Ice and Organics on Mercury

Obama Is Going Dictator!

Obama and his banker controllers are taking the power of the purse away from congress. And this is only part of a larger occupation.

A private corporate takeover of America!

Constitutional Contradictions

The United States Constitution is not a perfect document for a system of government.  While it did seek to limit a central government’s control over the several States, which original were sovereign entities with compelling interests in unity, it has more than its fair share of contradictions within it.  These contradictions are never really discussed, as most people, much like Jesus or the Bible, assume that the Constitution says one thing when really it says something else entirely.  Here are just a few contradictions I’ve found (and I’m not even a lawyer or a constitutional scholar):

• Amendment 14 Section 4 and Amendment 1 – Basically, the 14th amendment has been held up as sacred, seeing as how it was one of the post-Secession War (or Civil War if you believe the propaganda) Amendments to be passed.  In the fourth section it reads, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”  So much for freedom of speech, as outlined in the first one.  Now technically, this is correct as this is an amendment, not a law, but still, pretty dick thing to put in an amendment.  In a more modern context, this means that it is illegal for us to question the government when they provide grants to small towns in order to militarize their police against potential insurrections from Ron Paulers.
• Amendment 17 and Amendment 10 – The 10th amendment explicitly made sure that the States had sovereignty, save any powers specified in the United States Constitution.  It explicitly states what was originally implied in the first draft of the Constitution.  The 17th Amendment changed how Senators were selected, originally by State legislatures, now they were selected by popular vote of the people.  While on its face it seems like the same thing, in practice it is not.  The States cannot act with any kind of sovereignty without some kind of representation in the Federal government, it’s that simple.  In practice, the will of the people and the will of the ruling class, at both local, state, and federal levels, has always been different.  As such, these days many States are burdened with mandates from the Federal government of which there is little recourse.  Yes, there is a Court system, but those justices are selected by the President and confirmed by a Senate now populated with some of the biggest political whores in the history of mankind.
• Amendment 18 and Amendment 21 – Amendment 18 outlawed alcohol.  Amendment 21 repealed it.  These are contradictions, but I think this is the only time where the contradiction was intentional.
• Amendment 11 and Article 6, Section 2 – While I am no expert, the 11th Amendment basically established that individual citizens could not use the Federal court systems to settle disagrees they had with States with which they were not residents of.  However, Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution is the Supremacy Clause, which states that the Constitution is the law of the land.  These two contradict each other because one states that the Federal government is supreme and the other does not.
• Finally, we have the 16th Amendment and the 13th Amendment.  Amendment 13 abolished slavery and involuntary servitude.  Amendment 16 allows direct taxation in the form of income taxes.  Income taxes are basically a way for the government to get first dibs on your money.  In other words, you are working involuntarily for the Federal government and have a percentage of it taken involuntarily (and any asshole who says otherwise should try not paying taxes and seeing how many guns are at their heads later).

The Constitution as written was, overall, fairly decent a document for dictating a system of government.  And while it does have many contradictions in print, the real problems with it don’t stem from the wording but the application of it by the people who are voted into political office.  All systems of government are perfect until you add human nature into the mix.

The Half Man Speaks..Then Apologizes

Seeing as how I am a Christian, with no apologies to anyone, I guess I have to talk about the recent celebrity uproar about Angus T. Jones’ comments about “Two and a Half Men” and his subsequent apology about it all.  You know, because, like, I’m a Christian and am therefore responsible for the collective actions of all Christians past, present, and future.

One of the largest problems I have with Christianity in the West is their unwillingness to call out evil in this world.  Now maybe you disagree with me and consider Christians to be stereotypically judgmental and narrow-minded, given that if you are reading this, you’ve likely watch more television and movies about Christians than actually sat down and talked with them about matters of faith and the supernatural.  But I firmly believe that one of the reasons for societal decadence is largely because Christians have not acted like Christians out of either fear or apathy.

That being said, I am glad that Angus T. Jones first stood up and trashed the show that had been a big part of his own life for his more formative years.  Whether you agree with him or not, it takes some courage to do this.  He related his own spiritual experiences and came to the conclusion that “Two and a Half Men” was not exactly the kind of entertainment he wanted other people to enjoy.  Perhaps he felt guilty for having participated in something that causes so many people to fall into sin.  Food sacrificed to idols and all that.  In any case, I know that child stars are often given a lesson in adult maturity at a much younger age than they are supposed to from many of their own accounts.  In some cases, they are repeatedly molested by Hollywood big shots, if we are to believe Corey Feldman’s account.  I doubt that Mr. Jones has endured all that though.

But then he had to go and issue an apology.  I am not going to speculate as to why too much, but it was disappointing.  To me, it smacks of someone trying to save their acting career as Hollywood is, by and large, the only game in town if you wish to make it big as an actor.  I’ll grant that there are multiple competing studios, but at the same time, they are all seem to share the same beliefs and produce the same quality of entertainment.  Mostly because that is what people want to see.

Really, I couldn’t care less what Mr. Jones thinks of the show he has acted in for so many years.  I’ve never really watch “Two and a Half Men”, save a few scenes here and there.  I have never found the show to be that funny because the jokes were predictable and the story was mostly bland.  If you enjoyed the show, I don’t care.

What I do care about, however, is the fact that Mr. Jones has trouble standing on principle.  I’ll cut him some slack since he’s only 19 and probably still confused about a lot of things in life, given the quality of education we’re all given and the lack of parental guidance that is socially acceptable these days.  Still, I hope he have more conviction in the future.

Revolutionary Archimedes

This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book, yet it sold at Christies for over $2m. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings - words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years.

The text is the only record of work by one of the world's greatest minds - the ancient Greek, Archimedes - a mathematical genius centuries ahead of his time. Hidden for a millennium in a middle eastern library, it has been written over, broken up, painted on, cut up and re-glued. But in the nick of time scientists have saved the precious, fragile document, and for the first time it is revealing just how revolutionary Archimedes' ideas were. If it had been available to scholars during the Renaissance, we might have reached the Moon over a hundred years ago.-http://youtu.be/giUk9leseBs

David Friedman on How to Privatize Everything

"Producing laws is not an easier problem than producing cars or food," says David Friedman, author, philosopher, and professor at Santa Clara University. "So if the government's incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?"-http://youtu.be/S4CcannofnY

The Commentator Comments

All I know is it's good people are being exposed to other ideas and alternatives.

At the end, Friedman doesn't believe the EU should become one because it will inhibit competition and muses the U.S. shouldn't be one as well arguing it may be better off dissolving - or at least this is what he's implying.

Secessionism is on the rise to be sure. What if people know nothing can be fixed in the current political framework and do work towards breaking North America apart?

In this way, we could see, for example, Western states and provinces forming one block, the American Mid-west and Prairies another, Quebec, Ontario and surrounding states like Minnesota, Michigan and Ohio. New England and the Maritimes, the South, Texas, and so on.

I remember when Ken Dryden once talked about how Canadians lived in such a big country that the lives of someone living in Vancouver and Montreal may as well have been foreigners.

Are nation-states too big too fail? READ MORE FROM T.C. - Anarcho-Capitalism And Libertarianism

This Land is Mine

It tells the story of the wars in the land called Israel/Palestine/Canaan/the Levant, since the cavemen until today, all so musical and poetic.

Reference and original, including an explanation about each character in this video: http://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/10/01/this-land-is-mine/

"This Land is Mine" is a video from Nina Paley, originally posted on Vimeo.
In the end of this video appear the text "Copying is an Act of Love, please copy and share. copyheart.org". So, here it is.

The Old King is Gone, Long Live the King

People need a leader.  I wish it were not true, that people would be able to think for themselves, but as the feminist movement, the progressive movement, the conservative movement, and the neoconservative movements have all proven, people want more government, not less.  They want to defer their leadership to someone else because it is the easiest way to absolve themselves of the responsibility for their actions.  Like Pilot washing his hands in front of mob while ordering the execution of Jesus, for the crime of free speech no less, everyone wants to blame the other guy and clear their own guilt in the matter.

For the Ron Paul movement, this is sadly no exception.  While Ron Paul himself stood for freedom, individualism, and a world where people are self-determinant and instead adhere to the non-aggression principle.  He knew his run in Congress would be a Hail Mary play in politics.  To be the one man who stood against the growing tide of Statism and tyranny.  It was very admirable and I doubt this generation or the next will see another man like him.  It is very rare for men who think like him to risk politics.  Rarer still that they come out of it largely untouched by its corrupting influence.

So it is no wonder that already many in the liberty movement are wondering who the next man in Congress will be their man.  Already Senator Rand Paul has proven to be wanting in many cases, although he done more than most other “Tea Party” candidates have done for the cause of liberty.  In any case, it is clear that there was only one Ron Paul, just like there was only one Ronald Reagan for the conservative movement and only one Bill Clinton for the, um, blowjob movement.

What if the real answer is simply that there should be no one to lead.  What if the real answer is for people to start living outside of the government and to practice the non-aggression principle at all times.  To ignore all the regulations, mandates, and laws that choke the average man and only serve to empower a select few while scraps are handed out to the other parasites who are glad to get their “Obamaphones”.

Perhaps we should focus inwardly, perfect the art of liberty, and pass on that knowledge to our descendants.  In Italy, for example, there is a large black market, which is widely considered to be socially acceptable as they rightly view all politicians and government agents as corrupt parasites.  Maybe here in the United States, we could build something like this here.

We won’t achieve liberty through political means.  If anything, Ron Paul has proven that in his decades of service within Congress.  The common mentality of those who desire power through political means is one of selfish ambition and greed, not altruism nor benevolence.  Hell, it wouldn’t surprise if Ron Paul had a few skeletons in his own Congressional closet.  I certainly didn’t agree with his own pork barrel legislative measures.

The main point is that Ron Paul was the king of the liberty movement and while he still has life and has plans to continue it, he is no longer at the level of power he once had.  His congressional district is gone (probably on purpose by Republican operatives).  His run in Congress is done.  And while he may still have influence, there is a limit as he will die eventually.

So put not your faith in kings of this world, but work for your own life.  The best thing you can do for liberty is to live it and defy the tyrannous yahoos who presume to be gods among men when they are really just children in adult clothing.

The individual is sovereign.  The individual is the king of himself.

Penny Protest: Paying Vehicle Property Tax in Pennies

Inspired from a couple years back when Ian Freeman of Free Talk Live and FreeKeene.com paid his Cheshire County property tax bill in $1 bills, I decided to pay a vehicle property tax extortion bill in pennies in Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, NC.-http://youtu.be/QBLgcj_v4To

Notice how the tax-eating government parasite doesn't want to be recorded.

Silent Conquest - The End of Freedom of Expression in the West

Silent Conquest

Gerald Celente - ABC Australia with Ian Henschke

A Superhero for Dixie

Save the Constitution! Kick Spielberg's Hero's ass, Captain Confederate! For a free South!

‘Captain Confederate’ The Southern Avenger!

Who Owns You?

Jordan Maxwell continues as a preeminent researcher and independent scholar in the field of occult / religious philosophy. His interest in these subjects began as far back as 1959. He served for three and a half years as the Religion Editor of Truth Seeker Magazine, America's oldest Freethought Journal (since 1873). His work exploring the hidden foundations of Western religions and secret societies creates enthusiastic responses from audiences around the world.-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWUw-Z_9tj0&feature=share&list=UUUYQ6Vut7gYcJEmPfbH-zDg

Prison for your mind

Corrupt Canola a Canadian Concoction?

T.C., I think you got some 'splaining to do!

Canola stands for “Canadian oil low acid.” It’s (sadly) a Canadian invention and subsidized by the government. The subsidies make it very cheap to use, so almost all processed or packaged foods contain canola oil. Be sure to read the ingredients. Here’s why you should:

Canola oil is developed from the rapeseed plant, which is part of the mustard family of plants. These oils have long been used for industrial purposes (in candles, lipsticks, soaps, inks, lubricants, and biofuels). It’s an industrial oil, not a food.

Rapeseed oil is the source behind mustard gas, and on its own it causes emphysema, respiratory distress, anemia, constipation, irritability, and blindness. But through the beauty of genetic modification, we now sell it as an edible oil.-GMOs and why you should never use Canola oil.

Will You Join Me For Tea?

Will you join me for tea and also for this new SE series Will You Join Me For Tea?

Good, I thought so.

Today I'm having just Lipton black tea. I really do need to get me a tea kettle again, but for now I just grab my mug and heat some water in the microwave. I get my teabag out, place it in the hot water (on my microwave I don't use the "beverage" setting, I just nuke it for two minutes and thirty seconds).

I don't really eat cookies anymore, or scones, crumpets or other such gluten laden junk. They are nice with tea, and I admit to being tempted by those Scottish butter cookies (damn, they're good) but I'm sticking to my plan and consuming candy with my tea instead, which I'm sure you'll agree is much healthier.

I picked up the habit of having candy, mostly in the form of some kind of chocolate, from my Afghan ex-girlfriend whose mother served me green tea on every visit. I looked forward to the tea (her mother only used loose leaf, not bags) and the plate of chocolate, including many varieties of dark chocolate, she served with it. It's a habit that has stuck with me long after the break-up when she married some dude from Australia, and I mean my old girlfriend, not her widowed mother.

Today's candy is Cup-o-Gold, and for you unfortunate East coasters, you won't likely find it in your stores. It's distributed by Adams & Brooks in the city, Los Angeles California, my name is Friday, I carry a badge, oh wait, sorry, been watching too many episodes of Dragnet on Netflix. Anyway, just the facts from now on, ma'am, okay? Here's what the wrapper of a Cup-o-Gold looks like:

It has a marshmallow type center (that white stuff you see -get your mind out of the gutter, sicko, it is marshmallow) and has almonds (though not whole ones, more like crushed almonds or something) and coconut (though not like the coconut that you would find in an Almond Joy bar, and as I mentioned, not the same form of almonds). No, the Cup-o-Gold (much larger than a peanut butter cup, by the way) is like a more sophisticated Almond Joy, but with marshmallow filling added. I had one with tea just now, and I had one last night, too. I was going to save this one for tonight, but afternoon tea time was calling me, so what could I do? Now, however, I am all out of Cup-o-Golds? whatever shall I do? Will you join me, perhaps, for tea later? And bring some candy with you for chrissakes!

The Quickest Way EVER Through An Internal Checkpoint

Mini Hamburger, Fries and Soda Kit

Apparently the "hamburger" tastes like hamburger, the "fries" taste like fries, the "cola" tastes like cola and the "ketchup" tastes like ketchup. However, it is anything but "fast" food. Crazy Japanese! I love it!

youtube.com/RRcherrypie official blog

Black Friday, Fiscal Cliff, Gold, Dollar

Debate: Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World?

The Police Are Sneakier Than You Can Imagine

Police and Army Delete Files & Force This Video Off YouTube

Police and Army Delete Files & Force This Video Off YouTube from Charles Veitch on Vimeo.

Gaza’s Youth Manifesto for Change!

Here in Gaza we are scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed, killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes we even cant think what we want because the occupation has occupied our brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to shed endless tears of frustration and rage!

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

We want three things. We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?

Read More: Gaza’s Youth Manifesto for Change!

Mental Circle Jerk with a Statist

Officer Jiggles tries to argue in favor of authoritarianism with "underwear boy" but Jiggles is so brainwashed he just ends up playing mental circle jerk.

www.formula4409.com

"We don't want war with you, Gaza" ~ An everyday Israeli

Black Friday - “I will stab one of you motherf**kers!”

Roderick Long on Race, Gender, Equality and Libertarianism

"We don't have the right to subordinate other people to our ends or treat them as objects for our uses," says Roderick Long, professor of philosophy at Auburn University and President of the Molinari Institute. "And that is a fundamental kind of equality that I think is at the heart of libertarianism."

Austro-Athenian Empire

Molinari Institute

Obama Stuffs His Pie Hole with Pie

The Obamas spent Thanksgiving with friends, family and staff and served lots of pie: Banana, pumpkin, apple, sweet potato, huckleberry, and cherry, according to the press pool report.-The Obamas’ Thanksgiving Feast

Now that's "healthy" eating, right, Michelle?

People Fight Like Animals - Black Friday Fighting Over Phones

The filthy retailers have ruined yet another holiday. Americans themselves are responsible, of course, for patronizing these stores on what should be a nice quiet four day weekend with family and friends. Now, what was once Thanksgiving (and this year we witnessed the stores pushing "Black Friday" into Thanksgiving Day itself) has turned into one giant shopping frenzy.

Exodus to Nowhere? Refugees 'treated like criminals' in Germany

"Racism" is a Bogus Concept

If you mean "racial hatred" or "race-based malice", then say that. Otherwise, the word "racism" or "racist" is just an attempt to link descriptive claims about genetically-based group average differences with racial hatred.-http://youtu.be/ttguCMBy1Jw

The Science of 'Morning Wood'

I asked my dad about this as a child. Why does it do that? he answered it was because I had to pee, which I usually did. So, he was partly right. Or he didn't want to go into anymore detail. The worst part is when you do have a full bladder and an erection at the same time. Urinating is near impossible. I normally, under those conditions, just aim it at the bathtub.

via Out Left

The Pilgrims and Property Rights

November 22

It happened on my grandmother's birthday. Seared into the memory of all who were alive and old enough to know what was going on.

Dave Powers Interview

The assassination and subsequent slaying of shooter Lee Harvey Oswald shocked the country. In the five decades since, the assassination continues to capture the imagination of authors, filmmakers and the public. It has sparked hundreds of conspiracy theories and studies into who — if not Oswald — was behind Kennedy’s slaying. Robert Blakey, an attorney who served in the Justice Department in the 1960s and worked on drafting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations that was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

On anniversary of JFK assassination, investigator looks back- Q&A with Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of House Select Committee on Assassinations

Have A Happy TSA Thanksgiving!

Is the Drug War (at least on pot) Over?

President Obama's Justice Department still considers marijuana to be an illegal substance and in the past Attorney General Eric Holder has moved to shut down legally-mandated medicinal clinics and to penalize those who use marijuana for health care. But in advance of this November's pro-pot votes, A.G. Holder issued none of the usual dire warnings about enforcement. Hmmm, I wonder why not?

Perhaps Washington has quietly decided to join with what a majority of Americans think -- that marijuana should be legalized.-America's War on Drugs Sputters to an End

Upside Down Turkey

Roasting the Turkey

Thanksgiving Without the GMO

Non-GMO Thanksgiving Infographic!

Gerald Celente Thanksgiving Cornucopia

The Big Biz Show

"The War Monger March!"

Wall St. Shuffle

Ron Paul-A Look Back

From The Fix blog at The Washington Post comes "Ron Paul’s most memorable moments"

Throughout his tenure, Paul has inspired a loyal legion of supporters that extends well beyond the boundaries of his district. Thrice a presidential candidate and never shy about his views, Paul’s libertarian-leaning brand of politics left its mark on Congress and the broader political landscape. We look back below at the most memorable moments in his career.

Ron Paul’s most memorable moments

Sanctions- More Deadly Than The Atomic Bomb?

Comparing the effects of sanctions vs nuclear bombs. Contrasting the fatalities of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to those of the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s. "Genocide masquerading as policy" as one congressman put it.-http://youtu.be/_EfuiYpr840

InceptionHouse

Madeleine Albright, that stinking, statist, warmongering bitch, and criminal Clinton's Secretary of State, said the price of a million children DEAD was "worth it". Mitt Romney is in love with war crimes too. But it's Ron Paul (who opposes sanctions) who gets the wrath of non-thinking "conservatives" and Obama "liberals". He even gets more hate directed at him by Bret Alan types! Amazing!

Unlike the shock and horror that accompanied the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, there were no images of the 500,000 Iraqi children whose lives were cut short by sanctions to jolt the world into reality. Not only has America taken pride in the mass killing of innocent children, but encouraged by silence and the surrender to its weapon of choice, it has turned diplomacy’s weapon of mass murder on another country: Iran. There has been little resistance to sanctions in the false belief that sanctions are a tool of diplomacy and preferable to war. Enforcement of this belief has been a major victory for American public diplomacy. The reality is otherwise. Sanctions kill indiscriminately — they are far deadlier than “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” — the two atomic bombs that took the lives of over 200,000 people. In the case of Iraq, the United Nations estimated 1,700,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of sanctions, 1.5 million more victims than the horrific atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Diplomacy’s finest hour.-Sanctions: Diplomacy’s Weapon of Mass Murder

Today as the United States continues to intensify its international economic sanctions programme against Iran, it is worth revisiting the catastrophic harm which a previous sanctions campaign against Saddam Hussein's Iraq had upon that country. While the sanctions failed to remove Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country by keeping the overwhelming majority of the population focused purely on subsistence, they took a calculatedly devastating toll on Iraqi civilians.-Sanctioning society: From Iraq to Iran

Who Put Corn in My Coke?!?

Why, the government did, of course, largely due to special interests:

Mountain Dew Throwback tastes better than “modern” Dew

What this video fails to mention is that the Corn industry is also heavily subsidized as well and since it is domestically produced, it was a more viable solution once corn syrup was developed.

With new research indicating that high fructose corn syrup causes obesity and that GMO corn causes cancer, it is a good idea to avoid corn syrup products as much as possible.  Now, I’m not saying that GMO corn does cause cancer, it may very well not, but you have to at least consider it because nobody really thought that smoking cigarettes caused cancer.  It wasn’t even scientifically proven until the mid-1990s, even though we pretty much had accepted that simple fact long beforehand.

Basically, this serves as an example of how government officials are not only corrupt, but demonstrate that they are too incompetent to rule over us as their policies cause more harm than good.  It also explains why total democracy is a bad idea all around because in practice, the majority only cares about a few key issues and lets the elected officials do what they want otherwise.  In democracy, the greatest ally of the Statist is the apathy of the voter.

Creeped Out by the Real Obama

Twitter users creeped out by Obama mural in Burma

Honest Living vs. Thievery (or, the People vs. the Government)

via The Commentator

Lew Rockwell Owns the Gang of Overlords

Lew Rockwell says his side won (the non-voters) as there were more of them (us-I include myself, last election where I bothered to vote was back in 2000) than the votes for Obama and Romney. Fewer and fewer people are voting in the "democracies" which can only be a good sign. If only a small percentage of the non-voters are indicating by their lack of participation in the "democratic process" that the whole thing is a sham and a scam, then we are making progress.

And for those of you foolish enough to have waited in line to vote this election, just subtract your vote from the total of any race and ask yourself, did you waste your time? Did your one vote change an outcome or make anyone notice or care that you took the trouble to vote? If anything, not voting gets you more attention and possibly results. Romney got fewer votes (at least 2 million fewer) than John McCain in 2008. What's being noticed now is that it may not have been "demographic change" this cycle that determined the outcome (though the nation is certainly becoming less white as a percentage of population and greater numbers of non-whites are unfortunately voting for more government) but the fact that potential Republican voters never showed up at the polls. These include conservative finally fed up with the party establishment selecting big government "moderates" like McCain and Romney and libertarians and Ron Paul supporters staying home for being ignored and left out of the campaign. The Ron Paul forces in particular were treated shabbily at the GOP convention in Tampa. The irony now is, if the Republican party hopes to avoid the fate of the Whigs, it has to become more libertarian and appeal to the very movement its establishment currently so thoroughly despises.

Rockwell touches on a lot more as well, including the secession movement currently gaining steam. Let's just say he rightly, and for all the right reasons, comes out in favor of secession.

Next News Network

Tax Resister, Jay Noone

Perpetual Motion Machines

The history of perpetual motion machines dates back to the Middle Ages. For millennia, it was not clear whether perpetual motion devices were possible or not, but the development of modern theories of thermodynamics has indicated that they are impossible. Despite this, many attempts have been made to construct such machines, continuing into modern times. Modern designers and proponents often use other terms, such as "over-unity", to describe their inventions.History of perpetual motion machines

This museum is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.

The Museum of Unworkable Devices

Perpetual Futility- A short history of the search for perpetual motion.

No Masters, No Bosses

In his contribution to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians seminar on left-libertarianism (“Query for Left-Libertarians,” November 11), Daniel Shapiro confessed to puzzlement over our prediction that there would be less bossism in a freed market. First of all, he argues, if workers were free to sell their shares in a cooperative, it’s unlikely that most workers would keep all their investments in the firm they worked for. They would likely sell some of their shares in the cooperative, to reduce the risk of having all their eggs in one basket. And retiring workers will cash out their shares. And aside from the creeping tendency toward absentee ownership and demutualization in cooperatives, Shapiro raises the further question of the firms that aren’t cooperative to begin with — even if they’re a smaller share of the economy than at present. What’s to stop either demutualized cooperatives or conventional business firms — both of which are presumably motivated primarily by maximizing shareholder value — from adopting significant levels of hierarchy and managerialism? Even if hierarchy carries certain inefficiency costs, economies of scale mean that bossism and hierarchy may be the least inefficient form of organization, given sufficient firm size for maximum efficiencies.
First of all, to start with Shapiro’s argument on the alienation of shares in a cooperative: As a matter of purely technical nitpicking, a worker cooperative can be set up with bylaws that prohibit demutualization, and simply require worker buyins as a condition of membership without creating marketable shares.
But second, Shapiro seems to be assuming without warrant that a very high proportion of the characteristics of our reality under state capitalism would be conserved in a freed market, aside from the narrowest consideration of the specific changes he wants to address. It reminds me of Ralph Kramden’s boast to Norton, in anticipating the outcome of one of his get-rich-quick schemes: “Norton, when I’m a rich man, I’ll have a telephone installed out here on the fire escape, so I can discuss my big business deals when I have to sleep out here in the summer.” Ralph was imagining his reality as it would be with the one specific change he was considering, in isolation from everything else and neglecting the likelihood of other associated changes or ripple effects. And that’s what Shapiro’s doing.
Shapiro seems to assume an economic model in which ownership is expressed through marketable shares, the economy tends to be organized around large market areas with mostly anonymous economic transactions occurring mainly through the cash nexus, etc.
And he explicitly assumes (point three) that current firm size and market structure represents economies of scale that are inherent in production technology.
All the secondary assumptions he makes about the kinds of specialized knowledge a boss must have about consumer demand and the marketplace, it seems, reflect the primary assumptions above about the continuity of the hypothetical economy with the conditions of the one we live in.
None of these assumptions is warranted, in my opinion.
First of all, economies of scale would probably be achieved at a fairly modest size. Given advances in small-scale manufacturing technology like desktop machine tools, permaculture, and the like, and given the economies of localized, lean, demand-pull distribution systems over the old supply-push mass production model, it seems likely a large share of present consumption needs would be met by garage factories serving small town or urban neighborhood-sized markets. In this case the typical production unit would not be something even as large and formal as the Northwestern plywood cooperatives, but rather small artisan shops.
In this case it seems a major share of production would take place in family-owned firms or small partnerships. And in a left-libertarian version of the free market, there’s no inherent reason even larger worker-owned firms would organized along the lines of what we consider the conventional shareholder model. They might well be incorporated under bylaws with inalienable residual claimancy (with prorated pension rights on retirement) vested in the current workforce. There’s no obvious reason a libertarian law code, based on the precedents of free juries of a vicinage, would not recognize this as the basis of ownership. This is especially true, given the larger emphasis given to occupancy as the basis of property under both mutualistic and radical Lockean variants of left-libertarianism.
Under these conditions, most of the skills associated with marketing under the present model of capitalism would probably be obsolete. In most cases, the artisan machinists in a small town or neighborhood factory would have the same first-hand knowledge of the markets they serve as artisans did before the rise of the factory system.
And the incentives to what we think of as conventional marketing rules would be far weaker under this model. Most of them currently stem from the nature of mass-production technology and the enormous capital outlays it requires for machinery. Because of these huge capital outlays, it’s necessary to maximize capacity utilization to minimize unit costs — and therefore to find ways of creating demand to guarantee the wheels keep turning. The history of 20th century mass-production capitalism was one of finding expedients to guarantee absorption of output — if necessary, by the state either destroying it or buying it up via the permanent war economy and the automobile-highway complex.
But in an economy where production machinery is cheap and general purpose, and can quickly switch between short batches of a variety of products in response to shifts in demand, these pressures do not exist. When capital outlays and overhead costs are low, the minimum revenue stream required to avoid going further in the hole is much smaller. And at the same time, the distinctions between “winners” and “losers,” between being “in business” and “out of business,” are also much lower.
Since the currently prevailing firm size and model of production and distribution is a suboptimal way of doing things, subsidized and protected by the state, it follows that bossism is — in the words of Peter Drucker — a way of doing as efficiently as possible something that ought not to be done at all. We start out with the structural assumptions of an economy in which wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small plutocratic class of investors through a long series of robberies (aka “primitive accumulation“), and the state’s economic policy was aimed at guaranteeing the profits of this investor-robber class and enabling it to extract maximum rents from the productive elements of society.
Given the fact of an economy organized into a relatively small number of large, hierarchical firms, authoritarianism may well be the most efficient means for overcoming the inefficiencies of a system that was authoritarian to start with. In like manner, Soviet economic reformers under Brezhnev sought the most efficient way of running an economy organized around industrial ministries and central planning by Gosplan.
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, detailed a long series of models for land tenure, in which landlords allowed peasants various shares of their total product in order to maximize production — and hence the rents they were able to extract from that production. But all these forms of tenure were limited by one overriding concern: the need of the landed classes to extract rents. Absent these considerations, the most efficient expedient would have been simply to vest full ownership of all land in the people working it and abolish manorial land titles and rents altogether. No doubt a slave cotton plantation in the Old South would have had drastically increased output had the land been given to the cultivators and had they been given full rights to their product. But from the perspective of a plantation owner, the only form of production less efficient than slavery is having to do an honest day’s work himself.
Corporate capitalism is organized around the imperatives, not of maximizing efficiency, but of maximizing the extraction of rents. When maximum extraction of rents requires artificial imposition of inefficiency, the capitalists’ state is ready and willing.
If we start from the assumption of a system organized around absentee investors and self-aggrandizing managers, the most efficient model for organizing production may be very inefficient indeed for extracting rent from those who produce value. The divorce of ownership and control from both effort and situational knowledge creates enormous knowledge and incentive problems, in which those doing the work and who know best how to do the job have no rational interest in maximizing their own output. Whatever human capital they contribute to increased productivity will simply be expropriated in the form of management salary increases, bonuses and stock options. Under these conditions, a hierarchy is necessary to extract effort from those whose rational interest lies in minimizing effort and hoarding private knowledge.
Shapiro makes the unwarranted assumption — essentially the legitimizing ideology of the Michael Jensen model of capitalism — that shareholder value is the chief motivator in conventional corporate capitalism. It’s more likely in my opinion that this is nothing but a legitimizing myth to justify the power of management — the real interest being served in managerial capitalism. Management under corporate capitalism justifies its power in the name of the shareholder, in the same way that management under Soviet state socialism justified its power in the name of the people or the working class. In both cases, the reality was a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a large mass of theoretically absentee-owned — but de facto owned by them — capital, and maximizing their own interests while claiming to serve some mythical outside constituency.
Shareholder capitalism is, pure and simple, a fairy tale. The “market for corporate control” was a reality for a relatively brief time after the introduction of junk bonds, but corporate management — with its insider control of the rules — quickly gamed corporate bylaws to avert the threat of hostile takeover. Since then corporate takeovers have in fact been friendly takeovers, acts of collusion between managements of the acquiring and acquired firms.
Corporate management’s maximization of quarterly earnings figures — what it calls “shareholder value” — is real. But it’s motivated entirely by corporate management’s desire to game its own bonuses, not by external pressure. And it actually involves the long-term destruction of shareholder value to achieve illusory short-term returns — much like eating seed corn, or burning every stick of furniture in your house in order to minimizing this month’s heating bill. And management uses the legitimizing myth of shareholder ownership as a way of protecting itself against genuine stakeholder ownership, which would maximize output for everyone.
There’s a wide body of literature (see especially the work of Sanford, Hart and Grossman) arguing that efficiency and output are maximized when ownership rights in the firm are vested in those who create its value. In an age of declining costs of means of production and increasingly skilled labor, an ever-growing share of the book value of the firm reflects not the investment of capital by absentee owners, but the human capital — tacit, job-related, distributed knowledge of the kind Hayek wrote about. But workers will not contribute this knowledge, or contribute to productivity, under the Cowboy-CEO model of capitalism, because they know that any contribution will be expropriated by management in the form of downsizings, speedups and bonuses. So a class of parasitic managerial bureaucrats operates corporations with the short-term mentality of an Ottoman tax farmer, in order to maximize its short-term interests, but justifies it in terms of “shareholder value.” Shareholder ownership — the myth that they work for the shareholders rather than being de facto residual claimants themselves — is the legitimizing ideology that corporate management uses as a defense against more efficient distribution of control rights among stakeholders within the firm.
Under a genuinely freed market in which the ownership of land and capital reflected rules of just acquisition and the cost of inefficiency were not subsidized, most bosses would find themselves faced with the imperative of doing a productive days’ work.
Steve Horwitz (“On the Edge of Utopianism,” Nov. 12),  after some kind words for the left-libertarian project and stating his areas of commonality with us, continues:

The problem I often see in left-libertarian writing is the sense that the world of freed markets would look dramatically different from what we have. For example, would large corporations like Walmart exist in a freed market? Left-libertarians are quick to argue no, pointing to the various ways in which the state explicitly and implicitly subsidizes them (e.g., eminent domain, tax breaks, an interstate highway system, and others). They are correct in pointing to those subsidies, and I certainly agree with them that the state should not be favoring particular firms or types of firms. However, to use that as evidence that the overall size of firms in a freed market would be smaller seems to be quite a leap. There are still substantial economies of scale in play here and even if firms had to bear the full costs of, say, finding a new location or transporting goods, I am skeptical that it would significantly dent those advantages. It often feels that desire to make common cause with leftist criticisms of large corporations, leads left-libertarians to say “oh yes, freed markets are the path to eliminating those guys.” Again, I am not so sure. The gains from operating at that scale, especially with consumer basics, are quite real, as are the benefits to consumers.

Even as I agree with them that we should end the subsidies, I wish left-libertarians would more often acknowledge that firms like Walmart and others have improved the lives of poor Americans in significant ways and lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty in some of the poorest parts of the world. Those accomplishments seem very much in tune with the left-libertarian project. To argue with such confidence that firms in a freed market would be unable to take advantage of these economies of scale might be cold comfort to the very folks who left-libertarians are rightly concerned about.

Horwitz states his overall difference in emphasis from left-libertarians thusly:

Eliminating every last grain of statism does not magically transform everything we might not like about really existing markets into a form that will match the goals of the traditional left. One grain of statism doesn’t mean that the really existing world won’t essentially look like it does when markets are freed. My own conviction is that the underlying market processes carry more weight than the distorting effects of the state along more margins than the left-libertarians believe. I might well be wrong, but I worry that the promise of more transformation than a left-libertarian world can deliver repeats the very same utopianism that has plagued the left historically.

My impression of the economy we have is just the opposite. Any single monopoly or privilege, considered in isolation, has such huge centralizing effects that it’s difficult to imagine just how libertarian and decentralized things would have been without it. Just consider market economies as they would have developed without the cumulative effects of land expropriation in late medieval and early modern times, land expropriations and preemption of vacant land around the world, and ongoing enforcement of absentee title to unimproved land. Or imagine labor relations if the Industrial Revolution had developed without the Combination Laws, the internal passport system of the Laws of Settlement combined with parish workhouse slave markets, and all the other totalitarian social controls on free association from the 1790s through the 1820s. Or the role of “intellectual property” in promoting market cartelization, oligopoly, planned obsolescence, and what our economy would look like absent those cumulative effects. Or the railroad land grants, civil aviation system and Interstate Highway System. Or Cleveland’s intervention in the Pullman Strike, assorted state declarations of martial law in the Copper Wars, and Taft-Hartley. And now consider the synergies that result from all of them put together.
I think it’s more accurate to say our state capitalist economy possesses enormous continuities from the feudal-manorial system, and that it differs from a freed market to almost the same extent the Soviet economy did. Whatever market elements there are exist only within the interstices defined almost entirely by structural privilege, artificial scarcity, and artificial property rights.
To take Walmart in particular, consider all the structural presuppositions behind it. First, it presupposes the creation of a continental-scale corporate economy, largely through the efforts of the state (like the railroad land grants, the use of patents as a tool for market cartelization, etc.). Second, it presupposes the use of patents and trademarks by corporate headquarters to control outsourced production by sweatshops around the world. The Walmart model is only relevant when the main model of production is sweatshops on the other side of the world exporting their output to the U.S. via container ship, and “warehouses on wheels” distributing that output via a nationwide wholesale model that presupposes a high-volume national highway system.
Imagine a counter-example: An economy in which neighborhood garage shops — organized on essentially the same micromanufacturing model as the job shops in Shenzhen — are able to produce identical industrial goods, or generic spare parts, free from corporate “intellectual property” restrictions, for sale in retail outlets on Main Street in the same town. Just about everything Horwitz presupposes in his statement about the benefits of Walmart would be completely irrelevant.  John Womack, one of the early celebrants of lean production, argued that trans-oceanic supply chains were incompatible with the lean model. The same is true of “warehouses on wheels.” These distribution models simply shift mass production’s enormous warehouses full of inventory to the supply and distributino chains. Walmart is, essentially, the leanest possible way of organizing distribution in an economy that is organized on completely contrary principles.
So I think left-libertarians’ fundamental area of disagreement with Shapiro and Horwitz is that our model of freed markets isn’t a slightly tweaked, somewhat more leftish variant on the existing model of corporate capitalism. It implies a revolution in the basic structure of our economy.

 Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.

http://c4ss.org/content/14459  posted under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Quote of the Moment: Barack Obama - Messianic Narcissist

...there is a man whose messianic narcissism and hubristic naivety threaten the immediate safety of the entire world, who enjoys the company of terrorists and bigots, whose foreign policy has already cost the avoidable ending of thousands of innocent lives while he makes excuses for the actual murderers, qualifying their culpability, lying about their motives to make them seem more sympathetic and downplaying the imminent danger they pose, whose idea of gun control is to give thousands of deadly weapons free to Mexican gangsters and then do nothing while they slaughter each other, who spits on his friends and grovels to his enemies, and who is unquestionably the most clueless ass to have ever taken high office in his country's history. I'm not much of an economist, but I understand he's a bit shaky there, too.-Venerable Beads: Binders or Blinders?

Is YouTube Making Us Smarter?

Well, it might if it didn't keep taking videos down for "copyright violations". That simply reinforces the idea that ideas themselves are "property" which is plain stupid. Sure, there's some great original content on YouTube, but even those videos can and have been taken down due to some claim by a copyright Nazi or troll.

Psychotropic Drugs

Self-taught African Teen Wows M.I.T.

15-Year-Old Kelvin Doe is an engineering whiz living in Sierra Leone who scours the trash bins for spare parts, which he uses to build batteries, generators and transmitters. Completely self-taught, Kelvin has created his own radio station where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker, DJ Focus.-http://youtu.be/XOLOLrUBRBY

Finkelstein: Gaza War Spiral

Political scientist, activist and author Norman Finkelstein doubts that the current crisis in Gaza will further escalate.

McDouble Down

I'm on a diet again, and it's working. I cut out the junk, focus on more fruits and vegetables, and eat smaller portions. At work it's always tough, because I'm a stress eater and work is stress. I've kept a drawer full of snacks at my desk for a while. Now though, instead of stocking up for work and having all that temptation at hand, I stock up for home and just take what I'll need for the day to work. Yesterday I was up early before work and stopped by the store for a few things. That's easier for me since I work a late shift and hate stopping off when it's cold and dark. One thing I bought was a big bag of pistachios. Even having that whole bag there, I was able to pore a small portion out and stop eating after I'd consumed that amount. And pistachios are like potato chips for me, so it was an accomplishment. I'm finally gaining willpower instead of pounds.

Or so I thought. Yesterday I parked my temporary car (more on that some other time) in the sun because all the good spots are taken by the time I arrive at work. At lunch time I decided to move it to the shade, partly to help protect all my good stuff still in the trunk. But, I thought, as long as I'm starting the car, why not take it for a little run up to the food court? Sure, I'm on a diet, but I won't get much, and anyway, I won't eat for the rest of the day.

I went to the McDonald's drive-thru. I only had 3 dollars on me, so I ordered two McDoubles, thinking I'd go protein style and toss the buns. Well, I made a compromise with my original plan. I discarded one bun to save on carbs and stacked all the meat and cheese filling on a single bun. When I was done I had one hell of a hamburger. It almost looked like the burgers in the ads instead of something run over by a truck. I'm calling my creation the Double McDouble. I can almost taste it again as I write. I do have some spare change lying around. Hmm, maybe my diet can wait.

How Raising Taxes Will Not Balance the Budget: More Evidence

Although it may seem counterintuitive, raising taxes on the rich does not actually increase the amount of taxes the government collects. How could this possibly be the case? According to Professor Antony Davies, it is because the many loopholes in federal income taxes, capital gains taxes, and many other taxes, enable people to partially avoid these taxes. Perhaps instead of discussing how to raise tax revenues, we should spend our energy simplifying the tax code. This would make it more difficult for people to avoid taxes and, Davies says, "The less time and money we spend trying to work around a complex tax code, the more time and money we will have available to put to more productive uses."-http://youtu.be/bvqNVs4ix6E

Too Early for 2016 Talk?

If we skip over 2014, since it will “just” be House and Senate races, I think there are a few things that can be said about the coming 2016 race. On a side note regarding 2014, I think Republicans will maintain their majority in the House, though they will probably lose some seats (probably slightly more than Democrats, but not by much), and Republicans will probably pick up a Senate seat or two, though I am fairly confident Democrats will hold their majority there.

Republicans are starting off stronger in 2016 than they were when 2012 began. Obama had no need to campaign for his party’s nomination, and it’s arguable that the Republican primaries are where Romney’s run at the presidency really broke down (though I would argue he was doomed long before the Iowa Caucus).

When you have to campaign for your party’s nomination, you inevitably have some sore losers in your party who won’t support you. You have inner-party mudslinging that taints your image. You have to spend some of your money just getting to the big game, whereas an incumbent can just quietly watch from the sidelines, biding their time, watching you take cheap shot after cheap shot.

So yes, the old myth is true: an incumbent is harder to beat.

I think Republicans also have to get the nod when it comes to viable candidates. I don’t know who Republicans will nominate for 2016, but I would be willing to bet that it won’t be anyone who ran in 2012. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Mitch Daniels… there’s a lot of potential candidates who never threw their hats into the ring for 2012.

Contrast this with the Democrats, where the most likely early lead will be Joe Biden (though I don’t think he’ll get the nomination). “But what about Hillary Clinton?” Well, it’s possible. She is stepping down from her position as Secretary of State, and it certainly takes four years these days to campaign for the presidency. However, she has stated and restated that she won’t be running in 2016. I know… never trust a politician… except, I think she’s genuinely uninterested. I think it’s more likely we’ll see her run for Senate or simply retire from politics.

And at this point, I’m at a loss for what Democrats will do. I have heard silly suggestions ranging from Andrew Cuomo or Michael Bloomberg to Elizabeth Warren or Tammy Duckworth… but I don’t see that happening, at all. I like Elizabeth Warren in particular… which is sort of my first clue that she won’t be the nominee, though I suppose it’s possible she will run. I don’t think so, though.

So, Democrats are either stuck with Joe Biden, or they need to groom someone during these four years. Meanwhile, the Republicans have an impressive stable of candidates who have broad national appeal.

What we can’t know, however, is how Obama’s presidency will go. If I had to guess, I would imagine his second term will be as mediocre as his first term, which isn’t going to help Democrats.

Then again, how Republicans in the House act during the next four years will also have a strong effect on how the party is perceived. If congressional Republicans continue to cause legislative deadlock, it’s not going to bode well for their presidential candidate. Remember, many (if not most) people vote for the party, not the person, especially at the Federal level.

In fact, the entire tone of the 2016 race will likely be altered by the 2014 races, which are much too far off to predict. I mean honestly… you would have had to have been psychic to know that Tea Baggers would influence the 2010 elections, or that Republicans would be courting the rapist vote in 2012. Who knows what will be said in 2014 and 2016? Hell, I don’t even know who will be saying it, let alone what will be said.

But that doesn’t mean the entire election is a toss-up. While it’s embarrassingly early to make predictions, I think it’s clear that Republicans are in a good position for 2016.

One final note on why Republicans have an advantage in 2016: Republicans picked up a fair number of governors and state legislatures in 2012. When you have Republicans controlling a large number of states, you can expect a greater proportion of gerrymandering to go in favor of Republicans.

It’s not so much an issue of whether Republicans are “worse” about how much they gerrymander, but rather, just that they control so many states. Many of these states are low-population and therefore over-represented in both the House and the Senate. Even in 2012, it was not difficult for Republicans to maintain more seats in the House, despite getting less total votes for House members.

If Democrats want to regain the House, it will be crucial that they become active at the state level. It won’t be enough to simply break Republican majorities in most of these states; Democrats would need to gain control enough to redraw the districts in their favor. I don’t think Democrats have the will to do this in the places where it needs to happen. It would take some sort of strange, spontaneous migration from urban coastal centers to the less populated, inland states.

Basically, what I’m saying is… the best hope Democrats have is for global warming to devastate the coasts and cause more liberal citizens to move to the Midwest and Mountain states. I don’t think that will happen in four years. The oceans are rising… but not that fast. It’s appropriate, then, that progress will probably continue to move at a glacial pace… even if the glaciers won’t be here by the time progress arrives.

Tiny Wins Lead to Long Waits, or The Agony of Gradualism

Nikk asked me to elaborate on a comment I made regarding the idea that many seemingly liberal social programs have actually set back liberalism by decades. This short article will be an attempt to do that.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. – Martin Luther King Jr.

There are those who think that society must be gently goaded along through history. They see people as soft, weak, and unable to cope with change. I am not one of those people.

When it comes to righting an injustice, there is no room for compromise. To negotiate with those who defend injustice is to ensure that future generations will need to finish the job we should have done. If we are confronted with problems of vast importance, we cannot settle for half-vast solutions.

So it is with the Affordable Healthcare Act, also known as “Obamacare.” I was more than a little let down that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn the mandate, and I wish the whole thing has simply been struck down all together. But why would a liberal ever oppose Obamacare?

Because Obamacare is not liberal. It’s not a solution to the problem we face, it is a hand-out to private insurers and a slap in the face to poor Americans. Even when every facet of the AFA is enacted, there will be millions of Americans uninsured.

Just to put that into perspective, this means millions of poor Americans, the vast majority of whom work one or more jobs to try to support themselves and their families, will not have access to the same quality of healthcare that is available to convicted murderers and rapists in prison.

But most people won’t care, because the poor are disposable in our culture. A few middle class assholes won’t be dropped from their insurance anymore when they get sick, so just enough “success” stories will trickle in to make Democrats feel all warm and fuzzy, meanwhile the truly poor will go on dying from treatable illnesses.

That’s the reality of Obamacare. It’s a sedative designed to calm people down and make them forget that America is the only developed country without a national healthcare plan… and coincidentally, we also have some of the worst healthcare in the first-world (assuming you’re generous enough to even consider us first-world anymore).

It’s nothing new, either. Johnson and FDR are both notable for having pacified the masses with just enough to quiet them down, while still ensuring we would be exploited for decades to come. If you feed people just enough scraps, they won’t try too hard to get a place at the table, even if they deserve it.

It doesn’t even take an act of congress; sometimes blind luck has slowed liberal progress in America. Imperialist exploitation of other nations by corporations has also served to quell the cries in America for a legitimate worker movement. Even going back further, Karl Marx himself noted in the 19th century that the California gold rush would stunt worker’s rights movements in America for decades, as a sudden influx of wealth was liable to delay the inevitable.

And socialism is inevitable, just as capitalist markets are inevitable. Europe has steadily moved towards a more equal distribution of wealth among its citizens, while countries like China on the other end of the political spectrum have moved away from command economies towards that of capitalist markets. The ideal system is no longer a theory, it’s a proven fact.

The map to success is already drawn up, and America appears to be the last one on the road. There’s nothing revolutionary to try anymore; both extremes have failed miserably, and the way to peaceful prosperity is no longer a lofty goal, but is instead an oft-travelled path.

The concept of robust social programs and well regulated industries is no longer a controversial or radical idea, it’s just the only way that clearly works. America has been deteriorating the past few decades because we have lowered our taxes to the point of embarrassment, cut funding to necessary social programs, reduced funding for scientific innovation, and lowered our educational standards, all the while piling more and more debt on future generations who we have ensured will be ill-equipped to deal with the problems bequeathed to them by the self-centered Yuppies and Gen Xers,

But that isn’t the worst of our problems. No, the real problem we face is the fact that neither political party in this country wants to do anything about it. We have one party full of conservatives who want nothing to change and are beholden to corporate interests, and then we have the Republicans… who I have come to believe are syphilitic time-travelers from the 1800s.

Democrats propose no real solutions to our problems, while Republicans demand we make our problems worse. At this point, even the Libertarian Party has more to offer in the way of real answers than the Democrats, which would be fine… if the majority of the Libertarian platform wasn’t such a farce.

Personally, I blame the fact that America hasn’t had a war on our soil in a long time. We haven’t had to actually pull together, and it’s been too long since we let large populations of angry American morons kill each other. Europe and Japan got their shit together after their wars, but America didn’t. We just coasted on the fact that we didn’t have to rebuild, and once everyone caught back up with us and our backward ways, then surpassed us again, we just continued to sit around for decades with our thumb up our ass.

It’s time to wake the fuck up and realize America fell behind for a reason, and that reason is that real liberalism has been drowned in a pit of corporate money, then buried in a shallow grave by a complacent population.

If America can get used to being strip-searched every time they board a plane, America can get used to joining the rest of civilization. Then, when we aren’t uneducated, frightened fools, we can reclaim our civil liberties and go about achieving real progress.

The Conservative Media Bias

Two recent stories have shed more light on the blatant Conservative bias in the American media.

The first was the resignation of General David Petraeus as the Director of the CIA. Now, the real story here is that the guy is responsible for countless innocent people being killed overseas for… whatever the fuck it is we’re supposedly doing with our military in the Middle East. I wish I could say it was for oil, but gas is not less expensive. At this point, I have to assume it’s just because America likes killing Muslims.

In any case, which of his many heinous crimes forced him to leave in disgrace? Infidelity… because no one cares that he has blood on his hands, unless you count the time he fingered his mistress when she was on her period.

But that isn’t the really biased part. It’s the saddest part, but not the biased part.

No, the bias comes in with the over-analysis of how it impacts Obama… because everything that ever happens, ever, has to be blamed on Obama. I’m not a huge Obama fan myself, but I prefer to blame him for things he actually did, as opposed to just making shit up on a constant basis.

And that’s what the media did. “How long has Obama known about this and kept it quiet in order to not look bad before the election?” Well, it’s looking like he didn’t know, and strangely enough, Republicans like Eric Cantor did. But frankly, I don’t care that Republicans knew about some juicy gossip before the rest of us. It is irrelevant.

Well then, clearly Petraeus stepping down is a conspiracy to keep him from testifying over Benghazi… right? Except not. Petraeus will still testify, so again, more blatantly ignorant conspiracy theories coming from the right-wing media.

The real story here is… why does it matter if the Director of the CIA fucks someone who isn’t his wife? The only people who should be upset over it are Petraeus’ family, who I genuinely feel bad for at the moment. These are the sort of things the media has no business reporting, because a person’s private sexual life has nothing to do with how they perform on the job.

But the American news media isn’t really about news, it’s about turning everything into 24/7/365 reality TV, where frivolous personal drama trumps meaningful public debate, and Americans are intellectually lazy dipshits for buying into it.

This wasn’t the only story this week that exposed the embarrassingly right-leaning nature of American media. You also have the over-hyped coverage of “secession” petitions.

Let me get this straight… a few thousand morons went to the trouble of signing some online petition to do something incredibly dumb… and that gets more coverage than the entire Jill Stein campaign, which received several times more votes than these petitions are gaining signatures? Jill Stein got real votes, not online signatures which can be, and frequently are, easily forged. Hell, it’s getting more coverage than Gary Johnson’s campaign, too, just in case you’re the sort of prick who is incapable of supporting someone who wants to actually solve problems.

Since it’s another opportunity to showcase dramatic whiners throwing a hissy fit, the media has been all over this story, even though it amounts to fewer people than would fill my old high school’s bleachers for a basketball game proposing an idea that was dumb the first in it was suggested in the 19th century.

But honestly, who can be surprised by this? The media has no interest in helping this country, because a fully-functional society makes for bad ratings. The media wants a never-ending series of train-wrecks to point their cameras at, and if they have to derail a few trains… so be it.

Pity the Veterans and Hate the State that Abuses Them

This Veteran’s Day, let us remember that the United States government’s soldiers have gone to war for no good reason.  For the past century, the United States government has engaged in wars where soldiers have been traumatized, mutilated, and killed for no good reason.  From World War I (the war to end all wars) to the Iraq War, the US government has made it clear that it will waste as many young men as it can in order to achieve obscure goals like democracy for all or freedom for all.

I do not hate veterans.  In many cases I pity them.  But I do not regard their sacrifices as honorable or meaningful because the reasons for it were not honorable at all.  From fighting a war with Germans in order to protect the interests of J.P. Morgan (know your history) during President Wilson’s reign to occupying Afghanistan in order to secure their heroin fields (illegal drugs is good business), our leaders have done horrendous things and inflicted so much pain and suffering on naïve young men.  Young men whose only desire is to simply protect their country.

Our leaders took advantage of this again and again, all the while telling the rest of us civilians that these men died for our freedom.  The sad truth is: they died for nothing.  They served in these wars for no good reason.  There was no meaning to any of it, just pointless slaughter and death.  It is a harsh reality and a difficult concept to accept, I know.  To tell a man that all the people he’s killed were for nothing or that all the dead soldiers died for no good reason.

Our overlords view the soldiers as nothing more than disposable heroes.  Just look at what they did to Brandon Raub, whose only crime was committing an egregious act of freedom of speech.  The State will continue to treat veterans like garbage and the rest of the Americans will be told to honor them.  It is a sick group of people who inhabit the top ranks of our country and they need to be stopped.

But I digress.  To all those veterans out there who are not Chris Kyle or like him, I am sorry for my honesty.  I view you as victims of the same people who wish to enslave people like me (they’re halfway there) and so I view you with pity.  To those veterans and soldiers who contributed heavily to Ron Paul, I’m sorry that the bankster overlords who you are in service to managed to out-donate you and got Romney the nomination.

And for those who are still deployed in warzones, remember that you have to do what you have to survive, but don’t be afraid to defy or disobey orders, especially immoral ones.  When you commit evil acts, you are guilty and saying that you were just following orders is not an excuse, as the Nuremburg Trials demonstrated.  I know it takes a lot of courage to stand up to your superiors and stand your ground on moral issues, especially you are in the middle of nowhere, but you must.  What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Ron Paul: Abolish all Price Controls - Let the Free Market Function!

Hot Celebrities

The 10 Hottest Celebrity Pictures of the Week

The Future of America: VIOLENCE Breaks Out in Poland - Police Open Fire at Crowd of Protesters

Thousands of police in riot gear had earlier lined the streets of Warsaw to try to stop right-wing nationalists and radical left-wing groups from using the independence day holiday as an opportunity to fight each other.

It was the second year the celebrations have degenerated into violence, underlining the deep gulf between those who want a conservative, religious society that rejects foreign influence and those who want Poland to join the European mainstream.-http://youtu.be/1zPMz2g_fuQ

Secession!

Some sites are getting exited about secession petitions from around the country. The only problem is, anyone can file one, and at the White House website no less. Obviously these petitions asking Obama to grant permission to leave the Union will go nowhere, won't even be looked at, probably. Nevertheless, something will stir when the time is right. When Obama's economy finally crashes in his second failed term, bad times are guaranteed, including social unrest and even an opening for a breakup of the United States. This nation won't hold together anymore than other failed experiments in forcing two or more completely opposed cultures into a single unified whole were successful in other parts of the world. Here's part of the Texas "petition":

The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the US suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it’s citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.-15 States including Texas have filed a petition to secede from the United States

And just why are those beliefs of the Founders no longer reflected in Washington, D.C.? Because America has been flooded with people from other cultures with no such foundational belief in limited government. Of course, it started long before that with Lincoln, Wilson, the destruction of the dollar, the creation of the Federal Reserve, giving women the vote in 1920 (yes, the female brain gravitates to big government for illogical reasons) the FDR and LBJ expansions of Federal power over the economy and the states, and the final nails in the coffin of liberty in the US of LBJ's immigration "reform" act and Nixon's final removal of the dollar with any link to gold. It took forty or fifty years, but the chickens came home to roost.

If I were a traditionalist conservative I'd be crying. As an anarchist who doesn't believe in any states or borders, I'm ecstatic at the possibilities about to unfold before us. Hang on folks, it's gonna be a bumpy ride!

Massive Vote Fraud In Florida? Did Obama Steal the Election?

Heads are nodding right now "could be, could be", but hold, hold, hold your horses! The report looks suspect.

There’s lots of uninformed buzz on Twitter today about a report purporting to show 141 percent voter turnout in St. Lucie County, Florida-Voter fraud rumor of the day: 141% voter turnout in St. Lucie County, Fla.

However, it appears the numbers are based on "cards cast", not total voters, so if the ballot is multiple pages, you'll have a higher number of "cards".

Happy Veterans Day! Thanks for getting your legs blown off for the ruling elite!

British Fascism

The once free nation descends ever deeper into a complete totalitarian police state. Thank God the USA still has a First Amendment that can't (yet) be completely ignored by the courts.

Everyone agrees that his "jokes" making fun of two kidnapped girls crossed the line. Matthew Woods swiftly became an object of contempt after he posted the crude and offensive comments on his Facebook page. But did he deserve to be locked up for them? A judge thought so, and ordered the 19-year-old to spend 12 weeks in jail, essentially for overstepping the bounds of good taste. Woods now sits behind bars — and also in the middle of a growing clash in Britain between freedom of expression, societal mores and the digital revolution.-Britain's crackdown on Web comments sparks free-speech debate

Beyond the Point of No Return

Rep. Ron Paul, whose maverick presidential bids shook the GOP, said in the wake of this week's elections that the country has already veered over the fiscal cliff and he sees no chance of righting ship in a country where too many people are dependent on government.

"We're so far gone. We're over the cliff," the Texas Republican told Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop" program. "We cannot get enough people in Congress in the next 5-10 years who will do wise things."

Read more: Ron Paul: Election shows U.S. 'far gone' - Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/nov/8/ron-paul-election-shows-us-far-gone/#ixzz2BtdnGBdh Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Keiser Report: Wacko Wizard World

Liberal Atheists, This Means WAR

A Response to an A-Hole Obama Supporter

The intellectually dishonest "liberal" says this as they link to a pro-Obama site:

Nevertheless if you’re asking your’self, “WTF has Obama done for me lately.” You may enjoy this interactive site. Though I don’t promise you will agree with many of his decisions. Like if you oppose civil rights for all or think children w/ preexisting conditions shouldn’t have access to healthcare… you might not enjoy this link.-What the fuck has Obama done so far?

To which I replied with the comment below:

Well, lets see. He signed the NDAA, which, says the ACLU, resulted in "codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history". He supported reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act, supports the evil war on drugs (Obama has had more medical marijuana dispensary raids and federal marijuana prosecutions than George W. Bush), killed a 16 year old American citizen in a drone raid, killed innocent men, women and children around the world with numerous drone strikes, kept hero and whistleblower Bradley Manning rotting in prison, and has prosecuted more whistle blowers than all previous administrations combined. And that's just for starters.

Of course, if you hate civil liberties, love war and the murder of civilians, and don't care that he's throwing people into prison for supplying marijuana to people with illnesses, you might not enjoy my comment.

Oh, and the loser's blog where I left my reply is called "Topic Spill", but I misread it as "Toxic Swill". Well, I guess when something stinks, it names itself most appropriately in one's mind