Category Archives: News

My opinion of Obama’s remarks about success and “the village”

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.  I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service.  That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together.  That’s how we funded the GI Bill.  That’s how we created the middle class.  That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam.  That’s how we invented the Internet.  That’s how we sent a man to the moon.  We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea.  You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.”

via Did Obama Say “If You’ve Got a Business, You Didn’t Build That?” – ABC News.

My immediate reactions, in no particular order:

  • There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with Obama because they know they got their wealth by paying him off or someone like him to given them a monopoly source of income at public expense.
  • There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with Obama because they know his policies will allow them to keep prospering at the expense of the public in the name of helping them. Virtually everyone involved in college and university education, for example, is a source of garbage about “helping keep college affordable” while advocating policies to try to extend the life of an unsustainable bubble.
  • Why is “the Golden Gate Bridge” looked on as a shiny example of justice and collective power, and not a misallocation of resources? Pharaoh could claim that the pyramids could only be built by us working together. NASA still sings that song. Try this: they are the 1%.
  • “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” Absolutely, someone trying to be successful. Not their enemy and antithesis, a politician. Obama thinks his point leads to socialism. But it actually proves the opposite.
  • In a free market where people trade with each other without threatening violence to gain their stuff, the only way anyone can succeed is by trading what he has with others who are willing to trade with him or her. You can’t succeed unless you are “giving back to the community” from the beginning; and you will never stay successful unless you continue to do so.
  • Obama wants a society where it is easier to receive bribes and give kickbacks. There is a whole society of wealthy people who know how this game is played and who back him. They also back Romney. We are screwed. But let us at least know it for what it is rather than endure this disgusting and hypocritical moralizing.
  • Obama is going to create a society that is destroyed by its political class and its dupes. It is inherently destabilizing.
  • The idea that going to the moon was some kind of triumph is an amazing one. No Pharaoh  was ever able to convince the slaves that they wanted to build the pyramids. It is truly breathtaking that the State hucksters are able to appeal to this and everyone believes it.
  • Obama is very confident that private roads and fire protection services won’t work. But I have had free market road service twice now for about the quarter of the price I paid for one incident when the government cronies raided my wrecked car and “helped” me without my consent. They, of course, had a much nicer tow truck and had plaques on the wall of their “business” from the local police force thanking them for their contributions for the Corruptocratic Cover du jour. I’m not going to take Obama’s word that these things couldn’t be arranged better by the private sector.
  • Private protection, for example, would never randomly enrage people by sending expensive drones to murder at random overseas. It takes a state to invent that sort humanitarian and economic insanity. (And, by the way, government contractors are not the private sector).
  • There are a lot of smart people out there. I hope we see more of them. They watch Russia Today on the internet and vote for Ron Paul. And they are smarter than me; they would never waste time responding to this garbage from Obama.
  • The fact that “people” help you doesn’t mean you owe Obama–or his government, his military, or his cronies–one cent. Even if you actually robbed people to get your success, how can you pay them back by giving more wealth to people who want to rob them more?
  • People think that Obama sounds vaguely like Jesus. He does. Jesus spoke of how people owed God, who created, sustains, and controls all things, and should help the poor. Obama replaces God with the State, taking credit for all things, and says that we must give more to It, and trust It to help all those people.

Wish Pharma’s market was depressed

A new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics shows that over a 10-year period, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed across the United States by a staggering 400 percent — as the numbers of those diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (the clinical name for depression) and anxiety disorders has dramatically increased.

With the development of Prozac and similar drugs, more than one out of every 10 Americans over the age of 12 now takes an antidepressant, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed data collected from 12,637 people who participated in the center’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, which elicit information from about 5,000 Americans of all ages every year. Antidepressants were the third most common prescription drug taken by Americans of all ages in 2005–2008 and the most frequently used by persons aged 18–44 years. The nearly quadruple rate of antidepressant use was from 1988–1994 through 2005–2008.

Overall, women are more than twice as likely as men to take an antidepressant, the analysis reveals. The biggest users are women ages 40 to 59, with 23 percent of that group using an antidepressant. Among males and females ages 12 to 17, 3.7 percent take an antidepressant, compared with 6.1 percent of those ages 18 to 39, 15.9 percent of those 40 to 59, and 14.5 percent of those 60 and older.

Whites use antidepressants more commonly than anyone else, the surveys show. Fourteen percent of whites take an antidepressant, compared with 4 percent of blacks and 3 percent of Mexican-Americans. About 14 percent of Americans who take an antidepressant have been doing so for at least 10 years. More than 60 percent have been taking it for more than two years.

The CDC noted that about eight percent of Americans over age 12 with no current depression symptoms take the drugs for other reasons. And less than one-third of Americans taking one antidepressant and less than half of those taking multiple antidepressants had seen a “mental health professional” in the previous year. The surveys also discovered that there is no difference by income in the prevalence of antidepressant usage.

Read the rest: CDC: Antidepressant Use Up 400% in Past Decade.

Part of the reason is that the people who have the power to affect the content of the DSM are themselves in a profitable relationship with Big Pharma. For more, see this documentary, Generation RX.

 

He was not only a sex fiend in private, but he supported all such men as a politician

For those on the left, like Rep. Weiner, it’s easier to disregard their potential sexual missteps as a character flaw limited to the home life. In his career as a lawmaker, he has been an emphatic advocate for women. (NARAL gave him a 100 percent rating.)

via In defense of sex scandal double standards..

Bizarre. Does Dweck not even consider who a philanderer is really “advocating” by promoting abortion? He doesn’t hold to NARAL despite his character. Quite the opposite.

But nice to see the “Clinton-Lewinsky” media double standard openly acknowledged.

So did anyone vote for Obama in order to get constitutional control over the “National Security” insanity? Looks like you picked the wrong horse

Sen. Rand Paul has single-handedly stopped the extension of three key provisions of the Patriot Act until after they expire at midnight Thursday. Unless he folds.

via Sen. Rand Paul Delays Renewal of Patriot Act Provisions – Washington Wire – WSJ.

Looks like the Southern bubba is going to do it while the cool and sophisticated Harvard-educated community organizer just amasses power.

“He’s fighting for an amendment to protect the right – not of average citizens, but of terrorists – to cover up their gun. It he thinks that it’s going to be a badge of courage on his side to have held this up for a few hours, he’s made a mistake.”

— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor denouncing Sen. Rand Paul’s efforts to amend the PATRIOT Act.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday went beyond questioning Sen. Rand Paul’s patriotism, accusing the Kentucky freshman of trying to aid terrorists.

via Obama Dems Don’t Listen to Clinton on Debt – FoxNews.com.

I’m really curious if any blue-staters are allowing themselves to contemplate the present turn of events… and whether or not they might have been completely predictable.

Obushama’s state of nostalgia

How can we “win the future,” as President Barack Obama exhorted us to do in his 2011 State of the Union address, when our top elected official remains so drearily stuck in the past? And despite the commanding role of what can only be called Sputnik nostalgia in his speech, Obama was not even channeling the distant past in his remarks.

Instead, he served up the equivalent of a microwaved reheating of the sentiments of his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. That’s some sort of groovy, space-age technological feat, for sure, but we shouldn’t confuse left-over platitudes about cutting wasteful spending on the one hand while ramping up publicly funded “investment” on the other for a healthy meal.

With an unacknowledged debt to the long-running reality show Survivor (“Outwit, Outplay, Outlast”), Obama insisted that we must “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Which is to say, he sounded exactly like Bush 43, albeit with more open references to China and endless plugs for high-speed rail.

via We Can’t Win the Future By Repeating the Past – Reason Magazine.

Assange the rock star does not bode well

The fate of whistle-blowers and tellers of dangerous truth is rarely rock-star celebrity. Count them. Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed Israel’s nuclear program – imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Gary Webb, who exposed the CIA connection to the distribution of crack cocaine in the US – probably murdered. Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized Putin’s policies in Chechnya – assassinated. Lebanese journalists Samir Qassir and Gebran Tueni, who criticized the Syrian government – killed in car bombings. In 90% of such cases, says the Committee to Protect Journalists, the killers are never brought to justice. Yet, Assange, “the most dangerous man in Cyberspace,” according to the faux-alternative magazine Rolling Stone, lives to tell the tale of his persecution from the cover of Time magazine and the podium of TED conferences, weighted down with awards and honors from such establishment worthies as Economist, New Statesman, and Amnesty International.

And now he is the center of an international man-hunt. Here too, the claims are bizarre. If Wikileaks hasn’t put lives at risk or seriously damaged “national security,” by even the government’s own account, what to make of all these feverish cries for prosecution under the espionage act, for imprisonment and torture, even for execution? Are they for real, or does any one else detect an element of theater? The Wikileaks disclosures have been called cyber-terrorism by many. When before have we seen an international man-hunt for a rag-tag band of terrorists headed up by a charismatic mystery man with a striking appearance and a personal life shrouded in mystery? Now we have Osama-bin-Assange and Al-Wikileaks at war with Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin, on one hand, and cheered on by David Frum, on the other. Notice that Frum points out that the disclosures actually support George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

This is box-office gold. As some wide-awake journalist has noted, the big winner in all this is the establishment media. Before, it had one foot in the grave. Deservedly. Now it is a “truth-teller.” Readership is up, resurrected by proxy. And the major alternative press, the foundation activists, are bolstering the conclusions of the New York Times. How convenient.

I dearly wish Julian Assange were exactly as he seems – a brilliant iconoclast delivering the death blow to imperialism. But my memory is not so dim. I remember another media circus besides the one around Osama. I recall the mass adulation of a man who exuded brilliance, youth, hope, and salvation. That was in 2008, and he was a young law professor from Chicago. How did that turn out?

via The Case Against Wikileaks – I : Veterans Today.

The Sense (or lack thereof) of Education Law

You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

via Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!, by John Taylor Gatto.

Meanwhile, in California: Bill That Could Jail Parents of Truants Passes State Senate

Another government “success” is revealed to be a bubble

The Baltimore Sun reports that education officials have uncovered rampant cheating at George Washington Elementary School. According to the Sun, school administrators may have cheated their way to better test scores, helping them win the prestigious Blue Ribbon Award, reserved for the top schools in the nation.

Officials discovered that wrong answers on the tests were erased and the right ones filled in.

At the center of the scandal is 60-year-old Susan Burgess. WJZ spoke to the principal in 2007 when the school received the designation.

“The misconception is that the city schools are not meeting the needs of the children and are failing and that’s not true at all,” said Burgess.

At the time Burgess was hailed as an educational hero, turning one of the poorest schools in the city into one of the most successful.

Read the rest Rampant Cheating Found At City Elementary School – wjz.com.

Do we need the state to outlaw discrimination against marines? What would Rand Paul say?

Web postings claim a Stockton sandwich shop refused to serve Marines at lunch on Monday, and the talk has led to a boycott of the eatery.

Calls for the boycott were posted on Facebook pages for the Department of Defense and other sites across the Web.

Posters claim that that Marine recruiters in Stockton were refused service at this Charley’s Grilled Subs in Weberstown Mall.

Franchise store owner Jian Ortman said she’s scared. Phone calls have been coming in nonstop from across the country, some with threats.

via Marines Refused Service At Eatery? Claims Fly Online – Sacramento News Story – KCRA Sacramento.

This is directly related to the Rand Paul panic. Do we require a new law to protect servicemen from discrimination? Or can we let society handle it? (Assuming the story is true and the incident happened.)