What were you expecting?

"Government is actually the worst failure of
civilized man. There has never been a really good
one, and even those that are most tolerable are
arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent."
-- H. L. Mencken

...and busier 'n a one-armed paper hanger with the
seven year itch in a Texas windstorm.

Doin' what is anybody's guess.

Cheap entertainment

The question remains why two million people
would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave
his arms around online to a Romanian pop song.

It seems 2 million people are easily entertained
and probably chuckle even while watching grass
grow.

Read.

Beware of the Keepers of the Word

"...and the word was good, and the word was
of God"...

How could I possibly be against access to the
world's knowledge? Of course, like most sane
people, I am not against it and, after more than
40 years of working in libraries, am rather for
it. I have spent a lot of my long professional
life working on aspects of the noble aim of
Universal Bibliographic Control—a mechanism by
which all the world's recorded knowledge would be
known, and available, to the people of the world.
My sin against bloggery is that I do not believe
this particular project will give us anything
that comes anywhere near access to the world's
knowledge.

Now, keeping in mind what you just read,
continue...

"It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning
again, knowing almost nothing. People were
talking about the end of physics. Relativity and
quantum mechanics looked as if they were going to
clean out the whole problem between them. A
theory of everything. But they only explained the
very big and the very small. The universe, the
elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff
which is our lives, the things people write
poetry about -clouds - daffodils -waterfalls -
... these things are full of mystery, as
mysterious to us as the heavens were to the
Greeks. Because the problem turns out to be
different. We can't even predict the next drop
from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each
drip sets up the conditions for the next, the
smallest variation blows prediction apart, and
the weather in unpredictable the same way, will
always be unpredictable. When you push the
numbers through the computer you can see it on
the screen. The future is disorder. A door like
this has cracked open five or six times since we
got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible
time to be alive, when almost everything you
thought you knew is wrong..........
Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard.

"For two thousand years people have believed
that the sun and all the stars of heaven rotate
around mankind. Pope, cardinals, princes,
professors, captains, merchants, fishwives and
schoolkids thought they were sitting motionless
inside this crystal sphere. But now we are
breaking out of it, Andrea, at full speed.... The
old idea was always that the stars were fixed to
a crystal vault to stop them falling down. Today
we have found the courage to let them soar
through space without support ... And the earth
is rolling cheerfully around the sun, and the
fishwives, merchants, princes, and cardinals, and
even the Pope are rolling with it ... The
universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken
up to find it has countless centres. So that each
one can now be seen as the centre, or none at
all." .......Life of Galileo, by Bertold
Brecht

How about these 13,000 books available for free
download, without even a library card in your pocket.

So much for all the world's good information being
found only in the library.

What of those around the world that have no access
to a library but have an internet connection?

Read.

Torquemada, Dubya and Putin

Yet, there are thousands, nay, millions who are
saying at this very moment, "If I could only get
my guy in there." Bwahahahaha...

Dubya and Puty Put are peas in a pod and
certainly "share common ground," as ABC News
describes it. Indeed they not only shared a
medieval castle for a few hours but also share a
blood-stained medieval mindset, as epitomized not
only by Byzantine-like wars and crusades complete
with the modern equivalent of plunder and
foraging, but also a system or torture and
brutality that would prompt Tomas de Torquemada,
the inquisitor general of Castile and Aragon, to
take copious notes.

It was shortly after Torquemada that The Church
went cancerous and was never the same.

Creating that many new enemies is not good for
the health of the 'body'.

See any parallels?

Full article.

Thanks to L. R. White

China legalises private investment

I hear a giant sucking sound...

China has opened up a number of state-owned and
once-strategic sectors of its economy to local
and foreign private investment in a decision
which will extend the role of entrepreneurs in
industries long monopolised by the government.

Read.

Who's the terrorist here?

More of the tragicomedy...

There was this >bleep< up on the hill. There
were rooms in it and kids, segregated by age --
and sometimes by sex -- were being brainwashed
daily from attending this >bleep.< The principal
of the >bleep< was very nervous that some of his
pupils might get confused since in their writing
classes, journals, and even the miscellaneous
notes that they passed back and forth, they were
afraid to mention the >bleep< they were attending
--- or in fact, any >bleeping< >bleep< at all.

The rest of the story.

Classic hypocrisy

"Across the generations we have proclaimed the
imperative of self-government, because no one is
fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a
slave." -U.S. President G. W. Bush, Second
Inaugural Address, January 20, 2005

Beautiful, George. Now go home and take the rest
of your slave drivers with ya. I'll kiss your
speech writer, but you obviously come from another
planet.

A finer case of hypocrisy, I've never seen.

Thanks to L.R.White

On mass movements

"The vigor of a mass movement stems from the
propensity of its followers for united action and
self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a
movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda,
leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but
referring to instruments of unification and to
means used to inculcate a readiness for self-
sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand
the nature of a mass movement unless it is
recognized that their chief preoccupation is to
foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for
united action and self-sacrifice."
-- Eric Hoffer

Putting on the hip-waders

The neocons in power in Washington these days,
those who were delighted to talk about America as
the sole empire in the world following the Soviet
disintegration, will of course refuse to believe
in any such collapse, just as they ignore the
realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But I
think it behooves us to examine seriously the
ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically
imperiling itself that it will cause not only the
collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically
alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
...
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse
society on Greenland that collapsed in the early
15th century: "The values to which people cling
most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions
are those values that were previously the source
of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If
this is so, and his examples would seem to prove
it, then we can isolate the values of American
society that have been responsible for its
greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to
them no matter what. They are, in one rough
mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism,
technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of
humans over nature). There is no chance whatever,
no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that
as a society that we will abandon those.

Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

Let me get my hip-waders on and see if I can slog
thru this shit.

This is probably the dumbest fucking thing I've
ever seen in print.

The "expert" (I was gonna say dipshit) that wrote
these words doesn't have a clue that these values
that were responsible for America's greatest
triumphs (the ones that were allowed to operate
for the period between 1870 and 1913 when there
was no empire) were abandoned. Their opposites have
been in place since then, creating empire then
virtually guaranteeing its eventual collapse. He
sees no parallels with the Soviet Union.

Nationalism doesn't belong in the author's grouping.
Empires develop and nuture themselves using the
nationalist flag-waving and song-singing to go
forth conquering those that don't comply with their
standards. Without it there's no empire, hence
nothing to collapse, no Borg mentality.

No, what rules now is The Collective. Empire is
the epitome of power, the collective mind-rape
in its final glory and all the pomp that goes with
it.

The article.

Requiem for a Heavyweight?

The seminal example of "spontaneous order" is
found in truly free-trade in free markets. It was
first put on the intellectual map by Austrian
Economist and Nobel Laureate Fredrick Hayek. It
is the opposite and antithesis of "central
planning," -- and it's how "evolution" of all
kinds proceeds.

It works by what I would describe as "massively
parallel trial and error" -- lots of folks trying
lots of different approaches to almost everything.
Many fail, but the best are successful and spread
thruout a population by "memetic contamination"
(word of mouth, etc.) It's the sort of order that
evolves from this sort of process that allowed the
quasi free-trade united States to temporarily
out-last the centrally planned Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics.

Note how Mr. White says, "temporarily out-last".

He's right.

The nation state is damned if it does and damned
if it doesn't...rule, regulate, order and plan.

The reason?

If they regulate at all, they're going to have to
regulate more until they go the way of their
fraternal bro, the FSU. It's just a matter of
time.

That's what states do. Try to make order out of
chaos and in so doing create more chaos.

If they don't do anything, why would you call them
nation states?

Excellent article.

A speed bump on the road to thievery

Quoting from the decision (Schulz v. IRS, Case
No. 04-0196-cv),

"...absent an effort to seek enforcement through
a federal court, IRS summonses apply no force to
taxpayers, and no consequence whatever can befall
a taxpayer who refuses, ignores, or otherwise
does not comply with an IRS summons until that
summons is backed by a federal court order…[a
taxpayer] cannot be held in contempt, arrested,
detained, or otherwise punished for refusing to
comply with the original IRS summons, no matter
the taxpayer's reasons, or lack of reasons for so
refusing."
...
The court went on to say that the federal courts
are there to protect taxpayers from an
"overreaching" IRS, and that the IRS must go
through the federal courts before force can be
applied on anyone by the IRS to turn over
personal and private property to the IRS.
...
The paragraphs above begin a press release that
will be sent to thousands of media outlets and
influential individuals across the nation over
the next several days.

Just a speed bump on the road to thievery.

Expect a new shell game from ur eeelected officials.

"Overreaching"?

How much theft is not "overreaching"?

How can you assure that that amount remains the
same once you've selected it, if you could?

How many judges do you think will give the IRS
a court order to avoid an audit?

Who has the power in that scenario?

Click here to read and scroll down.

The Cocaine Price Support Program

The title is a little strange, but the reasoning
is sound.

This article is more about another short list
(of a very long list) of unintended consequences
than it is about cocaine price supports.

Will unintended consequences bring about the end
of the nation state?

Probably.

Like a dog eating its own tail...

The US Department of Agriculture spent about 95
billion dollars in FY 2005. A plurality of this
money went to the various direct and indirect
price support programs that raise the cost of
food. The second-largest pile of billion-dollar
bills goes to programs that buy food for the
poor, who naturally can’t afford enough
nutritious food because of the price-support
programs. A few billion goes to various money-
losing deforestation projects on public lands
that damage the environment and raise the cost of
plywood.

Read.

From the Twilight Zone

While playing with the stone on a very flat
surface at a restaurant one day, Hund realized it
was very well balanced. He took it to the
California Space Institute at the University of
California to have tests done to determine just
how well balanced it was. "It turned out that the
balance is so fine, it exceeded the limit of
their measuring technology and these are the guys
who make gyrocompasses for NASA.

The stone is balanced to within one-hundred
thousandths of an inch from absolute perfection,"
explains Hund. Nobody knows what these stones
are. One NASA scientist told Hund that they do
not have the technology to create anything as
finely balanced as this. He said the only way
that either nature or human technology could
create something so finely balanced would be in
zero gravity.

So, there's nothing new under the sun?

3 billion years ago?

Obviously there's a whole lot missing from this
report, isn't there.

Read and look at the pictures.

Why should I pay for what I don't want?

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to
pay for what he does not want merely because you
think it would be good for him."
-- Robert Heinlein

Have you seen any of that lately? In your own life.

Think about it.

Butler does it again

In a previous post, I covered a soap opera. This
one below is more like high opera and as ironic.

Imagine a bunch of 'amateurs' bringing MSM (Main
Stream Media) to it's knees.

Now that's enough to give a chuckle to almost anyone,
even the victims.

I hear the fat lady's dulcet tones coming from her
dressing room back stage now...

If another edition of this book is forthcoming,
the authors would be well-advised to pay
attention to the whining coming from members of
the established media, who are doing their best
to convince us that Internet "blogging" is just
another fad that will soon go the way of the hula-
hoop and the hokey-pokey.
...
In the face of so much competing and conflicting
information, CNN hostess Judy Woodruff pondered,
would people not be better advised to rely on the
"mainstream media" for their news? She might just
as well have added: "you have been content to let
us do your thinking for you; why do you want to
undertake such tedious and unceasing work? Let us
continue to tell you what we think you should
know!" That CNN is one of the "mainstream"
institutions, the self-interested nature of her
question expresses the empty desperation of the
practitioners of an information system model that
is rapidly dying.
...
Websites and bloggers are learning the same
lessons that now beleaguer the established media:
in a rapidly decentralizing world, men and women
will develop their own demands for information
that serves their interests. With the Internet,
people need no longer be passive recipients of
what institutional authorities regard as the
"politically correct" content of their
minds!

Pay particular attention to what he says in the
last paragraph of the article in the link below.

I've said basically the same thing here before.

The whole article.

Wired wrong, we are

"Physicist: a device for turning coffee pots into
theorems."

Not only that, it keeps these pontificating
'devices' on the dole and out of the coffee pot
business.

Be thankful for the latter. It's probably cheaper
in the long run.

Something big in the wind?

At 0620 CST, before the opening at the NYSE , almost
all stock markets showing down, in the red.

Of course the numbers are changing. When you click
on the link below, they may all be showing green
but I ain't banking on that.

Don't we live in exciting times?

The numbers.

Earth: The Entertainment Channel for Aliens

The only reason I'm posting this is to give you
another chapter in the Greatest Soap Opera on
Earth.

It's a typical 'soap'. The characters are to be
laughed at while most of the rest of the world
takes it as high drama.

That's the most hilarious part of all.

Reading this, I almost sprayed a mouthful of beer
on my monitor.

But the Gannon affair, which has shocked much of
America's political establishment, is just the
latest scandal in the media establishment.
Newspapers including the New York Times and USA
Today have been hit by plagiarism and forgery
scandals. Other papers and television stations
have been consumed with a soul-searching inquest
into how they were misled about non-existent
Iraqi weapons programmes. Added to that is
growing evidence of a White House campaign to
bypass or control the media in its everyday
presentation of government policy , which
included paying one journalist hundreds of
thousands of dollars to promote its policies.

Last week a federal watchdog warned the Bush
administration that any video news releases must
state that the government is the source. Twice in
two years, government departments have been
accused of distributing fake news packages, using
actors as journalists.

Read.

On lasting revolutions

"The revolutions of thought which shape the basic
outlook of an age are not disseminated through
text-books- they spread like epidemics, through
contamination by invisible agents and innocent
germ carriers, by the most varied forms of
contact, or simply by breathing the common air."
-- Arthur Koestler

Dallas Settles With Framed in Drug Bust

To serve and protect?

Yea, right.

Another myth.

The city of Dallas won't care. They'll just raise
taxes thinking they'll never go out of business
with unlimited funding.

How do you feel about that, Dallasonians?

Another example of what the War on Drugs brings
with it...

DALLAS (AP) - The city will pay about $5.7
million to settle lawsuits brought by 16 people
who were jailed after paid police informants
planted bogus drugs on them, two attorneys said
Friday.

Read.

Mean sombitches, these hairless apes

The aftermath of the Holocaust and the events
leading up to World War II, the world was stunned
with the happenings in Nazi German and their
acquired surrounding territories that came out
during the Eichmann Trials. Eichmann, a high
ranking official of the Nazi Party, was on trial
for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The
questions is, "Could it be that Eichmann, and his
million accomplices in the Holocaust were just
following orders? Could we call them all
accomplices?"

Stanley Milgram answered the call to this
problem by performing a series of studies on the
Obedience to Authority.

Read the whole sad experiment.

100 Funniest jokes of all time

"You mean jomama has a sense of humor?"

I heard that.

Yea, I know you're not gonna believe that I have
a sense of humor but what most call humorous
nowadays leaves me wanting.

These jokes are different.

Two guys are walking down the street when a
mugger approaches them and demands their money.
They both grudgingly pull out their wallets and
begin taking out their cash. Just then one guy
turns to the other and hands him a bill. "Here’s
that $20 I owe you," he says.

Jokes.

Thanks to jethrobodine.

Unintended consequences

Unintended consequences are a bitch.™

When the Bush administration decided to invade
Iraq two years ago, it envisioned a quick
handover to handpicked allies in a secular
government that would be the antithesis of Iran's
theocracy -- potentially even a foil to Tehran's
regional ambitions.

But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S.
intervention, Iraqis instead went to the polls
and elected a government with a strong religious
base -- and very close ties to the Islamic
republic next door. It is the last thing the
administration expected from its costly Iraq
policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and
regional analysts say.

...

Conversely, the Iraqi secular democrats backed
most strongly by the Bush administration lost
big.

...

For now, the United States appears prepared to
accept the results -- in large part because it
has no choice.

You create a monster and you live with it. What does
'in large part' have to do with it? Don't you either
have a choice or not?

Jeez. Logic lessons, dipshits.

Oh, my dear heavens. Now, how does The Institutional
Mind recover from this mess?

Take a guess.

Psst. Don't tell anyone.

I hope you do know by now that there is no such thing
as The Institutional Mind.

Read.

A Terrorist by Any Other Name ...

Telling it like it is...

Newspapers and other publications keep what they
call "stylebooks" to let the folks who write for
them know what's acceptable to the publication
and what isn't. Many factors determine the rules
that are included in a stylebook, many, but not
all of them, economic.

What these stylebooks reveal, however, is much
more than just preferences and economics. What is
a "terrorist" for example - - -

Read the short of it.

On credulity

"The fact that a believer is happier than a
skeptic is no more to the point than the fact
that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and
dangerous quality." -- George Bernard Shaw

I'll drink to that.

More on The System

"Economic power is exercised by means of a
positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive,
a payment, a value; political power is exercised
by means of a negative, by the threat of
punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.
The businessman's tool is values; the
bureaucrat's tool is fear." -- Ayn Rand

In today's world, values and fear have been so
entwined that not one in a thousand can see which
is which, even if they knew the difference.

The System is All and one can only wonder which
act of the tragicomedy is playing.

So it goes, on the third planet from the Sun.

"The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle
endlessly over the nature of the thinking process
in man, but no matter how violently they differ
otherwise they all agree that it has little to do
with logic and is not much conditioned by overt
facts." -- H.L. Mencken

I can't argue with that and I'd bet you can't either.

FBI Unable to Launch New Computer Program

Hot dang.

They can't even run a proper police state.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI has squandered
$170 million on a failed computer system agents
can use to instantly share information, and seems
to know neither how long it will take nor how
much it will cost to build one, a Justice
Department audit showed on Thursday.

Read.

On power and enemies

"Power cannot exist without creating enemies that
did not prior exist." --Doug Buchanan

'A war of all against all' that Hobbes talked about.

Opps, but he was talking about what would happen
in anarchy.

How to resolve this contradiction?

Do you really need a pill to do this?

Coming soon?

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start
by destroying money, for money is men's
protection and the base of a moral existence.
Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a
counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all
objective standards and delivers men into the
arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of
wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth
that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at
those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a
check drawn by legal looters upon an account
which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the
victims. Watch for the day when it bounces
marked: 'Account Overdrawn'." --Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Where does this energy come from?

My bro brought this to my attention after he quickly
scanned the chapter excepted below. Then it hit him as
it hit me some time ago. (I've covered it once
before on my blog.)

Any kid who's played with 2 pole magnets knows this
works.

Now think further, kids...

Do we truly understand magnetism? We know that
two magnets will repel each other if both of
their north poles or south poles face each other,
but can we truly explain this? If we try to hold
these two magnets together against this repelling
force our muscles will tire as we continuously
expend energy, but the repelling force from
within the magnet does not. Is it reasonable that
an apparently endless force from within magnets
will continuously battle any external power
source in this manner, eventually exhausting all
external power sources without an equivalent
weakening itself? In fact, there is no
identifiable power source at all within these
magnets to support this endless force from
within. Do we even know what magnetic fields are,
or have we simply discovered how to create them
and learned to model their behavior with
equations? That is, are we confusing practical
know-how and abstract models with true knowledge
and understanding?

From The Final Theory.

Endless free energy?

Bank on it.

Now I don't wanna hear anyone say this is a violation
of the Law of Conservation of Energy (what energy?)
or The Impossible Perpetual Motion Machine. If you
feel like doing that read the excerpt above again
and think again.

Somebody's gonna do this...sooner or later.

The objections will be irrelevant.

Now see what appears to be a practical application.

Envy

"To be truly selfish one needs a degree of self-
esteem. The self-despisers are less intent on
their own increase than on the diminution of
others. Where self-esteem is unattainable, envy
takes the place of greed." -- Eric Hoffer

On Discovery

"Exhibit a new truth of any natural plausibility
before the great masses of men, and not one in
ten thousand will suspect its existence, and not
one in a hundred thousand will embrace it without
a ferocious resistance." --H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Crestomathy.

Fred talks about life in Mexico

I'll let Fred talk about it . He does it better
than I could.

Besides, I'm lazy.

I get mail saying, Fred, what’s with this expat
thing? Sounds interesting. But what do you do all
day? What is it like down there in Guadalahorror,
or whatever strange and doubtless hazardous oddly-
diseased third-world fleshpot you infest? Who do
you hang with? Can you breathe the air? Do they
have food in Mexico? Girls? Come on, spit it.

The article.

Boredom is rampant. Jokes reign

A Norfolk, Va., legislator says the droopy-
drawers bill may be his legacy.

The dumb shit doesn't have anymore to do except
make jokes for his legacy?

What does that tell you of the state of civilization
(so called)?

Think about it.

...
The Virginia House of Delegates has tentatively
approved a bill to crack down on people who wear
low-riding pants.

Bwahahaha.

Read the whole joke.

Another act in The Play

The CIA has been sent to the doghouse. Too many
CIA veterans criticized or contradicted Bush's
and Cheney's phony claims over Iraq and
terrorism. So Bush has imposed a new, yes-man
director on the agency, slashed its budgets,
purged its senior officers and downgraded CIA to
third-class status.

Sounds like the author of this article has an ex-
CIA guy with sour grapes in his mouth on the other
end of the line.

Rumsfeld's new, massively funded SSB will become
the Pentagon's CIA, complete with commando units,
spies, mercenary forces, intelligence gathering
and analysis, and a direct line to the White House.

The Pentagon has just effectively taken over the
spy business.

Doncha luv it when the powerful go to battle amongst
themselves?

The stage is reset, the actors changed, the play's
the same and the final act moves closer.

Then a couple of actors spot a few in the audience,
far up in the peanut gallery, with shit-eating grins
watching what everyone else finds a dead-serious
performance.

A very small piece of one act of the play.

From the indefatigable Harry Browne...

Few people are aware that before World War I, a
9-year-old girl could walk into a drug store and
buy heroin.

That's right – heroin. She didn't need a
doctor's prescription or a note from her parents.
She could buy it right off the shelf. Bayer and
other large drug companies sold heroin as a pain-
reliever and sedative in measured doses – just
the way aspirin is sold today. Cocaine, opium,
and marijuana were readily available as well. No
Drug Enforcement Agency, no undercover cops, no
"Parents – the Anti-Drug" commercials. Just
people going about their own business is whatever
way they chose.

Heavens! We can't have that last part now, can we.

Read.

More about power from another visionary

The power elite have grown arrogant. Their
system is declining toward eventual failure.
Their blunders are magnified as accomplishments
are diminished. Enemies, both internal and
external, are created daily. Conspiracy is as
unnecessary as it is impossible; only collusion
has potential. Do nothing. Let religious fanatics
do the dirty work.[1] The after life. Apathy
kills. In the end, as everything falls apart on
its own, the power elite will be stunned–the
possibility will never occurred [sic] to them–and
I will laugh at their inbred brows furrowed in a
vain attempt to understand that which they
cannot.

So will I.

Endless pages will be used to describe The Fall,
plenty of blah, blah, blah.

The short version.

Web's Biggest search engine?

The Web’s Biggest claims to search more websites
than any other search engine.
...
Web’s Biggest search results comes from their
own web crawler—with a twist. The company uses
the information gathered by their spider to
summarize what each website is about. Users then
search those website summaries. The result is a
superior way to find the top sites on a
particular topic, rather than just pages which
contain the search words.

I tested it a bit. One thing I did find was that
if you spell something wrong, unlike Google, it
won't give you any hints at the correct spelling.

No comment yet beyond that.

Read the complete report.

On conceit

"It is impossible to understand the history of
economic thought if one does not pay attention to
the fact that economics as such is a challenge to
the conceit of those in power."
-- Ludwig von Mises

Gone and forgotten

Last week I asked some close friends of mine
(statists by habit, but free men by constitution)
where I could go to satisfy only one criterion:
To be left alone. Where could I go and not be
assaulted by thugs who presumed that they owned
my property, or who lived as though my non-
aggressive behavior was subject to their
birdbrain constraints? That was my question, and
it presumed that I would be self-sufficient, and
therefore immune from income tax and the like.
What a tragedy that not one of their answers
included a location in the United States, that
fabled land of the free, home of the
brave.

Salty Pig nails it all down very consisely.

Via Bill St. Claire

The Death of Politics

(With respects to Karl Hess.)

New leaders are still entering the political
granfalloon expecting to 'be discovered' as they
have for centuries.

In today's world they will instead 'be found out'.

It's irrelevant which side of the present political
spectrum - or even a new one - they are spit
from.

Few of them will see that they are found out, as
they continue to feed on power for breakfast,
lunch and dinner, savoring its bouquet in their
wine glasses.

I'm just here to help them be found out.

The Big Illusion

Systemic reform is akin to bailing a ship steered
by the inept.

Things that go bump and things that don't.

"Conscious and unconscious experiences do not
belong to different compartments of the mind;
they form a continuous scale of gradations, of
degrees of awareness."
-- Arthur Koestler

So much for the conscious and the sub-conscious.
(Keep reading an' maybe you'll get it.)

I couldn't agree more with Art.

If it's sub-conscious how would we be able to
be conscious of it?

Thinks that go bump and things that don't.

Damn, it's easy to go off on the things that
don't. We do it almost constantly.

Ah, the value of the tautology.

Think about it.

See what I mean?

A very taxing life

Last I heard about 50% of your life is taken
from you without your consent in The Good Ol'
USA. You Europeans have it much worse but you
don't seem to mind.

Strange.

The path away from liberty is paved with bad
taxes, and we trip over them, frequently.

All taxes are "bad". All sorts of protection
rackets use 'em.

The liberty Americans had in 1900 has been
seriously eroded by a taking of our earnings that
continually increases. Back then, little of that
was done. Read the following list of current
takings - and shudder:

The list.

The World's Oldest Profession

You've been told what it is. Do you believe it?

They were wrong. Prostitution wasn't the oldest
profession.

Sales is older. Someone had to sell it first
and sex is the easiest thing to sell.

Nothing happens in this world until something is
sold.

Nothing.

You can sell yourself, or someone else can.

Was there some profession that came before the
sale that I might have missed?

Now don't tell me it was the goddamned legal
profession.

The Biggest Racket the World has Ever Seen

(This article revised)

So many thought Enron was a racket.
Not even in the same league...

The United States is the world's most privileged
nation for having the monopoly privilege of
printing the world's reserve currency at will and
at a cost of nothing but the paper and ink it is
printed on. Moreover, by doing so, Uncle Sam can
export abroad the inflation he generates by the
extra dollars he prints, of which there are
already at least three times as many floating
around the world as at Uncle Sam's home.
Additionally, his is also the only country whose
"foreign" debt is mostly denominated in his own
world-currency dollars that he can print at will;
while most foreigners' debt is also denominated
in the same dollar, but they have to buy it from
Uncle Sam with their own currency and real goods.
So he simply pays the Chinese and others in
essence with these dollars that already to begin
with have no real worth beyond their paper and
ink. So especially poor China gives away for
nothing at all to rich Uncle Sam hundreds of
billions of dollars' worth of real goods produced
at home and consumed by Uncle Sam. Then China
turns around and trades these same paper dollar
bills in for more of Uncle Sam's paper called
Treasury Certificate bonds, which are even more
worthless, except that they pay a percent of
interest. For as we already noted, they will
never be able to be cashed in and redeemed in
full or even in part, and anyway have the lost
much of their value to Uncle Sam already.

The article goes on to state that Uncle's debt
is $7.5 trillion. Depends on whose numbers you
look at. I doubt anyone really knows what it is.

His analysis of the GDP also shows it's a worthless
calculation.

The whole excellent analysis.

Taking the Big Dump

Like I said in one of my comments to the famed
Richard Rieben,(he's much more famed than I)
I blog primarily to get my thoughts together
rather than the thoughts stuffed in my small brain
by my fucking, near-useless-teachers-of-all-things-
tried-and-true.

Why didn't any of 'em try to teach me the essence
of creating something of lasting value?

How could they? I doubt they were capable of creating
anything themselves.

Guess I'll hafta teach my very own self how to do
it.

De-programming is a bitch.™

On amateurs and professionals

"The world's greatest thinkers have often been
amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of
fine and independent living, and for that a
professional chair offers no special opportunities."
-- Havelock Ellis

I don't doubt it.

Peeping Sam and The Homeland Security State

I posted this primarily so you could get an idea
how many alphabet soup institutions there are
peeking into everything you do...so they say.

A host of disturbing and mutually reinforcing
patterns have emerged in the resulting new
Homeland Security State - among them: a virtually
unopposed increase in the intrusion of military,
intelligence, and "security" agencies into the
civilian sector of US society; federal-government
abridgment of basic rights; denials of civil
liberties on flimsy or previously illegal
premises; warrantless sneak-and-peak searches;
the wholesale undermining of privacy safeguards
(including government access to library
circulation records, bank records, and records of
Internet activity); the greater empowerment of
secret intelligence courts (such as the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act court) that
threaten civil liberties; and heavy-handed
federal and local law-enforcement tactics
designed to chill, squelch, or silence dissent.
...
While the army, navy and NORTHCOM naturally
profess to having no nefarious intent in their
recent civil-side forays, history suggests
wariness on the subject. After all, the pre-
Homeland Security military already had a long
history of illegal activity and illegal domestic
spying (much of which came to light in the late
1960s and early 1970s) - and never suffered
social stigma, let alone effectual legal or
institutional consequences for its repeated
transgressions.

Ur gummint is afeared of you else why would they
want to watch everything you do or say?

I don't give a shit what my neighbors do as long
as they're minding their own business.

Why would anyone think differently?

Like the nosey ol' biddy that we sometimes find
next door to us, I guess they ain't got anything
better to do.

If you don't dig the Homeland Security State, do
your best to thwart it. Of course, such talk, let
alone action, probably won't be popular - but
since when has anything worthwhile, from working
for peace to fighting for civil rights, been
easy? If everyone was for freedom, there would be
no need to fight for it. The choice is yours.

Well said, but what's to fight for?

Just exercise your freedom.

Read.

Law barring spam allows a flood instead

Bwahahahah.

Yes, indeedy, and the law of unintended consequences
walks thru the door yet agin....

A year after a sweeping federal antispam law
went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on
the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie,
according to Microsoft, is one reason.

...

And the Postini report concluded that most
legislative measures--in the United States,
Europe and Australia--have had little impact on
the problem.

That ain't gonna stop the twits (Things not Worthy
of Intense Trepidation) from writing more laws.

If you can't deal with spam, you shouldn't be on
the internet, waiting for your lawgivers to Make
It all Nice for you.

Now go forth and check out mailinator.com

The article.

Could a dressing help in superbug fight?

A simple dressing would seem little use in the
fight against the superbug which is sweeping
across Britain's hospital wards and operating
theatres.

...

But a dressing, laced with silver, may well
prove the best weapon in the fight against MRSA
(methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus),
according to an Austrian expert.

I say not "may" prove to be, but "will" prove to
be.

I and my family have personally used colloidal
silver for a large number of infections, used
externally and internally, and found it more
effective than anything else in eliminating them.
A number of other people I know had similar
results. This dressing is just another type of
application of silver.

Check out the links in the right panel here.

Full report.

Beyond the hype

Normally I consider another election anywhere
a non-event. Not to be noticed. A waste of page
and mental space.

But these folks are greenhorns, thinking they're
getting what they're voting for.

At least a few of us in DemocrazyLand know better.

The only reason I bring it up here is coz virtually
all the major media mouthpieces for 'good gummint'
are touting the failed process as The New Deliverance.

In reality, just some more hapless saps added to
The Big Con...

So, although the [Iraqi]elections may be a meaningless
exercise of imperial maneuvering, the coup was
carried off with considerable skill.

The article.