The Florida debate threw up a fascinating situation when Ron Paul asked John McCain a question:

McCain stumbles over Ron Paul’s question. He didn’t answer it because he had no clue what the Ron was talking about and has little knowledge of the way the economy works. The entire time answering the question he just named people he would have in his administration if he were elected and avoided the question.

Transcript of Ron Paul’s Question and McCain’s answer.

“My question is for Senator McCain. This is an economic question that I want to ask. It has to do with the President’s working group on financial markets. I’d like to know what your opinion is of this and whether you would keep it in place, what their role would be. Or would you get rid of this group? And if you kept the group, would you make sure that we’d see some sunlight and know what they’re doing and how they are being involved with our markets?” – Ron Paul

“Well obviously we would like to see more sunshine but I as President, like every other President, rely primarily on my Secretary of Treasury, on my Council of Economic Advisors and Head of that and I would rely on circle that I have had developed over many years of ..people like Jack Kemp, Phil Gramm, Warren Ruddman, Pete Peterson and the Concord Group. I have a process of leadership, Ron, that is sort of an Inclusive one that I have developed a circle of acquintances and and people who are supporters and friends of mine whom I worked with for many many years.” – McCain

“You get rid of this group.” – Ron

“You remember, in 1982, Phil Gramm and Warren Ruddman and Graham and all those people got the first real tax cuts done… The Real first restraints in Taxes. I was there. You were there. I rely on those people to a much larger degree than any “formal” organization. Although the Secretary of Treasury is one the Key and important post that I would have.” – McCain

This demonstrates several things, one of them being the McCain supporter that I met at random, “birds of a feather flock together”.

First of all, lets get some information:

PAUL PONDERS ‘PLUNGE’ TEAM
By ZACHERY KOUWE

January 26, 2008 — Republican White House hopeful Ron Paul has made shining some light on the secretive President’s Working Group on Financial Markets – better known as the “Plunge Protection Team” – his pet cause.

The Texas congressman brought up the issue at Thursday night’s Republican debate in Florida. Paul asked candidate John McCain whether he would keep the Working Group and if the Arizona senator would open it up in order for the public to see how it works.

[…]

On Wednesday, Paul indicated that the Working Group may have had something to do with that day’s nearly 300-point stock market rally.

“Rep. Paul believes the [Working Group] wields a heck of a lot of influence and operates without public scrutiny and with no accountability,” a spokesman said. “Sen. McCain seemed to indicate in his answer that he didn’t know what the group was.”

[…]

NEW YORK POST

That is news to me, and I would imagine, the majority of people.

John McCain claims that he is fit to ‘run the economy’. Clearly this is not the case.

Ron Paul, even with all of his knowledge of the inner workings of the executive and his vast experience and deep understanding expounded in the many essays and books he has authored and co authored admits that he does not know how to run the economy.

As you can see, John McCain has a long laundry list of people who he would use to tell him what to do once he gets into office. The Washington Post had an unpleasant shock at the level of ignorance of this man:

At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he “doesn’t really understand economics” and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm – whom he had brought with him to the meeting – as the expert he turns to on the subject, The Huffington Post has learned.

The incident was confirmed by a source familiar with the proceedings of the meeting.

On the campaign trail, McCain has often made light of his lack of economic policy understanding. But his concern over such a shortcoming may be even greater then he has suggested.

This is not the first time McCain has turned to Gramm as a buffer for criticism of his economic views – or lack thereof. Gramm, who regards himself as a budget-balancing, anti-government spending Republican, was brought on board a sputtering McCain campaign last summer. Since then, McCain has staged a political recovery and is now a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

[…]

Even as far back as 2005, McCain was admitting that he lacked depth in economic policy. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Stephen Moore offered a probing and at times blunt assessment of McCain’s economic policies. “[He] readily departs from Reaganomics,” Moore wrote. “His philosophy is best described as a work in progress. He is refreshingly blunt when he tells me: “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

And to whom did McCain tell Moore he turns to for advise? “His foremost economic guru,” wrote the columnist, “is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration).”

McCain’s office did not return multiple requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal, as a company policy, does not comment on meetings that take place privately with their editorial board.

“People around the table were sort of taken back,” said the source . “They thought McCain would have better answers.”

[…]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/21/short-on-economic-underst_n_82529.html

Fascinating.

The truth of the matter is, the ‘factor of influencability’ of John McCain is the square of the number of people he relies upon to advise him what his policy should be in any particular area. That means that he is many times more vulnerable to being turned into an unwitting puppet, working at the behest of special interests.

Ron Paul on the other hand, is not only an intellectual, giving him ample protection from the pernicious influence of advisors, but more importantly he is constrained by The Constitution so no matter what people bring to him as solutions to a problem, if it is not within the remit of the executive, it will not be acted upon.

This debate shows perfectly why McCain is unfit for office. It demonstrates once again, that Ron Paul outclasses all the other candidates. Romney, the buyer of influence whose campaign finances are secret, Guliani, the giggling warmongering booster of ID cards, Huckabee, who is as unqualified as McCain with the extra added taint of Religion™ – none of these men compare in knowledge, substance or quality of character to Ron Paul.

This debate gave us another glimpse at the profound change that would be unleashed by a Paul Presidency. It is clear that this highly intelligent man is the greatest threat to the established order that has been seen for a very long time.

And to think, this is only the beginning!

ASK US WHY
After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams.

Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!

The stated goals of current U.S.drug policy — reducing crime, drug addiction, and juvenile drug use — have not been achieved, even after nearly four decades of a policy of “war on drugs”. This policy, fueled by over a trillion of our tax dollars has had little or no effect on the levels of drug addiction among our fellow citizens, but has instead resulted in a tremendous increase in crime and in the numbers of Americans in our prisons and jails. With 4.6% of the world’s population, America today has 22.5% of the worlds prisoners. But, after all that time, after all the destroyed lives and after all the wasted resources, prohibited drugs today are cheaper, stronger, and easier to get than they were thirty-five years ago at the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs”.

With this in mind, we current and former members of law enforcement have created a drug-policy reform movement — LEAP. We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction. as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition. LEAP believes that a system of regulation and control of production and distribution will be far more effective and ethical than one of prohibition. We do this in hopes that we in Law Enforcement can regain the public’s respect and trust, which have been greatly diminished by our involvement in imposing drug prohibition. Please consider joining us.

You don’t have to be a cop to join LEAP! Find out more about us by reading some of the articles in our Publications section or by watching and listening to some of our multimedia clips,. You can also read about the men and women who speak for LEAP, and see what we have on the calendar for the near future.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e80_1186720972

Our unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown still does not seem to have grasped the fundamentals of his NuLabour compulsory centralised biometric database the National Identity Register scheme according to this propaganda interview with The Observer newspaper this Sunday

Gordon Brown demonstrated how shockingly out of touch with the real world, by trying to justify the multi-billion pound compulsory national population surveillance and control infrastructure that is the National Identity Register, partly because of some small scale, unproven fingerprint biometric trials in some US and, allegedly, European shops, even though there have been no such successful trials in the UK, and no major UK retailer has decided that the idea is worth spending money on nationally.

The Yorkshire Ranter got in ahead of us, to point out some of the obvious flaws in Gordon Brown’s muddled answers to the rather soft and friendly questioning by The Observer regarding so called “ID Cards”.

Maybe when you go to a supermarket, as happens in some parts of the States and Europe, you are going to be safer, instead of carrying a credit card which can easily be stolen, to use your biometrics to shop.

This has to be some kind of record for biometric scienciness; the Government has historically always handwaved reality-based objections to ID cards away by claiming that we wouldn’t need them very often, whilst also floating insanely grandiose visions of biometric imperialism. Charles Clarke, we may recall, advertised them as “making it easier to rent videos”; as well as offering horrific new possibilities for total surveillance, this would have blasted the Government’s hazy costings down to nothing, demanding vast numbers of readers and numbers of transactions per second that even telecoms engineers would consider ambitious. To say nothing of insulting our intelligence.

This idea is both ridiculous, and, typically for Gordon Brown, a re-tread of a previously announced idea – see Gordon Brown – part 3 of the Chatham House speech on the 10th of October 2006, when he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying unsuccessfully to pretend that he had a grasp on “security” and foreign affairs.

See also this NO2ID discussion forum thread on this latest spin by Gordon Brown.

See also Ideal Government, for another dissection of Gordon Brown’s ideas on “ID Cards” as outlined in the Observer interview.

We have not forgotten the other recent, dishonest and misleading attempts by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and by his “no longer a safe pair of hands” sidekick Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, who tried to pretend that the ongoing missing HMRC data .privacy and security breach scandal , which has not gone away, for which they are personally responsibler, would somehow have been less serious, if the the wretched biometric National Identity Register had been in place and linked to the missing Child Benefit Award database.

These political lies were punctured elegantly by this open letter from leading academic experts, who described them as a “fairy-land” scenario.

[…]

From Spyblog

Is any of this really a surprise?

Gordon Brown is a piece of shapeless grey clay in motion; imaginationless, artless, without personality or a soul; a creature, a tool, a lifeless monster. He has not a single idea of his own; his only reason for being is to attain a place where people will bow to him and where he can rub shoulders with ‘the great and the good’. This is why he hates Prime Ministers Questions he is not the PM to be grilled and made to look bad; he is there to shmooze with Richard Branson and make speeches on the New World Order world stage.

All that needs to be done is to completely refuse to comply with any aspect of the ID card scheme. The market is taking care of Mr Brown from their angle.

A bastard like Brown cannot survive a simultaneous attack from every side.

These people are so terrified of the public that they have to go out with security for even the smallest thing.

And while we are at it, look at the sort of FILTH these beasts eat:

Honestly, people who don’t know enough not to eat SHIT like that have no business telling ANYONE ANYTHING about ANYTHING.

Look at all the great comments over at this Guardian Blogs post:

Ron Paul places second in Nevada. Now that’s news. Bad news for Rudy Giuliani, whose Florida-or-bust strategy likely didn’t account for America’s mayor losing to the likes of Paul in Iowa and Michigan as well. Good news for Mitt Romney, who’s watching John McCain’s image recede in the rear-view mirror. For a few hours anyway. Interesting news for the rest of us. Does America really want a return to the gold standard? Concealed weapons to become commonplace? We know you Ron Paul supporters are online. Tell us what you think of the man’s coup earlier today

Hmph! Lets take a look:

Dr. Paul is the only uncorrupted and uncorruptible candidate running in the primaries for both parties.He is the only candidate that speaks humbly in terms of spending the people’s money and blood. Every other candidate speaks arrogantly of the “government’s” money, blood and resources.You trivialize the significance of his experience, his sincere empathy for this country’s history and that which is uniquely “American”, as well as the logic and breadth of his proposals by seizing upon a couple aspects of a very broad ideological discussion that has been going on for — well at least a hundred years.

Let me get this right. You would expect American voters to view as freakish a candidate who proposed the cessation of spending a trillion dollars a year of money borrowed from ideological adversaries simply in order to sponsor a military presence in 170 countries via 300 bases? To reject the only candidate that has proposed logical and sanely compassionate solutions for funding transitional economic and political solutions for a country on the verge of bankruptcy? You would expect American voters to reject a candidate that views the sacred function of government is to honor its founding covenants? You would expect American voters to view with contempt the only candidate that treats them as thinking citizens, capable of digesting the good, bad and ugly—and not subscribing to pandering, platitude and pervasive mendacity?And here is the real perversion of modern media. Here is the clarion call to citizens around the world that the almighty intellectually elite members of the vaunted fourth or fifth estate of “democracy” have subscribed to their own form of corruption.

This is a statesman whose campaign exists solely and thoroughly only through the contributions of individual donors. Did you hear that? Individual donors. Not Hillary’s and Obama’s $125 million of corporate donors, not the personal fortunes of one like Romney, not the insider connections of the apologist McCain—but regular folks.And we’re nationwide. And maybe some day in the future, we’ll go worldwide. And then maybe again the good and decent people in Europe, Russia, China, Asia, the Middle East will be able to understand what it means to be free. To be truly free.

Because what we are inheriting now is, in the end, slavery.

…

I wonder how the writers of our constitution would vote nowdays between the guy who:

1. wants money backed by something, or money backed by borrowing from the chinese?
2. Spreading our resourses so thin that we are effectively bankrupt and selling our industries to foreigners, or someone who wants to cut spending down to sustainable operations?
3. The guy that supports eroding personal liberties that they struggled so hard to achieve, or the guy that wants to keep big brother out of your business?

It is no contest….

Ron Paul would win if the founding fathers were voting. Our country has drifted so far off course that most have lost sight of what is important. Studying history might give us an insight as to how the great nations of the past slipped into nothingness, but I suspect that it is really to late to stop our slide. We probably have to crash and burn before hopefully something better will crawl out of the ashes. Even then there will probably be some kind of NY Banker to extend him credit.

…

“Does America really want a return to the gold standard? Concealed weapons to become commonplace?” Second question first. The vast majority of US states already have liberal handgun carry permit laws that allow law-abiding citizens to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon. (Actually, in one or two states you don’t even need a permit.) As each of these laws was proposed, anti-gun propagandists predicted that an orgy of “wild-west” shootouts would result. They have been proven wrong. If anything, the implementation of liberal handgun carry legislation has been associated with slightly reduced levels of violent crime. The real question is whether people should be rendered defenseless against violent criminals who (we may be sure) will get guns, legally or not. Apparently that’s what you folks in Britain want. Maybe that’s why your levels of violent crime have gone up so much in recent years. First question. The idea of a gold- or commodity-backed standard is to control government spending. Can’t just print more gold. Also, the value of the money would be relatively stable, which helps people plan for the future. Sounds like a good idea to me.

I think its pretty clear, from these and the rest of the comments that people in the usa with at least one firing brain cell, understand that guns are not the issue, and that they actually supress crime levels.

Of all the issues Ron Paul stands for, this article, naturally, picks the most controversial. He may be right on the Gold standard and weapons, or not, but these are side issues. It would be silly to concentrate on those in a time when democracy is being replaced by a belligerent, mad plutocracy that plunges Western societies and the world into chaos and war.

that last one was a very insightful comment, and I agree with it; typical of the prissy, limp wristed fear-mongering, scared of loud noises, Health & Safety Fascist, nanny-statist, control freak, scumbag, lying mouth, traitor loo paper Guardian to focus on things that are just not central to the Ron Paul platform, but which immediately pander to the worst ‘instincts’ of the modern British; FEAR.

But I digress. I posted this because reading those comments helped to wipe away my despair at meeting two very stupid americans, who can be further explained by this, which comes from another comment on that page:

One of the best quotes I found out there which sums it up a bit is from gambling911.com: “Sadly, it has become clear that without a fair shake in the media, it is really difficult to make a realistic run for the White House. On a very unscientific survey of anecdotal evidence (something that seems to be just a reliable as the polling methods these day that all but inagurated Obama in New Hampshire) I have found that roughly 90% of the population has never heard Ron Paul’s message. However, of those that hear the whole message, and not the twisted distorted filtered garbage the main stream media puts out, 80% become supporters….Over and over I hear that people like Ron Paul, would love to have him as President, they believe in his views, but alas, they don’t think he can win so they are willing to vote for someone they don’t like who will give them things they don’t want and take away their rights and liberties. It boggles the mind.” Check out Ron for yourself. Tell your friends. The best place to point them if they show ANY interest at all is here: http://thecaseforronpaul.com

Boggles indeed.

Sadly, I will not be able to report to you wether or not those nincompoops did what they said they would do, and wether or not they changed their minds. That they are able to and do is all that counts in the end.

This afternoon, we went up to Notting Hill for a late lunch.

Sitting to the right of us was a softly spoken american couple. Many americans in London have loud voices where the letter ‘R’ is brutally over pronounced and the work ‘like’ is used liberally and inappropriately. These two were not of that type. The female was reading a Sunday Tabloid paper, and spontaneously started tutting loudly.

I bit.

“Thats why I don’t read newspapers in the UK”.

“Oh! I know, they are so TERRIBLE!”

Then it came to, via a circuitous route, to the 2008 election.

They did not know who Ron Paul Was.

It transpired that these two people are using ‘The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from, and How You Can Choose‘. as their method of deciding who to vote for.

They did not know that america is borrowing money from China to run the war in Iraq.

They did not know that the head of the GAO is, in an unprecedented move, sounding the alarm about america’s debt crisis.

I told them that it would be useful for their decision making process to look up Ron Paul on the internets.

The man sitting to our right said that he is supporting John McCain, because, “He (John McCain) is against the earmarks and pork spending of Washington.”

I pointed out that John McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. I also pointed out again that america doesn’t have the money to pay for this, and that america is borrowing money from China to run this ‘war’.

“Even if you agree with John McCain in principle, who is going to pay for this adventure?”, said I.

He said, “america needs to keep troops all over the world. The Soviet Union fell because of those troops, and they help spread democracy. I’ll pay for it.”, said the man.

And we petty much left it at that.

This is the level of insanity and pure ignorance that the american public is operating at, and these people were not the lowest common denominator, but very educated, well spoken types.

Then the female came out with, “what is the central part of Ron Paul’s platform?”.

“Obey the Constitution, small government, no nation building, don’t be the policeman of the world. You can see him talking about this all over the internet, and when you read up about him and his background you will see that he is not like any other candidate”, I replied.

“Does that mean he is for americans being able to own guns, because if he follows the constitution, that means he is for guns, and I am against guns”.

I’m not making any of this up.

This is a person who has just been told that america is about to go bankrupt, there is a dream candidate whose voting record is perfect, who wants to end the insane wars and hatred that is (rightfully) tilted against america, that america is borrowing from China to run its wars….and she is concerned about GUN OWNERSHIP.

That is like a rat being concerned about finding a warm place to sleep on the Titanic.

They both promised that they would ‘Google Ron Paul’, being intrigued as to why it was that they had not heard or read about a man who has just won second place in the Nevada caucus.

Once thing is for certain; american international adventurism is over. The question now is how is it going to end. The idiots who still believe in the lies and false reasoning of the type that John McCain spouts are going to get a nasty wake up call in the future if they do not wake up right now. In any case, the world is a much bigger place than the usa; there are more genius level people in China than there are people in the usa and there are more people learning English in China than the entire population of the US. The world will go ahead without america; she will become a dream, a thing of the past, with only a flag on the moon to remember her by…and that will be plucked out of the lunar soil by Chinese lunar colonists.

People like this charming couple have a choice. They either wake up and hunker down, or have america subsumed after a disastrous crash the likes of which they have not got the brains to imagine.

All of this in around ten minutes.

What a life!

Ahmed Quraishi: Do we have a logistical problem in handling or managing our strategic assets?

Air Commodore Khalid Banuri: It is laughable. We did make the bomb, didn’t we? The world thought we couldn’t do it. We, too, were always concerned about how to protect it. Since 1998, when South Asia went overtly nuclear … this is 2007, we have consistently augmented our systems, a point that many people forget or overlook.

Ahmed Quraishi: Who holds the authority to push the nuclear button in Pakistan?

Khalid Banuri: The short answer is very easy: Not an individual but the National Command Authority, comprised of all the senior decision makers of the country, [they] would look at all the issues including the deployment, if it ever comes to that.

AQ: Is it possible there could be a scientist on the inside, an extremist with links to terrorists, maybe Osama bin Laden, who could steal a Pakistani weapon …

KB: In a Tom Clancy fiction that could be a possibility. We are very sure of what our systems are.

AQ: What about the reports before 9/11 that mentioned the links between some of the scientists in our strategic programs, names, who met terrorists in Afghanistan?

KB: Those names, when you actually go into the details, had nothing to do with the classified side of our programs,[they might have been] some people from the system who perhaps were power plant engineers who had some sympathies and were doing some charity work.

The key thing here is that Pakistan investigated those situations and now we have a system that takes care of all aspects, even for our very respected scientists who retire. There is a system where they will be occupied in various ways and we will know what they are doing.

AQ: Let’s say there is a violent change of government in Islamabad. Someone hiding in the foothills of Islamabad breaks into one of your facilities, kills 5 or 6 guards, goes inside, picks up one of those nuclear weapons held in a very elaborate security parameter, takes it out, comes out of the building, puts it in the back of a truck or van and speeds away. How possible is this scenario?

KB: Absolutely not possible. But it is a fair question. We have several layers—a multitude of systems of security and technical solutions for security, some of which are non-intrusive and invisible. There are no exceptions for anyone from the outside going into a facility. There are various levels of access. Then there is the issue of insider threat. Not possible. We look at each individual who works within the system very closely. We look at them from various angles, something that the West knows at ‘persona reliability’, the human factor. We look into everything, background checks, medical records, police records, any history of possible impulsive behavior. And if there is anyone who doesn’t have a smooth graph of behavior, they are not put into any sensitive jobs. Even if there is someone in personal distress, for example because of a death in the family, there is a way for relieving them for a few days from sensitive responsibility.

AQ: So the cinematic perception of a Pakistani equivalent of a suitcase carried at all times by the President or the Prime Minister, containing the button for a nuclear missile or something, is not correct?

KB: The decision making about nuclear assets is very carefully thought out. It’s not a hair trigger situation. We all have seen many Cold War movies and many of these idea come from them.

AQ: Well said. Where are we keeping our nuclear bombs?

KB: The response to this question is in two words: Strategic Ambiguity. If anyone even claims he knows where our weapons are, they are wrong. And if they think they do, they are in for a rude shock. Even within the system, if someone doesn’t need to know about sensitive sites, they don’t have that information. So very few in Pakistan would know where they are. And I’m not going to tell you [smiling].

AQ: Really, I was kind of hoping for a hint. Okay, are the safeguards in the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel and India any better than the Pakistani nuclear safeguards?

KB: Even if I sound arrogant, ours are better. We have the advantage of hindsight. We have worked hard, we have trained hard, and we are very sure of what we have. We have learned from the best international practices. We don’t have aircrafts flying around with unauthorized nuclear missiles and we have a short nuclear history compared to some of the countries you mentioned.

AQ: Media reports have suggested that the Americans have helped Pakistan secure its nuclear assets, which implies that the Americans have access to Pakistani nukes?

KB: Ensuring nuclear security is our own interest. We made the bomb, we have the means to protect it, and we’re confident of that security. But we do not mind exposure to education and awareness, but in a completely non-intrusive way.

AQ: So you’re saying you have exchanged ideas with the Americans but not given them any access?

KB: Absolutely. That’s out of the question. That’s the red line that was defined even before we got into this exchange of ideas. We do have some rudimentary equipment and some training [from the U.S.]. And the kinds of figures you have seen in the media [about U.S. financial aid to secure Pakistani nuclear assets] are highly exaggerated.

AQ: The figure quoted was in the tens of millions …

KB: A $100 million was quoted in one report [New York Times, Nov. 2007]. Nowhere in that range.

AQ: Really?

KB: Nowhere.

AQ: Some Pakistanis are concerned and are asking what if the rudimentary equipment handed over to you contained a transmitter that could send out signals to a satellite or something exposing where our installations are?

KB: You have responded to the question yourself. Anyone concerned in Pakistan would have thought about this. The Pakistani nuclear establishment is always concerned about even the remotest of possibilities. We have this responsibility on behalf of this whole nation. It’s a sacred responsibility.

AQ: So let me put this to rest once and for all: you have not given access to the Americans as part of accepting their ‘help’?

KB: No access whatsoever. There are no foreigners who have any access to any Pakistani assets and they will never have. There are very few Pakistanis, even within our policy circle, who have all the information.

AQ: Does everyone concerned inside and outside the region understand there will be consequences if Pakistan’s strategic assets are attacked?

KB: Let me say it in plain words: Those who have hostile intent would know that any endeavor to attack Pakistan in any way will not be successful and it will be disastrous. Our weapons are meant for deterrence and not for [aggression]. But we have the capability to deal with any threat.

AQ: So we will respond if we are attacked?

KB: My message is: Don’t mess with us.

AQ: Late Mrs. Benazir Bhutto had publicly warned a few weeks before her tragic death that extremists could descend on the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and take control of the nearby nuclear installations at Kahuta. Is this true?

KB: I don’t want to get into the politics of this statement. But I’d like to make two points. One, Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe and secure. I say this with a lot of confidence. And, Two, I’d request all Pakistanis, wherever they are, that they should not mix politics with nuclear security.

[End of Interview]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19101.htm

We start the year in Britain with a challenge to our essential nature, for 2008 might turn out to be the year when we decide to rip up the Magna Carta.

Among the basic civil rights in this country, there has always been, at least in theory, an inclination towards liberal democracy, which includes a tolerance of an individual’s right to privacy.

We are born free and have the right to decide what freedom means, each for ourselves, and to have control over our outward existence, yet that will no longer be the case if we agree to identity cards.

Britain is already the most self-watching country in the world, with the largest network of security cameras; a new study suggests we are now every bit as poor at protecting privacy as Russia, China and America.

But surveillance cameras and lost data will prove minuscule problems next to ID cards, which will obliterate the fundamental right to walk around in society as an unknown.

Some of you may have taken that freedom so much for granted that you forget how basic and important it is, but in every country where ID cards have ever been introduced, they have changed the relation between the individual and the state in a way that has not proved beneficial to the individual. I am not just talking Nazi Germany, but everywhere.

It is also a spiritual matter: a person’s identity is for him or her to decide and to control, and if someone decides to invest the details of their person in a higher authority, then it should not be the Home Office.

The compulsory ID card scheme is a sickness born of too much suspicion and too little regard for the meaning of tolerance and privacy in modern life.

Hooking individuals up to a system of instantly accessible data is an obscenity – not only a system waiting to be abused, but a system already abusing.

Though we don’t pay much attention to moral philosophy in the mass media now – Bertrand Russell having long been exchanged for the Jeremy Kyle Show – it may be worth remembering that Britain has a tradition of excellence when it comes to distinguishing and upholding basic rights and laws in the face of excessive power.

The ID cards issue should be raising the most stimulating arguments about who we are and how we are – but no, it is not: we nose the grass like sheep and prepare to be herded once again.

It seems the only person speaking up with a broad sense of what this all means is Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has devoted much of his new year message to underlining the sheer horribleness of the scheme.

He has said he will go to jail rather than bow to this “expensive, invasive and unnecessary” affront to “our natural liberal tendencies”.

I have to say I cheered when I heard this, not only because I agree, but because it is entirely salutary, in these sheepish times, to see a British politician express his personal feelings so strongly.

Many people on the other side of the argument make what might be called a category mistake when they say: “If you’ve nothing to hide, why object to carrying a card?”

Making it compulsory to prove oneself, in advance, not to be a threat to society is an insult to one’s right not to be pre-judged or vetted.

Our system of justice is based on evidence, not on prior selection, and the onus on proving criminality is a matter for the justice system, where proof is of the essence.

Many regrettable things occur as a result of freedom – some teenage girls get pregnant, some businessmen steal from their shareholders, some soldiers torture their enemies, some priests exploit children – but these cases would not, in a liberal society, require us to end the private existence of all people just in case.

If the existence of terrorists, these few desperate extremists, makes it necessary for everybody in Britain to carry an ID card then it is a price too high.

It is more than a price, it is a defeat, and one that we will repent at our leisure. Challenges to security should, in fact, make us more protective of our basic freedoms; it should, indeed, make us warm to our rights.

In another age, it was thought sensible to try to understand the hatred in the eyes of our enemies, but now it seems we consider it wiser just to devalue the nature of our citizenship.

What’s more – it won’t work. Nick Clegg has pointed to the gigantic cost and fantastic hubris involved in this scheme, but recent gaffes with personal information have shown just how difficult it is to control and protect data.

A poll of doctors undertaken by doctors.net.uk has today shown that a majority of doctors believe that the National Programme for IT – seeking to contain all the country’s medical records – will not be secure.

In fact, it is causing great worry. Many medical professionals fear that detailed information about each of us will soon be whizzing haphazardly from one place to another, leaving patients at the mercy of the negligent, the nosy, the opportunistic and the exploitative.

“Only people with something to hide will fear the introduction of compulsory ID cards.”

That is what they say, and it sounds perfectly practical. If you think about it for a minute, though, it begins to sound less than practical and more like an affront to the reasonable (and traditional) notion that the state should mind its own business.

In a just society, what you have to hide is your business, until such times as your actions make it the business of others. Infringing people’s rights is not an ethical form of defence against imaginary insult.

You shouldn’t have to tell the government your eye colour if you don’t want to, never mind your maiden name, your height, your personal persuasions in this or that direction, all to be printed up on a laminated card under some compulsory picture, to say you’re one of us.

You weren’t born to be one of us, that is something you choose, and to take the choice out of it is wrong. It marks the end of privacy, the end of civic volition, the end of true citizenship.

[…]

Telegraph

Well, the hammer has finally struck.

Several months ago, I wrote a column in which I described the strategy the establishment would use to attack Ron Paul’s candidacy:

The first step is already in play. The establishment will start by simply ignoring him, by using its power in the mainstream media and their influence over campaign donors. If possible, they will find ways of excluding him from the debates.

This strategy is already failing. The internet and talk radio are outside the elite’s direct control and are being used effectively by Rep. Paul to “get the message out.” (And mark my words, sooner or later the oligarchy will come for the internet. This medium has been a royal pain in their derriere from day one.)

If this strategy fizzles, the establishment will move on to ridicule and fear mongering. Ron’s ideas will be grotesquely distorted in establishment media “hit pieces.” They’ll say he wants to permit heroin use in public schools, or that he wants old people to die in the streets without their social security checks, or that he wants to allow greedy industrialists to dump toxic waste into our drinking water.

The next arrow in the oligarchy’s quiver will be scandal – real or fabricated. Usually, this takes the form of pictures, billing records, etc. involving financial or sexual hi-jinks. For folks with the right motivation and abilities, it would be child’s play to implicate him in some sort of phony ethical, moral, or financial skullduggery (e.g., doctored pictures, sordid media accounts from “eyewitnesses,” etc.)

Since the first two tactics met with limited success, they predictably moved on to the third (scandal) in the form of a scurrilous article in The New Republic. In that screed, James Kirchick accused Rep. Paul of authoring a series of articles that insulted blacks, gays, and a myriad of other “groups.”

Ron responded quickly. In a Reason interview, he noted that he did not write the articles in question and did not edit them. To his credit, he did take moral responsibility for inadequately policing the content of a newsletter associated with his name.

What is particularly nauseating about this hit-piece is the host of glaring double standards it represents.

James Kirchick is a prototypical neocon and a supporter of Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy for president. Rudy has been, from the start, a staunch supporter of Bush’s “War on Terror,” including the invasion of Iraq.

That invasion was conceived long before 9/11 and has taken the lives of somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Iraqi civilians. Nearly four thousand American soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more are physically and/or emotionally crippled. Our nation’s reputation has been soiled, perhaps irrevocably.

As has been exhaustively documented, that war was launched in a fog of lies, propaganda, and fabricated intelligence.

So now, five years into the war, we are forced to endure an attack by these same neocons, who are accusing the one viable antiwar candidate of…what?

Even if Ron Paul wrote every word in every one of those articles, how does that compare to the death and destruction the neocons have rained down on Iraq? It takes unimaginable chutzpah, nearly pathological gall, to stand amid mounds of smoking corpses and accuse Rep. Paul of cultural insensitivity.

Has America become so politically egocentric, so utterly consumed with its own cultural fetishes, that we could tolerate watching those who perpetrated the Iraq atrocity (or who supported it) smear a decent man for inadequately supervising a newsletter?

If Ron Paul’s candidacy is now tainted for (allegedly) slandering people of color, what should be the political punishment for Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and others who supported mass death and dismemberment of a third world country?

Even though I anticipated this sort of thing, it is infuriating to watch it unfold before my eyes.

Are we to be spared nothing?

In a very fundamental way, there are really only two candidates running for president this year: Ron Paul, and all the others.

This is because there are really only two issues at stake.

The first issue is our out-of-control foreign policy. America is embroiled in shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We spend more on our military than nearly the rest of the world combined. We have troops stationed in over a hundred foreign countries. Manic interventionism has stretched our military to the breaking point, and has ruined our nation’s reputation.

The second issue is our impending economic implosion. Our government, which has shed the last vestiges of constitutional restraint, has made a myriad of promises that it cannot keep. Our outstanding obligations to fund social security, government health care programs, and everything else under the sun are rapidly bankrupting our nation. To maintain these Ponzi schemes, the Fed is debasing our currency and igniting an ugly bout of hyperinflation.

Our predicament is severe and profound. We must immediately begin to shed our overseas obligations and put our domestic house in order. Otherwise, we will find ourselves reenacting the collapse of the Soviet Union right here at home.

Ron Paul is the only candidate who is willing to address these issues. He is the only one who is willing to speak frankly with the American people about our predicament and the painful actions which must be taken to prevent a real catastrophe.

And rather than offering solutions, Obama, McCain, Clinton and Romney, (and the other political hacks running for president) are not even willing to talk honestly about the problems.

As I noted in the previous article, the reason for this is simple: The establishment benefits from the status quo and would be disempowered by Ron Paul’s proposed solutions.

Specifically, as I noted in that previous article, Ron Paul is running on three ideas:

1. The federal government must function within the strict guidelines of the Constitution.

2. America should deconstruct its empire, withdraw our troops from around the world and reestablish a foreign policy based on noninterventionism.

3. America should abolish the Federal Reserve Bank, eliminate fiat currency and return to hard money.

This is not a political agenda. This is not a party platform. It is a revolution. The entire ruling oligarchy would be swept away if these ideas were ever implemented. Every sentence, every word, every jot and tittle of this agenda is unacceptable, repellent and hateful to America’s ruling elite.

So let us all be forewarned. If Ron Paul’s candidacy should rise to serious contention, that New Republic hit piece will be mild compared to whatever comes next.

The rulers of the universe will not go quietly.

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe82.html

They might not go quietly, but they will go in the end, like the Roman Empire did, and hopefully in the manner that the Soviet Union ended…only much faster. After all, who has seventy years to wait before a totalitarian system collapses? The same will go for the European Union as the Soviet Union; people will spontaneously, Baudrillard Mass style, down tools and bring about the end through inertia; the inertia of The Mass.

Americans: They’re fucked up, they talk like fags and their shit’s retarded, to quote a prescient film.

On the other hand…

They are the only country that could produce a Ron Paul, and they are the only country where such a man had a actual chance to get elected to the highest office and turn the country around on a dime. That is what is literally needed in this case.

This is why everyone still has hope for America, that everyone still has hope that the greatest country of all cam somehow re-emerge from the utter darkness that has enveloped it.

Despair is useless, and in a situation where a candidate like Ron Paul exists and can win, it is insanely dangerous.

This year computer users will be more exposed to cybercriminals than ever before. It’s not just because online crime is so attractive to identity theft gangs but, ironically, because the computer security industry that is supposed to protect users has deteriorated – from one which shared everything about newly discovered weaknesses to what some within it now call a “protection racket”.

It may sound alarmist,

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/computersecurity

SNIP!

Yes, it IS alarmist, and yet another example of computer illiteracy at The Guardian.

The fact of the matter is that you can…anyone can… download and install Ubuntu and be free of this ‘problem’.

The fact of the matter is that writers like Sean Hargrave are a part of this ‘protection racket’ because they steadfastly refuse to acknowledge and spread the information that there are perfect alternatives to Winblows; i.e. Ubuntu, which Dell are now delivering on their machines pre-installed. By stopping people from dumping Windows, Hargrave is protecting the Windows monopoly and monoculture which is the source of all these problems, and many others.

There is no longer any excuse not to run Linux instead of Windows. It outperforms Windows in every way, and has everything you need that you find on Windows (office suite) but for FREE. Its user interface is now more sophisticated than Aero on Vista, and since you can buy it pre-installed, that problem is gone also.

The reason why The Guardian doesn’t like linux is because they are an old economy newspaper. They are against the free music, free publishing, and free software movements, and every time they have an article about anything to do with any of the aforementioned subjects, they always take the stand of ‘the man’.

The answer to this is not fear-mongering articles with pictures of devils menacing the lone Guardian believer in his C0₂ neutral hovel. The answer is ‘go open source’; then the secrecy that unscrupulous companies use to gain commercial advantage is erased and everyone benefits…unless you are in the pockets of the people who sell the crappy products that you are complaining about.

And then there is the ‘problem’ of having nothing to fearmonger about once Windows is dead. But then people like this always find something to try and scare everyone about.

I think we need a new category: ‘fear-mongering’.

The next UK Census will be in 2011. Help us stop it being run by an arms company with close links to the United States government.

What’s the problem?

The process of running the 2011 Census will be contracted out by the Office of National Statistics to a private company.

One of the two contractors in the final round of selection is the arms company Lockheed Martin, 80% of whose business is with the US Department of Defense and other Federal Government agencies.

This might concern you because:

• The Census rules mean that every household will be legally obliged to provide a wide range of personal information that will be handled by the chosen contractor.
• Lockheed Martin produces missiles and land mines which are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and which are illegal in many countries.
• They also focus on intelligence and surveillance work and boast of their ability to provide ‘integrated threat information’ that combines information from many different sources.
• New questions in the 2011 Census will include information about income and place of birth, as well as existing questions about languages spoken in the household and many other personal details.
• This information would be very useful to Lockheed Martin’s intelligence work, and fears that the data might not be safe could lead to many people not filling in their Census forms.

Census Alert is therefore campaigning to stop Lockheed Martin from being given the contract.

The campaign is supported by the Green Party, politicians from Plaid Cymru, Labour and the Scottish National Party, and others opposed to the arms trade and concerned about personal privacy.

We are not opposed to the Census itself. Aggregated, the information collected is important in allocating resources to local authorities and public services.

But personal privacy is important too, and we are concerned that Lockheed Martin’s involvement could undermine public confidence in the process and lead to inaccurate data being collected.

What can I do?
There is still time to stop this happening and we are not calling for a boycott of the Census at this stage.
Before the final decisions on the contract are made, we are asking you to do the following:

Sign our petition opposing arms company involvement in the Census at:
Contact your MP and ask them to raise the issue in Parliament.
Contact your local Councillor and ask them to highlight their concerns about the allocation of local authority resources.

More about taking action on this issue

The 2006 Canadian Census campaign
Lockheed Martin were also involved in the 2006 Census in Canada, and a campaign calling for a boycott was organised by Vive le Canada and supported by progressive MPs in Canada’s parliament.

The campaign did not succeed in getting them removed. But it did achieve its aim of ensuring only civil servants handled the actual data, and a new government task force was set up to monitor privacy during the Census.

[…]

http://censusalert.org.uk/

and so on…

Of course, we on BLOGDIAL do not think you should fill out a census form at all, for many reasons.

I know nothing about the politics of this organization, but their “I am not afraid” campaign is something I can certainly get behind. I think we should all send a letter like this to our elected officials, whatever country we’re in:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Refuse to be terrorized, and you deny the terrorists their most potent weapon — your fear.

‘Terrorists’ do not want you to live in fear; they want you to get out of their countries and leave them alone. If you refuse to do that, then they will make you suffer the images and horror stories that they have suffered (only literally a million times worse).

Politicians are stoking up the fear of terror for their own ends. This has nothing to do with the true nature of these attacks, who is behind them and why we must view them in the correct context and solve the root problem; foreign policy.

EDITED TO ADD (12/21): There’s also this video.

And Chicago opens a new front on the war on the unexpected, trying to scare everybody:

Each year, the Winter Holiday Season tends to spur larger crowds and increased traffic throughout the City. As it pertains to shopping districts, public transportation routes, and all other places of public assembly, the increased crowds become a matter of Homeland Security concern. During this holiday period, as a matter of public safety, we ask that all members of the general public heighten their awareness regarding any and all suspicious activity that may be an indicator of a threat to public safety. It is important to immediately report any or all of the below suspect activities.

• Physical Surveillance (note taking, binocular use, cameras, video, maps)
• Attempts to gain sensitive information regarding key facilities
• Attempts to penetrate or test physical security / response procedures
• Attempts to improperly acquire explosives, weapons, ammunition, dangerous chemicals, etc.
• Suspicious or improper attempts to acquire official vehicles, uniforms, badges or access devices
• Presence of individuals who do not appear to belong in workplaces, business establishments, or near key facilities
• Mapping out routes, playing out scenarios, monitoring key facilities, timing traffic lights
• Stockpiling suspicious materials or abandoning potential containers for explosives (e.g., vehicles, suitcases, etc)
• Suspicious reporting of lost or stolen identification

This may be real or it may be a hoax; I don’t know.

And this is probably my last post on the war on the unexpected. There are simply too many examples.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/blog

The answer to all of this is Ron Paul. His policies and thinking are in line with Mr. Schneier’s in that we have to look at the real problem, not episodes of ’24’ to find the solution to this activity.

I am doubtful wether begging for your rights to be restored is a good thing. These people do not listen to the electorate on any issue; it would be better for them to propose taking our liberty back, either through an election or otherwise.

Mass murderers are not the listening kind.

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order.

This is a bad start to a bad article. It seems that many american writers are not capable of serious logical thought; there is nothing wrong with sweeping generalizations (as long as they make you laugh) but these sorts of line are nothing more than propagandistic slander words.

And I beg to differ that they are ‘no threat to the established order’. Libertarians and Libertarian ideas are the biggest threat the established order have faced in one hundred years.

But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let’s pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person’s money to someone else?

The libertarian perspective is useful, and undervalued. Why does the government pay farmers not to grow food? Why are medications for fatal diseases sometimes held off the market in case they aren’t safe? (Compared to death?) Legislators and regulators should ask themselves far more often than they do whether some government activity or other expands freedom or contracts it.

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger. How would you like a law requiring that people with odd Social Security numbers have to give $1,000 to people with even Social Security numbers? To libertarians, much of what the government does is essentially like that.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want. We have to decide that together. Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want.

I would say that pollution is a modern example, and it is there because the market for energy is distorted. The free market might have been able to produce a pollution free economy by now if it had been left to do so, just as we would be on Mars had Nuclear engines been allowed to fully develop and fly.

There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference –often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it chooses to intervene is purely pragmatic.

No. The point of principle is the the source of how we consent to ourselves to be governed; we should never allow government to choose to intervene on the basis of what is pragmatic. Governments that do that wind up expelling all ‘foreigners’, treating foreigners like animals, building concentration camps and waging pre-emptive wars.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. Hey, let’s issue stamps, y’see, and use the revenues to form a corporation that sells stock to buy military equipment, then the government leases the equipment and the stockholders vote on whether to user it — and so on. The point becomes proving a point, not economic or government efficiency.

That is a straw man argument.

Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection). Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: you are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation — to make inconsistent decisions in different cases. And usually there is no one “right” answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers, involving tradeoffs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically — that is, through government.

This is so wrong I do not know where to start. Sorry, yes, I do!
America is alredy ligigation mad. There is no way that more litigation is possible in that country; there are not enough judges or courts. But that is to use one of Kinsleys poorly formed style of argument. Judges and lawyers and juries are inexpert in everything else that is going on today; just look at the absurd decisions to do with RAM; it is clear that anything technical is out of the depth of most judges; does that mean that we cannot use the courts to settle disputes and that we must turn to Big Brother to solve all our problems? Of course not, one of the chief reasons being that government is as incompetent and science illiterate as any judge and jury. There is no reason why when you have a jury of your peers, the correct decision cannot be arrived at. If we are talking about pollution, then the judge should be a scientist with the correct background. If we are talking about wether a company should store the temporary and fleeting files that are held in the RAM of a server running LigHTTPd then the judge should be someone who knows the difference between ‘Apache’ and ‘an Apache’. As you can see from those links, the Google knows the difference!

To say that, “the solution ought to be made democratically — that is, through government”, is to engage in a dastardly misuse of the English language. It is a form of abuse that has been going on for a long time in both the UK and the USA; the substitution of the meaning of the word ‘fair’ with the word ‘democracy’. What Kinsley is doing is substituting the meaning of one word for another in a modern (and rather nasty) shorthand that connects a system of government to a word meaning goodness.

If we take that sentence literally, it makes no sense. To say pollution problems should be solved democratically means that a vote should be taken on each separate issue; not that the issue should be turned over to government to arbitrate. These subtle linguistic tricks, if they are done deliberately are evil in writing. If they are not done deliberately, then Kinsley is a poor thinker and writer. Either way it is wrong.

Sometimes libertarians end up reinventing the wheel. My favorite example is an article I read years ago advocating privatization of highways. This is a classic libertarian fantasy: government auctions off the land, private enterprise pays for construction and maintenance, tolls cover the cost, competition with other routes keeps it all efficient. And what about, um, intersections? Well, markets would recognize that it is more efficient for one company to own both roads at major intersections, and when that happened the company would have an incentive to strike the right balance between customers on each highway. And stoplights? Ultimately, the author had worked his way up to a giant monopoly that would build, own, and maintain all the roads, and charge an annual fee to people who wanted to use them. None dare call it government.

This is another straw man. You can come up with an infinite number of different offensive and unworkable proposals, call them ‘Libertarian’ and then say, “see! they are all wacky!”. None of these arguments change the true nature of Libertarianism, and none of them will dent its popularity. This is the dull thinking of the inured, powered by stupid skeptic tricks.

Something similar goes on when the government forbids or requires people to do something for their own good. Why shouldn’t people, at least adult people, have the right to decide for themselves? Libertarian thinking has been useful, for example, in making it easier to get prescription drugs through the maze at the FDA. The Terry Shiavo case of 2005 was libertarianism’s greatest moment so far, as the entire nation rose up in defense of her right to die.

I thought Libertarianism’s greatest moment was the penning of The Constitution…I could be wrong of course…

The trouble here is that libertarians tend to analogize everything to a right to die. If you have the right to end your own life, you must have the right to do anything else you wish, short of that. If you’re allowed to shoot yourself through the head, why aren’t you allowed to drive without a seat belt?

Or ride a bicycle or motorcycle without a helmet.

The answer is that it’s a bad analogy. When you drive without a seat belt, you are not motivated by a desire to die, or even a desire to take a small risk of dying. Why should your motive matter? Because your death — especially your death in a car crash — does impose externalities on others. I would pay good money not to have to see your bloody carcass lying beside the highway, or endure the traffic jam, or pay the emergency room costs. A serious right like the right to die may be worth the cost, while a right to be careless or irresponsible is not.

To say that government should force people to wear seatbelts so that you are not inconvenienced by a traffic jam is patently absurd. It is also absurd to say that government compulsion is justified to spare you the sight of a bloody carcass. These are the words of a selfish and stupid man; a man who clearly doesn’t understand the value of liberty, a squeamish and milk blooded weakling who is terrified of life, who happily runs into the arms of government for everything and anything. This is not the sort of person who would have packed up a trunk and taken the perilous voyage to the new world. This is not the sort of man who built america – or anything else for that matter. People as soft as that last paragraph implies are the Eloi; the human cattle of this age.

They are ‘the problem’.

Perhaps if more americans were exposed to carnage, in other words, real life, they would have a better appreciation of what it means to send their military to other countries to inflict ‘regime change’ on innocent people. More on that below.

Llibertarians are quick to see hidden costs of ignoring libertarian principles and slow to see such costs in adhering to them. For example, Tucker Carlson reports in the Dec. 31 New Republic that Ron Paul wants to end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does. Paul himself doesn’t. But it bothers him that the government tells people they cannot do something they shouldn’t do. Libertarians would say that if most people want pasteurized milk, the market will supply it. Firms will emerge to certify that milk has been pasteurized. These firms will compete, keeping them honest.

And that is the difference between people who live by principle and people who do not. A I said above we should only consent to be governed by a government that operates on principle, not by what is pragmatic. This concept is alien to the sheeple like Kinsley. The very idea frightens them; and that is behind this image of people drinking untreated milk.

Fear of untreated milk is symbolic of the programmed fear that the sheeple live in. They are like the hive people in THX-1138, where there is nothing natural; where the only food is processed food. The immediate revulsion felt by most people when they think about drinking milk straight from the cow without being blessed and sanctified by ‘science’ is the same reaction that drives them to run to the government to solve every problem. It is the same perverted instinct that causes them to distrust the flow of life and the market. It is the same force that has created the “Health and Safety” mass hysteria that has overtaken the once sane and rational British.

So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren’t interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.

To say that Libertarianism is comparable to a Rube Goldberg contraption is a complete polar opposite mischaracterization, and Kinsley knows it. This is the sort of line that we are now used to hearing from certain quarters in america: “downsizing” for “firing of many employees”, “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture, “extraordinary rendition” for the process of kidnapping people from countries where torture is illegal to countries where it isn’t, “wet work” for “assassination”, “collateral damage” for “civilians killed”, “take out” for “destroy”, “red tape” for “bureaucracy”, “area denial munitions” meaning “landmines”, “physical persuasion”, “rough interrogation” and “tough questioning” for “torture”, “illiquid assets” worthless real estate and “detainment of enemy combatants” meaning “prisoners of war”, “regime change” meaning “CIA organized assassination / military coup” and of course, “Democracy” meaning “colonization by the United States”.

Libertarianism is about simplicity, not complexity. Libertarians, and Ron Paul explicitly, unambiguously and repeatedly have said this, and they say it in plain language of the sort that is alien to Kinsley and his ilk.

A similar flaw affects libertarian thinking about government-mandated redistribution. Extreme libertarians believe this is immoral or even unconstitutional, and even more moderate libertarians disapprove of government social welfare programs as an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers. But freedom is only one of the two core values our nation was built on. The other is equality. Defining equality, libertarians tend to take a narrow view, believing that it means only political equality with no financial aspects. Defining freedom, by contrast, they take a broad view, and see a violation in every nickel a citizen must spend.

Libertarians ask: By what justification does the government concern itself with inequality — financial or otherwise — in the first place? They are nearly alone in asking this question. Even conservatives claim a great concern for equality of opportunity, while opposing opportunity of result. And the reasons seem obvious: some degree of material equality as a necessary basis for political equality; the huge role of luck in getting each of us to our relative stations in life; etc.

There is no such thing as an ‘extreme libertarian’. The prefix ‘extreme’ is used as code in this example to tarnish Libertarians as ‘extremists’; and of course, that bundles them in with ‘extremist islam’ and by extension ‘islamic extremists’. Glen Beck said it plainly for joe sixpack.

Theft is immoral, just as murder is immoral. That it is done by the government doesn’t make it not so. Bush Blair and Brown are mass murderers in the same way that Charles Manson is a convicted murderer; none of those three men were physically doing the murdering, and neither did Charles Manson, yet all four are guilty. But I digress. You cannot use force to take something from someone; that is theft. The fact that it is voted upon is irrelevant. This video makes it vividly clear why this is so.

But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians. They force us to think it all through from scratch. Good for them.

[…]

Washington Post

Actually, Libertarianism is good for YOU, and is superior to your philosophy. Your philosophy works on the presumption that you are correct in everything, and that therefore, everyone should obey you, hand over their cash to you, and live by your standards. Libertarians begin by saying that they only know what is good for them, not for others, and so we can co-exist with you, whereas you cannot co-exist with us. Your philosophy makes violent conflict inevitable as it depends on you stealing from people. Our philosophy is one of peace, since we believe it is immoral to steal.

Once again, that instructional video is one of the best presentations I have seen explaining what Libertarianism actually means, and how it works practically. The ideas behind this are spreading like wildfire because they make sense to everyone with a brain-cell and who doesn’t have something to lose by them being widely adopted and practiced.

Finally!

By Dorothy Thompson
Published August 1941

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times–in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look round the room.

The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.

He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him…. Why not?

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why?… Why the one and not the other?

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class–no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value–success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him–or his wife–to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him–he despises, for instance, Mr. B–because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language–though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal–a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him–intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

[…]

That is half of a very insightful article.

The fact that all of it rings true today means that it should be possible to create a system of government that makes it impossible for ‘the bad guys’ to take over and ruin everything. Sadly, whatever shape that government may take, it requires an educated public to maintain it.

And america does not have that any longer:

It’s called ‘The American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.

by Lew Rockwell
It was always Murray Rothbard’s argument that while we might from time to time be short-term pessimists, we should always be long term optimists, for many reasons from economics and history.

And look at what Ron Paul has done. Building on an unmatched record in public life, and decades of serious study of Austrian economics, foreign policy, American history, and constitutional law and philosophy, he has led a movement that is rightly called a revolution.

That revolution has touched the hearts of young people–and not only young people–across the country and the world. The ideals of peace, free trade, non-intervention, the gold standard, free markets, private property, and civil liberties have never been spread so well and so widely.

The fact that up to 10% of the Republican Party base, people who have historically supported war, empire, managed trade, central banking, business regulation, and the police state–“red-state fascists,” as I have called them–is really something quite extraordinary. Among independents and some Democrats, we will do much better.

Libertarians have long exulted in Ed Clark’s almost-one percent. Ron has improved on Ed by 900%. The political fight is far from done, of course. Ron will campaign hard in Michigan, Nevada, South Carolinia, and all the Super Tuesday states. He will not give up. He will never give up.

From the standpoint of the right and good, Ron Paul and our ideas should have an easy victory. But when has that ever been true, in all of human history?

Ron and his revolutionaries face not only bad ideas from neoconservatism to socialism, but a vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex. There is, we could say, much work to do, and Ron Paul will do it.

Through the primaries, the convention, and beyond, Ron and his movement will stand for liberty against its enemies. He will get more and more votes, and more and more supporters, to add to the hundreds of thousands already onboard. His presence on the national scene will only grow, and so will libertarian ideals. Murray loved Ron Paul, thought the world of him as a candidate in 1988 and as an intellectual, and so do all real libertarians and pro-liberty conservatives.

And now, by the way, on to Michigan, where people are really feeling the pain of the Fed’s deepening recession, and will be especially ready to hear Ron’s message of sound noney and no business cycles under freedom.

“Wilkes and Liberty” was the cry of English and American classical liberals in the 18th century, naming a parliamentary champion of free speech, free press, and civil liberties against government tyranny. From now on, the cry of every libertarian will be, “Ron Paul and Liberty”! We have much work to do.Roll up your sleeves and join our champion!

[…]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018458.html

There are the problems of the vast apparatus of entrenched rip-off artists from the Fed and its big banks and investment houses, to the military-industrial complex, but there is also the problem of the army of sheeple, of Eloi, of nincompoops, of people who are physically incapable of thinking (low IQ), the hard headed, the habituated, the delusional. These people, all of them, HAVE THE VOTE.

People in the 18th century had common sense. Men who did not own property could not vote. What we have today is a population that is too stupid to vote. That anyone, anywhere in the world, other than his relatives, could vote for John McCain is (yet another) testament to the utter stupidity of the american public.

Am I advocating the disenfranchisement of vast swathes of the american public? Hmmm! What is the inevitable outcome of the current crop of imbeciles having the vote and unthinkingly electing anyone other than Ron Paul? It means the disenfranchisement of ALL americans forever, as america is dismantled and its broken carcass subsumed into a North American Union and then a world government like human flesh absorbed into The Blob. Wouldn’t it be better if we took away the vote from these cretins BEFORE america is lost forever? In the final analysis the phrase, ‘live free or die’ if taken literally means that a free man could not and can not tolerate what the mass of dunderheads are unleashing upon him and his family.

And there you have the thinking behind the people who are determined to absolutely control everyone everywhere. They came to this conclusion decades ago, and are making sure that no one can ever cast a vote that will take away their liberty, which in this case, is predicated upon their absolute control over the population. Either that, or its all happening at random and I’m not sure if that is a worse proposition to contemplate.

Back to John McCain…

This is a man who says that it “would be fine with me” if the americans stay in Iraq for 100 years. Out loud. In public. Quite apart from all of his other insane policies, this one phrase alone should scare the flesh off of any american. What he is advocating is literally, the complete extinction of America. This is the same public that now knows that the pretext for invading Iraq was a lie. This is the same public that now believes that ‘911 was an inside job‘. Wether or not you believe that 911 was an inside job or not, if the majority of people believe that it is true, how is it possible that anyone other than Ron Paul is getting the majority of votes in these primaries? How can he possibly be equal in numbers to Judy Ruliani, arch warmonger / fearmonger whose whole campaign centers around the very 911 that they all believe is at the very least, fishy?

It boggles the imagination.

A very clever man said just before he died:

[…]

We have had the two worst Prime Ministers in our history – Edward Heath (who dragooned us into the Common Market) and Tony Blair. The harm these two have done to Britain is incalculable and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable.

Short of assassination there is little people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their own way at all costs and hold public opinion in contempt.

[…]

Daily Mail

When The Daily Mail prints an article saying that the only solution left is assassination, you know that there has been a sea change.

Live free or die. That phrase doesn’t mean ‘live free or commit suicide’. It means that you are willing to do anything unto death in order to be free. Disenfranchising the population, assassination, secession, suddenly people are actually talking about these options; not through desire for carnage and chaos and upheaval, but because every decent person has been backed into a corner and there is no way out.

A decent man with sons would not let the bovine majority cast a vote condemning his boys to be drafted into an insane man’s insane war. He has a few choices, and we all know that these choices have all been exercised in the recent past:

• Assassination,
• Disenfranchisement,
• Secession,
• Mass murder,
• Escape,
• Run for office and change the world (work in progress!),

Have I left anything out?

Oh yes:

• Join the winning side in the new feudal system!

Think about it; you keep everything you own, you get to own whatever else you like, you become one of the bosses, and there are no repercussions because the long pigs are too stupid to understand what is going on right in front of their faces.

Now, less of the horrorshow.

There have been great movements on this planet that have achieved monumental change without catastrophic bloodletting. I have said it before over and over, the only thing that you need to do to defeat the warmongers is NOTHING. No marching, no confrontation, simply remove yourself, (O.U.T.), no more participation, no more contribution, no more cooperation, no more passive obedience, no more of anything or action that helps the system work, unless the country is completely restored, all unconstitutional laws struck down and America returns. This ‘Do Not’ idea, when propagated widely is so profoundly disruptive, so powerful and unstoppable, it can topple any infrastructure. Since it is an idea, you cannot kill it. No on is marching in the streets to be arrested. No one is pitting themselves against armored personnel of the war machine. There is nothing to attack, no one to peruse, no head to cut off and nothing to capture..except the minds of your neighbors.

I do not believe that violence is right or necessary. You can get everything you want without so much as a fist fight. Assassination, disenfranchisement and other forms of violence are what our enemies use; they are the solutions of the imagiiantionless, the weak minded, mean spirited…the bad guys.

Thanks to the way democracy works, there is going to be a permanent unrepresented majority who are fed up to the teeth. It is this huge population of people, numbering in the high tens of millions, who are the constituency of the free, the people who can tip the balance and force change. They are the artists, the writers, business men, scientists, the better educated, the smart; they are the ones who make everything run, and they are the ones who can bring it all to a halt should they choose to do so.

All without firing a shot, clenching a fist or appearing in public.

The dream scenario is that the system works and America changes course and the world is put off of high alert. But I have always said that, “dreams are for those who sleep” either way the power to end this is in our hands, at the ends of our fingertips.

So let’s end it.

Joseph Somsel
American Thinker
January 4, 2008

“There is nothing wrong with your thermostat. Do not attempt to adjust the temperature. We are controlling your power consumption. If we wish to make it hotter, we will turn off your air conditioner. If we wish to make it cooler, we will turn off your heater. For the next millennium, sit quietly and we will control your home temperature. We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your thermostat. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… SACRAMENTO!”*

Building codes and engineering standards are generally good things. Updating and improving codes and standards better protect us against earthquakes, for example, as we better understand the weak points and failure modes of existing construction techniques. Requirements that ensure proper handling of sanitary wastes can be largely credited with the increased life spans in industrialized countries through the reduction of communicable diseases.

In California, we have 236 pages of state-mandated standards for building energy efficiency, known as Title 24. This prescribes methods for calculating the sizes of your home windows, the capacities of your air conditioner and heater, the thickness of the insulation in your attic. A small cottage industry has sprung up to perform these engineering calculations that are required for any new commercial or residential construction or major change to existing structures. While I’ve never personally been involved in this branch of retail professional engineering, I’ve had colleagues who would moonlight doing Title 24 calcs. It is now just part of the mandated paperwork involved in the construction business these days in California.

A new revision to Title 24 is in the works for 2008[2] and it includes a number of improvements and enhancements that are largely good sense items and should be non-controversial. For example a new swimming pool will probably need larger diameter pipes between the pool, the filter and the pump than was former practice. This will reduce the fluid friction losses that your pump must overcome and hence reduce the pump’s consumption of electricity, albeit at a minor increase in first cost for the larger pipes and fittings. Another good idea is a requirement for lighter colored shingles, the “Cool Roof Initiative.” That is intended to reduce heat loss over cold winter nights by emission and heat gain on summer days by absorption. My neighbor and I both recently discovered that it is difficult to get roofers to NOT use dark colored shingles for some reason. Having a little state muscle behind us will help, especially for renters.

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a “programmable communicating thermostat” or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes’ central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a “non-removable ” FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During “price events” those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During “emergency events” the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

[…]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/who_will_control_your_thermost.html

???!!!

By STAN GOFF

For starters, I have become a single-issue voter. The two-front war in Iraq-Afghanistan continues to drag on; and I am thoroughly convinced that no viable Democratic nominee will stop these occupations.

The recent analysis by Allan Nairn shows that even the putative anti-war Edwards (who the press is smothering because of his anti-corporate declarations) has a backroom full of defense contractors. Clinton is a ruthless war-monger, period. Obama is employing on the sorriest, pro-Zioinist, neoliberal trash on the market, i.e., Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Clarke, and Dennis Ross, on his core advisory staff.

No one listens to me much, but in some fantasy world where they might, I would suggest that others follow suit with me here. In open primary states, cross over to vote in the Republican primaries for Ron Paul. In closed primary states, switch fast to Republican (like in the next few days).

Vote in the Republican primary; and vote for Ron Paul. Turnout will be dismally low for Republicans this year, because they have been demoralized by the Bush loons’ performances. Independents will vote Paul. The other Republicans are engaged in a fratricidal melee.

I already know what I am going to hear from all over the program-intoxicated, “I won’t endorse this-n-that position” liberal-left. Ron Paul is backward on abortion, passively racist, anti-immigrant, and on and on. Sorry, but I said I’d vote a dead cat that was anti-war before I’d vote a resurrected Eugene Debs if he showed up and supported the war. I meant that from my heart.

Cynthia McKinney is running Green, though she hasn’t got the nomination yet. Remember Cynthia McKinney? When she broke with the DLC diktat, her own party fronted another Black woman (Denise Majette) to run against her in an open primary, and Republicans crossed over massively to vote in the Democratic primary to unseat her in a foregone Democratic Congressional district.

Two can play that game. If Cynthia McKinney runs in 2008 for President, I’ll write her in if I have to just to burn a vote for Clinton or Obama. But meanwhile, Ron Paul is on our primary ballot (North Carolina), because he is running as a Republican (we have draconian ballot access conditions here for thrid-parties, thanks to — of course — Democrats).

Ron Paul is running for President. Just what are the capabilities of a President, and what are his likely courses of action… in the unlikely event he wins?

Well, he is the Commander-in-Chief, so he can bring the troops home immediately, as well as order the military-industrial complex to radically scale back. In case anyone on the left has missed the implications of this, this would be a profoundly anti-imperial development that would take the US boot off the necks of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

He is a libertarian who dislikes corporate subsidies, so he would veto the mega-billion dollar subisidies for Big Agra, Big Pharma, nuclear power company insurance policies, Weapons-R-Us, the ADM/Cargill Great Ethanol Scam,et al. He could veto the federal highway spending that is promoting sprawl. He has also stated that he opposed so-called free trade agreements.

Hello?

Don’t argue with libertarians when they are right. Many of them say that the leviathan-capitalists that dominate the world’s economy could not get as big as they are in an unfettered and unsubsidized market. Newsflash: that is actually true.

Ron Paul is a Gold Bug. For the uninitiated, that means he believes dollar-value should be pegged to a gold-standard. The implications of a return to the gold standard by the Fed are grim… for Wall Street and the military, both of which depend on massive foreign loans convered by runaway printing presses. Putting a stop to this is a Good Thing. What is the net effect?

Ron Paul may have the most outrageous personal account of race you might imagine; but what is the most horrific social catastrophe in the United States for Black and Brown folk? You guessed it: the criminal (in)justice system. The malignant growth of the American Gulag has been fueled — more than by any other cause — by the ever-more-punative criminalization of drug use and drug addiction, and the ability fo the criminal justice system to apply this criminalization with special force against African America and Hispano-Latinas. Here’s the thing. Paul opposes the criminalization of drugs. What is the net effect?

When we are at the point in history where we cannot change the electoral system, then we need to think tactically about what we can do right now. What will a Paul victory in the primaries do? Not whether a vote for Paul in the Republican primaries endorses his decentralizing philosophy on reproductive choice. President Paul will not be writing legislation. The Executive Branch decides how strongly to enforce legislation… like domestic spying fer-instance.

President Paul would close Guantanamo, halt CIA kidnappings, and gut the enforcement capacity for the PATRIOT Act.

Nominee Paul would give 2008 voters a choice between a real anti-war candidate and a phony Democratic equivocator. The intensity of anti-war sentiment in the country already forced ex-war-hawk Edwards to adopt an out-in-nine-months position to left flank his Democratic opponents.

Don’t ask yourself “what are the ideas?” If your toilet backs up, you can come up with a thousand ideas while shit-water cascades onto the floor. The question is not about ideas; it is, “What will be the net effect?”

Wanna throw a monkey wrench into a fixed electoral system? Here’s a chance.

Stan Goff is the author of “Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), “Full Spectrum Disorder” (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and “Sex & War” which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com

[…]

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff01042008.html

And there you have it. Snarfed from Lew Rockwell who describes the above as:

Another Left-Liberal Supports Ron Paul
And smacks down some of the left’s dumb arguments against him.

Points of order; Ron Paul’s ideas on ‘race’ are not outrageous in any way – and the fact that Stan Goff calls people ‘black’ demonstrates that he knows less about people than Ron Paul does. But I digress. The rest of this is almost BLOGDIAL in its absolutely pure common sense.

I especially like the bit about your loo overflowing with shit; of course, on BLOGDIAL we say, “if your loo is overflowing and the poop, pee water and used partially disintegrated loo roll is about to spill over the edge, you do not sit there and call for a white paper, go on a demonstration or write to your MP…you get the plunger and start MAKING IT GO DOWN!” … and you do this BEFORE the ‘shit-water’ even gets to the edge; as soon as you see it rising, you ACT QUICKLY.

Sadly, for america and the rest of the world, the loo has already overflowed and we are all walking in an inch of filthy water. Its not too late to call in the plumber though, and his name is RON PAUL.

An educated lurker writes:

>>From BBC reportage:
>
> For Mr Huckabee, the key word was “values”,
> with many Republican caucus-goers saying
> the former Baptist minister was someone
> “who shares my values”.
>
> His win was built on the support he got
> from evangelical voters. More
> than half of Republicans interviewed as
> they attended the caucuses said
> they were either born-again or evangelical
> Christians, the Associated
> Press news agency reported.

This report, and most brits have missed and are missing the big news of the campaign; Ron Paul.

Not everyone in the states is an ‘Evangelical’ and if it is the case that ‘more than half’ of the idiots who voted for Huckleberry are those types, then that caucus is skewed.

read this:

http://www.ronpaulnews.net

every day, and watch ALL of the videos on that site going back through the weeks. ITs worth the effort, because this man is causing a revolution in the usa, and its effects are spreading outside the usa also.

> This won’t be good for reasserting the
> separation of church and state,
> obviously.

Ron Paul advocates TOTAL separation of church and state.

> No more freedom of choice on abortion,

Ron Paul is for removing the federal jurisdiction on the abortion matter.

> but more people on
> death row.

Ron Paul is for abolishing capital punishment

> Less big government, but more diktats.

Ron Paul is for a constitutional sized federal government; ie, no diktats.

> And more ‘keeping up with the Muhammeds’

Ron Paul is for removing ALL of america’s 570,000 troops from ALL bases all over the world.

> when it comes to creating an indoctrinated
> population capable of supporting
> faith-based conflict (sick)

Ron Paul is for home schooling and the abolition of the Department of Education.

> in all
> aspects of trade, migration and power-grabbing.
> (Remember the nice lady pastor talking about
> creating an army to combat ‘The Muslims’ at the
> beginning of jesus camp? Heart-warming stuff)

Ron Paul is for open trade and cultural exchange on the personal level with all countries and all peoples without exception and without restriction.

> And the alternative?

Ron Paul!

> Blandness Inc., an everyman for the
> head-in-the-sand generation. A man as strong,
> stand-uppish and resilient
> as the celery sticks in my fridge no longer
> fit even for stock.

You mean Obama of course :)

> Gah!

Ditto.

America is undergoing a volcanic change, and now, even the Main Stream Media is beginning to get on board with the revolution, whereas before, they were entirely dismissive and even openly hostile to Ron Paul.

Why?

Because everyone of them knows that business as usual is off the table, and if America (with a capital ‘A’) is to re-emerge, then Ron Paul is the only candidate that they have who will do the job.

The media in Britain is completely clueless about what is happening over there. Just look at how The Times has been reporting it. Even British journalists in the USA are completely blind to it; read the amazingly blinkered writings of Justin Webb for a tea soaked taste.

Something BIG is happening in america; America is making a comeback, as I said it could, and its about time.

Mike Huckabee is a fraud. He is a two faced, opportunist, hypocritical, tax loving, preacher of false religion.

Of course, he is free to believe whatever he wants and he is free to preach it, but anyone who wants high office and who also wears his religion on his sleeve like a brat with a cold who keeps wiping his nose and showing it to you is simply unfit. The only thing the candidates should be talking about is The Constitution, nothing else; not morality, ‘values’ or any other bogus nonsense. Lets look at what this man is ‘for’:

Faith and Politics
My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them. For example, when it comes to the environment, I believe in being a good steward of the earth. I don’t separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.

That should make loud sirens sound in every americans head; the only thing that should GUIDE the presidents decisions is THE CONSTITUTION not your own religious beliefs. THat he explicitly does not separate his faith from his professional life(, in this case, his profession is politician and potential president of the united states, ) should signal his immediate disqualification as a candidate – this man is a religious leader who doesn’t understand the separation of church and state. People like Mike Huckabee are extremely dangerous, not because they are religious, but because they do not know what their job is meant to be and what its necessary constraints and limits are.

Marriage
I support and have always supported passage of a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman. As President, I will fight for passage of this amendment. My personal belief is that marriage is between one man and one woman, for life.

Marriage is not the business of the state. Period. This is a perfect example of religious fanaticism creeping into policy. It is also a perfect example of why this man cannot be president; his own views and not the constitution are the basis of his policy decisions. Furthermore, he has the effrontery to want to change the Constitution to reflect his own religious beliefs. The president’s job is to protect our liberty, which includes our right to express our religious beliefs, even if you believe marriage means polygamy. This man is dangerous because he believes he knows what the absolute truth is, and hence, what is good for everybody; rather like a Communist or a Fascist Dictator.

Energy Independence
The first thing I will do as President is send Congress my comprehensive plan for energy independence. We will achieve energy independence by the end of my second term.

Mike Hukcabee is a religious preacher, not a scientist. He doesn’t understand anything about the dynamics of energy supply (or judging by this statement, economics) and has no business trying to organize it for the entire usa. Only the market can correctly supply energy at the greatest efficiency and lowest cost. That is true for everything, and whenever the government gets involved in a market it creates a distortion and ruins everything. Mike Huckabee is dishonest because he is saying that he can solve something that he cannot. Government needs to get out of business and let people take care of themselves. It is presumptuous that he thinks he can solve this problem, and doubly presumptuous that he thinks he is going to get a second term as president.

National Security/Foreign Policy: Iraq
Iraq is a battle in our generational, ideological war on terror. General Petraeus and our troops are giving their all to provide a window of opportunity for the Iraq government to succeed, while the Democrats are running for the exit doors.

There is no ‘war on terror’. Huckabee saying this means that he is committed to war without end, thats what ‘generational’ means in this context. Mike Huckabee is a suicidal maniac who wants to keep america at war, in other peoples business, and he wants americans to continue to pay for it in blood and cash…only there is no more cash to do it; america has to BORROW money or fraudulently PRINT IT to run its insane wars and 300+ bases around the world. There is also no more blood available, meaning that there is going to have to be a draft to replenish the soldiers for his insane quasi religious war.

National Security/Foreign Policy: War On Terror
I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war. Radical Islamic fascists have declared war on our country and our way of life. They have sworn to annihilate each of us who believe in a free society, all in the name of a perversion of religion and an impersonal god. We go to great extremes to save lives, they go to great extremes to take them. This war is not a conventional war, and these terrorists are not a conventional enemy. I will fight the war on terror with the intensity and single-mindedness that it deserves.

We are NOT engaged in a world war. That is a lie. If Huckabee believes that, he is delusional and unfit for command. There is no such thing as a ‘Radical Islamic fascist’ and no one has ‘declared war on the american way of life’. No one has sworn to annihilate those who believe in a free society. These are the words of the fantasy prone, warmongers, the ignorant and imbeciles. This sort of talk is the talk of Neoconservatism and insanity, and Mike Huckabee is clearly insane for believing it. A promise to fight the war on terror is a promise to destroy america utterly, by eliminating the last vestiges of its Constitution, cementing soft fascism, and murdering millions more innocent people round the world as Bush, Cheyney, Blair and Brown just have.

Cuba Policy
As President, I will enforce and implement all provisions of U.S. law governing policy toward Cuba including the Libertad Act. I will continue President Bush’s policy of pursuing indictments against any Cuban officials, including Raul Castro, responsible for crimes against U.S. citizens.

He really IS insane!!!!

Crisis Management
You need to know that your President will calmly and confidently lift you up in a crisis. During the massive emergency of Hurricane Katrina, when local, state, and federal governments were in melt-down, I stepped forward and directed the rescue and relief of 75,000 victims. Our island of success in a sea of failure was one of the reasons Time magazine named me one of America’s five best governors.

No, we need to know that our president is there defending our LIBERTY and nothing more you idiot!

Vertical Politics
Vertical Day is here and I want you to be a part of it.

Straight up to heaven?

All of this from Huckabee’s website.

If you didn’t think so before, now it must be absolutely clear; Huckabee is a totally INSANE and unfit candidate!!!!!

Barak Obama is no better; all we need to know about him is that he would invade Pakistan to find OBL. Another business as usual big government warmongering nutcase. His website’s issue page is full of meaningless twaddle, and on his foreign policy page, the word ‘constiution’ only appears once, in reference to Iraq’s Constitution.

I think that says all we need to know about that very young man.

America continues to be in VERY BIG TROUBLE. They and thanks to them, the entire world has been in a nightmare for decades. Now, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Mike Huckabee and Barak Obama want not only to blow up the tunnel, but they want to douse the light as well.

What a life!