Ralph Nader interviews Andrew Napolitano discusses the Judge’s latest book, Lies the Government Told You .
The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile, the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. [ . . . ] The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.
~Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke, as paraphrased by Wikipedia
The myth dies hard. Thomas E. Woods of the Mises Institute appeared last summer on Scott Horton’s Antiwar.com radio program to try to kill it, as quite possibly only he can, but even his deft hands are full. He’s up against a fallacy, wrapped in a half-truth, inside a pseudo-patriotic shibboleth. It may well be that nothing’s more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but a carefully cultivated Big Lie will invariably give that timely idea a run for the money. People know what they know. They know war brings prosperity. They know because “World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.” They know because the government schools told them “World War II got the U.S. out of the Depression.” Beyond that, they know because of what they see. They see the manufacturing might of the military-industrial complex (MIC). They see it employing land, labor and capital. They see its technological sophistication. They see the high-paying jobs.
I have a question to ask you. I would then like you to ask it of others, particularly of Christians:
How many innocent people would you be willing to kill – purely to defend yourself?
For example, let’s say you are well armed and an armed robber is shooting at you – but the robber is holding a hostage directly in front of him.
Or, suppose someone is shooting at you from within a crowd. Maybe some in the crowd don’t like you. Let’s push it even further and say that most of them hate you, and sympathize with the attacker. To shoot back, you would be aiming at the attacker, but you know you would also hit others.
I repeat:
How many of them would you be willing to kill, even absolutely and purely in self-defense?
I asked this question of someone fairly high up in military intelligence recently. I had to press the point as he beat around the bush for a while. His (eventual) response? "I’m not sure I know the answer to that question." Well, at least he was thinking about it.
The surveillance state.
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”
What is a fusion center?
The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.
Enemies of food fascism: Max Kane (left) and Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt
Many thousands of years ago, two men came across a dairy cow, a beast neither had previously beheld.
One of them, seeking to impress the other, pointed to the creature’s udder and declared: “You see those things dangling from the underside of that animal? Well, I’m going to squeeze one of them and drink whatever comes out of it!”
According to the late and much-missed George Carlin, that nameless daredevil was the bravest man who ever lived. He was also exceptionally fortunate, since he was able to consume raw milk, and even extol its nutritional benefits, without running the risk of imprisonment.
“I am shocked — shocked! — to find gambling is going on in here” – Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca.
The much ballyhooed dump of intelligence and diplomatic files concerning the Afghan War has been trumpeted as some kind of shocking expose, "painting a different picture" than the official version of events — revelations that are sure to rock the Anglo-American political establishments to their foundations.
The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw “human intelligence” (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums “in country” — reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas … not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.
Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 on videotape.
Admittedly, German experts say (rough English translation here) that the Bin Laden confession tape was mistranslated. But what do the Germans know, other than how to make beer?
Sure, an American computer expert says that a Bin Laden video released in 2007 was spliced together from earlier footage, and that:
There are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video….
But he’s just a pencil-neck computer geek, so why should we listen to him?
The United States-South Korea response to the recent sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan – supposedly by North Korea – includes the arrival of US Navy (USN) aircraft carrier USS George Washington along with other US warships at the South Korean port of Busan, much to China’s chagrin.
“Invincible Spirit”, a joint US-South Korea exercise that is about to get underway, will be sending North Korea a strong message – “Don’t try this again.”
Beijing is very irritable and nervous as a result.
“The moment is truly delicate,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of International Studies and deputy director of international strategy center at Peking University in Beijing. "Beijing is also worried about the possibility of the situation to spill into a military collision with North Korea. That’s why there is opposition from China. The joint exercise is rocking the boat.” [1]
Angelo M. Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, has written an extraordinary essay for the July/August issue of The American Spectator. It’s called “America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution,” but it deals much more extensively with the anatomy and functioning of the class system in the United States today than with the prospect of revolution.
Codevilla cuts immediately to the core: the United States today is divided into (a) a ruling class, which dominates the government at every level, the schools and universities, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and a great deal else, and (b) all of the rest of us, a heterogeneous agglomeration that Codevilla dubs the country class. The ruling class holds the lion’s share of the institutional power, but the country class encompasses perhaps two-thirds of the people.
Readers should take note of this advance warning: My math may be bad. I’m working with big numbers and dubious, sometimes unclear statistics.
In April of 2010, US customers purchased/consumed 273,090,000 barrels of gasoline (source: US Energy Information Administration).
A barrel is 42 gallons, so that’s just shy of 11.5 billion gallons of gas.
Also in April of 2010, the average price of gas at the pump was $2.84 and 8/10ths of one cent per gallon (source: op. cit.).
So, US consumers spent about $32.75 billion dollars on gas in April.
In the meantime, two mega-corporations — Boeing, an American firm, and EADS, a European concern — continue to vie for a US government contract to build gas stations in the sky (air-to-air refueling tankers for the military) at an “estimated” (in English, “lowball”) cost of $35 billion.
$35 billion is a pretty big number, so let’s break it down into something more manageable: $115 from every man, woman and child in the US.