BO fails to attend the celebration of the Fall of the Wall

He did, however give a canned speech for the occasion:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091110/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_wall_anniversary_27

"Let us never forget Nov. 9, 1989, nor the sacrifices that made it possible," Obama said to applause and cheers.

Um...what, exactly, were those "sacrifices" he's talking about? There was no war. OK, there was a cold war. Whatever sacrifices we made were all under the covers. It was all part of Reagan's campaign to wipe out communism without going to war, which he did quite well, if we are going to take any credit for it at all. I think we had a hand in it, though, because at the time, Reagan and Gorbachev were quite chummy.

The thing is, I think that BO is incapable of grasping:

1. That you can do things without sacrificing
2. That people other than him are capable of achievement (even though RR never got a Nobel Peace Prize)
3. That you actually need to read about an event before you give a speech on it.

Maybe you could consider the 20 years of oppression before the wall came down a kind of sacrifice, but it was not a sacrifice to remove the wall. It was a sacrifice to that enemy of freedom: communism, which our Dear Leader so ardently worships, despite lackluster protests to the contrary.

So, the lack of freedom that existed could be considered the "sacrifice." It's certainly arguable that without the lack of freedom before the wall came down, the event of the wall coming down itself would not have been a great achievement, but such a statement has a kind of empty of meaning. It only works as a rhetorical trick, with which our Dear Leader is always Johnny-on-the-spot. Yet, I think this is a stretch, even for him.

It demonstrates, though, that Dear Leader's favorite word is "sacrifice." So much so that he must find a way to insert it into any achievement, whether it belongs or not, in order for us to subconsciously associate the word "sacrifice" with words like "achievement," "accomplishment," and so on.

We must remember, though, that our sacrifice is the achievement that Dear Leader is trying to accomplish.

Gore's Deception

A close friend of mine exposed a rather interesting bit of cinema.

Most people have either seen or heard of An Inconvenient Truth, the movie that Gore launched to promote his ideal world without carbon dioxide.

What's interesting about this expose is that it suggests that, not only is the conclusion from Gore's own graphs false, but that he knew this when he did the movie.

However, unlike authoritarians, I'm not going t appeal to an authority or a scientist or some random guy with a degree. As with all things, you must make sure your information is first hand. In this day, you can trust nothing but your own eyes.

Verify for yourself.

How should it work? Nigel Strange answers everything.

The political/financial/medical system that we currently have is so far away from how it should be, that it is difficult to even imagine how it should be. I'll attempt to draw a picture, though.

• Medical providers: Health care providers should be competing with one another to provide the best care at the lowest cost. I don't believe this is happening, and why they don't seem to care if they have your business or not is largely because they are not rewarded for your customer loyalty. To them, you're just another number they have to squeeze in, paid for by some monstrous insurance program. They're not making money off you. They're not benefiting from your business. If they had to keep your business, they'd try harder.
• Medical insurance: Same deal. They should want your business, so they should want to charge affordable rates and give good service. If they do not provide coverage as stipulated in the contract, only THEN should the government step in to settle the dispute. That's the legitimate function of government: to enforce contracts. If you're being screwed by an insurance company that you paid for coverage, then you ought to get your coverage, and someone who is able to force the insurance company to make good on its deals needs to muscle them a little. When you're dispute is settled, they are done. If you don't want insurance, then you get to pay out of pocket. If you can't pay out of pocket, then you pay on time or try to negotiate a deal.
  
• Income tax on compensation: It wasn't legal when they drafted the constitution, it wasn't legal when they ratified the constitution, so why is it legal now? It's not. Don't be fooled. Just because everyone is doing it does not make it legal. The feds know this, but they maintain the facade of legality in order to rake in the money. Compensation is not profit, and was never meant to be taxed. Since the government is not going to be used in the capacity of catch-all safety net for everyone in every circumstance, they can get by with less money. What do they have to do? Protect the borders, protect our rights, and protect interstate commerce. So, why do they need trillions of dollars every year? They don't. They just keep eating more money in order to continue raising (illegal) taxes.
  
• Social Security: I don't feel very secure at the moment, even though I've been paying into this chimera since I started working. When they originally billed it, they told everyone that there was as "special account" set aside for you, and all the years you are working, the money you earn is deducted from your paycheck and added to your individual account. If this were the case, why do YOU have to do this all over again when you set up a Roth IRA through your bank and set up a 401K with your place of employment? Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. If they were honest about how it worked from the beginning, they never would have gotten it through. Right now, there should be little warning bells and red flags waving. You should be asking yourself: If Social Security was passed by lying to the people, what might they be lying about today to push legislation through?
• Money should be real. Not fiat money that can be printed up whenever the Federal Reserve wants to issue more debt. If we had real money, there wouldn't be appreciable inflation. Wouldn't this slow down the economy? I suppose it might, but putting breaks on a car that's rolling down hill off a cliff would tend to slow it down, and I would see that as a good thing. What is real money? Gold. Silver. etc.
  
• Corporations: They are not persons.
• Campaign contributions: Should be illegal. All of them. Money is not speech. Money is bribes. Speech is free. Money is not. Why is this so hard to fathom? If someone is running for public office, then the press should cover it because it's news. If they can't put their lying commercials on the tele to dupe voters into voting for legislation that is worded to mean exactly the opposite of what voters think they are voting for, then even better.
• Criminal justice. The system is way too complex. The laws need to be reduced and rewritten to serve the values of the community. Murder, stealing, rape...we can all agree that crimes that victimize people deserve punishment. Insanity is not a valid reason to allow people to escape punishment. If someone is insane, maybe a lesson or two on reciprocation would help them learn a something about reality. If a crime is committed, and nobody is a victim, is it still a crime?

OK, that's not everything, but it's a start.

The Blind for Reform

Taste the delicious irony as you watch this video. The organizers don't really seem to get what's going on until they walk into the punchline:

"So you're controlling the message?"

Several things are going on, though I feel that I am insulting my reader's intelligence by pointing them out. Well, except yourself, then, and consider the explanation for those who are coming here for the first time and don't know any better.

• Obviously, the people who are rallying in support of Obama's health initiative do not make their own signs, or even look at them, or if they do, they don't understand them. I wonder how much they are getting paid.
• Part of fascism is controlling the message, controlling the media, and ultimately controlling what people are allowed to say, what they are allowed to think. The organizers are simultaneously claiming that their movement is not fascist, while simultaneously doing all of the above.
• To their credit (I must give them credit for this) they did not violently assault the prankster or the cameraman, which is something we've seen from this thugocracy before. Maybe they didn't get the joke, or if they did, they took it in good spirits. So, maybe there is some hope for these people, after all.
  

Meme war pt 1: cultural relativism

There is this article about an ex-Muslim girl who is afraid that her own father will kill her because she converted to Christianity.

Tolerance, as an ideal, is not universal. We, Americans, are being brainwashed into a kind of listless tolerance for everything un-American. On the other side, everyone else learns to be more intolerant of us. It is a one-sided meme war.

When asked by CNN, the girl's father said: "We are not bad people. We are not like that, we are normal."

What does "normal" mean? In America, we had this idea of normal meaning having normal American values. However, in a multicultural America, the word loses all meaning. There are many "normals," and we are not allowed to consider the imposition of our own code of conduct on others. In some parts of the world, it is normal to kill a girl for the crime of being raped. In some parts of the world, it is normal to decapitate people for changing religions. So, when someone says "normal people" it has meaning there. When someone says "normal people" in a culture that has defined itself into nonexistence, as Americans have been brainwashed into doing, it is entirely meaningless.

So, is it by accident or by design?

It is by design.

For those new to this blog, you might want to start by reading the 45 stated goals of the communists here.

Information age

We live in the information age.

This information age was not created for our benefit, but for the benefit of memes.

We are in a meme war. Right here. Right now.

If you already know this, then you are fighting the meme war.

If you don't already know this, then you are just the territory.

Public servants

It occurred to me that public servants enjoy their positions way too much, particularly the legislature.

It seems to me that instead of being paid positions, congress and senate should be like jury duty: something you get picked to do by some random process and have to serve the time, making decisions.

Now, you might say that the quality of our law would deterriorate. I think not. Have you read the laws coming out of there? The language is often intentionally vague, if not downright misleading. It seems to me that if you had some regular people from different walks of life (like a jury) making this stuff, they'd do a better job of creating honest laws.

Also, when you think about it, every new law is a government expansion. It is a new restriction of some sort. Now, most of us would agree upon certain laws, such as murder and so on, but there are a lot of laws that are decreed ex cathedra that we're just supposed to suck up.

These legislators just have too much time on their hands. They want to get paid, and they want to look like they're getting paid for a reason. They want us to think that their work is worth our money. Well, suppose we did what BO is doing to private health insurance? Suppose we "removed the profit motive" from working for government. That would "incentivize" them to do a better job, right?

Really, the government is just another corporation now, only it is one that doesn't actually earn your money because they can take it by force.