How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
I was listening to radio new this morning as I worked, and the voice said that Mitt Romney had topped Newt Gingrich in the Iowa caucus polls. What he forgot to say was that those two were in second and third place behind Ron Paul.
Continue reading “Ron Paul can’t get any love”
I started running at age forty, and after working myself up to a five-mile habit, began to notice knee pain. I kept at it, and ended up with sore knees. So I moved indoors, and ran on a treadmill, five miles still my benchmark. That ended in knee surgery and sound advice from a doctor: Stop doing that.
All the while my weight was increasing. It was almost as if there were no correlation between exercise and body fat, because I was surely in the upper percentiles in terms of physical exertion.
Continue reading “Getting off the treadmill”
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it was already impossible to say which was which.
(Orwell, Animal Farm)
President Obama is ready now to sign the Defense Authorization Bill, which gives the executive the power to snatch Americans off the street and send them away indefinitely (CIA secret prisons, torture chambers in Romania, Poland, Iraq anyone?). Apologists are running around saying that the threat is overstated, and anyway, it is only aimed at terrorists. A rational observer might note that “terrorists” barely exist and are not a credible threat to our society, which would imply that our leadership is blind and stupid, or deliberately misleading us. Since there are so many of them, it’s easy to say “all of the above,” but the hard core elite that sits behind “the executive” are neither stupid or blind.
So it is easy to predict the real purpose and use of the snatch provision of the DFA: to attack protesters, quell the emergent rebellion. Since the executive already has to power to willy-nilly designate a “terrorist” (generally speaking, “someone we don’t like,”), we have effectively given the president the power to designate a group as terrorist without oversight, and then disappear its members. OWS can easily be attacked in this manner, likely will be.
Continue reading “American foreign policy comes home to roost”
Since I am technically challenged, I cannot upload the video here, and so am linking to it. Richard Perle, perhaps one of our greatest war criminals, dissembles in detail when confronted by a real journalist asking real questions about intent, outcome, and the possibility of deceit.
Have fun. I know I did.
I wrote with some trepidation that President Obama, despite public posturing, would sign the Defense Authorization Bill that includes a clause allowing for indefinite detention of Americans without due process. I played a card there, betting that overall I have a good measure of the man. I assumed that his professed opposition was merely a tactic to prevent real opposition from crystallizing. Obama’s got our back, you see.
Well, that turns out to be correct. Obama not only is not opposed to that provision, but according to Senator Carl Levin, the provision was put in the bill at the insistence of the White House.
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I’ll link this later, but I’ve been visiting an English-language Russian web site, rt.com. Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on the web is going on there.
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This link is troubling. But things must be kept in perspective – the compounds used to house Japanese citizens after Pearl Harbor did not materialize out of thin air. People were rounded up by teams of agents who knew who they were after and where they lived. The iron fist under the velvet glove has been there at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first professional use of agitprop to send the nation to war was used. There is nothing new under the sun. The only thing different now with the use of “terrorism” as the new “Hun” or “communist” is that the government is openly changing the laws that shield us rather than quietly ignoring them. And that is nothing more than the product of a frightened and dumbed-down population and a non-existent fourth estate. As any psychologist would note, no one can abuse you without your permission.
The US is operating at 78.8% utilization of manufacturing capacity. That’s very low. We are told that we need to keep taxes low, reduce them even further, to stimulate investment.
How on earth can that do any good if we are not even utilizing current capacity?
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Well, it took all of five minutes to get the usual response below. My question is why the “science” of economics does not describe the world that really exists.
The answer: “Econ 101” (!)…
Let’s rephrase the question: Is there a science that studies human behavior than can take our essential irrationality and put it on a graph? Does all of the insanity of our individual behaviors, when added together, create a singularity of sanity?
No. Economics is bunk. It is disguised ideology. The ideology that neoclassical economics is hiding goes by many names. I like oligarchy, but fascism works as well.
The most significant piece of union-busting legislation passed in recent years is the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006. This is the law that is crushing the postal service. It requires them to pre-fund pensions 75 years out by 2016 – to the tune of $5-6 billion per year. No other firm has such stiff requirements. Add this to the other problems it faces – inability to adjust prices where it competes with UPS and FedEx, the subsidy of advertising and other junk mail by first class mail, and the natural slow-down it is facing as people more and more use the Internet to pay bills and correspond, and it’s looking bleak. But take out that pension requirement, and the USPS would be in much better shape, perhaps approaching solvency.
Continue reading “A future bailout in the making”
While remarkably successful at home in producing a dumbed-down population with a servile intellectual class, US propaganda has never been effective abroad. Consequently, it resorts to military attacks, the objective of which is to remove the virus of anti-American ideology from places by destroying the vessels that carry it. If US-style “capitalism,” which is nothing of the sort, could stand up to “socialism,” which is real, Vietnam, South and Central America, Iraq and Iran might have escaped the violence that was rained on them in past decades.
Translate Hillaryspeak. She’s saying that our message doesn’t play well. Her answer – throw more money at it.
Egypt went to the polls this week and elected a new legislative body. That body, of course, has no power. Nor will it ever – get real. A country whose population offers up a 78% unfavorable view of the United States (we did, after all, back their dictator and arm their military for the past thirty years) cannot possibly be allowed a true democratic government. Such a government would be anti-American. Not allowed. The militarily will continue to rule for the foreseeable future, and palliative remedies like meaningless elections will have to suffice.
However, Egyptian democracy in its current form is superior to the American version. After all, Egyptians are mostly aware that the election was for politicians who have no real power. Americans are mostly oblivious to that small detail.
