Despicable!

There may be a money maker developing a website in supporter of accused wikileaker Bradley Manning, who Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg compares himself.

Manning's military lawyer outlines the inhuman treatment of Manning, including the tortuous awakening every 5 minutes at night.  Criminal!

If Manning is not allowed to read letters from people not on the approved list, but instead must sign a letter of rejection, then everyone should send him a letter.  The jailers would say, "not on your list, you must reject it." Manning would know by the thousands of letters he is obliged to reject that he is loved.

So the moneymaker would be a website that offers his address, and explains the activity.  The site may very well go viral, which means countless hits and ad revenue.  Do good while doing well.

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Yahoo Stores

Back when I first went online, I needed an ecommerce engine.  A Microsoft retiree worked up a projection of what it would cost to build, $800,000, and maintain, some $120,000 per year.  I read it and said "Someone is going to offer those online for $100 a month. "  Within a month, I found someone out of Massachusetts offering it for $90 a month, then Yahoo bought them, and offered even better for $50 a month.

The fellow who started that company and sold it to yahoo has a nice essay on start-ups.  I think you'll find a lot of it familiar.  Like I said, I don't teach anything new, just how it really works.

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Preserving Our Way Of Life

Whatever that means... but it is a common argument from people who support wars, that wars are necessary to preserve our way of life.

This is very strange.  I do not think I have ever met anyone, anywhere on earth, who desires to preserve his way of life.  Everyone wants change.  The hapless democrats voted in "change" (they thought) last election.  The republicans rejoice with the mid-term elections they will get change.

Just what is it in "our way of life" is one supposed to preserve?  Torture?  Suspension of habeas corpus?  The incarceration state? Rewarding bad management with bailouts of failing industry? Pre-emptive, unnecessary wars?  3500 abortions a day? Bad educational outcomes?  Election fraud?  Identity papers, please?  Racism? Our ersatz religious expression?  Malinvestment in housing?  Judges granting every warrant presented to them?  Warrantless searches? I cannot think of anything I'd like to see stay the same.

Roads?  I don't want to preserve roads.  I want to see them gone, and the oil burners on them.  MagLev is the answer, but it will not happen in USA, we are indebted to autos and oil. Look to Communist China for change, they have maglev. I think if we were free to make changes, we would have no roads. We would have something better.

Perhaps what is meant is that we should preserve our freedom to make changes.  But we do not have any such freedom.  True-believer democrats are discovering that, finally, right now.  Election fraud is material in USA, we are 3rd world status in that regard.  Change, or innovation, comes from small business, and the policy of the government is "get big or get out."    Every day is kristallnacht for USA small businesses.  This is not an overstatement.  The rate at which government regulation kills businesses in USA is far higher than what one night's riots could accomplish.  Since hitler, fascism has learned, slow cooking is best.  Heat up the pot with the frog slowly, so he does not quite get what is going on.  With more people working for government than making things in USA, government smashes innovation faster that the few who try can advance anything good.

The FDA alone is busy crushing any small business that would provide healthy dairy products, in Missouri, and Washington, and California, and many other places.  It's like the false child abuse cases rampant in the 1990s:  the feds offer local enforcement big money to destroy families, and the local enforement wants the money to keep their departments flush with cash.  It is about bigbiz/biggovt.  It's the DEA and Waco on and on.  Every agency is striving to makes itself relevant by false charges.  And one remarkable phenomena is the websites put up by consumers protesting the denial of good food are at once overwhelmed by government workers mocking and sneering at those who would buy good food.

Preserve our Way of Life?  No one wants that, everyone wants change.  The problem is, the system allows no important changes.

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WikiConspiracy

I raised some doubts of mine about wikileaks, and now someone a tad bit more substantial has done so as well...

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Decency And Principles, 2

We were all seared by 9-11.  Some people of good will went off the rails, abandoning all decency in face of what they saw as an unwarranted attack.  The one question that was foremost on everyone's mind was "why?"  If total stranger walked up to you on the street and slapped you, you first reaction would be "why?"

There where plenty of people who knew why, and said so: Osama bin Laden, the CIA, countless reporters and writers, and later the 9-11 commissions.  But at the time of the attack, we were overwhelmed with "they hate our freedom..."  as the reason.  (Of course, they attacked us because we, or specifically the Hamiltonians among us,  hate their freedom, their freedom of self-determination.)

What appeared to be a senseless and unwarranted, horrible, cruel and pointless attack to very many people was given an equally disturbing rationale: they hate our freedom.  That segment of society that is of good will, willing to risk their lives to pony up and ride off to right wrongs, left their workbenches and got a gun. It was time to sort out the bad guys, the bad guys went too far.  No time to consider Moslem sensibilities regarding US soldiers backing Wahabi vs Sunni in Islamic Holy Lands. Kill 'em all and let God sort out the innocent.

Of course, countless opportunists mixed in the crowd, knowing that money would flow, and avoiding actual danger is quite easy.  Who cares other people's pensions are being spread over the middle east, there is money to be made, just like in any other war.

No one has the whole picture.  Before acting, or letting hotheads ride off with a rope and a villain,  cooler heads are supposed to prevail.  After 9-11, two things should have happened.

1. Reflect on the rationale.  There should have been a thorough explication of why, then a debate on the response.  Instead, after being attacked by Saudi Arabians, financed by the Saudis, we invade a country (Iraq) at odds with Saudi Arabia.  The madness did not stop.  We invaded Afghanistan, and we are stalemated there.  The media that gets distributed was pro-war, anti-reflection.  We are still in those wars.

2. Law, labor, academia, religion and other groups in the commanding heights ought to have weighed in with alternatives to war, if after discussion the decision was to pursue those responsible, the Saudi Arabians.  Too late.  Those in the commanding heights are all bought and paid for.  The one entity with the moral authority to call for alternatives, the Roman Catholic church, was blindsided by false sex abuse charges in the run-up to the invasion, so widespread that the Church was hobbled defending itself.  (Just before the charges broke, Bill Clinton and a biz associate formed a company that used HUD funds to convert Church property to groovy condos...  buy church property forced into sale by abuse settlements, and buy low with HUD capital, sell high, taxpayer capital.  It too ended in scandal.)

Bill Clinton expressed regret 9-11 did not happen on his watch.  A strange regret, unless you realize the power to be arrogated when we are attacked.  The people who should be doing the decent thing have left the stage to those who want to exploit the situation.  Hawalas had nothing to do with 9-11, but the government ruined many businesses.  Our intervention in Afghanistan, attacking a country that never presented a threat to us,  has interrupted 3500 year old palliative care business.  Decent voices go unheard, or unused.

Instead we have hyper-"security:"  suspension of habeas corpus, torture, airport groping, total information awareness about your every transaction.  Nazi Germany had such security features.  Such security did not save even nazi Germany.  What makes anyone think it will save USA?

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Another Pointless War

Norman Stone covers the Eastern Front in WWI in a 1975 book, detailing the politics and logistics of the Russian front with the Germans.  The book is detail rich, and necessarily so, since it outlines how utterly clueless the general staff was about how to fight such a war.  Literally millions of men were sent off to suffer and die pointless and painful deaths.  Nothing was settled, and the war was refought 20 years later.

Stone could not have foreseen today when he wrote the book, but the details about the players is painfully familiar. War for profits sake, slaughter for honors sake, unwarranted fears, whipped up to manipulate the masses.

Financing war is a challenge, and Stone details the arrangements for war production and credit for the same.  Business and industry loved war, for it allows expansion and profits.  Stone shows that the idea that Tsarist Russia was economically backward is simply not borne out by the facts, Russian industry at the beginning of this optional, voluntary war compared favorable to German, French and British.  And a very important point:  "allies" very much had a view to a weakened Russia unable to sustain its sphere of influence, thus allowing Brit and French biz an opportunity to expand.  Clearly China today welcomes our self-destruction in the optional, voluntary middle eastern wars, but keep in mind it is likely the French, German and Brits do too.

Russia begins to unravel, when to expand for war production, Russia leaves the gold standard to create fiat money.  Read in 1975 Stone wrote about 1916, and you are reading what USA is doing today.  Follow the malinvestment, breakdown of distribution, where some people starve and not far away meat and grain rots.

Inept, politically operative generals are promoted, and are clueless on how to fight the war.  When someone of no count effectively manages a battle, it is ascribed to luck among the powers that be.  Those effective soldiers recognized one another, and became the kernel of what was eventually the Red Army, which in turn defeated fascism.  The funny money went bad, distribution broke down, virtually the entire country of Russia went on strike in the summer of 1917, and Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky overcame the liberals, and the Soviet Union emerged.

Surprised at the swiftness of their victory, and faced with widespread malinvestment, shortages and unemployment, Stalin first permitted, if not encouraged, the black market (aka free markets).  The economy improved immediately.  After sorting out other emergencies, the Soviets got to work getting Russia back on track economically.  Sadly they were communists, so it did not work out so well.  The first mistake was war, but that inevitably led to the 2nd mistake, going off the gold standard.

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Babs Glad Obama Blamed, Not Hillary

Larry King interviews Barbara  Streisand and she makes this point:
Streisand also told King she was glad it was President Barack Obama facing this economic crisis and not President Hillary Clinton. “In a way, I’m glad Hillary Clinton wasn’t the first woman president, because with this economic crisis, they would have probably blamed her gender,” Streisand said. “Rather than the eight years preceding, you know?”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/16/barbra-streisand-glad-hillary-not-first-female-president-theyd-have-blamed-her-gender-for-economic-crisis/#ixzz18IlqYJ00

Yes, current events were started under Bush, but Obama has embraced and extended all of the bad things...   and true enough, Hillary would have done exactly what Obama has done, for the same reasons...  the powers that be ran a fall guy, America's favorite kind, the black guy.  Why don't we just change the policies, instead of having people to blame?

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Mundus vult decipi; ergo decipiatur

The people want to be deceived, therefore deceive them.  This is how those who advance indecent acts putatively on our behalf rationalize their actions.  They call it the "noble lie" after the neocon fountainhead at Chicago, Leo Strauss.
When we avert our eyes in horror to USA blowing the hands off a little girl in Afghanistan, or any other horror we engage in (for no particular reason), the tens of thousands maimed and killed, and cover it with a heartwarming story of how we fly one child to USA to have reconstructive surgery, we welcome the relief from the horror.  But the indecent act preceded the noble lie. We do not need to be lied to if indecency is not first advanced on our account.

Sozhenitsyn spoke of "our right not to know."  There are things that happen that we ought no be apprised of, since the very idea should sicken and insensitize us.  There are hard men with grim resolve who deal with the child rapist, the rest of us need not know.

Those who first advance the noble lie use the false charge to propose a false dilemma, and the execute the lie:  they hate our freedom, we must hunt them all down.  Now we will search you.

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Tunisia and World Trade

Let's listen on a discussion between the Tunisian Trade Development chief and a Hong Kong trade Dev interviewer... sounds like Tunis want to be a New Hong Kong too...  Here is what the CIA has to say...

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Gift of ADD/ADHD - How To Treat

Ritalin is a consumer item for most parents, something to give the kid, like a wii box or braces or whatever is popular today.  The powers that be, following Huxley, condition teachers (and some parents) to see a kid who mind can go in ten directions at once and say

"O no!  My kid's mind goes in 10 directions at once!"

A propoer response to realizing your kid has a mind goes in 10 directions at once is

"My kid's mind goes in 10 directions at once.  So what?"

The mind goes in the right direction, it merely goes in 9 others too, at the same time.  So what?

But, the kid cannot study!

No, the course is boring.  By 10 minutes into the lesson, the kid has checked it out nine other ways, and has already figured it out: whole language is bogus.  New math is bogus.  State history is untrue.  If you already know that it is all a waste of time, then why pay attention?

How can you say new math or whole language is bogus.

Well, there is no science to support its efficacy.

But plenty of kids excel with this pedagogy.  No, the only kids who excel in school are those with parental involvement.  Kids spend 8 hours a day in front of essentially TSA workers who drone on about nothing.  They then go home and have their parents teach them the lessons, or go to khanacademy.org, or otherwise learn the topic.  They do well.

Love is defined as wanting the good for the other.  If you love your children, and he has ADD, then homeschool him.  Let him study math, language and music in 4 minute increments, and be finished at 10 am to snoboarding the rest of the day.  One parent may have to quit a job, but if you pencil it out, you'll learn you are probably not giving anything up.

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Legal Money Laundering

The feds have a problem.  An empire takes lots of money to pay off people overseas here and there, more than can be just shipped around, although there is plenty of that.  Mish Shedlock writes about Build America Bonds and explains it is a bad deal for taxpayers, wherein the feds make good on bonds written by cities.  For Mish it is a sidenote that the taxpayer money goes to overseas investors.  For me it is central:  it is another way the powers that be can pay off their buddies overseas, the source of their power.  It is a huge money laundering system.

As a side note, why is every government program exactly the opposite of its title?  The Patriot Act should be called "Al Qaeda Surrender Act." The Transportation Security Act should be called The Molest Travellers Act.    These bonds should be called Destroy America Bonds.  The indecency is relentless.  Self-employment is self-defense.

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Sunday Quattro

From Japan:

Notice how McDonalds has localized their ad...

Fanta from India..

Fanta from Japan...

Fanta from USA...

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