Useless Eaters

22,000 wounded soldiers discharged with mis-diagnosis of "pre-existing personality disorder". They are denied access to promised medical care and disability pay, and are forced to pay back their signing bonuses. Listen here.

A series of article that demonstrate how a corporate-government cabal was not responsible for the events of 9-11.

In fact there is substantial evidence pointing to the strong likelihood 9-11 was initiated and carried out by a "bunch of pissed-off Arabs".

Belmont to be first U.S. city to ban all smoking

Including anyplace that is not a detached single fanily home. This is, of course, nuts. This is also peculiarly American - we legislate away behavior that we don't like.

Example: here in Minnesota the Guv'ner has arrived at a solution that will provide Universal Health Insurance to all. He wants to make it illegal not to have health insurance.

The San Mateo Times article is telling. This whole catastrophe was triggered by some old fart who wanted to sue his neighbors for smoking. That's us my friends. Anytime we have an issue with a neighbor, we, in essence, call the cops.

Poor, sick, and uninsured? Damn well better not seek help in Minnesota - you'll get stuck with the full sticker price for treatment plus a fine.

Given to enjoying the occassional cigar in the privacy of your apartment? You're outa luck in Belmont. There's some geezer down the street who's primed to report you to the authorities.

American health care tends to divide the population into insiders and outsiders. Insiders, who have good insurance, receive everything modern medicine can provide, no matter how expensive. Outsiders, who have poor insurance or none at all, receive very little. To take just one example, one study found that among Americans diagnosed with colorectal cancer, those without insurance were 70 percent more likely than those with insurance to die over the next three years.

In response to new medical technology, the system spends even more on insiders. But it compensates for higher spending on insiders, in part, by consigning more people to outsider status—robbing Peter of basic care in order to pay for Paul's state-of-the-art treatment. Thus we have the cruel paradox that medical progress is bad for many Americans' health.

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It

[P]erhaps, our people might get into their heads some glimmering of the fact that the State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class – that is, for a criminal purpose.

- Albert Jay Nock

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."- Frank Zappa

And so it goes. Today's news includes an item about opinion tracking software that will be used to identify anti-American (Bush?) sentiment, ostensibly amongst our foreign freinds and neighbors, but ominously funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

The United States has always been overrated as a democratic system. We are at best an almagation of a 19th century bourgeois republic and an oligarchy of extreme wealth. Democracies that have been established since 1789 have progressively become more, well, Democratic. The United States as a political/economic system capable of empowering its majority consituents, and responding to their needs is woefully deficient as compared to the parlimentary social democracies that flourish in the rest of the first world, (and in most of the second world).

The insults to democracy that have occurred in the past 6 years: stolen elections, suspension of habeus corpus, exaltation of the executive branch, underscore the true nature of our system. It was never intended to be a popular republic. Founded on the Roman model, it seems destined for blatant Caesarism.

Bush seeks congressional approval for Khmer Rouge techniques.

"The similarity between practices used by the Khymer Rouge and those currently being debated by Congress isn't a coincidence. As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS."

I've added a couple and removed a few:

Truthout is a decent portal in the dictionary definition of the word (as in "marked by moral integrity, kindness, and goodwill...")

The Cool Hunter because its kind of cool if a tad commercial. Lots of design stuff.

Lenin's Tomb is on the trash-heap of history. Its a great blog and all, and has an intresting unreconstructed perspecrive.... but I can't quite deal with being two clicks away from the Hezbollah site. People who refuse to see a correlation between a state that bombs one set of non-combatants, and a quasi-state that lobs rockets at another set, are willfully blind. The IDF is guilty of war crimes. So is Hezbollah. In my highly sensitive and educated view, both can go fuck themselves.

Blue Pill Red Pill - boring.

Information Clearing House - redundant

But the Inquisitions here, and its here to stay!

Traditional Values Coalition Stands Up for the Traditional Value of Torture.

What happens when a militarist cabal, which stole two elections and holds itself above domestic and international law, is challenged?

Tiger at Bay by Immanuel Wallerstein

Through special courts, protective custody, demonization of the opposition, and fear.

"The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.... The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country."

- William Shirer

"Bush has been convinced by self-appointed spokesmen for Israel and the Jewish community that endless war is in Israel’s interest. He needs to hear in no uncertain terms that Israel is ready for dialogue, that the alternative — endless jihad — is unthinkable"

Time To Change the Tune
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