common ailments
the AMA restricts the number of doctors that graduate every year, ensuring their pay stays high
lowering speed limits does not reduce crash rates
raising speed limits does not increase crash rates
speed is not implicated in most crashes; inattention is
.08% BAC is too dangerously intoxicated for driving
SUVs are less safe than small cars
you don't need to add aerobic exercise to your weightlifting routine to get cardiovascular benefits
cats can be trained
welfare isn't good for poor people
Lincoln, Hoover, FDR, and LBJ were terrible presidents
Bill Clinton created the precursor of the Iraq invasion and the 9/11 attacks
deficits DO matter
the Federal Reserve is a corrupt cartel that subsidizes the finance industry, and ensures never-ending personal and national debt
the educational system is a government monopoly run by a rigid union resulting in very poor schools
realtors have a monopoly on selling homes, and lobby for laws to protect their trade; that is anti-trust activity; they run an information campaign making it appear that selling or buying homes is complicated and needs their expensive services
the "war on poverty" has wasted trillions of dollars, with no effect on the number of poor people
illegal drug trade is so lucrative, that even prison guards partake. So even if the whole country is turned into a prison, illegal drugs would still be here
The Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and is a scam

See what I mean? How did those statements make you feel?

Because people are trained to instantly and vehemently reject any opinion that is contrary to the "mainstream", the "Strawman Fallacy" is often used to discredit a person and his other arguments. Because of this, a person fears attack by others using the Strawman Fallacy, and it becomes a form of self-censorship. For example, let's pretend I believed the earth is flat. Knowing that it's an unpopular view, I don't even write about it because I'm afraid I'll be attacked. I censor myself. FSK wrote about this: http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/07/strawman-fallacy.html

When the flat earth theory was popular, the round earth people were attacked.

I am an engineer, and I am proud to say I went to a university where we were taught how to think and how to ask the right questions. I always question my own assumptions. I sometimes backtrack and re-question my own conclusions. It is crucial for my work.

I realized also that most people are very poor at Critical Thinking. Most of them aren't used to thinking logically, and make logical fallacies. And a lot of people argue with emotion. As I was thinking about this the other day, I realized I had very little formal training in university - we weren't taught it per se, other than in Philosophy I, and I just got used to thinking logically by exposure and out of necessity.

So I decided to go and buy a few books on logic to brush up. At the very least, if I hear a bad argument, I can pinpoint the logical fallacy, and know its name. I just got them, but I haven't started reading them yet. I browsed through them and they looked good. Here they are:

book: Critical Thinking
book: Crimes Against Logic

The Compound Interest Paradox

2007-08-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

I ended my last post with "Why does debt spiral out of control?"

I believe the answer is in the Compound Interest Paradox. I'm convinced the monetary system is fundamentally flawed. Whether it's a conspiracy or not is irrelevant in proving the Paradox's existence. The Compound Interest Paradox is a mathematical paradox that proves that the total debt can never be repaid.

In a nutshell: Only the Federal Reserve and banks have the authority to create money. Whenever they create money, it is loaned. At the time of creation, it needs to be repaid with interest. Because they do not create the money for the interest at the same time, this interest will only come from someone else who himself has taken out yet another loan (also with interest, of course). Where else will the interest money come from? Every new dollar created needs to be repaid, plus interest, which didn't exist yet at the time of that dollar's creation. The total money in circulation is not enough to cover all the debt. And as the economy grows, the debt grows even larger. This paradox guarantees spiralling debt.

Sound strange? Others have written about it much better than I can, so I will provide links:

Here is FSK's blog. I've known about this paradox before his blog, but his blog is the first place I saw it with a name. He's the scientific, mathematical type, so his writing and reasoning about the Compound Interest Paradox appeals to nerds like me:
http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/06/compound-interest-paradox.html

He has a bunch of other entries which I also like. Some of his other blog entries are "fruity". However, do not make the logical fallacy of assuming that because his other blog entries are fruity, that all his entries are false. He talks about that exact fallacy here: FSK on the Strawman Fallacy. Fear of others using the Strawman Fallacy against you, is a form of self-censorship. It makes people tend to fear saying things that are against "mainstream thought" or against "commonly accepted wisdom".

Here is an excellent allegorical tale that leads up to the Compound Interest Paradox, though again it isn't named as such. It is easy to read, and is illustrated. This is where I first heard of the Paradox, and was dumbfounded when I realized its overwhelming significance:

I Want the Earth Plus 5%

And here is an excellent 47-minute animated video presentation about the banking system, and includes the Compound Interest Paradox, though again it isn't given a specific name. At the end of it is a proposed solution for the Paradox.

video: Money As Debt

If your interest is truly piqued, here is a 3.5 hr documentary shown on PBS more than 10 years ago. I watched the whole thing. It's very long and detailed. It covers the history of money and banking from more than 2000 years ago. It also has a proposed solution for the Paradox, in this case Milton Friedman's (the famous economist). Copy and paste it into your torrent client:

torrent: "The Money Masters"

and here is a book by Murray Rothbard about the subject. His proposed solution is different.

book: What has the Government Done to Our Money?

And if you think that "I don't live in the USA, it doesn't apply to me"... virtually all the central banks of the world have the same system.

What is the consequence of this? Two things: that there will always be boom and bust cycles, and that during a bust cycle, the inevitable foreclosures on loans mean that the banks can confiscate hard assets, and the wealthy (who can ride the bust cycle) can buy hard assets, at pennies on the dollar. Every time there's a bust cycle, huge swaths of real wealth transfer hands from the middle class to the wealthy.

This is part of the reason that since the 70s, the American middle class have had a slight decline in real incomes, while the top 1% now earn 3x as much. (This particular topic will be discussed in another blog entry.) The increase in GDP in the economy since the 1970's BTW, have all been going to the wealthy. The richest 1% have 80% of the world's wealth.

Debt is Slavery

2007-08-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

As an engineer, science, technology, and math, interest me. The past few years however, I have also been interested in things that are more political and social in nature.

I have been taking the red pill.

Do you want to take the red pill and journey down the rabbit hole with me? If so keep reading.

Let's start with a fairly obvious one. Almost everyone I know is in debt. Let's start with the statistics:

In the USA, the average debt per man, woman, and child, is $160,000!
Link to Grandfather economic report on debt

What is the significance of this? DEBT IS SLAVERY!!

(Aside: The etymology of the word "mortgage" is the same as "mortuary" and "mortician".)

When I told this to a friend, he said, "I'm well below that $160,000 average". Well, sad to say, that $160,000 includes not only personal debt, but also his share of the national debt. A family of 4 owes $640,ooo!

Here's the national debt over the decades:

So now one may ask, why is the debt spiralling out of control? Do deficits really matter? Why does the government keep raising the debt ceiling?

Here are two recent news items:
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/07/30/afx3967902.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60963-2004Nov18?language=printer

More on this in my next post.