Lost Films Found

Long-missing comedy shorts such as 1927’s “Mickey’s Circus,” featuring a 6-year-old Mickey Rooney in his first starring role, 1917's "Neptune's Naughty Daughter"; 1925’s “Fifty Million Years Ago,” an animated introduction to the theory of evolution; and a 1924 industrial short, “The Last Word in Chickens,” are among the American silent films recently found...Read More: A treasure trove of silent American movies found in Amsterdam

News and Notes

I've been a little behind in updating the blog. I have original posts lined up and other things, but I fall behind because I have so many other things on my mind and so much on my plate right now. But stay tuned and don't lose heart, for my pledge to SE and you is to devote my entire life to blogging, to spend every free waking hour at a computer slaving away writing outstanding pieces to enlighten and entertain. I won't even eat (I'm too fat anyway, my body can use the calorie break, and I can probably live off my belly fat for a few weeks).

Of course, when I'm thin and trim again, you may face another SE lack of good posts crisis, but that's life, and blogging.

So Consolation Trumps Truth?

Banker Suicides the Prequel to Global Collapse?

The onset of the great depression of the 1930's brought a spike in banker suicides, Will Rogers noted of the time, "When Wall Street took that tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and speculators were selling space for bodies in the East River."-http://youtu.be/czBIBEMuRQU

Coroners in London are preparing to investigate two apparent suicides as unexpected deaths by finance workers around the world have raised concerns about mental health and stress levels in the industry.-Bankers' Deaths Shine Light on Stress in Industry, Tunnel Vision

The sudden rash of bankers expiring in mysterious ways has been well documented. Jim Willie revealed last week that we are seeing bankers removed who are on the verge of revealing big data details on FOREX bank fraud. Read more at Alert: At Least 20 Bankers Now Dead!

Just As Predicted

A little help:

Quote of the Day: The Laws of Nature

"We must proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature." – Warren G. Harding

The Crisis is Not Over! A Conversation with Legendary Investor Jim Rogers

But of course, the Chinese economy is anything but free market.

China is the greatest construction boom and credit bubble in recorded history. An entire nation of 1.3 billion has gone mad building, borrowing, speculating, scheming, cheating, lying and stealing. The source of this demented outbreak is not a flaw in Chinese culture or character—nor even the kind of raw greed and gluttony that afflicts all peoples in the late stages of a financial bubble.

Instead, the cause is monetary madness with a red accent.-China’s Monumental Ponzi: Here’s How It Unravels

"Twinkle, Twinkle" Piano Variations- Evolution of Popular Music

Scott Bradlee takes the popular children's song, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and uses it to trace the evolution of 24 popular music styles, from waltz to dubstep.-http://youtu.be/-jDR14y19fQ

Manual for Creator Gods and Universe Operators

All Welfare is Corporate Welfare

Did you ever wonder why most welfare programs continue to stay afloat even as it is proven to be riff with corruption, inefficiencies, and scandal?  The answer is simple: like all things in DC, lobby groups work constantly to keep these programs going on behalf of large corporations.

Case in point, I found this article from WeAreChange.org a little enlightening:

Although a notorious recipient of “corporate welfare,” Walmart has now admitted that their massive profits also depend on the funding of food stamps and other public assistance programs.

In their annual report, filed with the Security and Exchange Commission last week, the retail giant lists factors that could potentially harm future profitability. Listed among items such as “economic conditions” and “consumer confidence,” the company writes that changes in taxpayer-funded public assistance programs are also a major threat to their bottom line.The company writes:

“Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control … These factors include … changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans …”

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is notorious for paying poverty wages and coaching employees to take advantage of social programs. In many states, Walmart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients.

Notice that listed in this section I shared that Wal-Mart is dependent on not one, but two different forms of welfare: both Medicaid and SNAP.  In the past, Wal-Mart has also encouraged the raising of the minimum wage as well.  Recall also that Wal-Mart also allowed the poor to loot one of their stores when the EBT system went down.

It looks to me that Wal-Mart is a retail chain that is wholly dependent on the War on Poverty continuing because they make huge profits from other productive taxpayers who do not shop there.

It is one thing for a free market system where an individual can deny their money or services to a business.  But in this case, Wal-Mart is forcing the government to ensure that poor people get money so they can get rich.  This is not capitalism, this is cronyism at its finest.

All welfare programs exist for the express purpose of enriching the large corporate companies, which the Left hates so much.  This is largely because the poor tend to have more disposable income than the middle class due to the fact that the government subsidizes nearly every foundational expense they have from food to housing to utilities.  So of course Wal-Mart and other retail chains like them benefit from these programs because it means the poor can buy crap that they don’t need, thus boosting their profits.

No welfare program will ever be defunded or eradicated so long as the current system is in place.  And no, I’m not talking about the constitutional system, but the corporatist system that makes even the Whig party roll in their graves.

40-Year-High for Butter Consumption in US

Kevin Carson: This is Not Your Ancestors’ Collapse Scenario

A forthcoming “NASA study” that predicts medium-term collapse has gone viral on the Internet, based entirely on Nafeez Ahmed’s advance writeup for The Guardian (“NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?,” March 14).
To start with we should note, just in passing, that it turns out not to be quite a “NASA study” after all. It was the work of independent researchers at the University of Maryland, using analytical tools that had previously been developed for an entirely different NASA study. It wasn’t commissioned or funded by NASA. And on top of everything else, a lot of the authorities cited to support its premises aren’t all that pleased with the authors’ interpretation of their work (“Keith Kloor, About That Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization“; “Judging the Merits of a Media-Hyped ‘Collapse’ Study.” Discover, March 21; ).
The study, a group effort led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei, argues for a cyclical pattern of civilizational rise and collapse in human history, based on the interaction of two mutually-reinforcing variables: 1) the growth of resource extraction to unsustainable levels and 2) the polarization of societies between economically privileged elites and commoners. The latter process insulates economic elites from fully experiencing the real costs of resource depletion, and allows them to externalize the suffering from the crisis onto the lower orders — thus delaying a rational response until it’s too late.
First of all, its line of analysis strikes me as fairly simplistic, assuming a handful of very gross variables and playing out a scenario based on a first-order extrapolation from them, with very little taking into account of agile responses to feedback — especially the rapid growth of ephemeralizing technologies that are totally changing the game compared to previous collapses.
And oddly enough, it’s being cited by a lot of commentators as evidence for why we need state intervention. But if anything, it’s the state and the model of industrial growth it promoted the past century or two that are pushing us toward collapse.
The main function of the state has been subsidizing a model of expansion based on the wasteful use of additional resource inputs rather than boosting productivity through more efficient use of existing inputs. Under the existing model of capitalism, the state does two major things. First, it enforces privileges and artificial property rights that result in large monopoly rents to the propertied classes. The overall effect is to shift income from workers with a high propensity to consume to rentiers with a high propensity to save and invest, so that capitalism is plagued with chronic crises of overinvestment and underconsumption. Second, the state subsidizes a business model based on large-batch production for large, centralized market areas using extremely expensive, specialized machinery — a model of production far higher in overhead and far more capital-intensive than would be sustainable in a genuine free market, without subsidies and barriers to competition. Because of the enormous capital outlays required for this model of production, industry is driven to minimize unit costs by running continually at full capacity, and the capitalist state organizes society around the consumption of this output, which was undertaken without regard to preexisting demand.
So we have an economy whose dominant class face an enormous glut of far more capital than it can find profitable investment outlets for, and find themselves in a constant uphill battle against excess industrial capacity and inadequate consumer demand. In short, it’s an economy organized by the state around solving the problems of a ruling class with too many resources, and every incentive in the world to use them as inefficiently as possible.
The state’s chief activity has been finding ways to waste capital and soak it up on horribly inefficient blockbuster projects as capital sinks for solving the problem of overaccumulation and idle capacity, to encourage waste investment in inefficient ways of doing things, and pay people to hold land out of use or subsidize the most land-inefficient forms of industrial farming. The automobile-highway complex, mass suburbanization, planned obsolescence and the military-industrial complex all fall under these headings.
At the same time, the state preempts ownership of the natural environment and gives preferential access to it to the economic ruling class, effectively turning it into an unorganized and unregulated commons that industry can use as a no-cost, no-liability sink for pollution and a subsidized source of artificially cheap raw materials and fuel inputs.
The study argues that “elite power” will protect the ruling classes from the negative effects of looming collapse for some time after commoners begin to experiencing it, thus allowing “business as usual” for the privileged despite “impending catastrophe.” As for the saving potential of technological advances, don’t count on it. The only effect it will have — based on what amounts to a warmed-over appeal to Jeavons’ Paradox — is to temporarily encourage even larger-scale, less sustainable consumption and resource extraction.
I’m a lot more optimistic than the authors on both counts.
First of all, the legal barriers and subsidies that insulate the elites from the real costs of the decisions they make are rapidly becoming unsustainable. While industry’s demands for subsidized inputs rise exponentially — as you might expect from the basic principles of economics — the state is becoming fiscally exhausted from its inability to keep up with those demands. And crises of Peak Oil, Coal, etc. will likely drive the collapse of long-distance industrial supply and distribution chains, and the relocalization of production, in the near future. Meanwhile, as the revolution in high-tech, ephemeral manufacturing tools makes the means of production increasingly cheaper, smaller in scale and more amenable to relocalized production by individuals and small groups, corporations find themselves forced to resort to legal monopolies and anti-competitive barriers like licensing and “intellectual property” to prevent manufacturing from being undertaken by ordinary workers and consumers outside corporate boundaries. But as the record industry or NSA can tell you, legal barriers to the free use of information and technique are becoming virtually unenforceable.
And it’s the “lower orders” themselves, the very people who experience the externalized negative consequences of resource depletion, who are being driven by necessity to develop the new, more efficient technologies that will become the building blocks for the post-capitalist culture.
So what we’re really seeing is an old state-corporate economic order, accustomed to achieving its goals by throwing unlimited cheap capital and land at them, experiencing something very much like past collapse scenarios described by Joseph Tainter. At the same time, a new junkyard dog economy of micromanufacturing, open-source hardware, free software, permaculture, vernacular building techniques and passive solar design, household micro-enterprise, cooperatives, etc., is emerging from the ruins of the old corporate dinosaur economy. It has grown up in the face of unrelenting pressure to extract every last drop of value from the merest scraps of land and capital, and will eventually digest the decaying ruins of the system it supplants.
So yes, an old system is collapsing. But it’s entirely feasible for a new and better one to take its place. The only thing the state can do, in alliance with the old order, is to obstruct the new one by enforcing the inequalities of wealth and unevenness of resource distribution Motasharrei points to. And the best way to get rid of those inequalities is for the state to stop actively promoting them. - http://c4ss.org/content/25793

Proving That God's Plan Is Impossible

Is The US Becoming A Police State?

Source: SecurityDegreeHub.com

Undoing the Imposition

Women Don't Join the Military!

“Higher military rates of sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and divorce compared to the general civilian population consistent over time all confirm a longstanding significant correlation measured between sexism, sexual violence and America’s culture of violence and war.”-Sexual Assault against Women in the U.S. Armed Forces

Kansas to criminalize complaints against cops?

House Bill 2698 in the Kansas State legislature has run cold, but if enacted, it would deal a serious blow to anyone who has a complaint against cops. The bill would remove the option to complain anonymously, allow the cop in question to see the evidence against him or her before investigation, prevent the FBI or other agencies from looking into complaints the cops deemed fraudulent, and perhaps worst of all, criminalize the filing of a complaint that is dismissed by cops.-http://youtu.be/qWdvFO1QKrU

It would appear that this bill is simply designed to intimate victims of police abuse. In a police state age of militarized cops and curtailed civil liberties and stories almost every day of innocent citizens brutalized by thugs in government uniform, no wonder the powers that be (the state) are getting worried and are now hopelessly trying to "nip in the bud" the right of the people to respond to the injustices of "law" enforcement.

Go DuckDuckGo!

Yet go up against Google is exactly what Gabriel Weinberg did. In 2008, he launched his own search engine, DuckDuckGo, in the gloom of his Pennsylvania basement. The project started quietly, but over the last six months it has gained ground and is now starting to ruffle Google’s feathers.

...

DuckDuckGo tapped into this demand, by offering a service which does not retain any of their information. It does not download “cookies” onto people’s devices. It does not register the “IP address”, which pinpoints a users computer. -DuckDuckGo: The privacy search ruffling Google's feathers

The Real Noam Chomsky

Armed with evidence of Chomsky's willingness to accept millions in salary and benefits from the Pentagon while trying to run ROTC off campus, I wrote him an e-mail asking him to explain himself. To his credit, Chomsky did respond. But what he sent back was less than convincing.

"I think we should be responsible for what we do, not for the bureaucratic question of who stamps the paycheck," he wrote, adding provocatively, "Do you think you are not working for the Pentagon? Ask yourself about the origins of the computer and the Internet you are now using."

Somehow, the fact that I use the Internet, which was created by the U.S. military, not only means that I am "working for the Pentagon," it is the moral equivalent of Chomsky himself growing wealthy on Pentagon contracts. I don't know about you, but I'm still waiting for my check.

Intriguingly, Chomsky seems to have taken me for someone even farther to the left than he is. Thus as our correspondence continued, he suddenly grew defensive and accused me of attacking "those who have not been living up to your exalted standards."

But of course it was Chomsky himself who had created this "exalted" standard by condemning those who might consider taking grants or scholarships from the Pentagon.

When Chomsky appears on college campuses, he usually dresses in a rumpled shirt and jacket. He is identified with dozens of left-wing causes and professes to speak for the poor, the oppressed, and the "victims of capitalism." But Chomsky is himself a shrewd capitalist, worth millions, with money in the dreaded and evil stock market, and at least one tax haven to cut down on those pesky inheritance taxes that he says are so important.-NOAM CHOMSKY: Do as I say not as I do

And here's the "radical" Chomsky defending fiat currency and central banking and the Federal Reserve (which is currently enriching the 1% with its policies).

Contrast Chomsky's defense of the Fed and Bernanke with the truth as outlined by David Stockman:

Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher has been a thoughtful dissenter all along on the lunacy of QE and the Fed’s massive bond buying spree. But now he has left nothing to the imagination, admitting that Bernanke’s objective all along was to aggressively levitate the price of financial assets and thereby confer massive windfall gains on the wealthy who own most of them. And all this was done in pursuit of some whacked-out, latter-day Keynesian version of “trickle down” economics, which, according to Bubbles Ben, was for the good of the average American—even if they didn’t appreciate it, comprehend it, demand it, or vote for it.-Fisher Outs Bubbles Ben: QE Was A Massive Intended Gift To The 1%

SPLC: Profits of Hate

Nick Bostrom - The Simulation Argument

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

He makes a distinction between what he calls the "simulation hypothesis" and the "simulation argument". The hypothesis says that we are living in a simulation, which Bostrom thinks is "less than 50% likely to be the case", whereas the "argument" purports to show that one of three propositions are true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Personally, I don't think we are a simulation. If we are, then we should find the evidence someday, but that is possible only if there are imperfections in our simulation, or clear clues that our "reality" isn't as real as we thought. If, however, the simulation is so good as to be indistinguishable from the historical reality it imitates, then there is no way we can ever find out if the hypothesis is true or not, and we should simply conclude we are living in the real universe.

Of course, there are some who suggest that there is evidence that our reality is a simulation:

Unfortunately, the interview in the above YouTube is with Anthony Peake, who as far as I can tell is just another of the many promoters of pseudoscience.

I remain skeptical.

Dead Civil Rights Leader

A noted civil rights lawyer passed away last week.  When he was fresh out of college, he fought to end Jim Crow laws in Kansas.  His law firm was attacked by the racists there, having his windows shot out by people while being called a “niggar-lover”.

In other cases, he also sued President Ronald Reagan for appointing an ambassador to the Vatican, citing separation of church and state.  He also received awards for his representation of black clients in Kansas.

In 1988, he supported Al Gore in the Democratic Presidential primary.  He also ran for governor three times in the Democratic primary in Kansas as well as once for the Senate.

He was also known to have been a huge opponent to the Iraq War.  He had his followers protest the funerals of fallen veterans for doing what he viewed was evil in the name of the United States.

That civil rights leader was, of course, the late Fred Phelps, Sr., founder of Westboro Baptist Church.

God Hates Flags

Bubble Finance, 1987-2014

So when all was said and done, Willard “Mitt” Romney was a creature of the great deformation of finance that had been unleashed by the administration in which his father had served as secretary of HUD. History has left few clues about what George Romney thought about Nixon’s final destruction of the gold dollar, but his son’s business history documents in spades how Nixon’s actions eventually destroyed the free market in finance and fostered an unsustainable era of debt-fueled GDP growth and speculation- driven accumulation of wealth by the 1 percent.

That Mitt Romney turned out to be the conservative party’s candidate for president in 2012 is ironic in the extreme. As detailed below, Romney’s winnings from bubble finance during his years at Bain Capital were so preposterously impossible in an honest free market that it is no wonder that his 2012 campaign amounted to one giant platitude. He honestly thought his experience doing leveraged buyouts could show the way forward to ameliorate the nation’s economic ills. In fact, Romney had been an energetic agent of the very financialization process that had generated the economic failures against which he campaigned.-The Truman Show of Bubble Finance, 1987-2014, RIP

What Christians Can't Account For

The British People on Russia vs. the EU

Britons see Russia in a more positive light than the European Union, despite recent tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, according to a poll published on Saturday.-Britons rate Russia more positively than EU, poll shows

Resistance Against the New YouTube Police

The Final Confirmation That Google Is Evil?

A major anti-Obama YouTube channel with 55 million views was shut down yesterday just days after a new policy went into effect handing governments the power to flag “extremist” content on the video sharing website.

Do You Doubt Googuhl Is Eevuhl?

Oh, and here's what Google did to libertarian Eric Peters auto website:

Something happened – we’re not sure exactly what – about two months ago. We got a notice from Goo-guhl advising us we’d been “de-listed” – for reasons never explained and which we’ve never been able to discover. Since then, although the site still comes up when you enter the URL in a search engine, our traffic (and revenue from Goo-guhl ads, the primary source of our revenue) has collapsed.

We’re talking 75 percent down. And our Google page rank is now 0.

0 out of ten.

It used to be 5.-EPAutos is Deay-Ud

Inside the Tabasco Factory

Cajun Catsup! I like that. I also like that Tabasco is a family company and so far has not sold out to a larger food conglomerate, though there have been offers to buy the company out. It's always a good idea to have some hot sauce on hand, and though there is a lot of competition in the segment now, Tabasco is still holding its own against upstarts and other hot sauces, and I have some on my kitchen shelf right now.

Rape Culture Quote of the Day

“If a woman has (the right to abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”-Lawrence Lockman

h/t

Lawrence Lockman is a state representative in Maine. You can read more about him at this attack piece at a Bangor Daily News blog: Maine Rep. Lawrence Lockman’s decades-long history of extremism

Of course, to "liberals", anything anti-government, anti-tax or remotely "libertarian" is extremist, so you can pretty much dismiss a great deal of what the "liberal" who wrote the piece said. However, Lockman's sexist, anti-liberty views on women is a perfect example of why I generally hate conservatives or right-wingers motivated by loony religious beliefs.

You'll notice, I hope, that I said generally. There certainly are many much more reasonable conservative/libertarian types out there with views I disagree with on issues such as abortion or Christianity, but there are many more that just get me angry, and it's not limited to abortion or similar positions, but also things like the tendency of conservatives to get mad if you criticize "law" enforcement or the military (the distinction between the two is becoming increasing blurred) too much, as most of them still worship cops and troops as heroes.

So, let's examine Lockman's hateful comment in more detail. He of course takes the illogical anti-abortion position that abortion is murder. He is being deliberately provocative in order to make his point about abortion being the murder of a human being and then compares it to the crime of the rapist. Most people would rank rape second to murder in order of seriousness in a list of criminal acts. Rape victims have to live with the trauma they experienced for the rest of their lives. Most women who are raped need some kind of therapy to get their lives back and feel normal again. But most also will never completely recover from the experience of being sexually violated. Rape can be so soul destroying that some rape victims even commit suicide. And yet this asshole is comparing the ending of a pregnancy and abortion of a non-conscious potential human with murder and actually making the argument that abortion (because, you see, it is murder) is a worse crime than rape! Think about that for a few minutes and then I'm going to tell you a true story.

I personally know someone who was raped. The perpetrator was someone she knew. He kept calling himself her "boyfriend" when he was only, she thought, her friend. He became so obsessed with her that he stole her cell phone and began contacting all her male friends with text messages saying to never contact her again. Then he started stalking her, following her everywhere she went. She would get in her car to go somewhere and she'd see him following in his car in her rear view mirror. She finally went to court and got a restraining order against him.

A few months later he raped her, not just once, but many times over a period of days. She got pregnant as a result. He was eventually arrested, tried and convicted. His sentence? Eight years in prison. EIGHT! That was eight years ago and she still has not recovered. She's soon, hopefully, to go into a program of therapy again to deal with what she calls the worst experience of her life (and this from a woman who spent months in a hospital recovering from a terrible car accident and saw her father die a slow painful death from cancer when he was only 53). As she told me when I first found out what had happened: "I was raped and I haven't been the same".

And she wasn't. She was not the same happy, cheerful person I had known. She still isn't, all these years later. And, yes, she had an abortion. She ended the pregnancy imposed on her by the piece of filth rapist that ruined her life.

Now, if you're Lawrence Lockman, you view her as a worse criminal than her rapist. But it's worse than that, because if rape is SECOND to murder in serious criminal acts, then ALL anti-abortion individuals (I won't even acknowledge the nonsense that you are "pro-life") must logically take the position that her choice to abort was a worse offense than his sexual violence, because, after all, no one died from his crimes.

Perversion For Profit (1965)

Modern Good Samaritan

Purity Balls

Purity balls, in which a girl pledges to remain ‘pure’ until her wedding day, symbolically ‘marries’ God, and promises her father that she will remain a virgin until she's a wife, have become a phenomenon in America, now taking place in 48 out of the 50 states.

The balls resemble giant wedding ceremonies, with the girls - all around the age of 12 - wearing white gowns and dancing with their fathers who promise to ‘protect’ their daughter’s chastity.

During the ceremony, fathers present their daughters with purity rings, which they wear to symbolise their commitment to virginity.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2586036/You-married-Lord-daddy-boyfriend-Purity-Balls-girls-gift-virginity-fathers-marriage-sweep-America.html#ixzz2whuPfmcL Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

'You are married to the Lord and your daddy is your boyfriend': Purity balls, in which girls 'gift their virginity' to their fathers until marriage, sweeping America

Exporting Chaos: 'West spent $5 billion destabilizing Ukraine'

ATF seizes customer records in California raid

A customer list containing the names of over 5,000 people was seized in a San Diego, Calif. gun store in a raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The store sells gun parts that can be used to assemble an AR-15 rifle. The owner of Ares Armor initially refused to turn over customer records, citing privacy concerns, which prompted the raid.-http://youtu.be/mR1fTc5jBpM

The gun store in question was willing to comply with the ATF in turning over the parts but their natural concern was the violation of their customer's rights by ATF. The ATF is a criminal organization that has no right to exist. It MUST be abolished and every ATF agent tried and convicted and sentenced to hang!

A Piece of Furniture

He sat back and waited. He was on the floor, against the sofa, and he knew it was only a matter of time. He looked around him in every direction, and all was stillness, quietness, peacefulness. No one else was in the house at the moment to bother him. His mom had gone to the corner market, his sister was at a friend's house playing Barbie, and his dad hadn't come home from work yet.

All the furniture in the living room where he waited was rattan, the style his mom preferred. He imagined himself one of their number, transformed into a chair, table or sofa. A life of perfection and freedom from humanness. Think about it, furniture never had to go to the bathroom or brush its teeth! It didn't have to get up early and be forced to go to school. It just sat all day doing nothing, and with the curtains drawn, the sunshine that entered gave the room the wonderful comfort of light and warmth. He waited.

Another fifteen minutes went by, but he still was himself. He concentrated harder, but soon there was the sound of footsteps, and then his sister was there, laughing at him and calling him stupid again.

"It won't be long and you'll be sorry," he said.


Two weeks went by with no result, though he faithfully sat every afternoon after school and did his waiting and communing with his furniture pals. He imagined sometimes that the couch was his mom, the table his dad, and the two chairs his siblings. Then, one evening, when everyone had gone to bed, he chanced sneaking out of his room and visiting the living room furniture. It was dark and he didn't want to draw attention by turning on a lamp. So he felt his way through the darkness and found his usual place and sat down on the plush carpeting.

At first he thought he was dreaming. His legs were stiff, and his arm felt weird. He tried to get up but couldn't. He screamed but no sound came out of his mouth. Then he understood. He had no mouth. He wanted to go turn on the lamp, but then he realized that even if he'd been able to move, the light would do him no good and would not swallow the darkness. He had no eyes! In just moments all thoughts inside what was left of his "head" had ceased.


"Honey, I see you finally went downtown and picked up that end table you always wanted."

"No I didn't" she replied to her husband.

"Sure you did," he said, and pointed. "It's right there." 

"Hmm, no, I didn't pick that up. What the hell? Maybe your aunt dropped it off. Remember she gave us that loveseat we had to give away to the Salvation Army? Oh well, this will have to go too. Look, it doesn't match the rest of the furniture at all." 

"How to be Seventy" - Mark Twain

Modern civilization headed for collapse, says NASA-funded study

Vaccine Choice

More in vaccination news.  Apparently, a popular celebrity named Kristin Cavallari said that she isn’t vaccinating her child.  She cites, among other things, her concerns about autism and it’s link to vaccines.

I know, the science is settled, according to government scientists.  They insist that we inject several concoctions into our children which are said to prevent certain diseases, many of which are treatable and non-fatal.

But I’d like to make a few observations here:

• For one thing, Kristin Cavallari is not harming anyone by not vaccinating her child.  Her own child can make that the decision to get all those vaccinations later in life.  The risks for most of the diseases that her child can get are very low and even contracting some of them poses no long-term health effects.
• When I was a child, by the age of six, I had 10 vaccinations.  The current vaccine schedule from the CDC requires 38 vaccinations by the age of six.  You cannot reasonably tell me that this is sane as hygiene habits have changed very little since then.  What possible justification could the CDC have for demanding children get 4x the number of injections that we got when we were younger.
• That being said, how does not vaccinating children endanger other children who are vaccinated?  This is a surprisingly common argument and illustrates just how stupid people are.
• Most illnesses that kids get are ones that cannot be vaccinated against.  The flu, for example, is something that cannot be vaccinated against.  The common cold is another thing.  In many cases, kids get sick from things that cannot be vaccinated against.
• Vaccines do contain harmful materials like mercury.  And most doctors justify it by saying such ridiculous things like children getting 5x the doses of mercury from breast milk than vaccines.  Like we’re not supposed to understand the difference between the ingestion process and the injection process.  Sadly, a lot of people probably have no idea what I just said.
• The flu vaccine is nothing more than a crap shoot.  Every year a different strain is suspected to be dominant and so vaccine manufacturers just pick one based informed predictions.  They are literally playing weatherman with your health in this regard.  And every year they try and scare all of us into taking them.  Sorry, but I’d rather not trust my health to some executive in a vaccine firm and a government agent.
• Keep in mind that the vaccine schedule is brought to us by people who refuse to report the relevant stats on things like unborn baby deaths related to vaccine usage.
• Bill Gates has openly stated that vaccines are a great way to reduce the population.  Whether he means to directly poison people or just covertly sterilize them shouldn’t matter as he is a man with a lot of means.  So when a powerful man who believes that all of us should die off through vaccines, it makes me wonder what he is doing about it.

I could go on, but it’s the end of the day for me.  I am not anti-vaccine, but I am not pro-vaccine either.  I am a vaccine skeptic.  I have a young son now and I have to make my own vaccine schedule because I don’t trust the government’s own schedule due to the fact that the government is always lying.  So far, he has been much more healthy than his fully vaccinated cousin, who is six months older than him.  To be fair, my son doesn’t go to daycare, so that is a huge factor as well.

The hysteria against people who do not wish to overdose their kids with dead viruses (and dead baby cells) is astounding though.  I am amazed at how much malice people have against parents who do not vaccinate their children.  And when anti-vaccine advocates do try to get more scientific studies done, they are met with fear and malice.

It makes me wonder who is right in all of this.  When one side responds to a debate with irrationality, I often find that the more rational side is right.  And the pro-vaccine people have been much more irrational than the anti-vaccine people.

Ron Paul - Crimea, So What?

Residents of Crimea voted over the weekend on whether they would remain an autonomous region of Ukraine or join the Russian Federation. In so doing, they joined a number of countries and regions — including recently Scotland, Catalonia and Venice — that are seeking to secede from what they view as unresponsive or oppressive governments.

These latter three are proceeding without much notice, while the overwhelming Crimea vote to secede from Ukraine has incensed U.S. and European Union officials, and has led NATO closer to conflict with Russia than since the height of the Cold War.-http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/03/17/crimea-ukraine-russia-ron-paul-editorials-debates/6544163/

"Liberal" Takes Comfort in Knowing Gay Man Jerked-Off Into Pickles At Chick-fil-A

For me, comfort comes from knowledge, not material things or even personal relationships. Like... I take great comfort in knowing a gay friend of mine who worked at Chick-fil-a jerked off into the pickles quite frequently during the time when anti-gay dipshits were lining up outside the door to eat there. No matter how down I'm feeling, that knowledge never fails to make me smile.-Bret Alan

Confirmation once again that "liberals" have no ethics worthy of decent people.

Crazy Snow Plow Driver

From the video description by the guy who took the video:

He forced my car into the other lane where I lost control and did a 180 - so I decided to follow him and take some video for a few seconds.

John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling

Americans Despise Justice

I am convinced that our society has turned its back on justice.  The very concept of justice is pretty much dead in this country and the justice system only serves to provide the illusion of such a concept and to enrich private corporations who build prisons for the government.  But blame cannot be placed solely on the government or the individuals who run it.

Case in point, we have this wonderful story:

A campaign to save a pit bull that viciously attacked a four-year-old Arizona boy now has almost 45,000 signatures from supporters around the world who don't want the dog to be put down.

The fate of Mickey, a five-year-old pit bull terrier, was supposed to be decided on March 4, but a restraining order against his euthanasia was extended until a decision can be made about his fate.

In other words, an animal tried to kill a toddler and 45,000 people want to keep that animal alive.  Because he’s a cute doggie and I’m sure he’ll never do anything like that again.

There is no justice for the boy.  If there was, the owners of the pit bull would be forced to pay for his multiple surgeries.  The dog would be dead right now at the expense of the owners.

Instead, we see thousands of morons who do not care that a little boy was nearly killed by a pet dog.  Instead, we see a case of blaming the victim:

Supporters of Mickey say the boy shouldn't have been in the yard with the dog, and that Mickey was behaving instinctively because he believed the child was taking away his food.

It is the child’s fault for thinking that a pet wouldn’t attack him.  On a related note, it is the woman’s fault for being raped and she deserves to be stoned to death.

This is common sense.  If an animal attacks another human being with the intent of killing him or her and without provocation, then that animal needs to be put down.

This isn’t about a pit bull being a dangerous breed.  This isn’t really about the boy who was nearly killed and now has to breath and eat through tubes until he heals, then has to go through various surgeries to make him look somewhat normal again.

This is about how Western society, and America in particular, no longer care for true justice.  They no longer care about human life.  Instead we see a bunch of yahoos who believe that animals are more important than people.

Penn Jillette on Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss

Little Anarchist vs. Big Bad Statist

Mark Twain St. Patrick's Day Quote

"St. Patrick had no politics; his sympathies lay with the right--that was politics enough. When he came across a reptile, he forgot to inquire whether he was a Democrat or a Republican, but simply exalted his staff and 'let him have it.'"

Universe Crueler, More Uncaring Place Than Previously Thought

Haha! The stuff of satire, right? Video via "raving loon" Francois Tremblay. I haven't gotten very excited by the new Cosmos, appearing on Fox with Neil deGrasse Tyson. That sort of thing hasn't excited me since Carl Sagan was still alive. The universe is not a very impressive place. It amuses me that so many atheists think it is and that they call themselves optimists, imagining the wonders of science and the future of humanity in space. If they were intellectually honest they would be calling for the soon extinction of the human race and the end of consciousness and the nightmare it brings with it.

People Saved by Guns

If you favor gun control, you favor crime and the creation of victims...period!

Don't Say Parmesan, Say Cheese

So the asswipes of the European Union want to ban American made cheese from carrying "European" names. What utter bullshit! The first part of this nonsense is that something labeled "Parmesan" has to come from only one place, Parma, Italy. Well, fuck Parma, Italy! Anyone who wants a monopoly on a type of product to stifle competition (and that's what this rotten, evil proposal from the socialistic, statist E.U. is, make no mistake about it) can go straight to Hell! The lie of this "place of origin" crap is exposed by its extension. The ban would include, apparently, all "European" cheeses, even if there is no specific place with the name of that variety of cheese, for instance, feta, though there is no "Feta", Greece. But get this, the assholes of the E. fucking U. (that's Europe fucking you Americans, folks) "argue" that feta "“is so closely connected to Greece as to be identified as an inherently Greek product." Hmm, so what about "Greek" yogurt, or spaghetti (why limit this to cheese), Should American made pasta not be allowed to use the name "spaghetti" since spaghetti originated in Italy? What nonsense!

United States dairy producers are rightly fighting this attempt to destroy their business, but Canadians aren't so lucky, as their Super Nanny State has already caved:

Under the Canadian agreement, for example, new feta products manufactured in Canada can only be marketed as feta-like or feta-style, and they can’t use Greek letters or other symbols that evoke Greece.-Say bye bye to parmesan, muenster and feta: Europe wants its cheese back

Oh, so now you have to pretend, based on the State's lies, that it isn't really "feta", but only "feta-like". And you can't use Greek letters??? Fuck that shit!

The only argument that would make sense was if protecting the consumer who is so stupid as to think something was produced in Greece when it was obviously not is your top priority, but people that stupid are few, and don't deserve "protection" anyway. The companies making these cheese products would only be guilty of fraud if they were deliberately deceiving consumers into believing their cheese was imported when is wasn't. None of them are doing any such thing. If I have a cheese labeled "Parmesan" that clearly states on the label that it's a "product of USA", then case closed, statist raving lunatics, there is no crime, there is no wrong, and you can take your ban and shove it up your nasty fucking European ass!

God, I fucking hate Europe!

Lack of belief in gods

Women's Political Priorities

Green Ice "Cream" For St. Paddy's Day

I'm not a vegan, in fact I disagree strongly with the vegan religion (yeah, it's a religion, and a pretty unreasonable one at that, but I'll get to that in another post) but I have no problem with a substitute dessert that replaces ice cream (I'm not against ice cream for its dairy, but rather for its sugar) as a treat. So, you might like to try this:

All you green smoothie-lovers out there will appreciate this vegan ice cream made with frozen banana, mango, pineapple, and an iron- and fiber-rich green ingredient — spinach. The fruit completely overpowers this mild-tasting veggie, so you're left with a creamy, oh-so-sweet ice cream that's low in calories — just 160 — and completely dairy-free.-Give This Vegan Ice Cream the Green Light For St. Paddy's Day

Skip the soy milk if you're sane and go with coconut milk if you can't tolerate cow's milk.

I've given up sugar again, except for the small amount in very, very dark chocolate. The only sweeteners I have on hand are honey and molasses, which at least have some nutritional value, and which I use sparingly. Sugar really is a poison, so I've decided to finally eliminate it from my diet. This means, however, that I'll have to prepare more of my own food and buy fresh. Nearly every prepared and processed food product has added sugar. I'll get enough in whole fruits and more unprocessed sugars such as the aforementioned honey and molasses. By the way, you can create frozen alternatives to ice cream with just a single ingredient as well (in this case, bananas): Step-by-Step Instructions for One-Ingredient Ice Cream

Mark Twain Quote of the Day

"Familiarity breeds contempt--and children." - Mark Twain's Notebook

Now That's A Super Hero!

100 Years of War Lies

Butter Wins!

Shedds Spread Country Crock was, I believe, introduced in the 1970s. The tubs of it were huge, yet I remember we went through them fairly quickly. I hate to think how fast we used them up and how much of that garbage entered my body over the years.

Butter was something people used in baking, plus it came in sticks and was hard, and how the hell did you spread it on your bread without shredding your bread? Maybe if you put it on hot toast it would be easier as it would melt, but why bother when that soft stuff in the tub was so easy to spread? I often took peanut butter sandwiches to school. For some reason, even though I don't bother with butter or margarine on my sandwiches now, back then no matter what the sandwich, it had to be "buttered" with something. One day I was sitting at lunch at the outside benches and tables, and as I pulled my sandwich from its brown paper bag and unwrapped it, some brat of a girl who hated me asked what that stuff was under the peanut butter.

"Margarine" I innocently replied. She went all disgusted and let out an "Ewww!" like I'd said it was monkey ear wax or something. Maybe they only used real butter at her house, but back then butter was bad because of the false nutritional information on saturated fat and cholesterol. Margarine was, on the other hand, "healthy" (what a colossal lie, and even more so in those days of it being made from hydrogenated oils) and so much cheaper than butter (which is still the case if you buy the really inexpensive brands).

In my grandmother's house I remember there was often a stick of butter sitting outside the fridge in one of the cabinets to keep it soft and spreadable. We, however, were superior thinkers and bought only margarine, which could be kept refrigerated with no problem. Today, I use only butter. I like it on my steamed veggies, and other things that call for butter. I really don't need it for sandwiches, but for the occasional toast or grilled cheese sandwich, it's perfect and adds great flavor.

It is no surprise that one of the world’s largest margarine producers has come out and admitted that they have been wrong about butter all along, and that it is indeed healthier than margarine. This is not a suddenly new found concern about the health of consumers, but a marketing reality as sales of margarine continue to plummet while sales of butter skyrocket. So don’t expect them to start offering healthy whole foods anytime soon. Their solution is simply to add some of the “real” stuff into the fake stuff. And that real butter will more than likely come from milk produced in large CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations).

The logical result of seeing that consumers prefer butter would be to produce more butter. But that does not fit the model of the industrial margarine manufacturers. Also, most Americans have not yet realized that to eat truly healthy REAL food they need to pay a lot more for it. Americans spend less percentage of their income on food than any other country in the world. A big reason for that is because prices are kept low on the major farm subsidies that go into about 90% of the food Americans eat and that are fed to our livestock: wheat, corn, and soy.-The War Against Butter is Over: Butter Won

The move amounts to a stark about-face for a company that has been an anti-butter bastion for years. (“Some people say it’s bread and butter, but here we say, it’s bread and margarine,” Bernard de Saint Affrique told investors back in 2010.)

But the reversal is a wise one. As the locus of health and nutrition concerns have shifted away from fat content and toward worry over processed foods, margarine sales have tanked. In the US, margarine consumption is at a 70 year low. Since 2000, sales are down by more than 30%.-http://qz.com/168276/the-war-against-butter-is-over-butter-won/

Counter-intuitive though it might seem, there's no evidence that fat is fattening. Indeed by sating the appetite effectively, it may prevent overeating. To quote Kendrick, "there is not one molecule of evidence to suggest that saturated fat consumption causes obesity". What's certain is that saturated fat is a key component of our cell membranes, and essential for the production of certain hormones. It also acts as a carrier for important vitamins, and is vital for mineral absorption, and many other biological processes. So why has the public health establishment so assiduously encouraged us to shun it?

Viewed charitably, public health advice is just like any other socially constructed wisdom in that it gains authority through endless repetition. And who can blame GPs and other well-intentioned purveyors of health guidance up and down the land, if they recycle and disseminate uncritically tablets of nutritional wisdom dispensed from above?

Viewed cynically, however, it would be naive not to notice how the anti-sat-fat message has been used effectively by food manufacturers and processors to woo us away from whole, natural foods, such as butter, which is only minimally processed, on to their products, which are entirely the opposite, such as margarine.-Butter is bad – a myth we've been fed by the 'healthy eating' industry

I grew up eating mostly margarine, rather than butter. In my memory, that's what all of my friends at as well. In fact, I distinctly remember reading Matilda for the first time in grade school and being confused by the book's portrayal of eating margarine as a sign that someone was truly poor. From my perspective back then, butter was a hard, un-spreadable, depressing thing that you only bought when you couldn't afford a tub of Country Crock.-The history of margarine

Well, we've come a long way baby, because only butter butters!

Dji Phantom flies into Volcano

Yellowstone Caldera : The Biggest Volcanic Eruption Ever Awaits (Maybe)

If only this would happen...too bad we probably won't see it in our lifetime, and if we do, it will likely be a relatively small eruption, not the massive and life destroying one the alarmists proclaim. Well, one can still hope.

The internet is a funny place. It is a bounty of incredible scientific information the likes of which the average person has never had at their fingertips. It is also a place where unsubstantiated and downright wrong rumors can catch fire and sweep people away in a fury. One of the biggest culprits in generating these blazes, at least in my neck of the woods, is Yellowstone Caldera. Very few volcanoes can offer the same insta-panic reaction that Yellowstone can, which leads to people either (a) making all sorts of wild conjectures out of fear and (b) making all sorts of wild conjectures out of malicious mischief.-So, You Think Yellowstone Is About to Erupt

NSA posed as Facebook to install malware on computers

Anti-Pi Rant, 3/14/14

iPad Painting Collection

iPad Painting Collection (2013-2014)

Female on Male Sexual Assault

Two Maryland teenage girls were charged this week with assaulting an autistic boy and recording him on their cell phones performing sex acts, including some with animals-Teenage girls use knife to force autistic boy to perform sex acts

GUN NUTS: "Your 2nd Amendment is Outdated!"

More from Carey Wedler. I'm really liking this young woman.

...it's time to stop quibbling about an amendment that "allows" people to defend themselves and start looking st the people that have full legal access to guns and what they do with them. They're called the state and they have a monopoly on force and violence and in the twentieth century alone the state was responsible for the deaths of a quarter billion people, making them the biggest mass murderers in human history. So it's time to stop rationalizing your double standard for government murder as opposed to regular murder.-http://youtu.be/2tuhjewGdSo

Bye-Bye Obama

Carey Wedler burns her Obama shirt. From 2008 Obama supporter to a wised up anti-state activist. Good for her. I'll be subscribing and checking out her future YouTube videos. What I especially like about her is her realization that politics and political parties are not our salvation, and that she isn't just another "conservative" anti-Obama Republibot. She sums it up nicely at the end, stating that it doesn't matter what party is in office, and that the institution of government is the real problem. I'd call her an anarchist. Quite a conversion!

Yeah, I sort of fell for Obama, too. Back in 2008 it was a number of factors that foolishly lead me to have hope for change, or at least root for Obama over the others. Obama's campaign rhetoric was far removed from his actions once he was in the White House, but it seemed as if he might actually be anti-war and other forbidden things based on many of the things he said and positions he took. Scary John McCain and horrible Hillary made me wish for an Obama win in 2008, and though I didn't vote myself, I watched the election returns with interest and was happy with the results. I loved seeing the Clinton machine defeated in the Democrat primaries, but to what purpose? It's a stupid con game to fall victim to. I thought I had wised up after 2000 and the horrible mistake of George W. Bush (who I regret to say I voted for in the last election that I'll ever participate in) but I briefly fell for hope of change through politics again. Bush wanted a more "humble" foreign policy too, you'll remember. And now we face Hillary 2016? I thought we'd gotten rid of that monster, but the Clinton's political ambitions aren't demolished that easily. If she is the nominees of her rotten party in 2016, no doubt I'll be rooting for the other guy, but even if that's Rand Paul, I know now not to hope for anything significant. God help us all.

Judge Napolitano Right, Daily Show Wrong, on Fugitive Slaves

Tom Woods corrects the record on the fugitive-slave law, vindicating Judge Napolitano.

http://www.TomWoodsRadio.com
http://www.TomWoods.com
http://www.LibertyClassroom.com
http://www.facebook.com/ThomasEWoods

REICH FRIENDS

via Some guy in Canada

#banbossy Fun

For all those women who want to ban the word “bossy” here’s Vox Day’s take on it:

The women who are telling everyone to stop using the word "bossy" really need to learn the definition of the word "irony". #banbossy

— Vox Day (@voxday) March 14, 2014

Then I found this one, a close second:

Wait, so is the point of #banbossy to allow women to be even bossier?

— Bryce Laliberte (@AnarchoPapist) March 14, 2014

There is this one:

Dear #banbossy women, I'm a 6' 3" 240lb man, you can't make me do anything without resorting to the help of another man.just shut up already

— Dark enlightenment (@enlightdark) March 14, 2014

There really doesn’t need to be much else said about it really.  Well, there is mine:

All right, I'll #banbossy if women will give up their right to vote. At least then a bossy woman wouldn't matter.

— Mark Fox (@swiftfoxmark2) March 14, 2014

Yeah, I’d make that bargain.  The question is, how much do women really want this word gotten rid of?

For Goodness Sake

I've been angry lately in some of my posts, but I'm going to tone it down now. I'll try and lay off the profanity too. Sure, there are a lot of a-holes out there, and yes, they get me angry, and yes, my anger is justified, but for your sake, my sake, and the world's sake, I'll take a gentler approach from here on out. At least, until some evil person or story about government tyranny gets me mad again, which will most likely be sometime this afternoon. Until then, let's all be happy and make someone happy!

Riverside Cop Tricks Autistic Teen into Buying Pot

"We felt like our family was totally violated by the sheriff's department and the school district," says Doug and Catherine Snodgrass of Temecula, California. Last December their 17-year-old autistic high school son was arrested after twice buying marijuana for an undercover Riverside county police officer.

The undercover operation, titled "Operation Glass House," spanned a few months and included undercover officers in three area high schools: Chaparral, Temecula Valley, and Rancho Vista Continuation. The officers posed as regular high school students and would ask other students for drugs. Twenty-two students were arrested - the majority of them are reported to be special needs students like the Snodgrass' son.-http://youtu.be/0t1oVWOlnk8

Yes, correct, it's not the drugs that are most harmful, it's the evil war on drugs that is evil and destructive to all human values. FUCK THE COPS and all who love the state and its "laws"!!! h/t to T.C.

Things I Learned from President Obama

Here is a list of things I learned from President Barack Obama in no particular order:

• Cannibalism is a tolerable practice.  When President Obama promotes the overthrow of the Syrian government by supporting the rebels, he didn’t bother to even condemn the rebel leader who devoured the heart of a dead Syrian soldier.
• Multiculturism is a sham.  When Uganda, a sovereign foreign nation, passed an anti-gay bill in opposition to Western leaders, President Obama condemned the bill.  Who is he to say that their culture is bad and ours is superior?
• Child rape is a tolerable practice.  Uganda’s anti-gay bill also included life imprisonment for sodomizing minors, the disabled, and transmitting HIV (which is technically murder).  By condemning the law, President Obama implicitly stated that he’s fine with child rape.
• Congress doesn’t matter.  President Obama has openly stated that he doesn’t care what bills are passed by Congress.  This has been a common practice in many administrations in the past, but he is the first to openly state it.
• Marijuana has no medical value.  President Obama stepped up the medical marijuana raids despite promising not to do so when he campaign.  Of course his first targets were in California, a state that continues to provide him with overwhelming support.
• It is all right to allow your friends to not pay taxes.  President Obama was good friends with the CEO of GE.  GE as a legal person under the US government paid no taxes while many other corporations and, more importantly, actual people have to pay taxes.
• Oppressing the poor is good practice so long as they support you.  If you are unable to afford health insurance, you are now a criminal in America.  That means that if you have to use Medicaid, you should be fined or put in prison if you are unable to pay the fine.
• Low coverage health insurance is not good enough.  If you are not poor enough to be unable to afford health insurance but not well off enough to get really awesome coverage, you do not have enough.  You will have to completely revamp your entire lifestyle to get more adequate coverage, which includes dental and vision coverage for young children who don’t need it, because otherwise you are criminal.  True story: I lost my coverage for my family last year, which cost me $256 a month and had a 10,000 annual deductible with regular check-ups covered.  When I looked up equivalent coverage plans, the closest I found was a plan that had all the same coverage with the addition of dental and vision coverage for my infant son.  The cost was over 500 a month and the deductible was 12,000 annually.
• There is nothing wrong with the National Debt.  With the National Debt exceeding the United States’ GDP, it is clear that the President doesn’t seem too concerned with money that is not his, but that he is free to spend.
• American citizens are subject to drone strikes for no reason.  President Obama approved of a drone strike against 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose crime was taking up residence in Yemen and having Anwar al-Awlaki as a father.  In short, if you are overseas, you are not subject to due process.
• It is all right to impose your will on the justice system.  When President Obama was confronted about Bradley Manning’s case, which was ongoing at the time, he flatly stated that “he broke the law.”  This is tampering with the justice system and he crossed a legal line when he said that.  Instead of taking back his statement, the administration defended President Obama’s remarks.
• Suspected terrorists don’t deserve due process, regardless of citizenship.  President Obama has repeatedly signed the NDAA for each year that allows him to lock up suspected terrorists without trial indefinitely.  A suspected terrorist, by the way, is a war veteran or a person with a Gadsden flag on their car.
• Spying on US citizens is right and proper.  Because evil people do things in secret.  Unless you are working for the government, in which case you are not evil and therefore you must suppress those upstarts who leak information to the press.
• As President, it is all right to spend a full month on vacation.  So many problems that this nation faces.  I think I’ll go golfing, the perfect white man’s sport.

There is more I can learn from President Obama.  He does have a little over two years left to teach me.

How My Point of View on Gun Control Changed While Traveling

It's important to understand people's different points of view and why they have them. I grew up thinking guns were dangerous but now I think they are an important tool for self defense.-http://youtu.be/ymFuWrrd_fY

The rule (in spite of the lying Statist denial of it) of universal morality dictates that if it is moral and right for a police officer to have a gun to protect himself from criminals, then it is also moral and right for any person to have a gun and be armed wherever they are, and to have the means to protect themselves from the criminal element. Case closed, statist assholes!

The Intellectually Dishonest Piece of Shit John Stewart

Jon Stewart told Roger Ailes of FOX News that he is “an atheist and a socialist” who “would have voted for Norman Thomas.”  As a self-described godless communist, Jon Stewart is a prototype of your typical member of the “mainstream” media.  Had he worked for the New York Times in the 1920s, he undoubtedly would have been an apologist for Stalin as well, as that newspaper was.
(Lew writes to say that Stewart probably would NOT have voted for Norman Thomas, despite his proclamation to Roger Ailes,  since Thomas was board member of the America First Committee and an opponent of  the war in particular and of foreign policy interventionism in general).-http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/why-am-i-not-surprised-4/

Napolitano vs Jon Stewart the Statist Ass

When Jon Stewart ordinarily has a guest on his show – whether to talk about a book they have written, or a movie/TV program they will be in – it is usually a one-on-one discussion between two people of shared philosophic outlooks. That was apparently too discomforting a format for Stewart when dealing with the good Judge.  I was surprised Stewart had Napolitano on at all – particularly to discuss Lincoln. Perhaps, like the proverbial elephant in the room, Lincolnism has become too hot a topic to continue to ignore.  What was interesting is how Stewart had to have four people (including himself) on-stage to confront the Judge’s comments.  Is this a quantitative expression of just how bankrupt the statists are in responding to their collective enemy (i.e., liberty)?-http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/judge-napolitano-and-jon-stewart/

Because they don’t believe they have to

Every few months, the US government closes in on its self-imposed “debt ceiling.” Every few months the American public gets treated to theatrics on whether or not that ceiling should be “raised,” complete with hysterical projections of doom if the politicians aren’t allowed to spend as much money as they want, on anything they might happen to covet. And every few months the ruling parties agree to let themselves borrow more money instead of living within their means.

Why don’t America’s politicians balance their collective checkbook? Because they don’t believe they have to.
It’s not that it would be difficult. In fact, it would be quite easy.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that for fiscal year 2014 the US government will spend $514 billion more than it steals in tax revenue. But that government could cut its military spending by $514 billion and still be the third largest “defense” spender in the world (behind only Russia and China).
In reality, as nation-states go, the US shouldn’t even be in the top 10. It has no current (or likely near-future) enemies on its borders. It’s separated from its most likely and dangerous enemies by thousands of miles of ocean, tundra or other nation-states. And cutting its military spending to a not quite so insanely unreasonable level would make it less, not more, likely to embark on the kinds of global misadventures its spendthrift politicians pursue as an obsessive hobby.

So let’s dispense with the fiction that the US government faces a dilemma or conundrum of some sort to which increased indebtedness is the only plausible response. It’s just plainly untrue. It could balance its budget today and be better off for it, not just fiscally but in nearly every other respect as well.
So again: Why don’t they?

And again: Because they don’t believe they have to.

After all, they’ve been getting away with overtly stealing double-digit percentages of your work and wealth, and borrowing similar amounts from lenders  (who expect them to keep stealing that much and more to make payments) for decades, without apparent penalty.

And just like all freeloaders and junkies, they’ve convinced themselves that the party never has to end, that they can just keep on keeping on and wheedle or beat ever more money out of us as needed.
Heck, they’ve even written a “no crushing our buzz” clause into the US Constitution: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned.”

Horse-hockey. They’ve amassed such a mountain of debt at this point that no reasonable person ever expects it to be paid off, and the notion that that debt is “public” is pure nonsense. We’re not the ones kiting checks. They are. We’re not responsible for the fortunes of their criminal enterprises; it’s all on them.
At some point, both the debt and the politicians who incurred it will be not just “questioned,” but repudiated — by the rest of us. And the sooner the better.-http://c4ss.org/content/24565

by  Thomas L. Knapp

under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 

Egyptian Woman's Message to Obama: Shut Up, We Will Not Restore Morsi

Russell Brand - The Time is Now!

A consolidation of some of Russell Brands greatest speeches into one strong message.

)

Waiting...

Political parties are not going to solve our problem, which is the existence of the state itself. Certainly, if you're not insane, you can see that voting for Republicans and Democrats changes nothing. The third party hopes of those who foolishly believe that "democracy" can be saved by more ballot choices are equally deluded. End the state itself. That is the only path to real hope and change.

The Legacy Of Abraham Lincoln - Judge Andrew Napolitano

Risks In Porn

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Free Will Quote of the Moment

"This is the big one.  The notion that we have free will -- the ability to exercise conscious control over our actions and decisions -- is deeply ingrained in us...  We all have a sense of agency -- the conviction that even though we did one thing, we could have done another, and that at any given moment we have free choice of any number of actions.  Yet it seems that this is an elaborate illusion created by your brain.  The conclusion is inescapable.  We really are deluded." -Graham Lawton, Deputy Editor of New Scientist  weekly

A Little Vacation

Beginning Friday I'll be taking a short vacation, having a total of five days off from going to work. Looking forward to it. I just wish vacations went by as slowly as the workweek. I've stocked up on canned soup and chili, which I'll be taking along with me. Good eating in them cans!

And here's a little bit of vacation fiction for you.

More Than A Little Vacation

Henry sat at the table, a dirty mug in his hand. "Where's my damn toast!"

His wife looked at him and screamed. "Toast! Again? How many pieces of toast for you will that be today? 40? 50?"

Henry drank the last of his cold coffee and stared into the empty mug. "No, but you like to make me feel guilty for enjoying toast on my vacation, don't you?"

"Vacation! Ha! All you ever take are staycations and then sit around the house all day eating toast!"

Henry got up and walked to the breadbox. "Well, if you had a problem with my love of toast, you should have said something before we got married." Henry reached for a slice of bread and headed for the toaster.

His wife watched him with a look of both amazement and disgust on her makeup-free face. "Oh, so now you're gonna make me look like a bad, lazy wife by making your own toast? No way, Jose!"

She ran to where he stood by the counter, snatched the bread from his hand, and inserted it into the toaster slot herself. "I suppose you want peanut butter on it again."

"Of course. You know I always have peanut butter on my toast."

She went to the cabinet where the peanut butter jars were lined up ten wide and five deep. "All this peanut butter. It's ridiculous. And you even have to spread it on your toast thick when I serve you eggs for breakfast. Who ever heard of peanut butter and eggs going together? Who do you think you are, William F. Buckley juniors?"

"Just one. It was William F. Buckley junior, not juniors!"

The toast popped up and she snatched it angrily from the toaster. "Yeah right, I happen to know there were at least three of them, so you're not pulling the wolf over my eyes, motherfucker!"

For a second Henry looked shocked, then he laughed. "It's wool, not wolf!"

She opened a jar of peanut butter, retrieved a knife from the silverware drawer. "A normal man would have jam on his toast once in a while, but not you!"

"That's because I prefer peanut butter, jam is too damn sweet, and besides, we don't have any decent jam in the house."

His wife held the knife in an almost threatening manner now. "No good jam? I can tons of jam for you! The basement is full of it, jars and jars of fruit jellies and jams."

Henry lit a cigarette, he only smoked when he was on vacation, and only his favorite brand, Winston, which he first saw on television as a child while watching the Flintstones characters Fred and Barney smoking them during commercial breaks. "Like I said, no decent jam in the house."

"How dare you! I slave over that jam and by golly you're gonna have some on your toast!" She reached for the jam cabinet and pulled down a large jar of strawberry.

Now Henry was getting angry. "You're not spreading any of that toxic waste on my toast, bitch!"

She spread the peanut butter, then brought the plate with his toast on it over to the table where he sat again. She brought the strawberry jam with her, and then, while he sat watching, she defiantly opened the jam, and took the knife and spread big gobs of thick jam over the layer of peanut butter. "Eat it!"

As she strutted way, her back turned to him, her nasty fat ass wiggling in a "fuck you" movement, his fury rose like an exploding volcano and he picked up the jar of jam and hurled it at her, striking her on the back of the head. She fell to the floor with a thud.

He knew she was dead when he turned her over. When he fully realized what he'd done, he calmed down, and even though it had been an accident, he began to think it wasn't an unfortunate one. The problem would be disposing of the body. Thankfully he was on vacation and would have a few days to work it out. Perhaps he could bury her in the basement where she could be with her precious homemade jam forever. He went back to the breadbox, pulled out another slice of white bread, put it in the toaster, then lit another Winston.

Why Rape Happens

Enough of blaming the victim in any way! Rape is a sick, evil act of pure aggression. Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, as well. The rapist, with his criminal, sociopathic mind, takes advantage of trust to violate his target. I wouldn't mind seeing all rapists have their sex organs completely removed. Take it a step beyond castration. And anyone who thinks rape is funny or a joke needs to take a knife to their own dick and just cut it off.

Barney and Fred Enjoying a Smoke

And now, here's Granny and Jed!

Rand Paul: War Monger

An op-ed written by Rand Paul, published in Time:

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a gross violation of that nation’s sovereignty and an affront to the international community. His continuing occupation of Ukraine is completely unacceptable, and Russia’s President should be isolated for his actions.

It is America’s duty to condemn these actions in no uncertain terms. It is our role as a global leader to be the strongest nation in opposing Russia’s latest aggression.

Putin must be punished for violating the Budapest Memorandum, and Russia must learn that the U.S. will isolate it if it insists on acting like a rogue nation.

...

It is important that Russia become economically isolated until all its forces are removed from Crimea and Putin pledges to act in accordance with the international standards of behavior that respect the rights of free people everywhere.

...

The real problem is that Russia’s President is not currently fearful or threatened in any way by America’s President, despite his country’s blatant aggression.

But let me be clear: If I were President, I wouldn’t let Vladimir Putin get away with it.

Japanese Omelette

How to make a Japanese rolled omelette ( Dashimaki Tamago ) as demonstrated by the Master Chef at the Shunraku Kaiten Sushi Restaurant-http://youtu.be/NTIcJ_tdEJM

Eggs are such a perfect food. You should always have some fresh eggs in your fridge. They can be the foundation for a complete meal. Many is the time I've made dinner with eggs, combining them with whatever other ingredients I had on hand.