The Ethics

There are various level of indirection in
engineering; we can force materials into shapes
which can be used to apply superior force to
superior materials and so on down to the final
products, which defy hand-tooling techniques and
pricing.

Then along came Social Engineering.
The reasoning went,"We can 'change' people to
make them 'better'."
The reasoning was specious.
The reasoning hid a multiplicity of evils.
The reasoning contained no real reasoning.

These are the ethics of the situation.

See the next post on why whacking people over the
head will fail...

...miserably.

Read.

Where the gravy's going

I can't remember seeing something this succinctly
written...

"The fiat currencies and debt creation model the
industrialized world has implemented will
collapse unless money and credit is continuously
being expanded. It is basically a type of Ponzi
finance scheme where new buyers must take out
existing holders of assets at always-higher
prices."

Most, if not all the institutions involved will
fail at that too.

Full report.

Living long and well

I like beer, coffee, cigs, butter and eggs.

These are a large part of my daily diet.

If you can believe those studies then I'll live
to 130+.

I never understood how one could abuse an
inanimate object like drugs, alcohol or rocks,
for example. I've never heard any of 'em howl
about how their feelings are even hurt when I
talk nasty to 'em.

Anybody know to abuse one of these til it screams
in pain?

Using words that don't hold their meaning doesn't
bode well for problem solving, does it. Language
is vague enough as it is.

From the mind of another expat

They loathe the inescapable matrix of work-tax-
work-tax, bitch about brainless government, and
know we're driving headlong to perdition, but
won't change a single molecule of their familiar
routine. For goodness sake why not?

Take my word for it. You're going to want to read
the whole thing.

Full warning.

Via alisvoice

Governing unhinged

While I think most individual "citizens" don't
much care how much privacy (if any) they have,
the gummint is in a panic that someone on the
inside would want to broadcast heretofore secret
stuff like their tapping of SWIFT wire transfers
to catch the "bad guys".

Do you really think the "bad guys" or even the
"good guys" didn't already know this?

Washington (and other capitols) are now connected
to a firehose of leaks if not a waterfall. Have
you noticed?

People on the inside wanting to expose the beast?
I expect so and I'd wager none of it is organized.

Hilarious.

The circus continues.

French trying to challenge Google Earth

It may not be off to a great start, though.
Although a CNN article implies the site is
supposed to be up and running, well . . . at the
moment, all I'm getting is a "cannot find server"
error message. Try it yourself; perhaps they'll
have it operational by the time you read this.

I'm getting a "site saturated" message myself.

Typical taxpayer-funded project: lotta stolen
money doing nothing. I'm sure they'll throw
another couple 'o million at it and get it to
work someday.

Vulgator reported in April that "50cm or even
20cm details will be visible."

So now we'll all be able to watch French ant
colonies from space.

Oooha.

Read.

Another failed attempt at state capitalism laid off on European taxpayers

A year and a half later, things could not have
turned out more differently. Far from
establishing Airbus's dominance over its US rival
Boeing, orders for the A380 have stalled at just
over 150.

Against this came a bombshell that could wreck
the company and even threaten the French
government.

Europeans are all partners with their bummints
now.

Full report.

From the mind of Robert Anton Wilson

I love RAW. He keeps my nerves firing and my
chuckle motor working.

Giambatista Vico, "the father of sociology",
suggested in The New Science that Thunder
historically underlies the "god" idea; the Noisy
Thing roaring in the sky , seemingly in rage, had
to be appeased. Sometimes lightning came from
that roaring monster, and sometimes lightning
killed somebody. Hence Zeus bronnton [Zeus the
thunderer], Jupiter, another thunder god; Thor,
Donner, whose very name means thunder; etc....
and Yahweh..... and Allah...... Joyce uses this
god=thunder equation repeatedly in Finnegans Wake
[which drove me to read Vico...]

I have also observed that thunder on the sound-
track -- signalling oncoming tragedy or horror --
appears in films as diverse as those of Orson
Welles, James Whale, Howard Hawks, Wes Craven,
Monty Python etc etc.... Listen for it and note
how bloody often it pops up...... especially in
thrillers....

The monotheistic idea implies a cruel and grumpy
old electric donut surrounding Earth and ever
threatening it.

I think this explains the "structural
unconscious" or inarticulate neurosemantics of
Bozo, Ariel Sharon and Osama bin Laden equally.
They're all heaping up human sacrifices, as at
Stonehenge, to Him Who Thunders From On High.

Read.

Even more peeping

Shortly after publication of the Times article,
Treasury Secretary John Snow issued a statement
defending the government's use of the SWIFT
program and expressing regret its existence had
been made public.

There are no secrets anymore, boys and girls.

Full report.

Garden shop owner gets 30 years in prison for selling iodine

His business on South Broad Street was forfeited to the government.

Fuckin' thieves take whatever they want in the
world's largest Banana Republik.

But that's all right, ain't it. It wasn't your
business, was it. Why should you care?

Full report.

Via chumpfish

9/11 Vendetta

I'm not fond of videos as I think the future is
text-based, but you regular visitors in particular
are going to want to see this one. (Based on the
movie, V for Vendetta)

Highly recommended.

BYU Physics Prof Finds Thermate in WTC Physical Samples, Building Collapses an Inside Job

author: Jacob Hamblin

Based on chemical analysis of WTC structural
steel residue, a Brigham Young University physics
professor has identified the material as
Thermate. Thermate is the controlled demolition
explosive thermite plus sulfur. Sulfur cases[sic] the
thermite to burn hotter, cutting steel quickly
and leaving trails of yellow colored residue.

Full report.

Via whatreallyhappened

Update:

Video with Steven Jones explaining his findings.(long)

Thanks to L. Reichard White

New death by government statistics

R.J. Rummel's site has just been updated. The
government kill figure for the 20th century went
from 174 million to 262 million.

It's just possible that we've had our alien
invasion and they're all in gummint. Isn't that
what it looks like? Are these people from Planet
Earth?

Just to give perspective on this incredible
murder by government, if all these bodies were
laid head to toe, with the average height being
5', then they would circle the earth ten times.
Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people
than died in combat in all the foreign and
internal wars of the century.

The details.

Thanks to L. Reichard White

She's your Mommy now

...or your Daddy. Take your pick.

In a restaurant I saw a warning at the bottom of
the menu, which I can’t reproduce from memory. It
said something like, “The consumption of raw or
uncooked fish or eggs or whatever can do bad
things of some sort.” Why is this here, I
wondered? Is there anyone on the planet that
doesn’t know this? Was the implication that the
restaurant was likely to serve putrescent food,
requiring a warning to the public? Then why not
close it? Later I saw the same warning on the
menu of The Village bistro, a classy restaurant
in Rosslyn, Virginia, where I have eaten for
years. I concluded that it must be governmentally
mandated mommyism, presumably from brainless
affirmative-action office proles with little to
do.

The Sovietizing of America runs apace. It is not
imaginary. The Department of Homeland Security?
KGB stands for Committee for State Security.

Full rant.

The newest Banana Republik on the block

"The knock-and-announce rule is dead in the
United States," said David Moran, a Wayne State
University professor who represented Hudson.
"There are going to be a lot more doors knocked
down. There are going to be a lot more people
terrified and humiliated."

So why aren't your bags packed? There are a
number of more liveable banana republics.

Full report.

The Price of Madness

Depth analysis takes a commitment of moral and
intellectual energy, and most of us are more
comfortable inquiring into such superficial
matters as missing teenagers, spousal murders, or
sexual predators.
...
In the language of “chaos” theory, America – if
not all of Western civilization – is in a state
of turbulence of such intensity that efforts to
restore order by recourse to traditional systems
and policies will be to no avail. On the
contrary, it is our insistence upon established
practices that has led us to our plight; and only
a fundamental, creative change in our thinking
and behavior can extricate us from the
destructive consequences of our prior
assumptions. Just as the western segment of the
Roman empire was no longer able to sustain
itself, so, too, the western franchise of Western
civilization is finished, no more capable of
rehabilitation than would have been the case with
Jeffrey Dahmer. Like a caterpillar, the hope
remains that America may be able to metamorphose
into something more beautiful; to transcend its
limited capabilities.
...
In an age in which a collective mindset is
expected to drown out the voice of the
individual, philosophic principles have been
replaced by public opinion polls. I don’t know
how often my opinions on some matter have been
met by the response “most people don’t agree with
you.” In our Panglossian world, “principles” have
become little more than politically-correct
slogans; mantras to be splashed across a T-shirt
or the bumper of a car.
...
And, so, the upcoming elections will provide us
with what prior elections offered: new-and-
improved candidates with new-and-improved
messages. But, like the selling of detergents or
corn flakes, the new product will consist of
nothing more than a repackaging of the old,
replete with new commercials. What remains of the
voting public will be urged – by media parrots
and others – to participate in the collective
hallucination of voting. Those who refuse to join
in this electoral debauchery will be condemned
for “allowing terrorism to succeed,” or for
disrespecting “the sacrifices of the young men
and women who died on the battlefield” to protect
the “freedom” of Americans to participate in the
meaningless ritual of voting.

Can you think of anything to add?

I can't.

Full essay.

More peeping planned

A US Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
rule requiring VOIP providers to allow
wiretapping by May 2007 would either require a
massive re-engineering of the Internet or
introduce broad security risks, said authors of a
new study released by the Information Technology
Association of America (ITAA), an IT vendor trade
group.
...
If the FCC CALEA rules are enforced, all kinds of
Internet applications would be monitored, added
Cerf, also the chief Internet evangelist at
Google. "I don't see any way to constrain or
restrict the target of the intercept to simply
voice, because, in fact, every application would
have to be effectively treated in the same
fashion," he said. "There's no way to tell what
the bits mean in the packets that are flowing."

Does anyone really believe it's possible to
monitor billions of bits a second racing around
the planet to find that proverbial needle?

Read.

Civilized consensus

Self-interest vs. social planning

...they are led to condemn even the basic motive
power of human actions—I mean self-interest—since
it has brought about such a state of affairs. Let
us note that man is made in such a way that he
seeks pleasure and shuns pain. From this source,
I agree, come all the evils of society: war,
slavery, monopoly, privilege; but from this
source also come all the good things of life,
since the satisfaction of wants and the avoidance
of suffering are the motives of human action. The
question, then, is to determine whether this
motivating force which, though individual, is so
universal that it becomes a social phenomenon, is
not in itself a basic principle of progress.

In any case, do not the social planners realize
that this principle, inherent in man's very
nature, will follow them into their new orders,
and that, once there, it will wreak more serious
havoc than in our natural order, in which one
individual's excessive claims and self-interest
are at least held in bounds by the resistance of
all the others? These writers always assume two
inadmissible premises: that society, as they
conceive it, will be led by infallible men
completely immune to the motive of self-interest;
and that the masses will allow such men to lead
them.
...
Either the social planner must have at his
disposal force capable of crushing all
resistance, so that human beings become mere wax
between his fingers to be molded and fashioned to
his whim; or he must gain by persuasion consent
so complete, so exclusive, so blind even, that
the use of force is made unnecessary.

I defy anyone to show me a third means of
setting up and putting into operation a
phalanstery*14 or any other artificial social
order.

Now, if there are only two means, and we
demonstrate that they are both equally
impracticable, we have proved by that very fact
that the social planners are wasting their time
and trouble.

...and creating chaos in the process.

Read the great man, Bastiat, here.

Progress

"People just went wild," said Freddie Oakley,
Yolo County clerk recorder. "People were writing
in Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. We always see a
couple of those in every election, but we saw
thousands of them."

Read.

Bank on this

Don't think you're the only one who is worried
about where the United States is headed. Listen
to this guy:

"America ... [is going] down the tubes, and the
worst part is nobody knows it. They're all in
denial, patting themselves on the back, as the
Titanic heads for the iceberg full speed ahead."

No one can claim the person who said this is a
nut or a radical either. He's Andy Grove, the man
who built one of America's great New Economy
companies--Intel--as quoted by mainstream
journalist Fareed Zakaria in the current issue of
Newsweek. When people like Andy Grove are ready
to tell the whole world that the United States is
headed "down the tubes," it's time to act so you
can protect yourself and your family.

Highly recommended. No bullshit there.

Read carefully.

Then read it again along with the link within.

The illegal alien question

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Keystone cops

...the whole point of Operation Mazhar, launched
by Scotland Yard and MI5, was to demonize the
internet and portray it as a cesspool inhabited
by “al-Qaeda” terrorists clutching bomb
blueprints, thus an out of control medium in need
of regulation, or at least a large dose of
monitoring.

As usual, we are expected to ignore the
inconsistencies and irrationality of the details
and focus instead on scary Freddy Kruger Muslims,
running around in the woods, sporting camo,
plotting to abduct prime ministers and chop off
their heads in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fashion.

Read.

Gasoline prices in Germany

A German friend recently told me that gas costs
about $7 a gallon there of which 85% is taxes.

Let's do the math.

That means the bummint gets $5.95 of that.

Now we know where the oil profits go, and don't
forget bummints collect additional taxes on those
profits. Can anyone sort out where the bummint
"profits" go?

You say to the roads and bridges...but where else?

Wouldn't it be a better idea if the ones who
benefit from the use of gasoline, the oil
companies, built the roads?

Betcha it'd be a whole lot cheaper and nothing
more than abolishing the tax would have to be
done. The oil companies would do the rest.

Too simple, ain't it.

Think about it.

Somalia report

"While Boosaaso is a dramatic example, its
experience is more the rule than the exception
throughout Somalia. Somalis are thriving and
prospering without a central government. Exports
in 1998 were estimated to be five times greater
than they had been under the Republic."

Read.

How many rabbits are in this hat?

Our biggest delusion is that we are real and
have some significance to the overall macrocosmic
universe. Some of us have always been able to
manipulate the energies of our reality through
thought. Some of us have always stood on the
threshold of the door that joins our reality to
scores of others, and a few of us have been able
to shuffle back and forth through that doorway,
wandering among dimensions, exchanging greetings
with entities made of an energy different from
our own. Our biggest problem has been the
translation of these multiple realities into a
single, cohesive universe governed by inflexible
laws throughout. But there really are no
universal laws. Men like Newton, Crookes, and
Einstein merely studied one set of delusions and
interpreted the laws that hold up the walls of a
single delusion. They vaguely understood that our
world is a trick done with mirrors, and, like any
uninformed audience, since they couldn't see the
mirrors, they had to invent interpretations of
the effects they were witnessing. A rabbit cannot
spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not
first introduced into the hat somehow. They could
not grasp the ancient truth that even though the
hat always seems empty, it is always full. The
rabbit does not come from the sorcerer's sleeve
but only crosses from one delusion to another.

--John Keel, The Eighth Tower

Meanwhile, enjoy the delusion...according to John.

Via Orlin Grabbe

'round we go...

"Only the institution of government could take
an honest piece of paper and make it worth less
through the simple act of printing something on
it." --Ludwig von Mises

Just one current example.

But it can't happen where you live, can it?

Another look at force

In other words, he who fights against the weak -
and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak
indeed - and loses, loses. He who fights against
the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent
who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary
and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill
you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As
Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed
force, however rich, however powerful, however
advanced, however well motivated is immune to
this dilemma. The end result is always
disintegration and defeat...

...seen here.

Just another way of looking at The Bigger Picture
that I posted here earlier:

It is among the simplest and most proven social
equations in human history.

The use of force escalates to the self-defeat of
the institution that is using force, always.

Non-profit institutions may be born smart due to
some individual's good thinking, but they soon
begin to live and die stupid.

Even the ones who don't use force, if there be
such an animal.

The sheep

"The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the
impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and
lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice
the self and a willingness to dissolve it by
losing one's individual distinctness in a compact
collective whole." --Eric Hoffer

More on hamsterism

A majoritarian democratic government might as
well be a cargo cult for all the good that
rational thought does you: think this, blog that,
vote the other, and out pops a result. If you
like the result, do the same thing next year. If
you don’t, change a few things and try again. A
cargo cult doesn’t operate any better if you
think real hard about it.

Neither does a herd of hamsters running about in
their cages til they croak.

Whole rant.

Don' worry

Chaos works...see the video here.

More ethanol insanity

Ethanol's national average market price has made
gasoline prices seem stable by comparison,
catapulting from about $1.20 a gallon in early
2005, to $1.80 or so by September 2005, to $2.75
a gallon this Spring. Now, it is just about at
the price of regular gasoline—and that is after a
Federal subsidy of 51 cents on every gallon,
additional state subsidies and tax breaks, and
some local subsidies. As the price has soared, 35
new ethanol plants have leapt up. Fermentation
ethanol production has zoomed from 2.7 billion
gallons in 2003 to almost 4.5 billion gallons
annually now, and corn for ethanol now exceeds
corn for export, by volume. The phenomenon is an
ethanol investment bubble, adding at least
several more "tulips" to the global commodities-
markets fury of the past 18 months.

"Tulips" here refer to the Tulip Mania.

The only place the writers of the ethanol article
go wrong is their advocacy of nuclear power.

Remember Chernobyl?

Who would want to support a power source that only
the bummint would insure, remembering that
everything it touches turns to crap...at best?

Best to keep those matches out of the hands of
the earthmonkey.

Take a look at all the monkeys humpin' that
football.

Thanks to L. Reichard White

Angels and puppets

"The savior who wants to turn men into angels is
as much a hater of human nature as the
totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into
puppets." --Eric Hoffer

Reform

REFORM, v.
A thing that mostly satisfies reformers
opposed to reformation. --Ambrose Bierce in
The Devil's Dictionary